Rental Cars Greece
History of Greece
Greece was the birthplace of European civilisation. The period starting from 700 BC saw the rise of the great city states of Athens, Corinth and Sparta, frequently engaged in long struggles for supremacy, and uniting only when faced with the common threat of invasion by the Persian Empire.
Known as the classical (or Golden) age, great advances were made in culture, philosophy and the definition of democracy. Architecture made great strides forward, the Parthenon was commissioned, great tragedies were written and performed, and civilisation pre-dated the Roman empire by several centuries. The legacy of this era is a collection of remarkable ruins throughout Greece, the best preserved of which are found on the Acropolis in Athens.
The Peloponnesian Wars (431-404 AD) bought an end to the stability and saw the militaristic Spartans control the region. They didn’t last long before the Macedonians expanded south and conquered, lead by the ambitious Alexander the Great (en-route to claim another great civilisation - the Egyptians). The resulting of this was the Hellenic identity.
By 146 BC Greece and Macedonia had become Roman provinces, but by 395 AD, the empire had split, with Greece being included in the illustrious Byzantine Empire. By the 12th century, the Crusades were in full flight and Byzantine power was much reduced by invasions by Venetians, Catalans, Genoese, Franks and Normans.
In 1453 the Turks captured the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, and by 1500 almost all of Greece was under Turkish control. In 1821 the Greeks started The War of Independence against the Turks. This independence movement lacked unity and in 1827 Russia, France and Britain decided to intervene and helped the Greeks in their battle. After independence was won in 1832, the European powers made Greece a monarchy with a non-Greek ruler - Otto of Bavaria who was made king in 1833. This monarchy held on until well into the 20th C. However, George I established a new constitution in 1864 that returned democracy and pushed the king into a largely ceremonial role.
The Greeks fought with the allies and after the war, Prime Minister Venizelos sent forces to 'liberate' the Turkish territory of Smyrna (present-day Izmir), which had a large Greek population. The army was repulsed by Ataturk's troops and many Greek residents were slaughtered. This led to a brutal population exchange between the two countries in 1923, the resultant population increase (1,300,000 Christian refugees) straining Greece's already weak economy. By 1936 the Communist party had widespread popular support. In 1936 General Metaxas was appointed as prime minister by the king and quickly established a fascist dictatorship.
Despite Allied help, Greece fell to Germany in 1941, leading to carnage and mass starvation. Resistance movements sprang up and a bloody civil war resulted, lasting until 1949, when the royalists claimed victory. During the civil war, America gave large sums of money to the anti-communist government, and implemented the Certificate of Political Reliability, which remained valid until 1962. This document declared that the wearer did not hold left-wing sympathies; without it Greeks could not vote and found it almost impossible to get work.
In 1974 the colonels attempted to assassinate Cyprus' leader, Archbishop Makarios, leading to Turkey's invasion and occupation of Northern Cyprus. This is still a volatile issue for the Greeks, and tensions with Turkey are easily inflamed.
In 1981 Greece entered the European Community (now the EU), and Andreas Papandreou's socialist party (PASOK) won the elections. In the end his government was replaced by an unlikely coalition of conservatives and communists in 1989. Elections in 1990 brought the conservatives to power with a majority of only two seats. A general election in 1993 returned the ageing, ailing Papandreou and PASOK to power.
Kostas Simitis was appointed prime minister in early 1996 when it became clear that Papandreou's time was drawing to an end. Since receiving a fresh mandate, he has pledged to forge better relations with Turkey and to carry out economic reforms that will secure Greece a place in the European Monetary Union.
