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Construction activity (about 10% of GDP) has increased due to infrastructure projects partially financed by European Union structural funds and the public investment for the Olympic Games in Athens. Up to 1999, about $20 billion has gone to projects to modernize and develop Greece's transportation network. The centerpiece of this effort was the construction of the new international airport El. Venizelos near Athens and the new ring road "Attiki Odos" to connect it with the city and the south of the country. In addition, the Athens subway system is being greatly expanded, and construction or expansion of roads, railway lines, and bridges is either underway or planned.

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.

Finally every Greek town had a theatre. These were used for both public meetings as well as dramatic performances. These performances originated as religious ceremonies; they went on to assume their Classical status as the highest form of Greek culture by the 6th century BC (see Greek theatre). The theatre was usually set in a hillside outside the town, and had rows of tiered seating set in a semi-circle around the central performance area, the orchestra. Behind the orchestra was a low building called the skene, which served as a store-room, a dressing-room, and also as a backdrop to the action taking place in the orchestra. A number of Greek theatres survive almost intact, the best known being at Epidaurus.

Cape Sounion in Attica, looking out to the Aegean islandsThe Ottomans ruled Greece until the early 19th century. In 1821 the Greeks rebelled and declared their independence, but did not succeed in winning it until 1829. The elites of powerful European nations saw the war of Greek independence, with its accounts of Turkish atrocities, in a romantic light (see, for example, the 1824 painting Massacre of Chios by Eugene Delacroix). Scores of non-Greeks volunteered to fight for the cause - including, for example Lord Byron - and indeed at times the Ottomans seemed on the point of almost entirely suppressing the Greek revolution but for the threatened direct military intervention of France, England or Russia. The Russian minister for foreign affairs, Ioannis Kapodistrias, himself a Greek, returned home as President of the new Republic following Greek independence. That republic disappeared when a few years later Western powers helped turn Greece into a monarchy, the first king coming from Bavaria and the second from Denmark. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, in a series of wars with the Ottomans, Greece sought to enlarge its boundaries to include the Greek-speaking population of the Ottoman Empire, slowly growing in territory and population until it reached its present configuration in 1947. In World War I Greece sided with the entente powers against a pro-German Turkey. In the war's aftermath the Powers awarded parts of Asia Minor to Greece, including the city of Smyrna (known as Izmir today) which had a large Greek population. At that time, however, the Turkish nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, overthrew the Ottoman government, organised a military assault on the Greek troops and defeated them. Immediately afterwards, hundreds of thousands of Turks then living in mainland Greek territory left for Turkey as an exchange with hundreds of thousands of Greeks living in Turkey.

Man himself and the animals had come into being by like transmutations. Mankind was supposed by Anaximander to have sprung from some other species of animals, probably aquatic. For this, even though he had no theory of natural selection, some people consider him to be evolutionary theory's most ancient proponent.

Some of the best known Hellenistic sculptures are the Winged Victory of Samothrace (2nd or 1st century BC), the statue of Aphrodite from the island of Melos known as the Venus de Milo (mid 2nd century BC), the Dying Gaul (about 230 BC), and the monumental group Laocoön and his Sons (late 1st century BC). All these statues depict Classical themes, but their treatment is far more sensuous and emotional than the austere taste of the Classical period would have allowed or its technical skills permitted.

In ancient Greece, mixed-gender choruses performed for entertainment, celebration and spiritual reasons. Instruments included the double-reed aulos and the plucked string instrument, the lyre, especially the special kind called a kithara.

Pythagoras has the reputation of having taught a doctrine of reincarnation. His other teachings appear framed in pithy sayings, or sumbola, often in question-and-answer format. Some of these teachings took a simple form: "What is wisest?" "Number"; "What is truest?" "Most men are bad." Others were more cryptic: "What is the Delphic oracle?" "The tetraktys, in which the Sirens sing." Other sumbola related to sexual, dietary and other taboos, including the proper way to stir a fire or place one's shoes before going to sleep.