Page 447 - (DK Eyewitness) Travel Guide - Europe

IT AL Y AND GREECE  445

GREECE

Greece is one of the most visited countries in Europe, yet remains one of
the least known. Although most visitors will be familiar with the images of
Ancient Greece, the modern Greek state dates only from 1830. Situated at a
geographical crossroads, Greece combines cultural elements of the Balkans,
the Middle East, and the Mediterranean.

For a small country, Greece possesses amenities. A number of improvements,
marked regional differences. Nearly three- including the growth of tourism, helped
quarters of the land is mountainous, Greece develop into a relatively wealthy,
uninhabited, or uncultivated. On the modern state. However, the financial crisis
mainland, fertile agricultural land supports of 2010 to the present has led to a rise in
tobacco farming in the northeast, with unemployment, a series of unpopular
orchard fruits and vegetables grown farther austerity bills, and political instability.
south. A third of the population lives in the
capital, Athens, the cultural, financial, and History
political center, where ancient and modern Early Greek history is marked by a series of
stand side by side. Of the myriad islands, internal struggles, from the Mycenaean
only about eighty are today inhabited. and Minoan cultures of the Bronze Age
For centuries, a large number of Greeks to the competing city-states of the 1st
have lived abroad. Currently, there are over millennium BC. In spite of warfare, the
half as many Greeks outside the country 4th and 5th centuries BC were the high
as in, although recent years have seen point of ancient Greek civilization, a
reverse immigration, with expatriates golden age of exceptional creativity
returning home, especially to the islands. in philosophy and the arts.
Rural and urban life in contemporary In 338 BC, the Greeks were conquered
Greece has been transformed since the by Philip II of Macedonia at Chaironeia,
start of the 20th century, despite foreign and Greece soon became absorbed into
occupation and civil war. Until the 1960s, Alexander the Great’s vast empire. With
the country remained underdeveloped, the defeat of the Macedonians by the
with many rural areas lacking basic Romans in 168 BC, Greece was made a

The idyllic Myrtos Bay as seen from the clifftops of Kefalonia, one of the Ionian islands
Dusk falls over picturesque Oia village, on the island of Santorini, in the Cyclades

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