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The Muslim minority, concentrated in Thrace, was given legal status by provisions of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 and is Greece's only officially recognized religious minority.

One minority possesses special rights (deriving mainly from the Treaty of Lausanne): the Muslim minority of Thrace.

Greece was inhabited as early as the Paleolithic period and by 3000 BC had become home, in the Cycladic Islands, to a culture whose art remains among the most evocative in world history. Early in the 2nd millennium BC, the island of Crete nurtured the sophisticated maritime empire of the Minoans, whose trade reached from Egypt to Sicily. The Minoans were challenged and eventually supplanted by the Mycenaeans of the Greek mainland, who spoke a dialect of ancient Greek. Initially, Greece's mosaic of small city-states were ethnically similar. During the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires (1st century-19th century), Greece's ethnic composition became more diverse. Since independence in 1829 and an exchange of populations with Turkey in 1923, Greece has forged a national state which claims roots reaching back 3,000 years.

The Greek Constitution claims absolute freedom of religion. It also states that all persons living within the Greek territory shall enjoy full protection of their religious beliefs. Note however, that apart from Christian churches and Jewish synagogues, visibly operational temples of other religions do not exist in the capital, mainly due to opposition from the Greek Church. The Orthodox Church, as well as the secular state must approve any activities related to building official temples. The Constitution defines the "prevailing religion" of Greece as the Eastern Orthodox Church of Christ.

The majority of Greeks (95 to 98%) have at least nominal membership of the Eastern Orthodox Church, although religious observance has declined in recent years. Greek Muslims make up about 1.3% of the population, and live mainly in Thrace. Greece has some Roman Catholics: mainly in the Cyclades islands of Syros, Paros and Naxos; some Protestants and some Jews, mainly in Thessaloniki. Some groups in Greece have started an attempt to reconstruct Hellênismos, the old Greek pagan religion. See also: Greek Orthodox Church.

One of the earliest attempts to give a theology to the Greek religion is found in the works of the poet Hesiod, whose Theogony provides a creation myth focusing on deified abstractions like Night and Time. The decision as to which deities were considered major enough to number among the Twelve Olympians who were the chief gods of the pantheon was no doubt a political decision, at least in part. Because most of the gods were originally local, and inconsistent stories were told of them from one locality to another, the faith of the ancient Greeks resisted systematization, at least at first. Socrates and other philosophers were accused of atheism by the populists of Athens when they pointed out the difficulties in accepting the received ideas about the gods as a whole. Yet Socrates' view of the gods was ultimately to triumph; as time went on, the traditional piety of the sacrificial rites tended to be dismissed as a sort of folklore, while those who were philosophically minded tended to believe in abstract, remote, and genteel gods who vaguely acted to uphold social norms and public virtues.

As with pottery, the Greeks did not produce sculpture merely for artistic display. Statues were commissioned either by aristocratic individuals or by the state, and used for public memorials, as offerings to temples, oracles and sanctuaries (as is frequently shown by inscriptions on the statues), or as markers for graves. In the Archaic period, statues were never intended to be representations of actual individuals. They were depictions of an ideal — beauty, piety, honour or sacrifice. They were always depictions of young men, ranging in age from adolescence to early maturity, even when placed on the graves of (presumably) elderly citizens. Kouroi were all stylistically similar. Gradations in the social importance of the person commissioning the statue were indicated by size rather than artistic innovation.

Greece is located at the junction of three continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa. Greece's foreign policy, despite its joining NATO in 1952 and its accession to the European Community in 1981, has remained focused on the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean region.

The manufacturing sector accounts for about 13% of GDP. The food industry is one of the most profitable and fastest-growing areas of manufacturing, with significant export potential. High-technology equipment production, especially for telecommunications, is also a fast-growing sector. Other important areas include textiles, building materials, machinery, transport equipment, and electrical appliances.

In the 19th century, opera composers like Nikolaos Mantzaros (1795 - 1872), Spyridion Xyndas (1812 - 1896) and Spyros Samaras (1861 - 1917) helped revitalize Greek classical music

In the 1950s and 1960s Greece continued to develop slowly, initially with the help of the U.S.A Marshall programme and later with the growth of tourism. In 1967 the military seized power in a coup d'état, overthrew the social-democrat government of George Papandreou, senior and established what became known as the Régime of the Colonels, supported by the U.S.A. In 1973 the régime abolished the Greek monarchy. In 1974, dictator Papadopoulos denied help to the USA and as a result the (US/Kissinger) "appointed" a new dictator named Ioannides. Many hold Ioannides responsible for the coup against President Makarios of Cyprus -- the coup seen as the pretext for the first wave of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974. The Cyprus events and the outcry following a bloody suppression of Athens Polytechnic uprising in Athens led to the implosion of the military régime. A charismatic exiled politician, Konstantinos Karamanlis, returned from Paris as interim prime minister and later gained re-election for two further terms at the head of the conservative Nea Dimokratia party. In 1975, following a referendum to confirm the deposition of King Constantine II, a democratic republican constitution came into force. Another previously exiled politician, Andreas Papandreou also returned and founded the socialist PASOK party, which won the elections in 1981 and dominated the country's political course for almost two decades.

Architecture (building executed to an aesthetically considered design) was extinct in Greece from the end of the Mycenaean period (about 1200 BC) until the 7th century, when urban life and prosperity recovered to a point where public building could be undertaken. But since most Greek buildings in the Archaic and Early Classical periods were made of wood or mud-brick, nothing remains of them except a few ground-plans, and there are almost no written sources on early architecture or descriptions of buildings. Most of our knowledge of Greek architecture comes from the few surviving buildings of the Classical, Hellenistic and Roman periods (since Roman architecture heavily copied Greek), and from late written sources such as Vitruvius (1st century AD). This means that there is a strong bias towards temples, the only buildings which survive in any number.

Cypriot music has many similarities to traditional Greek music, and their modern music scenes remain well-integrated. Ethnic Greeks have long been the largest ethnic group on the island.