Greece , [ a ] officially the Hellenic Republic , [ b ] is a country in Southeast Europe. Located 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. Greece has the longest coastline on the Mediterranean Basin , featuring thousands of islands. The country comprises nine traditional geographic regions , and has a population of over Athens is the nation's capital and largest city , followed by Thessaloniki and Patras.
Greece is considered the cradle of Western civilisation , being the birthplace of democracy , Western philosophy , Western literature , historiography , political science , major scientific and mathematical principles, theatre , and the Olympic Games.
From the eighth century BC, the Greeks were organised into various independent city-states known as poleis singular polis that spanned the Mediterranean and Black seas. Philip II of Macedon united most of present-day Greece in the fourth century BC, with his son Alexander the Great rapidly conquering much of the known ancient world from the eastern Mediterranean to northwestern India.
The subsequent Hellenistic period saw the height of Greek culture and influence in antiquity. Greece was annexed by Rome in the second century BC, becoming an integral part of the Roman Empire and its continuation, the Byzantine Empire , which was predominately Greek in culture and language. The Greek Orthodox Church , which emerged in the first century AD, helped shape modern Greek identity and transmitted Greek traditions to the wider Orthodox world.
After the Fourth Crusade in , Latin possessions were established in parts of the Greek peninsula, but most of the area fell under Ottoman rule by the midth century. Following a protracted war of independence , which started in , Greece emerged as a modern nation state in Over the first hundred years, the Kingdom of Greece sought territorial expansion , which was mainly realised in the early 20th century during the Balkan Wars and up until the catastrophic defeat of its Asia Minor Campaign in The short-lived republic that was established in was beset by the ramifications of civil strife and the challenge of resettling refugees from Turkey.
