The Greeks (Greek: Έλληνες, ) are a nation and ethnic group, which historically populates Greece, the nearby regions of the Balkans and Cyprus. Additionally, there are significant Greek populations throughout various countries due to the Greek diaspora.

Greek colonies and communities have been historically established in most corners of the Mediterranean but Greeks have always been centered around the Aegean Sea, where Greek has been spoken since antiquity.Encyclopedia Britannica. The Greeks, 2008, O.Ed. Until the early 20th century, Greeks were uniformly distributed between the Greek peninsula, the western coast of Asia Minor, Pontus, Cyprus and Constantinople, regions which coincided to a large extent with the borders of the Byzantine Empire of the late 11th century and the Eastern Mediterranean areas of the ancient Greek colonization.

In the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922), a large-scale population exchange between Greece and Turkey transferred and confined ethnic Greeks almost entirely into the borders of the modern Greek state and Cyprus. Other ethnic Greek populations can be found from Southern Italy to the Caucasus and in diaspora communities in a number of other countries. Today, the vast majority of Greeks are at least nominally adherents of Greek Orthodoxy.CIA World Factbook on Greece: Greek Orthodox 98%, Greek Muslim 1.3%, other 0.7%.

History

Greek has been spoken on the Greek peninsula (i.e. the southern Balkan region) for over 3,500 years and in western Asia Minor for a little less. It has an almost unbroken literary history which makes it one of the oldest surviving branches of the Indo-European languages. From Ancient Greece the Greeks have inherited a sophisticated culture and language documented over three millennia.

Greece was the first modern state to be created in the Balkans when the Greeks liberated a part of their historic homelands from the Ottoman Empire. The large Greek Diaspora and merchant class were instrumental in transmitting the ideas of western Romantic nationalism and Philhellenism. These, together with the conception of Hellenism formulated during the last centuries of the Eastern Roman Empire, formed the basis of the Greek Enlightenment.

Mycenaean

see: Mycenaean Greece

Classical

Main: Ancient Greece see: Greek tribes

The classical period of Greek civilization covers a time span from the early fifth century BCE to the death of Alexander the Great, in 323 BCE. It is so named because it set the standards by which Greek civilization would be judged in later eras. In that time Greeks contributed to the future development of arts and sciences by creating a legacy of influence upon Western civilization. The ethnogenesis of the Greek nation is marked by the first Olympic Games in 776 BCE when the idea of a common Hellenism amongst the Greek speaking tribes was first translated into a shared cultural experience. Hellenism was supremely a matter of common culture.Roberts, J.M. The New Penguin History of the World, The Greeks (Fifth Edition), 2007, pp. 171-172. ISBN 9780141030425