Greece

The place where much of what Europe considers its own inheritance was made, and a modern state assembled around that claim. Mycenaean palaces fell around 1200 BCE and the polis emerged from the dark age that followed: Athens produced democracy, tragedy and philosophy in a single century, Sparta a militarised society that fascinated and repelled its neighbours, and the city-states together held off Persia before destroying each other. Alexander then carried Greek language and forms to India. Rome conquered Greece and was culturally conquered by it, and the Byzantine empire that followed was Greek-speaking and Orthodox for a thousand years until Constantinople fell in 1453. Four centuries of Ottoman rule ended with a war of independence from 1821 that European philhellenes joined, Byron among them. The modern state expanded northward in stages, and the attempt to take Anatolia ended in 1922 with a population exchange that moved around two million people. Civil war followed the Second World War, a military junta ran the country from 1967 to 1974, and the debt crisis after 2009 shrank the economy by a quarter. Athens is the capital. The country has about 10.4 million people and around six thousand islands, of which some two hundred are inhabited. Greek has been written continuously for over three thousand years, the longest of any European language. Eighteen of its sites are World Heritage listed. Mount Athos has been a self-governing monastic community for over a thousand years. Shipping owners control a large share of the world's merchant tonnage.

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