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The Greek economy is growing fast after the implementation of stabilization policies in recent years. Greece remains a net importer of industrial and capital goods, foodstuffs, and petroleum. Leading exports are manufactured goods, food and beverages, petroleum products, cement, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals.

Late in the history of classical religion, the Neo-Platonists and the Roman emperor Julian attempted to organize classical paganism into a systematic belief system, which they gave the name of Hellênismos to: the belief system of the Greeks. Their failure to do so stemmed from the essentially local and traditional nature of the religion they sought to protect. Since classical paganism even at that late date was chiefly a matter of following a local tradition, rather than commitment to an overarching belief system and body of doctrine, their rear-guard attempt to create an overarching structure or body of doctrine came too late.

Crete has a well known folk dance tradition, which includes swift dances like syrtos, maleviziotikos, haniotikos, pentozali and laziotikos.

Some of the earliest popular music stars from Crete were Mountakis and Skordalos. Later, in the 1960s, musicians like Niko Xylouris and Yiannis Markopoulos combined Cretan folk music with classical techniques. Some Cretans felt that this was unpatriotic, and Xylouris especially was criticized relentlessly. Nevertheless, he remained popular, as did similarly-styled performers like Charalambos Garganourakis. The film Zorba the Greek also helped to expand the audience for Cretan folk music; popularity peaked from about the middle of the 1970s to the middle of the 1980s.

Despite the country's numerically small and ill-equipped armed forces, Greece made a decisive contribution to the Allied efforts in World War II. At the start of the war Greece sided with the Allies and refused to give in to Italian demands. Italy invaded Greece on 28 October 1940, but Greek troops repelled the invaders after a bitter struggle. This marked the first Allied victory in the war. Hitler then reluctantly stepped in, primarily to secure his strategic southern flank: troops from Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria and Italy successfully invaded Greece, overcoming Greek, British, Australian and New Zealand units.

Theology did not come naturally to a faith this diverse and essentially local. At the time of the Homeric epics, the Greeks were familiar enough with their neighbours to be aware that the next city-state over worshipped a different subset of gods. The Homeric Hymns tell us something about the belief and worship of various gods, but apart from the (often variable) family trees of the gods, there is little attempt to provide an overarching system of belief.

A major function of religion was the validation of the identity and culture of individual communities. The myths were regarded by many as history rather than allegory, and were used by groups to proclaim their divine right to the land they occupied, and by individual families to validate their exalted position in the social order.

The country consists of a large mainland at the southern end of the Balkans; the Peloponnesus peninsula, -- separated from the mainland by the canal of the Isthmus of Corinth; and numerous islands, including Crete, Rhodes, Euboea and the Dodecanese and Cycladic groups of the Aegean Sea. Greece has more than 14,880 kilometres of coastline and a land boundary of 1,160 kilometres.

Greek painters worked mainly on wooden panels, and these perished rapidly after the 4th century AD, when they were no longer actively protected. Today nothing survives of Greek painting, except some examples of painted terra cotta and a few paintings on the walls of tombs, mostly in Macedonia and Italy. Of the masterpieces of Greek painting we have only a few copies from Roman times, and most are of inferior quality. Painting on pottery, of which a great deal survives, gives some sense of the aesthetics of Greek painting. The techniques involved, however, were very different from those used in large-format painting.

Eastern Orthodox Christianity is the dominant religion in Greece. During the centuries of Ottoman domination, the Greek Orthodox Church preserved Greek language, values, and national identity and was an important rallying point in the struggle for independence. There is a Muslim minority concentrated in Thrace. Other religious communities in Greece include Catholics, Jews, Old Calendar Orthodox, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, and Protestants.

The greatest works of the Classical period, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia and the Statue of Athena Parthenos (both executed by Phidias or under his direction), are lost, although smaller copies and good descriptions of both still exist. Their size and magnificence made them a target for imperial acquisition in the Byzantine period, and both were removed to Constantinople where they were later destroyed in fires.

After the Turks conquered Crete in 1669, Crete went through a dark period of tyranny and poverty. During the 17th century, the lyre became the national instrument of Crete, though it was much different then than it is now. In the 1810s, Georgios the Cretan helped to revive Byzantine music traditions.