97. Greece: A Modern Nation Built on Ancient Memory

And for many of us, that's where our education actually kinda stops. At least that's the case for me. You know, we learned about Athens, Sparta, Socrates, Plato, Alexander the Great, and then Greece sort of disappears from the history classes, and suddenly it's just a vacation destination. And my question today is, what about the rest of the history? Greece is a country that was occupied for 400 years.

that lost nearly a third of its ethnic population in a single population exchange. It endured a military dictatorship within living memory. And it also nearly went bankrupt in 2010 in a crisis that shook the entire European economy. Greece is a multifaceted place with a complex, rich history, and the last 200 years or so are far less told. So let's learn about Greece today.

Welcome to Wiser World, a podcast for busy people who need a refresher on all things world. Here we explore different regions of the globe, giving you the facts and context you need to think historically about current events. I truly believe that the more we learn about the world, the more we embrace our shared humanity. I'm your host, Ali Roper. Thanks for it.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates, national average 12-month savings of$946 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2024 and May 2025. Potential savings will vary. Hey, welcome back. I am so excited to share a little about Greece with you today. We're gonna start with geography and then we'll move to the economy, language, religion, food, culture, and then of course history and what Greece looks like today.

I really enjoyed studying for this episode. It's probably one of my favorite episodes I've made, mostly because Greece is fascinating. I learned so much. And I just have a much deeper appreci appreciation for Greece after studying for this episode. But as always, please keep in mind that this is not comprehensive.

Greece is deep in literally every direction. We could do 50 episodes and still have more to explore. And that's the hard part about sometimes making these shorter episodes is trying to figure out what to keep, what to leave out. So please let this just be a starting point. And if you'd like to go deeper, head to patreon.com slash wiserworld podcast. I've put together maps, photos, links to help bring everything in this episode to life.

I've also done my best with Greek pronunciation, but Greek words can be really tricky, especially because Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, and English pronunciations. don't always line up really neatly. So please know I looked up words and I tried my best, but I am not a native Greek speaker. I apologize in advance for my mistakes. All right. Let's start off with where Greece is.

So Greece is located in southeastern Europe at the southern end of the Balkan peninsula. It borders Albania, North Macedonia, and Bulgaria to the north. And Turkey to the east. And then on the other three sides, there is water. The Ionian Sea is to the west, the Aegean Sea is to the east, and the Mediterranean stretches to the south. Now that location matters a lot. Greece sits at a crossroads between Europe, Asia, the Middle East, North Africa.

For thousands of years, people, goods, armies, religions, ideas have moved through this region. It has always been right in the middle of major historical worlds. And the geography of Greece is very dramatic. The mainland is very mountainous. About eighty percent of the country is mountains or hills.

And that's mattered throughout Greek history because those mountains meant that different regions were effectively isolated from each other. This is part of why ancient Greece was organized into city-states. rather than one unified nation. The geography made it natural for each valley or coastal plain or wherever to develop its own political life.

It also made it harder to unify. The highest mountain in Greece is Mount Olympus, which rises to nearly 10,000 feet tall, and in Greek Greek mythology, this was the home of the gods. Now one thing that makes Greece geographically extraordinary is the coastline. Greece has the eleventh long coastline in the world, more than 8,000 miles. That's about 13,000 kilometers of coastline.

And that's because the country doesn't just have a mainland, it has islands, somewhere between 1200 to 6,000 islands, depending on how you want to count them. Of which only about two hundred and twenty-seven are permanently inhabited. There are large islands like Crete, which is large and mountainous and has its own very distinct culture and history. And there are tiny islands that are home to just a smattering of houses. So it's important to know that Greece is not one uniform landscape.

Northern Greece can feel very Balkan. The islands can feel very different from each other. The Peloponnese, which is the large peninsula in southern Greece, has its own history and identity. Athens is huge and busy and modern. The small villages are probably gonna feel a lot more traditional. They're all Greece, but they're just not all the same.

The climate is mostly Mediterranean, especially along the coast and on the islands, hot, dry summers, mild, wet winters. But because Greece is mountainous, the interior can get cold and there can be snowfall in the mountains.

Today, Greece has a population of around eleven million people, so not a whole lot of people. Athens is the capital, by far the largest city. Athens is one of those cities where history is Very, very layered, almost absurdly layered, like where you can be walking through a modern neighborhood with traffic and apartment buildings and coffee shops and then suddenly there's the Acropolis above you.

You know, it reminds me that people have been building and worshiping and arguing and living there for a very, very long time. Now let's talk about the economy. So Greece's economy today rests on a few major pillars. And one of the biggest is tourism. Tourism accounts for about 20% of GDP and employs about one in five. So in 2024, Greece received about 40 million inbound traffic.

which is almost four times the country's population. So that's a huge number. Tourism brings in jobs, investment revenue, it is a major part of how people around the world also encounter Greece. But tourism is also a vulnerability when an economy depends heavily on visitors. It can be affected by things outside of its control, like pandemics, recessions, airline prices, wildfires.

waves, you know, just changing travel trends. It it brings money, but it can also bring overcrowding and raising house cr house costs and environmental pressures. And all of that is part of Greece's story. Agriculture is also very important. Greece is known for olives, olive oil, grapes, wine, citrus, vegetables, honey, sheep, goat products.

Feta cheese, which is made from sheep's milk, or a mixture of sheep and goat milk, is one of the most famous Greek foods. It is protected within the European Union as officially Greek. Shipping is another major pillar of the Greek economy. This is one of those facts that really surprised me when I first learned it. Greece has one of the largest merchant shipping fleets.

in the world. And this really makes sense when you stop and think about how Greece is so attached to water. Its access to trade routes is still very, very important for its economy. Greece uses the Euro and joined the Eurozone in two thousand one, and that will matter a lot when we get to the debt crisis in the history section.

When it comes to language, the official language of Greece is Greek, and Greek is one of the oldest recorded languages that's still spoken today. Greek has a written tradition going back more than 3,000 years. And that is just so remarkable to me. When you stop and think about that, that's a long time. Language has changed, Greek has changed a lot, but there's still continuity there. The Greek alphabet developed from the Phoenician writing system around the eighth century BCE.

And it later helped shape both the Latin alphabet we use in English and the Cyrillic alphabet that's used in Russian and other Slavic language languages. So even if you don't speak Greek, You are still living with the influence of Greek writing. Well, most people are living with the influence of Greek writing. Modern Greek is different from ancient Greek.

So it's not as if every Greek person can just sit down and casually read the original Homer without some effort. But there is still a relationship between modern Greek and ancient Greek that matters really deeply to Greek identity. There are also regional dialects, and Greek is spoken in Cyprus as well. English is widely spoken in many tourist areas and by many younger Greeks, especially the cities. So learning a few Greek words is always appreciated if you are traveling there.

All right, let's talk religion next. So, to understand Greece, you really need to have some understanding of Greek Orthodox Christianity. Not every Greek person is deeply religious in the same way, of course. and modern Greece includes secular people, Muslims, Catholics, Jews, and other religions. But culturally and historically, Orthodoxy is central. About ninety percent of Greeks identify as Greek Orthodox Christian, making Orthodoxy not just a religious affiliation.

But a core part of Greek national identity. I think a little history can really help here. So the Eastern Orthodox Church. split from the Roman Catholic Church in ten fifty four and what is called the Great Schism. Now the split had been building for centuries over theology, things like authority and culture. And the eastern and western halves of the old Roman Empire had been growing apart for a very long time. Eastern Orthodoxy rejected the authority of the Pope.

developed its own liturgical traditions and maintained a closer connection to the Greek language and Byzantine culture, which we'll talk about in the history section. So Greek Orthodox services are long, elaborate. In many cases, the entire liturgy is chanted or sung. It's not spoken. It's a visual experience with gold mosaics. Clouds of incense, hundreds of candles, icons, which are sacred images covering every surface.

Depending on your background, it may feel very sensory and ancient feeling. The liturgy that a Greek Orthodox Christian hears today is very similar and or even the same liturgy. that Byzantine Christians heard a thousand years ago. The Greek Orthodox Church is woven into the calendar, the food, family rituals, holidays, names, architecture, national identity. Easter is the central event of the Greek Orthodox calendar. It's bigger than Christmas.

It's more emotionally significant, more celebrated. The week leading up to Easter is called Holy Week. And on the night of Holy Saturday, people go to church for a midnight service and churches fill beyond capacity. People spill into the streets. and at at exactly midnight, all the lights go out. The priest brings out a single candle from behind the altar, which represents the light of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

and passes the can the candle to the congregation, person to person, until thousands of candles are lit. and the darkness is filled with light. And then they go home and many eat lamb soup at one in the morning with their families and on Easter Sunday, whole lambs are roasted on spits in the street. So it's a very it's a very all-encompassing experience to do Easter in Greece.

Name days are also very important. In many Greek families, the feast day of the saint you are named after can be celebrated as much as or even more than your birthday. So if you are named after Saint George or Saint Nicholas or Saint Demetrios, your name day is also a major event. We'll talk more in the history section about the Greek Orthodox Church and how it played a specific political role during the Ottoman occupation that shaped its place in Greek identity.

But one more tradition I think is worth knowing about, at least if we're c just covering basics like we are in this episode, is the evil eye, which is also called the Mati in Greece. So that's M A T I. The basic idea is that envy, jealousy, So even maybe a little too much admiration can somehow bring harm to a person. So the belief goes back to ancient times, but still very present today. And that is why you'll see blue eye charms everywhere, like on jewelry or in shops and cars, maybe on boats.

They're meant to protect against the evil eye. And if something goes wrong, like you have a headache or bad luck or a sudden problem, some people may say it was caused by the mati. There are also prayers and rituals used to remove it. It is one of those traditions that connects modern Greece to both Orthodox Christianity and also much, much older belief.

Now, we have to talk about food for a second. Greek food is famous for a reason, and it is built on some of the oldest agricultural foundations in Europe. Just like how we talked about the three sisters of Mesoamerican food in the Mexico episode, Greek Greece also has a grouping of three. This is the holy trinity of Greek cuisine, olive oil, wheat, and wine.

These three crops have sustained Greek life for forever. Greece produces extraordinary olive oil. It's used very generously. It's it's poured. It's not drizzled. And the country has been producing olive oil for at least five thousand years and the olive trees are both a cultural and agricultural symbol. The culture around eating in Greece is as important as the food itself. Greek meals are not fuel stops. I want to say that again. Greek meals are not fuel stops. They are social events.

Mazettas are small dishes that are meant to be shared. You order several dishes for the table and then you eat slowly while you talk. And that's the point. Greek meals are not just about getting food into your body. It's about lingering and having a good time. Now, mousaka is perhaps the most internationally known Greek dish.

This is layers of eggplant, minced meat, and bechamel sauce. It's baked until it's golden, it's rich and very savory and completely different from versions you might find outside of Greece. There's also spana copita, which is spinach and feta wrapped in this flaky phyllo pastry. There's sulaki, that's grilled meat on skewers, that's often served with pita or bread.

tomatoes, onions, tsatsiki. Tsatsiki is made with this thick yogurt, cucumber, garlic, herbs. It goes with almost everything. And then of course gyros. I always laugh because sometimes in the United States people call it gyros. It's nope, it's it's gyros. Anyway, it's very similar to Suvlaki, but it's with meat carved from a vertical rotisserie spit.

Greek coffee is also thick, strong brewed in a small copper pot called a briki. It is poured into a tiny cup and served with a glass of cold water. You drink it really slowly, you don't rush. and you do not drink the sediment at the bottom. After you finish, you can turn the cup upside down on the saucer and someone will read your fortune fortune in the grounds. So fortune telling from coffee grounds is a genuine Greek tradition.

Now let's talk a little bit about culture and values because I think some of these ideas are really beautiful. Greece has a concept called phylotimo that is sometimes described as the most Greek thing about Greece. and it's almost impossible to translate. Literally it means love of honor, but I don't really think that completely captures it. It is a complex

set of values that includes personal dignity, generosity, hospitality, responsibility to your community and family, and a kind of deep seated pride. It's not arrogance, but something closer to integrity. Another way to put this would be you do the right thing not because you're told to, but because of who you are. You offer hospitality because to withhold it would be unthinkable. It's like a failure to yourself. And many Greeks say phylotimo is the most important word in the language.

And it's just a really important value of the Greek Another Greek value that you'll hear about is Philoxenia or Xenophilia, which literally means love of the stranger. It is again the idea of hospitality toward guests and foreigners. It's an ancient concept. It shows up in Greek mythology and in literature. And Greeks are very often generous with food and directions and conversation and

Family is also central. Extended family networks are very important. Many adult children remain very closely tied to parents and grandparents' Sunday meals. holidays, baptisms, weddings, funerals, name days, major family gatherings. And Greek mothers and grandmothers feeding everyone is a stereotype, but it is a stereotype with a lot of lived truth behind it. Another word that you might hear is kefi. It is K-E-F-I. It also does not translate perfectly, but it means something like joy.

like high spirits, enthusiasm, the feeling when the music is good and the food is good and the people around you are happy and life just feels full and good. Kefey is almost a way of of being alive. Greeks are also famous for arguing very passionately and loudly in a way that sometimes visitors mistake for conflict, but it's usually just enthusiasm. Silence is not. a typical thing at a Greek table. Disagreements very normal. Consensus is not necessarily the goal.

I really love that, honestly. I think there's a lot of cultures, my own included, that could benefit from a little bit of Greek enthusiasm. Honestly, there are so many cultural values that I admire about the Greeks that we could talk about. But I'm going to let Giorgios talk about those at the end of the episode because he has some amazing thoughts about being Greek.

So I'll let him talk more at the end of the episode, and I'm now going to start talking about the history. Now, like I said at the beginning of the episode, Greek history is enormous. thousands and thousands of years of history. And it was a real challenge to figure out what I wanted to keep in this episode, what I wanted to gloss over, what I wanted to focus on. But I hope to give you the art

the major chapters and turning points that help explain Greece today. Just know there are lots of great podcasts out there about ancient Greece. So I might not spend as much time on that as some people would prefer, but this is just an overarching primer to the history of Greece. Before democracy, before Socrates and Plato, before the Parthenon, there were older Bronze Age civilizations in the Greek world.

The Minoans developed on the island of Crete, and the Mycenaeans developed on the Greek mainland, and they built palaces, they traded across the Mediterranean, they developed riding systems, and they left behind. stories and symbols that later Greeks would remember in myth and epic poetry. So if you know the myth of the Minotaur, the half man, half-bull creature living in a labyrinth.

That story is connected to Crete, and probably draws from memories of Minoan culture, and the Mycenaeans are the world that Homer wrote about in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Then around 1100 BC, the Mycenaean world collapsed as part of the Whiter Bronze Age collapse. which affected many civilizations across the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Greek world became poorer, less connected, less urban for several centuries. But out of that collapse, something new emerged.

By around 800 BC, Greek civilization was rebuilding itself around the polis or polis. Another word for that would be city state. Ancient Greece was, again, not one unified country. It was a collection of independent communities, each with its own government, laws, customs, identity. Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, Syracuse, these were all Greeks. But they were not one political unit. And that is one of the great themes of Greek history. We have cultural connection, but political fragmentation.

So Greeks shared language, gods, myths, festivals, this sense of being Greek, especially when they compared themselves to non Greeks, but they also fought each other constantly. Athens and Sparta became the most famous examples of how different these city states could be. Sparta developed a highly militarized society built on discipline, obedience, and the forced labor of the Helots.

Which were an oppressed population tied to the land. They kinda kept the land going and the food being made so that the Spartans could fight. Athens, on the other hand, developed one of the earliest and most influential democracies in world history. The word democracy comes from the Greek democratia, meaning rule by the people.

Now, Athenian democracy was not democracy as we would define it today. Women, enslaved people, foreigners could not vote. So when we say Athens helped invent democracy, we don't mean that Athens created like a fully equal society. We mean that Athens introduced A radical political idea for its time that citizens should participate directly in governing themselves. And that idea would have a very long afterlife.

Now, during this same broad period, Greeks expanded across the Mediterranean and Black Sea. They founded communities from southern Italy and Sicily to Asia Minor and North Africa, and the Olympic Games became one of the great shared traditions of the Greek world. Every four years, athletes and visitors came from across the Greek world to compete and to worship. There was even a sacred truce that can that was connected to the games.

meaning that people were allowed to travel safely to and from Olympia. So again, even though the Greek city-states were politically divided, events like the Olympics reminded them that they were part of this wider cultural Greek world.

And Greek thinkers also began asking questions during this time about nature, reality, politics, ethics. And the human condition in ways that has helped shape philosophy and science for centuries. Then in the early 400s BC, the Greek city-states faced the Persian Empire, one of the most powerful empires in the world. And against the odds, Some of the divided Greek states cooperated with each other. The Athenians defeated the Persians at Marathon in four hundred ninety BC.

Ten years later, the Spartans and their allies made their famous stand at Thermopylae, and the Greeks won a major naval victory at Salimus. the Persian Wars became central to Greek memory. Greeks saw themselves as free peoples resisting imperial conquest. And again, this idea is gonna echo for centuries. After the Persian Wars, Athens became more powerful than ever. In the 400s BC, Athens entered what people call its golden age.

Athens became a center of art and drama, architecture, philosophy, political experimentation. The city rebuilt after the Persian destruction, and one of the great symbols of that rebuilding was the Parthenon. the temple to Athena, built on the Acropolis. It remains one of the most recognizable buildings in the world. This was also the age of Greek tragedy and comedy. Herodotus wrote about the Persian Wars and is often called the father of history.

And the medical tradition associated with Hippocrates helped move medicine toward natural explanations for illness rather than just like purely supernatural ideas for why people got sick. And then of course the philosophers like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, they were asking questions that still shape how people think about truth and ethics and politics and knowledge today. And I'll share more about them on Patreon because there's a lot we could talk about there.

But Athens' cultural brilliance did not happen in a peaceful vacuum. Athens' power frightened Sparta and its allies, and the Greek world was pulled into the Peloponnesian War from four thirty-one to four oh four BC.

And in this case, that outsider was Macedon. Now Macedon was a kingdom to the north of the Greek city states. Many southern Greeks saw Macedonians as somewhat outside of the traditional Greek world, or at least kind of on its edges. But Macedon was deeply connected to Greek culture, and in the three hundreds BC it became the dominant power in Greece. King Philip II of Macedon built a powerful army and brought most of the Greek city states under his control.

But then he was assassinated, and his son Alexander inherited his throne. Alexander was only twenty years old. You might know him as Alexander the Great. Alexander had been educated in part by Aristotle, which I think is one of those historical details that like, it sounds made up, you know.

Alexander's conquests spread Greek language and art and architecture and education and political culture across a huge part of the ancient world. And that's important because this post-Alexander world is called the Hellenistic Age. Greek civilizations were not just only on the Greek mainland. The Greek Culture had been spreading across the wider Mediterranean and Near Eastern world. And then another power rose in the West, Rome.

Rome formally brought mainland Greece under its control in a hundred and forty six BC. Politically, this is the major turning point. The Greek city states are no longer truly independent powers. But Culturally, the story is really interesting. The Romans admired Greek culture deeply. Educated Romans studied Greek literature. They hired Greek tutors. They read Greek philosophy and rhetoric and history. And they felt like a Greek education was a mark of refinement.

So this is why the Roman poet Horace wrote one of my favorite lines of this period. He said, Captured Greece, captured her fierce conqueror. Captured Greece, captured her fierce conqueror. So, in other words, Rome conquered Greece militarily, but Greece conquered Rome culturally. First centuries Greece was part of the Roman Empire, and then as the Empire shifted eastward, Greece became part of the Eastern Roman Empire, what we now call the Byzantine Empire.

the people living in it would not have called themselves Byzantines. They thought of themselves as Romans. But over time this empire became increasingly Greek speaking, Orthodox, Christian, and centered on Constantinople, which is modern day Istanbul. And this is one of the most underappreciated chapters in Greek history. Byzantium matters because it is the bridge between ancient Greece and modern Greece, at least in my opinion.

Byzantine civilization blended Roman government, Greek language, and Christian theology. So these Byzantine churches, they glittered with mosaics and icons and monasteries, copied manuscripts and preserved learning. And the religious traditions shaped during this time have really deeply influenced Greek identity. So again, if you visit Greece today, you're gonna see Byzantine influence everywhere.

And this is an enormous middle chapter, more than a thousand years when Greek-speaking Christians were central to the Eastern Roman world.

Now, the Byzantine Empire faced many enemies over the centuries, but one of the most damaging events came in 1204 when Western European crusaders sacked Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade. This was a catastrophe for the Byzantine world. The Empire eventually recovered the city, but it was very weakened. And then in 1453, Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks under Sultan Mehmed II.

For Greeks, fourteen fifty three became a major historical wound. It marked the end of the Christian Greek speaking empire that had carried so much of Greek identity for centuries. But again, Greek culture did not disappear. It entered a new phase under Ottoman rule.

So Greece remained under Ottoman control for roughly four centuries until the Greek War of Independence began in eighteen twenty-one. Four hundred years is a very long time, and the Ottoman period shaped a lot of things that we know about modern Greece today. Now I don't want to oversimplify it, but it seems like the Ottoman period was not one identical experience for everyone. Some Greeks became wealthy merchants, traders. They owned ships.

Some lived as poor peasants paying taxes to Ottoman authorities and local landholders. Some converted to Islam, some became part of Ottoman administrative life, some lived in mountain villages with relative local autonomy. At the same time, Ottoman rule also meant subjugation, taxation, discrimination, and periodic violence for many.

Greek boys were sometimes taken through the Dev Sherme system, which was the practice of conscripting Christian boys for service in the Ottoman military and bureaucracy. The best known of these in Greek memory are the Janissaries. These elite Ottoman soldiers, some of whom came from Christian families.

The Ottoman Empire also organized many of its subjects by religious community, and Orthodox Christians were under the authority of the ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople. And this meant that the Greek Orthodox Church. Played an enormous role in preserving religious life, education, language, and community identity. In a world without a Greek state, the church became one of the main institutions through which.

Greekness survived. I don't think this can be overstated. This was really, really important to how Greek culture survived.

By the 1700s and early 1800s, new ideas were spreading across the world. Enlightenment ideas. about rights and liberty in nationhood. These were moving throughout Europe, throughout the Americas, and other parts of the world. And Greek merchants and intellectuals in the diaspora were beginning to imagine liberation from Ottoman rule

and also the revival of a Greek political community. In eighteen twenty one, the Greek War of Independence began. And according to tradition, on march twenty fifth, eighteen twenty one, a Greek bishop named Germanos, raised a Greek flag at a monastery in the Peloponnese and he called for a revolt against Ottoman rule. Whether the story happened exactly that way is debated, but March twenty fifth became Greeks, Greece's Independence Day. It's still celebrated every year.

Now what followed was a very brutal war. It lasted nearly a decade. The Ottomans were way more powerful, and the Greek had to fight with limited resources, divided leadership. And really no idea if they were actually going to succeed. Ottoman forces committed massacres, including the massacre of Chios in eighteen twenty two, where tens of thousands of Greeks Greeks were killed or enslaved. Greek fighters also committed violence against Muslims and Jews in areas that they captured.

But the Greek cause attracted enormous sympathy in Europe. Educated Europeans had long admired ancient Greece as the birthplace of democracy and classical art and philosophy, and this admiration for Greece called Philhellenism. Translated into real support, money, weapons, volunteers, political pressure. The most famous foreign volunteer was the English poet Lord Byron, who came to Greece in 1823 to support the independence cause.

And he died there of fever in eighteen twenty four. He became a martyr for Greece Greek independence, and actually he is still honored in Greece today. Eventually, though, the great powers intervened. Britain, France, and Russia defeated Ottoman and Egyptian forces at the Battle of Neverino in eighteen twenty seven, and Greece was recognized as independent. fully in 1830. Now, as you might have guessed, independence came with complications, it always does, and the new Greek state was small.

It included parts of the mainland and the Peloponnese, but many Greeks still lived under Ottoman rule. And the European powers decided that Greece should have a monarchy. So they put in a young Bavarian prince. named Otto as king. He was seventeen. So imagine fighting a war for national independence, and then you're handed a foreign teenage king who doesn't speak your language.

This is a very tense time, right, between Greek national dreams and also the reality in front of them because Greece was independent, but it was small, poor, politically unstable, and it was dependent on these great powers of Europe. And Otto moved the capital to Athens in 1834. At the time, Athens had only a few thousand inhabitants. It was mostly ruined.

and he helped build a large metropolis in Athens. Otto's time was very turbulent and when he was eventually deposed in eighteen sixty two he was replaced By George I, who was a Danish prince, chosen again by the great powers. And over the rest of the 1800s and early 1900s. Greece slowly expanded. This expansion was tied to an idea known as the Megali idea or the Great Idea.

Basically, it was the dream of uniting Greek-speaking Orthodox communities into one larger Greek state, possibly with Constantinople as its capital. That was the dream. So for Greeks who had lived for centuries under Ottoman rule, this gym is pretty powerful.

And it also created tensions with other peoples living in the same regions. The Turks, Bulgarians, Albanians, Jews, Armenians, Slavs, Muslims, other Christians. The Eastern Mediterranean was not like neatly divided into modern nations. It was mixed. And we know that nationalism often tries to draw clean borders, but the reality is that humans are very messy.

Greece fought in the Balkan Wars of nineteen twelve and nineteen thirteen, emerged significantly larger, for example, Macedonia, Crete, many Aegean islands were incorporated into the Greek state from that. So for a minute there it looked like the Megali idea might be within reach. But then came World War One.

Greece eventually entered the war on the Allied side, but after the war the defeated Ottoman Empire was being carved up by the victorious powers, and leaders saw this as an opportunity. They suggested that Greece send troops to the To the Anatolian coast, the western edge of modern Turkey, where there were large Greek communities, especially in and around Smyrna, which is modern Ismir. Smyrna had a major Greek presence for centuries, roots going back to ancient ancient Greek world.

So Greek leaders hoped to expand deeper into Anatolia and again fulfill that dream of a greater Greece. But Turkish national forces under Mustafa Kemal, later known as Anaturk, Fought back and the Greek army was defeated. So in nineteen twenty two, Smyrna burned. Greek and Armenian neighborhoods were destroyed and huge numbers of people were killed or fled. And Greeks remember this as the Asia Minor Catastrophe. This is one of the defining traumas of modern Greek history.

It kinda ended the dream of a Greek state stretching into Anatolia and it also ended thousands of years of Greek life in many parts of what is now Turkey. Afterward, Greece and Turkey agreed to a forced population exchange. So more than a million Orthodox Christians from Turkey were sent to Greece.

And hundreds of thousands of Muslims from Greece were sent to Turkey. The exchange was, again, largely based on religion, not not language or personal identity. Some of the Orthodox Christians arriving in Greece spoke Turkish as their first language. Some Muslims leaving Greece spoke Greek. So think about how disruptive that is. Families who'd lived in the same towns for generations were uprooted, and they were told that because of their religion they belonged somewhere else.

Now, Greece was still a relatively poor country and it had to absorb a huge refugee population. Refugee neighborhoods developed around Athens and other cities and these refugees brought music and food and memories, skills.

They added a new layer to Greek identity. And the years between World War I and World War II were politically unstable. There were coups. Changes of government, tensions between monarchy and republic, deep social divisions. In nineteen thirty-six, General Ayowanis Metaxas. established a dictatorship, and his regime borrowed some of the imagery and methods from European fascism.

However, in October of 1940, Mussolini, that's from Italy, demanded that Greece allow Italian troops to occupy strategic positions. And Metoxas refused. The answer is remembered as ohi, which means no. So Greece went to war, and remarkably, Greek forces pushed the Italians back into Albania. In fact, it's reported that Churchill said, From now on, we shall not say that Greeks fight like heroes, but that heroes fight like Greeks. And the day that Italy invaded Greece, october twenty eighth,

is now celebrated as Ohiday, which means no. And again, that's the day that Greece said no. But then Nazi Germany invaded in April of nineteen forty one. Greece fell, and the occupation that followed was brutal. Germany, Italy, and Bulgaria occupied different parts of the country until nineteen forty-four. Food was in short supply or seas.

Infrastructure was very damaged and that winter famine of nineteen forty one to forty two killed so many people. The Jewish community of Greece suffered catastrophically. Before the war, Thessaloniki was one of the largest Sephardic Jewish communities in the world. These were Jews whose ancestors had been expelled from Spain in 1492 and welcomed into the Ottoman Empire.

So in Thessaloniki, Jews had been central to the city's life for centuries. And then between 1943 and 1944, the Nazis deported virtually the entire Jewish community of Greece to Auschwitz. And of the approximately seventy thousand Greek Jews deported, roughly eighty-seven percent were murdered. The Jewish community of Thessaloniki, which had existed for four hundred and fifty years, was uh nearly annihilated.

At the same time, there was a powerful resistance movement that emerged in Greece, one of the strongest in occupied Europe. Greek partisans fought the Axis occupation and forced Germany, Italy, and Bulgaria to keep troops and resources in Greece. that could otherwise have been used elsewhere. The resistance did not save Greece from the horrors of occupation, but it demonstrated something important about the Greek capacity for refusal.

And then when the Germans left in nineteen forty four, Greece did not simply return to peace. And here is a chapter of Greek history that is much less known outside of Greece, and that is the Greek Civil War. So after World War II, Greek Greece had a civil war. During the occupation, that resistance had been dominated by mostly communist-led forces, especially the AOM and ELOS movement.

The Greek government in exile, which was backed by Britain, returned after the war and was not going to let communist forces take power. So a brutal civil war followed. It lasted from nineteen forty six to nineteen forty nine.

The British and then the Americans backed the government side. The communist side had some support from neighboring communist countries, especially Yugoslavia for part of the war. But the politics of all this is is really complicated, more than we can talk about in this episode. But the fighting was especially intense in the mountains of northern Greece, where these communist guerrilla forces operated from these strongholds, from border areas, more in the rural areas.

The government controlled the main cities and had support from Britain at first and then, like I said, more from the United States because the Cold War was beginning. So the war became both a Greek conflict and an early Cold War battlefield. We have the government trying to hold the country together, prevent a communist takeover in their perspective.

On the other hand, leftist fighters believed that they'd carried much of the resistance against Nazi occupation. They were now being shut out of power. Villages were caught in the middle. People were pressured, they were punished, displaced. recruited by both sides. It was not a clean ideological struggle from a distance. It was very intimate and local and from what I have read, really brutal. One reason the Civil War mattered so much is that it did not just

And on the battlefield, it really shaped Greek society for a generation. Families were divided by politics. Some children were evacuated or taken across borders during the fighting. Many leftists were imprisoned, exiled, or excluded from public life afterward. and jobs, education and even basic social trust could be shaped by which side your family had been associated with. So even though the war officially ended in nineteen forty nine, it was won by the government side.

its emotional and political aftermath lasted much, much longer. So for many Greeks, the civil war became a wound that people learned to live with and didn't talk very openly about The post-war years also produced major waves of Greek immigration. Many Greeks left for Australia, the United States. Canada, West Germany, elsewhere in search of work and stability. So if you have Greek communities near you, especially like Melbourne or

Chicago, New York, Toronto, parts of Germany, a lot of that diaspora history connects to this period of poverty, war, migration. After the Civil War was over, Greece slowly rebuilt, but that political tension remained. And in nineteen sixty seven a group of right wing military officers staged a coup and established a dictatorship, known as the Junta or the Regime of the Colonel.

Now they claimed they were saving Greece from communism and chaos, but they suspended democracy, censored the press, they banned political parties, they imprisoned or tortured opponents. And controlled culture. The Junta collapsed in 1974 after a disaster in Cyprus. So Cyprus is an island in the eastern Mediterranean with both Greek and Turkish communities. And the Greek unta backed a coup in Cyprus that was aimed at uniting the island with Greece.

Turkey responded by invading and occupying the northern part of the island. The island is still divided today, and Cyprus is still a major source of tension between Greece and Turkey. And this failure in Cyprus discredited the Junta and democracy was restored in Greece in nineteen seventy four. There's a lot to this part of the history, including student movements that I didn't have time to talk about in this episode that I'll share on Patreon.

But the transition is called the metapolitefsi, meaning political change or regime change. And a referendum abolished the monarchy or any sort of one person rule. and Greece became the democratic republic that it is today. Political life opened up, the leaders of the UNTA were tried and imprisoned. But we can see here that their method was that anti communism could be used as a license

for authoritarianism and that was done away with in nineteen seventy four. In nineteen eighty one, Greece joined the European Community, which later became the European Union, and this was a big deal. It helped anchor Greece in Western Europe politically and economically. Living standards rose over the next couple of decades, an infrastructure improved, a middle class expanded. And in 2004, Athens hosted the Olympic Games, which was a moment of enormous national pride, but also enormous expense.

And in the late 2000s, Greece faced one of the most painful chapters in its modern history, the Greek debt crisis.

That they assumed that lending to Greece was fairly safe. But when the global financial crisis hit in 2008, that confidence In 2009, Greece revealed that its bed its budget deficit was much larger than previously reported. So the government had been giving a rosier picture of its finances than was actually true. Financial markets panicked.

investors began to worry that Greece might not be able to repay its debts. So they demanded much higher interest rates to lend Greece money. And very quickly Greece could no longer borrow normally. And here is where the Euro really mattered. If Greece still had its old currency, it might have been able to devalue that currency, basically make it worthless.

Which can sometimes help a country make its exports and tourism cheaper, a little more competitive. That strategy has serious downsides, but it is one tool that countries can use in a crisis. But Greece no longer controlled its own currency. It used the euro. And that meant that Greece could not simply print more money or devalue its currency or set its own independent monetary policy. It needed help from outside lenders.

So Greece received bailout loans from the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. those loans came with really strict conditions. Greece had to impose austerity measures. We talked about in the that in the Venezuela 101 series. But that means that policies are designed to reduce government spending to bring that debt under control. So this is going to include cutting public sector wages.

reducing pensions, raising taxes, cutting public services, privatizing some state owned assets, restructuring parts of the economy. Again, the goal is to make Greece financially stable again, but the human cost was enormous. The Greek economy shrank by about a quarter. Unemployment rose to around 28%, and youth unemployment reached even higher, close to sixty percent at its worst.

businesses closed and families really struggled, those public services were strained. Many young educated Greeks left the country to look for work elsewhere and that creates what people call brain drain. So the Greek debt crisis was not just like an economic event. It really was a trauma to the social structure. It really changed family life. It damaged trust in the government. And it created resentment toward Greek political elites.

toward European institutions, it it really shaped Greek politics. And for many Greeks, it raised this really painful question of what does democracy mean if voters choose one thing but creditors and financial markets. And international institutions force another. And that is why the Greek debt crisis matters beyond Greece, at least in my opinion. It showed how deeply connected modern countries are, and how in a shared currency system like the Eurozone.

one country's crisis becomes the crisis for an entire region. Greece has recovered since then very slowly. Growth has returned, tourism has rebounded, and the country exited its bailout program in twenty eighteen. But there are still scars there. Young people left. Pensions were some pensions were never restored. And again, public trust was very damaged.

Today's Greece is a country in a very complex position. It's economically recovering. It's still scarred by the crisis. It's really tied to Europe and it's located in the middle of some of the most pressing issues of our time. The migration and refugee crisis hit Greece earlier and harder than many other European countries because the Aegean Islands are one of the closest entry points from Turkey into the European Union. So starting in twenty fifteen,

Hundreds of thousands of people fleeing Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. They crossed the Aegean in inflatable boats. Many did not survive. the journey, and the island of Lesbos became a symbol of both the crisis and the humanitarian response. Greek civilians help people arriving on shore, even while the Greek state, which was overwhelmed, under resourced, still reeling from the debt crisis.

were struggling to cope, and Europe's response deepened Greek resentment toward European institutions that had already been strained by the austerity years. Another thing is the relationship with Turkey. Things are still tense on multiple fronts. There's Cyprus, we talked about that already. There's also competing claims in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean. And there's migration, since Turkey has used migrants as leverage in negotiations with the European Union at times.

Greece and Turkey have come close to military confrontation more than once in recent decades, but there have also been periods of dialogue and trade and sometimes cultural warmth. So it's one of those relationships where history and proximity create conflict and connection. Brain drain is still a challenge in Greece. The debt crisis sent

a generation of educated young Greeks abroad. Some have returned, many have not. The country needs talent and energy, but higher salaries in Northern Europe, yeah, that's a really powerful draw. And tourism continues to reshape Greece, especially the islands. Tourism brings lots of jobs and global attention, but also overcrowding and rising housing costs, environmental strain,

And the question of a lot of beautiful places like Greece is how do you welcome the world without losing the place itself? What strikes me the most about Greece is the way that it holds contradictions without collapsing under their weight. Now, I'm just sitting here at my desk with my hands going back and forth like it's on a scale. It's both ancient and it's modern. And it's proud and it's wounded. It's European and it's Mediterranean.

It's orthodox and it's secular. It's very local and also global. And it's a country that gave the world ideas that still govern how many of us think. And also it's people who are trying to live in the present. So I just keep toggling my hands back and forth and I think that Greece balances that in a really profound way.

So to wrap up this episode, I've asked my new friend Georgios to share his thoughts on Greece. He is Greek, and I asked him what he loves about Greece and its people and culture, as well as what he wishes the world knew about Greece. And his answer is profound and hands down the best part of this episode. So here is Giorgio.

Greece is not the richest country in Europe. We're not obsessed with optimizing every minute of every day. But when you visit Greece, you'll notice something. People make time for family, they make time for friends. Meals aren't something you squeeze between meetings. They're an event. Grandparents are deeply involved in the lives of their grandchildren. Neighbors know each other. Conversations last longer than they need to.

And then there's the C. As Greeks it's hard to explain how much the sea is woven into our identity. No matter where you grew up in Greece, you're never far from it. The colors of the Aegean, the light, the coastline, the islands. They become part of your memory. Maybe that's part of why life slows down there. When you're surrounded by this kind of beauty, it's a little easier to remember what matters. Nature constantly reminds you to look up, take a breath, and appreciate where you are.

Living abroad has helped me appreciate this even more. In places like the United States, we're incredibly good at pursuing achievement, growth, and success. And there's a lot to admire about that. But Greece offers a different reminder. A meaningful life is not measured only about what you've accomplished. It's also measured about who you're sharing it with. One thing I wish more people knew about Greece is that it is far more than ancient ruins and postcard islands.

Greece is a modern country full of remarkably resilient people. We've lived through wars, occupations, economic crises, and countless challenges. Yet somehow Greeks remain optimistic, welcoming, and generous. You will often find kindness and generosity in the places you least expect. In fact, some of the happiest people you'll ever meet are people who by many modern definitions don't have much at all.

They live simple lives. They spend time with family. They sit at a cafe with their friends. They watch the sunset, and they're genuinely content. The older I get, the more I think there is wisdom in that. And while we're cleaning up misconceptions, I should probably mention one thing. Not every Greek meal comes with hummus. In fact, I think it's a good idea

I didn't even even start eating hummus until I moved to America. So if you're picturing every Greek grandmother serving bowls of hummus, you're being slightly misled. At its best Greece reminds us that happiness is often found in simple things family, friendship, community, generosity. And a place at the table. Thank you.

So much goodness with the world. So many things come out of Greece. And I'm very grateful for it. And if you enjoyed learning about Greece today and want to explore a little deeper, a little further, you can also support the podcast this way by heading to patreon.com slash wiserworld podcast. You can also sign up for my free weekly email newsletter at wiserworld.com or follow us on YouTube and Instagram at Wiserworld Podcast.

You can also click the plus button on your favorite podcasting app. So when new episodes drop, you get them immediately. This is free for you and it helps me a lot because it helps people to find the show as well when there's more subscribers. I love learning about the world with you. I hope you'll come back and learn more with me in the future. And until then, let's make the world a little wiser.