Greece

The earliest documented civilisations in the territory of present-day Greece arose in the Aegean during the Bronze Age. The Minoan culture of Crete, flourishing from roughly 3000 BCE, produced palatial centres at Knossos and Phaistos and an as yet undeciphered script known as Linear A. From the seventeenth century BCE the Mycenaean kingdoms of the mainland, centred on citadels such as Mycenae, Tiryns, and Pylos, developed a Greek-speaking palace economy recorded in Linear B. The collapse of these palace systems around 1200 BCE ushered in a so-called Dark Age, after which the archaic and classical city-states emerged, with Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes shaping a political culture of citizenship, law, and democratic experiment. The classical period, the Persian Wars, and the Peloponnesian War were followed in the fourth century BCE by the Macedonian ascendancy under Philip II and the conquests of Alexander the Great, which spread Greek language and institutions across the eastern Mediterranean and into Asia in what is conventionally called the Hellenistic age.

Roman conquest, completed in 146 BCE, incorporated the Greek lands into a Mediterranean empire whose eastern half eventually became the Byzantine Empire, with Constantinople as its capital and Greek as its administrative and ecclesiastical language from late antiquity onward. For more than a millennium Byzantium shaped the religious, legal, and cultural life of the region, including the consolidation of Orthodox Christianity. After the Fourth Crusade of 1204 fragmented Byzantine authority, Frankish, Venetian, and other Latin polities held parts of the Greek world until Ottoman forces, who took Constantinople in 1453, gradually absorbed the mainland and most of the islands. Ottoman rule lasted until the Greek War of Independence, which began in 1821 and culminated in international recognition of an independent Greek state by the London Protocol of 1830 and the Treaty of Constantinople of 1832.

The new kingdom, initially under the Bavarian Wittelsbach prince Otto and from 1863 under the Danish Glücksburg dynasty, expanded through successive territorial settlements, including the acquisition of the Ionian Islands, Thessaly, much of Macedonia and Epirus after the Balkan Wars of 1912 to 1913, and Western Thrace and the Aegean islands by the early 1920s. The catastrophic war with Turkey in Anatolia ended with the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne and a compulsory exchange of populations. The interwar period oscillated between republic and monarchy and ended with the Metaxas dictatorship, followed by occupation during the Second World War and a bitter civil war from 1946 to 1949 between government forces and communist insurgents.

A constitutional monarchy was restored after the war but was overthrown in 1967 by a military junta, the Regime of the Colonels, which ruled until its collapse in 1974 in the wake of the Cyprus crisis. A referendum that year abolished the monarchy and established a parliamentary republic under the 1975 constitution. Greece joined NATO in 1952, having already been aligned with the Western bloc, and acceded to the European Communities in 1981, adopting the euro in 2001. The early twenty-first century was marked by a severe sovereign debt crisis from 2009 onward, successive bailout programmes, and significant migration pressures.

Greece today is a unitary parliamentary republic, with a directly elected legislature, an indirectly elected ceremonial president, and a prime minister drawn from the parliamentary majority.