I think there’s a view that Greece has been an independent country since the time of ancient Athens, Sparta, and Thebes two thousand five hundred years ago.

This is most certainly not the case as this book amply illustrates.

The books starts with a chapter on how Hellenism (the national character and culture of Greece) survived under the rule of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years. Various upheavals in Europe led certain important Greek figures to believe that the time was right to rise up against the Ottomans. This started in 1800 with the Septinsular Republic – essentially the Ionian Islands – which was the first independent Greek state. In 1821, the struggle really began across most of what we could regard as modern Greece, with the outbreak of the Greek war of independence against the Ottomans, with some help at various times from the Venetians, Austrians, British, French, and Russians.

Most of the battles and violence happened in The Peloponnese and Roumeli. One man kept the movement going, a man called Ioannis Capodistrias, the first President of Greece who did everything in his power to create Greece as we know it today. His reward for his tireless efforts and unstinting belief in a Greek nation, was to be assassinated outside a church in Nauplia in 1831. The reason for the killing was because he’d ordered the arrest of Petrobey Mavromichalis (whose picture is inside the church!), chieftain of the Mani Peninsula and a popular and successful leader in the uprising against the Turks. The assassins were close relatives of Mavromichalis.

There was a reign of terror and anarchy for two years, but eventually Russia, France, and Britain agreed that the best person to become the leader of Greece was the second son of the king of Bavaria, Otto, who arrived in Nauplia in 1833 and was enthusiastically received. He reigned for thirty years and Greece at last had some stability.