Greece is a sovereign state located in southeastern Europe. Greece has the 11th longest coastline in the world and is considered a transcontinental country since it has land borders with Albania, Bulgaria, and North Macedonia to the north, and Turkey to the east. Greece is divided into 9 geographic regions: Macedonia, Thessaly, Epirus, Peloponnese, Aegean Islands, Thrace, Crete, Ionian Islands, and the South Aegean. Greece has more than 2000 islands, of which 165 are inhabited. Greece is home to 18 UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Greece is the birthplace of the Olympic Games and Democritus’s philosophy of atomism. Greece has a mixed legal system including civil law and common law traditions as well as influences from Roman law. Greece is a member of the European Union, NATO, the Council of Europe, the United Nations, and the OECD. Greece has an advanced economy with a high standard of living. Greek culture has had a significant impact on Western culture as a whole. Some of Greece’s most famous exports include olives, feta cheese, lamb, wine, honey, tobacco, figs, and marble. The numbers never lie: Learn twenty interesting statistics about Greece and its people that will surprise you.
·.5 million tourists arrive in Greece every year. This means that visitors exceed in number the... local population of about 10 million.
Crave to Discover Some Alternative things to do in Athens? Read this: 3 exceptional “under the radar” Athens Tours for 2022
Weird Staff About Athens
· Did you know that Athens was a small town two centuries ago? Did you know that the Greek islands are about 2,000? That no part of the country is more than 137 kilometers from the sea and that our merchant fleet reaches 70% of all ships in Europe? These and many more interesting facts about Greece follow and teach us the little curious secrets of our country.
· The population of Athens in 1834 was 10,000. From the moment it was chosen as the capital of the new Greek state until today, its population has increased to the unimaginable number of more than 3 million inhabitants, i.e. about 40% of the Greek population.
· Athens has been inhabited continuously for 7,000 years. This makes it one of the oldest cities in Europe
Greek Products? Exceptional Quality!
· About 7% of all marble produced on the planet comes from Greece.
· Greece is the third country in the world in olive production. The cultivation of olive trees began in our places since antiquity. In fact, some olives planted in the 13th century still produce fruit.
· It is also the first country in the world to trade... Sponge.
· Ships flying the Greek flag make up 70% of europe's entire merchant fleet. The domestic law requires 75% of the crew of the ships to have Greek citizenship.
Greek People and Things about them!
·. Today, life expectancy has reached 77 and 82 years for Greeks and Greek women respectively, which ranks us in the top 26 of the countries with the highest expectancy in the world.
· Slaves in ancient Greece constituted 40-80% of the population in the city-states. They were mostly prisoners of war, abandoned children or children of slaves.
· Twelve million people in the world speak Greek. These of course include the ten million Greek inhabitants, the Cypriots, but also the Greek-speaking people in Italy, Albania, Turkey, the USA and other countries that the Greeks previously preferred for immigration. The Greek language has been spoken for about 3,000 years, which makes it one of the oldest languages in the world.
· In the 50s, only 30% of Greeks knew how to read and write. Today, the rate of illiteracy barely reaches 5%
· The government's corruption cost the country about 800 million euros in 2009 alone. Greece's national debt is greater than the national economy.
Greek Animals and Landscape...(not only Donkeys!)
· The enviable wildlife of the country includes 116 species of mammals, 18 species of amphibians, 59 species of reptiles, 240 species of birds and 107 species of fish. However, about half of the mammalian species are at risk of extinction.
· About 100,000 birds from northern Europe and Asia overwinter in our places.
· No part of Greece is more than 137 km away from the sea. The country's coastline is the tenth longest on the planet.
· Once, Greece was a rocky mass, which was completely under the sea. After the collision of a tectonic plate with Europe, its mountainous field was formed, while even today the earthquakes in the Aegean are related to the movements of this particular lithospheric plate.
· On average, we enjoy 250 days of sunshine a year. This corresponds to 3,000 enviable hours of sun per year.
·://acropolis-greece.com/2023/05/11/best-islands-near-athens-to-visit-in-summer-2023/">island, Crete, has an area of 8,260 square kilometers.
· 80% of the territory of the country is mountainous. The country does not have a single navigable river, because of this particular geomorphology.