Greece historical timeline

The Greece a visitor moves through is a young state on very old ground. Its borders were drawn and redrawn across a century, its population was reshaped by war and exchange, and the republic itself dates from 1974. The chronology below is the modern story; the ancient and Byzantine layers belong to the sites themselves.

Chronology

1. 447 B.C. Construction of the Parthenon starts, at the peak of the Delian League's power; the building is completed in 438 B.C. and its sculpture and decoration finished in 432 B.C. It is the reason the Acropolis is the single most visited place in the country, and the reason its marbles are still an active diplomatic question.
2. 1821 The first revolt against Ottoman rule breaks out in February in the Danubian Principalities and is put down; the war of independence that follows lasts nine years.
3. 1830 The London Protocol of February recognises Greece as an independent state. In 1832 the Treaty of Constantinople fixes the new country's borders and gives it a Bavarian prince, Otto, as its first king -- which is why so much of central Athens is neoclassical rather than Greek in the older sense.
4. 1864 Britain hands the Ionian Islands to Greece as a reward for accepting a pro-British king, George I. Corfu and its neighbours keep the Venetian and British architecture that sets the Ionian apart from the Aegean.
5. 1896 The first modern Olympic Games are held in Athens from 6 to 15 April, organised by the International Olympic Committee that Pierre de Coubertin had created. The Panathenaic Stadium rebuilt for them is still standing and still open, and the Games gave Greece a modern claim on its own antiquity.
6. 1912–1913 The Balkan Wars roughly double the country: Thessaloniki, Epirus and the north Aegean islands are taken, and Crete, self-governing since the century's turn, is formally united with Greece in 1913.
7. 1922 The campaign in Asia Minor ends in defeat. The treaty of 1923 and the population exchange that follows bring 1.3 million Orthodox refugees into a country of a few million; whole neighbourhoods of Athens and Thessaloniki, and the music of rebetiko, date from their arrival.
8. 1940 Italian troops cross the border from Albania on 28 October and are driven back; German occupation follows in 1941. The war passes into civil war, fought between communist and government forces until 1949, and the scars of that decade are still part of village memory.
9. 1946 The Greek Civil War runs from 1946 to 1949, a communist-led uprising against the government that erupted immediately after the Second World War. It is the reason Greece entered the post-war decades poorer and more divided than its neighbours, and the reason the dictatorship of 1967 found the ground it did.
10. 1967 On 21 April a group of colonels seizes power a month before elections. The dictatorship falls on 24 July 1974 under the pressure of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus; a referendum that year abolishes the monarchy, and the constitution of the present republic is approved on 19 June 1975.
11. 1981 Greece becomes the tenth member of the European Community on 1 January. The euro follows in 2001 and the Athens Olympic Games open on 13 August 2004 -- the metro, the airport and much of the road network a traveller uses today were built for them.
12. 2010 On 2 May the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF agree a €110 billion loan, the first of the bailouts of the debt crisis. The decade of austerity that follows is recent enough that it shapes prices, wages and conversation still.

What survived, and how

Very little of ancient Greece survives as more than foundations, and what stands -- the Acropolis, the temples of the Peloponnese, the theatres -- has been through two and a half millennia of reuse, earthquake and, in places, deliberate removal. The Byzantine and Ottoman centuries left more that is still in use: churches that have never closed, the monasteries of Meteora and Athos, the market streets of the old towns.

The modern state added the neoclassical city of Athens under its Bavarian kings and, after 1923, the refugee quarters that turned it into a metropolis. The twentieth century's wars destroyed a great deal, and the building boom that followed was fast and unlovely; the country a visitor sees is that layering, with the oldest and the newest usually a street apart.