Griechenland

Athens invented deliberative citizenship, Plato and Aristotle metaphysics, Hippocrates rational medicine. Greek became the language of the Septuagint and then of the Gospels; Byzantium preserved ancient manuscripts for a thousand years and returned them to the West at the Renaissance. Mount Athos has perpetuated Orthodox monasticism there for ten centuries.

Between the eighth and fourth centuries BC the Greek cities created the polis, generalised alphabetic writing, tragedy, critical history and philosophy. Athens experimented between 508 and 322 with the first documented direct democracy.

Alexander spread that culture from Egypt to the Indus; Hellenism became the common language of the eastern Mediterranean, including for the Jews of Alexandria and the first Christians. Absorbed by Rome in 146 BC, Greece transmitted its models: “captive Greece took captive her savage conqueror”, wrote Horace.

After a thousand years of Byzantine Empire and four Ottoman centuries, independence in 1830 was carried by a European philhellenism that saw in Greece its own origin. A member of the Communities since 1981, the country went through the euro area's gravest crisis from 2010.