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Geography
The Hellenic Republic, also known as Greece, is a country in Southeast Europe, situated on the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula. Greece shares land borders with Albania to the northwest, North Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, and Turkey to the east. The Aegean Sea lies to the east of the mainland, the Ionian Sea to the west, and the Sea of Crete and the Mediterranean Sea to the south.
Greece has the longest coastline of any country on the Mediterranean Basin, featuring between 1,200 and 6,000 islands (depending on the definition), 227 of which are inhabited. Crete is the largest and most populous island; Euboea is the second largest, followed by Lesbos and Rhodes.
Since 2011, the 54 old prefectures of Greece have been divided into 13 regions, which in turn, are subdivided into a total of 325 municipalities. The old prefectures have been largely retained as sub-units of the regions.
Athens is the nation's capital and largest city, followed by Thessaloniki and Patras.
Demographics
Greece's has a total population of just over 10.5 million people. There is no official information for the size of the ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities because asking the population questions pertaining to the topic has been abolished since 1951. The Muslim community, numbering about 98,000 people, is the only minority group explicitly recognized by the Greek government. This group consists of Turks (50%), Pomaks (35%), and Romani (15%). No other minorities are officially acknowledged by the Greek government.
A large majority of Greece's native population use Greek as their first or only language. Speakers of the distinctive Pontic dialect came to Greece from Asia Minor after the Greek genocide and constitute a sizable group. The Cappadocian dialect also came to Greece due to the genocide, but their language is endangered and is barely spoken now. Indigenous Greek dialects include the archaic Greek spoken by the Sarakatsani; traditionally these were transhument mountain shepherds from Greek Macedonia and other parts of Northern Greece. The Tsakonian language is also still spoken in some villages in the southeastern Peloponnese.
Near the northern Greek borders there are also some Slavic–speaking groups, locally known as Slavomacedonian-speaking, most of whose members identify ethnically as Greeks. The Jewish community in Greece traditionally spoke Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), but today the language is maintained by only a few thousand speakers. Other notable minority languages include Armenian, Georgian, and the Greco-Turkic dialect spoken by the Urums, a community of Caucasus Greeks from central Georgi.
Although guaranteeing freedom of religious belief for all, the Greek Constitution does recognize Eastern Orthodoxy as the 'prevailing' faith of the country. An estimated 97% of Greek citizens identify themselves as Eastern Orthodox, belonging to the Greek Orthodox Church which uses the Byzantine rite and the Greek language.
Following the 1919–1922 Greco-Turkish War and the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, Greece and Turkey agreed to a population transfer based on cultural and religious identity. About 500,000 Muslims from Greece, predominantly those defined as Turks, but also Greek Muslims like the Vallahades of western Macedonia, were exchanged with approximately 1.5 million Greeks from Turkey. Today, the Muslim minority in Thrace amounts to approximately 1% of the total population of Greece.
Judaism has been present in Greece for more than 2,000 years. The ancient community of Greek Jews are called Romaniotes, while the Sephardi Jews were once a prominent community in the city of Thessaloniki, numbering some 80,000, or more than half of the population, by 1900. However, after the German occupation of Greece and the Holocaust during World War II, the number of Jews in Greece is estimated to have dropped to around 5,500 people.
The Roman Catholic community is estimated to number around 250,000 people, of which 50,000 are Greek citizens. Their community is nominally separate from the smaller Greek Byzantine Catholic Church, which recognizes the primacy of the Pope but maintains the liturgy of the Byzantine Rite. Old Calendarists account for 500,000 followers. Protestants stand at about 30,000. Other Christian minorities total about 12,000 members.
History
Greece is considered the cradle of Western civilization. It is the birthplace of democracy, Western philosophy, Western literature, historiography, political science, major scientific and mathematical principles, theater and the Olympic Games. From the eighth century BC, the Greeks were organized into various independent city-states which spanned the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. In the fourth century BC, most of present-day Greece was united by Philip II of Macedon. His son, Alexander the Great, subsequently conquered much of the known ancient world. Greece was annexed by the Rome Empire in the second century BC. and remained an integral part of Rome's successor, the Byzantine Empire.
After falling under Ottoman rule in the mid-15th century, Greece emerged as a modern nation state in 1830 following a war of independence. Over the first hundred years the kingdom of Greece sought its territorial expansion, which was mainly achieved in the early 20th century, during the Balkan Wars and up until its Asia Minor Campaign ended with a catastrophic defeat in 1922. The short-lived republic that followed came to an end in 1936, when the imposition of a royalist dictatorship inaugurated a long period of authoritarian rule, marked by military occupation during World War II, civil war and military dictatorship. Democracy was restored in 1974–75, and Greece has been a parliamentary republic ever since.
Resources
Click here for a list of resources relevant to Greek genealogical research:
Notable Greeks
In the below list, columns can be sorted by clicking on the arrow button in any category heading box. A "C" in the final column denotes a Notable who has been successfully connected to the Big Tree. "N/C" stands for Not Connected.
Notable | Born | Died | Claim to Fame | Photo | C |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Evangelos Zappas | 1800 | 1865 | Founder of the Modern Olympic Games | ![]() | N/C |
Demetrious Vikelas | 1835 | 1908 | First President of the International Olympic Committee | ![]() | Connected |
Eleftherios Venizelos | 1864 | 1936 | The Maker of Modern Greece | ![]() | Connected |
Spyridon Louis | 1873 | 1940 | Winner of the first modern-day Olympic marathon | ![]() | N/C |
Nikos Kazantzakis | 1883 | 1957 | Author of Zorba the Greek, The Last Temptation of Christ | ![]() | N/C |
Georgios Papanikolaou | 1883 | 1962 | Physician who invented the Pap smear | ![]() | N/C |
Georgio De_Chirico | 1888 | 1978 | Artist who influenced the Surrealists | ![]() | Connected |
Katina Paxinou | 1900 | 1973 | Academy Award Winning Actress | ![]() | N/C |
Odysseas Alepoudellis | 1911 | 1996 | Nobel Prize Winning Poet | ![]() | N/C |
Melina Mercouri | 1920 | 1994 | Academy Award Winning Actress and Cultural Minister | ![]() | Connected |
Mikis Theodorakis | 1925 | 2021 | Composer who scored Zorba the Greek, Z, and Serpico | ![]() | N/C |
Theo Angelopoulos | 1935 | 2012 | Internationally acclaimed Filmmaker | ![]() | N/C |
Vangelis | 1943 | 2022 | Film Composer: Chariots of Fire | ![]() | N/C |
Katerina Sakellaropoulou | 1956 | LIVING | Current President of Greece | ![]() | N/C |
Kyriakos Mitsotakis | 1968 | LIVING | Current Prime Minister of Greece | ![]() | Connected |
- 15 Nations Global Tour: Greece Wrap-up Sep 11, 2023.
- 15 Nations Global Tour: GREECE (Stop #12) Aug 22, 2023.
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