Overview
Modern Greece begins with the revolution of 1821 and runs to today’s Third Hellenic Republic. The nineteenth-century state was a small kingdom: King Otto was deposed in 1862 and the Danish Glücksburg dynasty followed. Expansion came by stages — the Ionian Islands in 1864, Thessaly in 1881 — amid recurring Cretan crises, while the Megali Idea, the irredentist vision of uniting Greeks outside the state, drove national policy. The Balkan Wars of 1912–13 nearly doubled the state, adding Macedonia, Epirus, the Aegean islands, and Crete.
Key developments
The First World War brought the National Schism, the split between Venizelos and the king over entering the war. The campaign in Asia Minor ended in catastrophe in 1922 — defeat by Kemal’s Turkey and the burning of Smyrna — and the 1923 Lausanne population exchange uprooted by treaty some 1.2 million Orthodox Christians from Turkey and about 400,000 Muslims from Greece, a defining trauma that ended the Megali Idea and remade Greek society. In the Second World War Greece repelled Italy’s invasion in 1940 — the refusal still commemorated as a national anniversary — but was overrun by Germany in 1941; the brutal occupation brought the great famine of 1941–42 — some 40,000 deaths are documented in Athens and Piraeus that winter alone, and estimates for the whole occupation run to 250,000–300,000 — alongside resistance, while the Jewish community of Thessaloniki was almost entirely murdered in the Holocaust. The Civil War of 1946–49, fought between the government and communist forces, was among Europe’s first Cold War conflicts — estimates of the dead range from about 50,000 to well over 100,000 — and left lasting political wounds. The postwar decades brought recovery and emigration.
End and transition
The military junta of 1967–1974, the colonels’ dictatorship, imposed censorship, and imprisonment and torture of opponents are documented; the Athens Polytechnic uprising of November 1973 was crushed with deaths, by the accounts of the time and since. The junta’s adventure in Cyprus triggered the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 and the regime’s collapse. In the transition that followed, a referendum confirmed the republic in 1974, and Greece joined what is now the European Union in 1981 and adopted the euro in 2001. The debt crisis of 2009–2018 brought austerity, bailouts, and mass protest. Greece today is an EU and NATO member, a maritime power, and a tourism economy.