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View of Greece » History of Greece |
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The infinite variety of the landscape of mainland Greece, ranging
from snow-capped rugged mountains to sun drenched idyllic beaches,
is equalled, if not surpassed, by the beauty of the seascape of almost
one thousand five hundred islands scattered over the translucent waters
of the Aegean and Ionian
Seas. Close to eleven million inhabitants live on the 132.160 square
kilometres, which are blessed by a temperate climate under the blue
sky of the Mediterranean.
Five thousand years of dramatic history have left their indelible
imprint, rivalling nature in its diversity, from the Minoan
palaces, Mycenaean fortresses, classical
temples, Hellenistic tombs, Roman
towns, Byzantine churches, Crusader
castles, Turkish mosques and the picturesque villages
of the distinctive island architecture to the pleasing modernity of
the main cities, spas and summer resorts. (See
our reconstructions gallery).
Each region displays a characteristic
brand of natural and artistic features, which, nevertheless, only
serve to emphasise the unity of Europe's oldest culture, the cradle
of western civilisation. No wonder that a people looking back on such
a glorious past has preserved in its purest and most welcome form
the traditional hospitality towards all strangers visiting their lovely
country.
| Between 4.000 and 3.000 B.C. the Minoans settled in the southern
island of Crete, with 3.327 square
miles Greece's largest, and founded one of the most brilliant
and sophisticated civilisations of antiquity, and Europe's first.
Mythology and history blend in the Priest -King Minos, the legendary
son of Zeus, ruler of the Olympian gods, and Europa,
the lovely princess after whom the continent is named. (See
our mythology gallery). |
knossos palace |
From his splendid palace at Knossos, successive Minos ruled the world's
first naval empire, which was destroyed by the eruption of the island
volcano of Thira, a Cretan
colony, in about 1450 B.C. According to some archaeologists this was
the lost island of Atlantis, and the recent discovery of a
whole town under 160 feet of lava and pumice lends credibility to
this theory.
History then shifts to the mainland, where for a thousand years Hellenic
tribes, Pelasgians, Achaeans, Aeolians and Ionians
had infiltrated from the north, subdued the native Celts and established
numerous small principalities following the country's natural division
by impassable mountain ranges.
| In the eighth century B.C. the great epic poet Homer
was to immortalise the Mycenaean age in the Iliad and Odyssey,
the story of the Trojan War fought by Achilles, Odysseus and
countless other heroes under the leadership of the High King
Agamemnon to bring back the beautiful Helen, |
Achilles in Troia |
wife of King Menelaus of Sparta. Long believed to be
nothing but poetic fantasy, the German amateur archaeologist Heinrich
Schliemann vindicated Homer's historical accuracy by following
the poets geographical indications to the letter to unearth in the
1870s the palaces and towns of the epic cycle.
In about 1100B.C. the magnificent Bronze Age civilisation
of the Mycenaeans (see
our Mycaena tour) tour fell to the iron weapons of a pew invader from
the north, the blond, blue-eyed Dorians. Warlike
feudal kingdoms emerged from the Dark Ages at the dawn of recorded
history in the ninth century B.C. and in the following six-hundred
years the Greeks tried and often invented every political system the
human mind has as yet conceived. As a tribute to their experimentations,
most forms of government still bear the Greek name indicative of their
origin.
Tribal, feudal, absolute and constitutional monarchy, landed and commercial
oligarchy, Spartan racism followed by a short spell of communism,
| dictatorships of all kinds, democracy where the active participation
of all citizens was possible due to slavery, decline into demagogy
which made the anachronistic city states an easy prey to the
unified Macedonian kingdom of Philip,
who laid the foundations on which his son Alexander
the Great (see our Grand Classical Tour)
could build his world empire. |
Alexander The Great |
The great names in this period are Lycurgus, who
imposed a totalitarian way of life on Sparta in the eighth century
B.C.; Dracon and Solon, the latter
one of the Seven Wise of Antiquity, who brought law and order to Athens
in the two subsequent centuries; Miltiades, who defeated the Persians
at Marathon in 490 B.C. (see
our Marathon tour) in one of the decisive battles in the eternal
struggle between Europe and Asia; Themistocles, who
brought this struggle to a victorious climax at the battle of Salamis
(see Saronic isl. gallery)
10 years later, by the use of seapower which assured Athens of mastery
in the Aegean for the entire fifth century B.C. Yet like his predecessor
Miltiades, who had died in prison, he fell a victim
to the jealousy of his ungrateful Athenian compatriots, who not only
ostracised him -exile for ten years without any accusation and thus
no means of defence -but eventually condemned him to death, so that
the saviour of Greece had to seek refuge at the court of the Persian
king he had so brilliantly defeated; and Pausanias,
the Spartan regent who finally drove the Persians from Greek soil
in the battle of Plataea in 479 B.C., (see
our battlefields gallery) but succumbed to Persian bribes and
was stoned to death, his mother reputedly throwing the first stone.
| The billiant generalship of Kimon extended
the Athenian empire along the shores of Asia Minor, so that
when he in his turn was ostracised in 461 B.C., Pericles
presided over the Golden Age of unparalleled
intellectual and artistic achievements coinciding with a political
decline, almost imperceptible at first, but leading to the outbreak
of the disastrous Peloponnesian War (431-404
B. C.) in which the personification of Greek virtues and vices,
Alcibiades, played the leading part. |
Pericles |
The year of Athens' final defeat and humiliation also witnessed his
murder.
Spartan dominance was challenged in the next century by the military
genius of Epaminondas, who briefly established Theban
supremacy by introducing a new fighting force, the phalanx, which
was perfected by Philip of Macedonia
and assured his victory over the for once united Greek city states
at Chaeronea in 338 B.C. Philip generously forgave
his main opponent, the Athenian orator Demosthenes, who yet succeeded
in persuading the Greeks to another stand against the Macedonians
after Philip's murder two years later. (See
our Macedonia gallery)
Young Alexander, who ruthlessly destroyed Thebes
but spared Athens for its cultural prestige, swiftly crushed the insurrection.
He forced the reluctant Greek states to follow him in his expedition
into Persia and in 334 B.C. he crossed the Hellespont
at the head of a mere 40.000 men to the greatest conquest the world
had ever seen. In eleven years of unbroken victories, Alexander founded
an empire that stretched from the Ionian Sea to beyond
the Indus, and from the Upper Nile
to the Caspian Sea. But the centre of gravity had
shifted from Macedonia to Babylon, where Alexander
died in 323 B.C., having failed in welding Greeks
and Persians into a new imperial master race.
In the deadly struggle for the succession, Demetrius Poliorcetes
(Besieger of Towns) lost Asia but gained the Greek-Macedonian kingdom,
over which the Antigonid dynasty ruled precariously
till the Roman conquest in 146 B.C.
Yet Greece achieved a remarkable cultural conquest-in-reverse, and
the Roman empire became impregnated with the higher art and thought
of Greece, to which the Roman aristocracy sent its sons for education
in the schools of Athens and Rhodes.
In exchange the Romans used Greece as the battleground for the momentous
civil wars of the first century B.C. In 48 B.C. Julius Caesar
at Pharsala in Thessaly crushingly defeated Pompey's
numerically superior army. In 42 B.C. Brutus kept his fatal
appointment with Caesar's ghost at Philippi in Macedonia, where
Brutus and Cassius committed suicide, while Mark Antony
and Octavian divided the world in preparation
for the final round. That came in 31 B.C. at the naval battle of Actium,
where Cleopatra precipitate Mark Antony into unreasonable
flight and another double suicide, leaving Octavian sole ruler and
at last able to establish the Pax Romana for some
four hundred years.
The Roman emperors varied in the treatment of their most precious
province from Nero, who shipped priceless statues by the hundred
to Italy, to fladrian, who munificently embellished the venerable
centres of culture. Roman tourists flocked to the famous sites, so
not quite in the same numbers as today.
In the partition of the Roman Empire in the fourth century A.D., Greece
was allotted to the Eastern Empire. The new capital,
Constantinople, was adorned with the spoils from Greece, while
pious Byzantine emperors closed the pagan universities and temples.
Successive waves of barbaric tribes, Goths, Huns, Vandals and Avars
ravaged the country with fire and sword, joined by Saracen pirates,
bringing in their wake Slav settlers who threatened to engulf the
mainland till Vasilios the Bulgar-Slayer decisively
stopped the flood.
After the conquest of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204,
feudalism returned to the country, which had experienced an earlier
version in Mycenaean times. Under the nominal suzerainty of the Latin
emperor, the Frankish lords were fighting each other as much as the
renascent Byzantines, Bulgarians, Serbs, Catalan mercenaries and soon
the advance guard of the Turks. The dying Byzantine empire
achieved a final but hollow triumph with the reconquest of the Peloponnese
in 1430, where two brothers of the last emperor ruled for another
six years after his death in the defence of his capital. But in 1460
they were driven out by Sultan Mohammed II, who replaced the Frankish
and Byzantine nobles with Turkish veterans. The Greek peasants remained
serfs, paying besides tithes a poll-tax and a blood tribute of a fifth
of their male children, who were brought up as Moslems and enrolled
in the corps of Janissaries, the military elite of
the Turkish armies. The frequent incursions and temporary occupation
by the Venetians only worsened the lot. of the wretched
inhabitants, whose only protector was their recognised representative,
the Patriarch of Constantinople, while the bishops provided local
guidance and the parochial clergy the little education there was.
In their decline the Turks became only interested in the collection
of tribute, while the country was reduced to a state of anarchy, from
which a military adventurer, Ali Pasha, was able to carve, by unscrupulous
treachery and merciless cruelty, a private principality centred on
Epirus, where he was visited by Lord
Byron. After forty years he was finally reduced by the Turks, but
not before the Greek War of Independence had started in 1821.
On the 25th of March, the feast of the Annunciation, the Archbishop
of Patras proclaimed Greek independence at the Monastery of Aghia
Lavra in the Peloponnese. The Turks retaliated
with the massacres of Greeks on Chios, in Macedonia
and Constantinople, where the Patriarch was hanged on Easter Sunday.
Lord Byron |
The heroic expoits of the Greeks inspired numerous
Philhellenic volunteers, especially British, among them Lord
Byron who died in Messologi. The intervention by an Egyptian
army and fleet in support of the Turks led in 1825 to the formation
of a Triple Alliance of Great Britain, France and Russia, whose
navy decisively defeated the Turco-Egyptian force at Navarino
two years later.
The Protocol of London in 1832 established the frontier
of the reborn Greek state, first a republic under the Corfiote
nobleman Capodistria, who had for a time been the Czar's
foreign minister, and after his murder as a kingdom under the
young Bavarian Prince, Otto. After a bloodless revolution
in 1843, which culminated in the proclamation of a liberal constitution,
Otto was forced to abdicate in 1863. |
An overwhelming majority voted to offer the vacant throne to Queen
Victoria's second son, the Duke of Edinburgh. But the dynasties of
the three Protecting Powers were excluded, and the acceptance of their
joint choice, Prince George of Denmark, was made popular by the session
of the Ionian Islands by Great Britain to Greece. 1n 1881 Thessaly
was incorporated in the Kingdom of the Hellenes, but the Cretan uprising
in 1897 led to an unsuccessful war with Turkey and in the following
year to the granting of full autonomy to Crete
under purely nominal Turkish suzerainty.
The two Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 almost doubled
Greece's territory and population, but in the interval King George
I was murdered in the newly conquered Thessalonica. His son and heir,
King Constantine lacked his father's political foresight;
having received his military training in Germany he believed in the
final victory of the German Emperor William II, whose sister he had
married. The Allies intervened and forced King Constantine to leave
the country where his second son, Alexander, became king.
In 1920 he died of blood-poisoning from a monkey bite, and by another
of the many plebiscites King Constantine was recalled. After a disastrous
war with the resurgent Turks in Asia Minor, in defence of the vast
gains made by the Treaty of Sevres, Greece had to
resign itself to the frontier of the Evros river in Thrace
and an unprecedented exchange of populations, 1,500.000 Greeks against
370.000 Turks, which burdened the small country tremendous social
and economic problems. Kind Constantine abdicated now in favour of
his eldest son, who briefly ruled as George II before the proclamation
of a republic in 1924. But the King was recalled by another plebiscite
in 1935, only to leave the country again in 1941 after a heroic resistance
against the Italians and Germans.
Returning as the result of the plebiscite of 1946, in the lull between
two, Communist rebellions, George II died the following year, before
the end of the Civil War in 1949 in the reign of
his brother, King Paul, who was succeed in 1964 by his son, King Constantine.
Continual cabinet crises led to the military Revolution of the
21st April 1967 and in December of the same year the King left the
country.
The military regime in Athens
resigned July 23, 1974. Former President Caramanlis
returned to Athens and was sworn in as Premier of Greece's first civilian
government since 1967. Since 1981 Greece is an E.U. member country.
So long and varied a history naturally left splendid architectural
and artistic remains scattered al lover the country.
See also: Gallery, Greek
regions, Maps, Tours
in historical places
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