Where to buy Greek property

 

Publication by the research team of the Global Property Guide.

Greek Properties   apartment

The home of the gods, the birthplace of democracyóGreece has greatly contributed to Western civilization and culture. It is also a beautiful country, a country of mountains and plains. Greece consists of a continent on the southern part of the Balkan Peninsula and over 2000 islands spread mostly across the sparkling Aegean Sea.

Its towns and cities are proof of its rich historic and cultural heritage, from the stately ruins of the Parthenon in Athens, to the whitewashed churches on Santorini Island. Often the rocky landscape gives way to cultivated vineyards, citrus fruits and olive groves. These are the basic products of Greek cuisine which can be tried in the tavernasósmall restaurants which serve local food and traditional Greek drinks, retsina and ouzo.

The history of Greece is very long. In Crete, the earliest civilizations were the Minoan civilization and in mainland Mycenaean civilization, which prospered until the Bronze Age, about 1100 B.C.

Two centuries later, the emergence of the city-states led to an unprecedented cultural boom on the islands with outstanding achievements in architecture, philosophy, mathematics, arts and literature. Ancient Greece was conquered in 146 B.C by the Romans. In 330 A.D. Emperor Constantine made his new capital the Greek city of Byzantium.

Renamed Constantinople, it became the second Rome in a period of imperial preference for Christianity. It was the center of the Eastern Roman Empire or the Byzantine Empire. For over one thousand years, the empire lasted until Constantinople came down to the Ottomans in 1453.

Until the first quarter of the 19th century, Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire, when briefly it became the republic and then the monarchy under European leaders. Though the Greeks were able to shake Ottoman rule, they kept fighting the Turks until the 20th century. Greece fought Turkish nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal after the First World War. This led to a massive exchange of population between the two countries. The period between the wars was a time of great political instability.

Greece repelled the Italians during the second World War but eventually fell to the Germans. The period after the war saw fast economic growth under the Marshall Plan financed by the United States, but politics remained a bitter battle between the democratic forces, the military and monarchy. In the 1960s a number of military coups were carried out, and in 1974 Turkey invaded Cyprus, causing the military government to collapse.

Modern Greece actually dates back to the founding of a democratic republican constitution in 1975 and the abolition of monarchy. Since then the peaceful alternation between the PASOK and the free-market New Democracy Party has been witnessed in Greek politics. Greece, after the invasion of Cyprus, rejoined NATO, improved relations with Turkey and joined the EU in 1981. The country has enjoyed remarkable peaceful economic growth.

Greece is divided into 13 administrative or peripheral divisions. It has an estimated 11 million inhabitants, a quarter of whom live in Athens, the capital.