Greek history is very long and in many ways the history of European civilisation itself: democracy, philosophy, theatre, science and the Olympic Games were born here. But Greece is not only antiquity: it was Byzantine for a thousand years, Ottoman for four centuries, and in the 19th and 20th centuries built a modern state through wars, dictatorships and rebirths.
- 7000-3000 BCNeolithic: the first farming villages in Thessaly and Macedonia.
- 3200-2000 BCCycladic civilisation: the famous marble figurines.
- 2000-1450 BCMinoan civilisation: the palaces of Crete, Knossos and Phaistos.
- 1600-1100 BCMycenaean civilisation: Mycenae, Pylos, Tiryns and Homer's age of heroes.
- 1100-800 BCDark Age: palaces collapse, writing is lost, iron comes into use.
- 800-480 BCArchaic age: the polis, the alphabet, Homer's poems, colonies and the Olympic Games.
- 480-323 BCClassical age: Persian Wars, Pericles's Athens, Peloponnesian War, Socrates and Plato.
- 336-323 BCAlexander the Great conquers the Persian Empire as far as India.
- 323-31 BCHellenistic age: the kingdoms of Alexander's successors, Alexandria in Egypt.
- 146 BC-AD 330Roman Greece: Corinth destroyed, Greece becomes a Roman province.
- 330-1453Byzantine Empire: Constantinople capital of the Christian, Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire.
- 1204-1669Venetians and crusaders hold islands and coasts; Crete is Venetian until 1669.
- 1453-1821Ottoman rule: Greece is part of the Turkish Empire.
- 1821-1830War of Independence: the Greek state is born.
- 1832-1913Kingdom of Greece: territorial expansion and the Balkan Wars.
- 1914-1974The 20th century: world wars, Asia Minor catastrophe, occupation, civil war, dictatorship.
- Since 1974Third Republic: democracy, EEC membership (1981), the euro, debt crisis and recovery.
Antiquity
Ancient Greece was never one state but a world of hundreds of independent city-states (poleis), often at war, united by language, gods and great sanctuaries such as Delphi and Olympia. The most powerful were Athens, cradle of democracy and culture, and Sparta, a military society. Together they repelled the Persian invasion at Marathon (490 BC), Thermopylae and Salamis (480 BC) and Plataea (479 BC). In Pericles's golden age Athens built the Parthenon and hosted philosophers, historians and tragedians. Rivalry with Sparta led to the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), which weakened all the Greek cities and opened the way for the kingdom of Macedon under Philip II and his son Alexander.
Read more: detailed timeline, history of Athens, philosophy, art, mythology.
From Romans to Ottomans
Conquered by Rome, Greece in turn conquered Roman culture: Romans learned Greek, copied Greek statues and sent their sons to study in Athens. With the founding of Constantinople in 330 the centre of the Greek world moved to the Bosphorus, and for a thousand years the Byzantine Empire was Christian and Greek-speaking. After the Fourth Crusade (1204) Venetians, Franks and Genoese divided part of the land; in 1453 the Turks took Constantinople and in the following decades almost all of Greece. The Ionian Islands stayed largely Venetian until 1797, with only brief spells of Ottoman rule.
Modern Greece
The revolution that broke out in 1821 led in 1830 to a small independent state, covering only the Peloponnese, Attica, Central Greece and the Cyclades. For over a century Greeks pursued the Megali Idea, the "Great Idea" of uniting all Greeks in one state, until the Asia Minor catastrophe of 1922.
The 20th century was harsh: two Balkan Wars, the First World War and the National Schism, war with Turkey and the population exchange, resistance to the Italian invasion and German occupation, a bloody civil war (1946-1949) and the colonels' dictatorship (1967-1974). Since 1974 Greece has been a stable democracy, an EU member since 1981 and in the euro since 2001; it came through the severe debt crisis and is now recovering.
See also famous Greeks and politics today.