Road Map Athens Greece Sources of road map athens greece resources from the Web

About 80% of Greece consists of mountains or hills. Dry and rocky conditions prevail in much of the country is ; only 28% of the land classes as arable. Western Greece contains lakes and wetlands. Pindus, the central mountain range, has an average elevation of 2,650 m. Mount Olympus forms the highest point in Greece at 2,911 m above sea level.

The Greeks decided at a very early period that the human form was the most important subject for artistic endeavour. Since they saw their gods as having human form, there was no distinction between the sacred and the secular in art — the human body was both secular and sacred. A male nude could just as easily be Apollo or Herakles or that year's current Olympic boxing champion. In the Archaic Period the most important sculptural form was the kouros (plural kouroi), the standing male nude (See for example Biton and Kleobis). The kore (plural korai), or standing female figure, was also common, but since Greek society did not permit the public display of female nudity until the 4th century BC, the kore is considered to be of less importance in the development of sculpture.

Glimpsed through the practice of animal sacrifice are the traces of an older practice, which was abandoned by the increasingly civilized Greeks - that of human sacrifice. Indications for this remain in the mythology, and in comments ascribing to Orpheus teachings that forbade such practices.

Pythagoras was born on the island of Samos, off the coast of Asia Minor. As a young man he left his native city for Croton in Southern Italy to escape the tyrannical government of Polycrates. Many writers credit him with visits to the sages of Egypt and of Babylon before going west; but such visits feature stereotypically in the biographies of many Greek wise men, and are likely more legend than fact.

Traditional dhimotiká are accompanied by clarinets, guitars, tambourines and violins, and include dance music forms like syrtó, kalamatianó, tsámiko and hasaposérviko, as well as vocal music like kléftiko. Many of the earliest recordings were done by Arvanites (ethnic Albanian) like Yiorgia Mittaki and Yiorgios Papasidheris. Instrumentalists include clarinet virtuosos like Yiorgos Yevyelis, Vassilis Saleas and Yiannis Vassilopoulos, as well as oud and fiddle players like Nikos Saragoudas and Yiorgos Koros.

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.

According to Iamblichus, the Pythagoreans followed a structured life of religious teaching, common meals, exercise, reading and philosophical study. We may infer from this that participants required some degree of wealth and leisure to join the inner circle. Music featured as an essential organizing factor of this life: the disciples would sing hymns to Apollo together regularly; they used the lyre to cure illness of the soul or body; poetry recitations occurred before and after sleep to aid the memory.

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.

Greece's climate features mild, wet winters and hot, dry summers. Temperatures rarely reach extremes, although snowfalls do occur in the mountains and occasionally even in Athens in the winter.

The economy has improved steadily over the last few years, as the government tightened policy in the run-up to Greece's entry into the zone of the EU's single currency, the euro, on January 1, 2001. Average per capita GDP in 2003 comprised $20,000[3] (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/fields/2004.html). Greece has an expanding services sector and telecommunications industry and has become one of the largest investors in her region. Moreover, Greece now operates as a net importer of labour and foreign workers (mainly from the Balkans, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Pakistan) now account for 10% of the total population.