Socrates, Aristotle and Alexander the Great are the most famous people from ancient Greece, while modern Greece is best known abroad through the War of Independence general Theodoros Kolokotronis, the statesman Eleftherios Venizelos, the soprano Maria Callas, the novelist Nikos Kazantzakis of Zorba the Greek, the composer Vangelis, who won an Oscar for Chariots of Fire, and the basketball player Giannis Antetokounmpo, twice the NBA's Most Valuable Player. Greeks themselves tend to start the list somewhere else: with the handful of revolutionaries, poets and prime ministers who created a Greek state between 1821 and 1913, and then used the ancient names as its national symbols. This guide follows that order, from the nation-makers to the people who carried the name of Greece abroad.
1797 to 1831: Rigas Feraios, Kolokotronis, Bouboulina, Kapodistrias and Solomos
For almost four centuries before 1821 most Greek speakers lived inside the Ottoman Empire. The first voice to call openly for revolt was Rigas Feraios (1757–1798), born in the Thessalian village of Velestino. His battle hymn Thourios (1797) contains the line most Greek schoolchildren still learn, that one hour of free life is better than forty years of slavery. The Austrian police arrested him in Trieste and handed him to the Ottomans, and in 1798 he and five companions were strangled in Belgrade and their bodies thrown into the Danube. In Paris, the Smyrna-born scholar Adamantios Korais (1748–1833) worked on the other front, editing ancient texts and shaping the written form of modern Greek.
When the War of Independence broke out in 1821, its leading general was Theodoros Kolokotronis (1770–1843), a former klepht, or mountain brigand, born on the slopes of Ramavouni in Messenia. He captured the Ottoman stronghold of Tripolitsa in late 1821 and in 1822 destroyed Mahmud Dramali Pasha's army at the Battle of Dervenakia. His bronze equestrian statue stands outside the Old Parliament in Athens. At sea, Laskarina Bouboulina (1771–1825), born in Constantinople and raised on Hydra and Spetses, spent a fortune inherited from two husbands on ships and joined the siege of Nafplio; the Russian Navy gave her the honorary title of admiral after she was killed in a family feud in 1825. Manto Mavrogenous (1796–1848), a Trieste-born heiress whose family came from Mykonos, fitted out ships for the revolution at her own expense.
The new state needed an administrator. Ioannis Kapodistrias (1776–1831), a count from Corfu, had served as foreign minister of the Russian Empire from 1816 to 1822. The Third National Assembly at Troezen elected him head of state in 1827, and he landed at Nafplio in January 1828 to build a government for a country exhausted by seven years of war. His centralising rule made enemies, and in 1831 members of the Mavromichalis clan of the Mani assassinated him in Nafplio.
The poet Dionysios Solomos (1798–1857), from the Ionian island of Zakynthos, wrote the Hymn to Liberty in 1823, in the middle of the war. Set to music by Nikolaos Mantzaros, its first stanzas became the national anthem of Greece in 1865 and of Cyprus in 1966, and Solomos is regarded as Greece's national poet.
Trikoupis, Venizelos, Karamanlis and Mercouri: the reformers who redrew Greece
The kingdom that emerged in 1832 held only the Peloponnese, Attica, central Greece and some islands. Charilaos Trikoupis (1832–1896), born in Nafplio, was prime minister seven times between 1875 and 1895. He established the rule that a government needs the confidence of parliament, and he pushed through railways, roads and the Corinth Canal, 6.4 km long and cut at sea level through the isthmus to link the Gulf of Corinth with the Saronic Gulf. The canal opened in 1893, the same year his heavy borrowing for public works ended with Trikoupis telling parliament that Greece was bankrupt.
Eleftherios Venizelos (1864–1936) did most to set the country's modern borders. Born in Mournies near Chania, in Crete when it was still Ottoman, he led the Cretan movement for union with Greece before being invited to Athens in 1909. He served as prime minister for more than twelve years across eight terms between 1910 and 1933. Through the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 Greece doubled its territory and population, gaining most of Macedonia, Epirus, Crete and the eastern Aegean islands; Athens airport and dozens of squares now carry his name.
Konstantinos Karamanlis (1907–1998), born near Serres in Macedonia, was prime minister from 1955 to 1963. After the military junta that seized power in 1967 collapsed in 1974, he returned from exile in Paris to lead the transition to democracy, known as the Metapolitefsi. A referendum in 1974 abolished the monarchy, and as president he oversaw Greece's entry into the European Economic Community in 1981.
Melina Mercouri (1920–1994) was already an international film star, winning Best Actress at Cannes for Never on Sunday (1960), when the junta stripped her of her citizenship for campaigning against it. In 1981 she became Greece's first woman Minister for Culture. She launched the campaign for the return of the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum and proposed the European Capital of Culture programme, with Athens the first holder in 1985.
Pericles, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates and Alexander: the ancient names
The modern state claimed the classical past from the start: in 1834 King Otto moved the capital from Nafplio to Athens, then a small town below the Acropolis. The ancient figures most often named as Greek therefore became national symbols as much as historical people.
Pericles (c. 495–429 BC) led Athens at its height, roughly from 461 BC until his death, and started the building programme that produced the Parthenon. Socrates (c. 470–399 BC) wrote nothing himself; he is known through the dialogues of his pupil Plato and was sentenced to death by an Athenian jury in 399 BC. Plato (c. 428–348 BC) founded the Academy in Athens, and his pupil Aristotle (384–322 BC), born in Stagira in Chalkidiki, set up his own school, the Lyceum, and wrote on logic, biology, ethics and politics. Hippocrates of Kos (c. 460–c. 370 BC) is credited with separating medicine from religion; doctors still take an oath that bears his name.
Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) was born at Pella, capital of the kingdom of Macedon, a site that lies today in the Greek region of Central Macedonia. Aristotle was his tutor. He became king at twenty and by thirty had built an empire stretching from Greece and Egypt to north-western India. The use of the name Macedonia was for decades the subject of a dispute between Greece and its northern neighbour, which the two governments settled through the Prespa Agreement, signed in June 2018; when it entered into force in February 2019, the neighbour became North Macedonia.
Cavafy, Callas, Kazantzakis, Seferis, Theodorakis, Vangelis and Giannis: Greeks in the wider world
Many of the Greeks best known abroad were born outside today's borders or made their careers elsewhere. Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933) spent most of his life in Alexandria, Egypt, working as a civil servant and circulating poems such as "Ithaka" on privately printed broadsheets rather than in books; his accepted canon runs to 154 poems. Giorgos Seferis (1900–1971) was born in Smyrna, now İzmir in Turkey; his family moved to Athens in 1914 and lost its ties to Anatolia when Smyrna fell in 1922, he served as Greek ambassador in London from 1957 to 1962, and in 1963 he became the first Greek to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Odysseas Elytis (1911–1996), whose family came from Lesbos, won the same prize in 1979 for work including the long poem Axion Esti. Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957), born in Heraklion while Crete was still Ottoman, published Zorba the Greek in 1946 and The Last Temptation of Christ in 1955, and is the most translated Greek author.
Maria Callas (1923–1977) was born in Manhattan to Greek immigrant parents, moved to Athens with her mother in 1937 and trained at the city's conservatories during the war. She renounced her American citizenship in 1966, leaving her Greek nationality, and is remembered for reviving the bel canto operas of Bellini and Donizetti. Nana Mouskouri (born 1934), the daughter of a cinema projectionist in Chania, Crete, has released an estimated 450 albums in at least thirteen languages.
Two composers took Greek music to the cinema. Mikis Theodorakis (1925–2021), born on Chios, wrote the score for Zorba the Greek (1964) and its "Zorba's Dance"; the junta imprisoned him and banned his songs. Vangelis (1943–2022), born in Agria near Volos and raised in Athens, won the Academy Award for the score of Chariots of Fire (1981) and scored Blade Runner (1982).
In science, Georgios Papanikolaou (1883–1962) from Kymi on Euboea emigrated to the United States in 1913 and developed the Pap smear, the screening test for cervical cancer. In sport, the water carrier Spyridon Louis (1873–1940) from Marousi won the first Olympic marathon at the 1896 Athens Games in 2 hours 58 minutes 50 seconds. Giannis Antetokounmpo (born 1994) was born in Athens to Nigerian parents and received Greek citizenship only in May 2013, weeks before the NBA draft. He was named the league's Most Valuable Player in 2019 and 2020, and in 2021 he led the Milwaukee Bucks to their first championship since 1971, winning the Finals MVP award.
Read side by side, the two halves of this list show how Greece presents itself: a young state from 1830 that claims a very old past. The Greece country guide traces how its borders grew from the Peloponnese to Crete and Thrace, our guide to Athens, capital of Greece covers the city Kolokotronis and Pericles both shaped, and the ancient Greek city-states explains the world that Socrates, Aristotle and Alexander came from.