More about Greece

Time Zones

Greece is two hours ahead of Universal Coordinated Time (UTC+2). Like most states in Europe, Summer Time or Daylight Saving Time is observed in Greece, shifting time forward on the last Sunday in March by one hour (UTC+3). After the summer months (on the last Sunday in October) the time is shifted back by one hour (UTC+2). This means that, except for a few days in mid March and early November, Greece is 10 hours ahead of Pacific Time. Of course, countries (such as the U.S.) do monkey around with their daylight saving time schedules, so it's always good to check ahead of time.

Greek Names

Part of the charm of visiting Greece is dealing with the Greek alphabet and Greek place names. The Greek language is spoken nowhere else in the world besides Greece (except for Greeks living elsewhere!) In most places we visited, English worked just fine, and we were never really unable to communicate due to language. Of course, in the larger cities, English is much more common than in the outer islands. After a little practice, reading the words in Greek got easier, which worked for place names, but Greek words, after all, are still Greek!

Over the years, non-Greeks have given Greek locations names that differ from names the Greeks use, and that causes confusion. Further confusion comes from attempts to transliterate Greek names to the roman alphabet. Many signs in Greece carry both Greek and roman spellings of place names. Businesses catering to tourists will typically have both Greek and English words on their signs.

For example, the Greeks do not call their country Greece. The Romans named that part of the world Greece after the name of a single tribe living in the area. The Greeks call their country Ellas, which is spelled Ελλας, which we have used in the title of all our pages. The western cultures put an H in front of that (to try to capture the Greek pronunciation,) so we see references to Hellas (and derivations such as Hellenic) in literature as a transliteration of Ελλας.

The island of Corfu is called Kerkyra (sometimes spelled Kerkira) by the Greeks. Airline and ferry schedules refer to Kερκυρας which, of course, doesn't look anything like Corfu. In ancient times, it was called Corcyra.Team Sivota member Kevin consistently called Corfu by the ancient name because he was studying the stories of the Peloponnesian War. A conversation about Corfu/Kerkyra/Corcyra/Kερκυρας was always entertaining.

The navigation charts were not immune to confusion. One of our favorite stops was the town of Nafpaktos -- in Greek, this is spelled Ναυπακτος. The third letter is upsilon, and would generally have an "ee" sound to us. In this word, the pronunciation in Greek has a hint of an "f" in that location, and it is normally written Nafpaktos in our alphabet. However, on the marine charts, it is written Navpaktos. This just adds to the charm (confusion?) of navigating Greek waters. The ancient name was Lepanto, and, of course, Kevin was helping us with our history by calling the town by that name.

One final note on Greek names. Greece has a religious history, and some 98% of the population is Greek Orthodox. Hence, many places are named after saints. The Greek word for "saint" is agios (in the male form,) or in Greek Aγιος. Note that in Greek, the second letter is gamma, the Greek letter for "g". The lower case gamma looks very much like the English "y". When printed on a sign or map, the name of a town, such as St. George, might have Agios abbreviated to Ag. much as Saint is abbreviated to "St." But when written in Greek, the abbreviation looks like "Aγ" (alpha gamma) and gets transliterated to "Ay", not "Ag", most likely as an attempt to capture the Greek pronunciation. This is just a strange custom, and we see "Ay. Giorgios" instead of perhaps a more proper "Ag. Giorgios" (or for that matter, "St. George"!).

Money

Greece uses the Euro as do eleven other European countries.

The Euro banknotes are the same in every country. On the front of the banknotes, windows and gateways symbolize the European spirit of openness and co-operation. The 12 stars of the European Union represent the dynamism and harmony among European nations.

To complement these designs, the reverse of each banknote features a bridge. The bridges symbolize the close co-operation and communication between Europe and the rest of the world. Images of the banknotes.

One side of the Euro coin is the same in each country and the second side is personalized by each country. Kind of like the State quarters in the US.

The Greek €2 coin depicts a scene from a mosaic in Sparta (third century AD), showing Europa being abducted by Zeus, who has taken the form of a bull. Europa is a figure from Greek mythology after whom Europe was named. Edge lettering of the 2 euro coin: ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΗ ΔΗΜΟΚΡΑΤΙΑ * (Hellenic Republic).

See all of Greece's Euro coins

More on Greek Literature

The Greeks wrote a great deal, and a surprising amount of what they wrote is still available to us today, 2,500 years later. Their writing is traditionally divided into types:

1) the epic: Around 700 BC, Homer wrote two connected epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Epics are long poems that tell the story of a hero.

2) the poem: Two early Greek examples are Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days, both from around 700 BC. There are also a number of shorter poems by Archilochus (Are-KILL-oh-cuss) and Sappho (SA-foe) from the 600's BC, among others. Sappho's poems are the only surviving literature by a Greek woman.

3) the play: Plays are divided into tragedies and comedies. The oldest tragedies that we still have were written by Aeschylus around 500 BC. We also have tragedies written by Sophocles (around 450 BC) and Euripides (around 425 BC). The oldest comedies that we still have are by Aristophanes, and were also written around 425 BC. Some later comedies were written by Menander around 350 BC. Plays are also written in verse, like poems.

4) the history: Two major histories that we still have are those by Herodotus and Thucydides.  About 450 BC, Herodotus wrote a history of the Persian Wars. About 400 BC, Thucydides wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War. After the Peloponnesian War, Xenophon wrote about his adventures as a mercenary soldier for the Persians. During the Roman takeover of Greece, Polybius wrote a History of Rome in Greek. These are all written in prose (not in verse).

5) philosophical dialogues and treatises: The first written philosophy was written by Plato around 380 BC in the form of a kind of play, two or more people talking to each other. Later on both Plato and his student Aristotle wrote regular philosophical books, in prose without dialogues.

6) legal speeches and political speeches: The first speeches we have surviving are from the 300's BC. The three most famous speechwriters were Lysias , Isocrates, and Demosthenes.

Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War

Kevin's favorite topic and the theme of research on the trip...

Thucydides (thoo-SID-id-ees) was an Athenian from a rich family. He was related to the Athenian general Miltiades, who led the Athenians against the Persians at Marathon. Thucydides also became a general in the army. He led troops in the Peloponnesian war with Sparta in the late 400's BC, but when he lost a battle the democratic government exiled him for the rest of the war. Thucydides left Athens and spent the rest of the war writing a book about how the war started and what happened during the war, and why the Spartans finally won. Most of what we know about the Peloponnesian War comes from Thucydides' book. He died shortly after the end of the war.

Sparta was a town in southern Greece. It was already there in the Late Bronze Age, and appears in Homer's Odyssey as the kingdom of Menelaus and Helen. During the Dark Ages, Sparta declined like other Greek towns. In the early Archaic period, around 900 BC, Sparta began to grow again. Although most Greek towns got rid of their kings at this time, the Spartans kept their kings. In fact, the Spartans had two kings at the same time.

The biggest change in Sparta's history, though, came around 700 BC, when they seem to have conquered a group of people living near them, in Messenia. The Spartans enslaved the Messenians, whom they called "helots" (HEEL-otts), and made the Messenians (mess-EEN-ee-anns) farm all the land for them. They treated the helots very badly, often beating them and whipping them, or even killing them for no reason, and not giving them enough food. Spartan men, now that they didn't have to work anymore to get , spent all their time training for war.

Thucydides said that basically the Peloponnesian war started because Athens was too greedy, and tried to take over all of Greece. So the Spartans decided to stop the Athenians, and help all the cities of Greece become free and independent. The Spartans formed an alliance with Corinth and some other, smaller Greek cities, and brought an army to march to the walls of Athens in 441 BC.

In the first years of the war, it must have seemed pretty hopeless. The Athenians had a lot of money, and a lot of power, and they were the only Greek city that had a good navy. Even though the Spartans could attack the countryside around Athens, the Athenians were safe inside their walls, and the Spartans could not break through. And the Athenians could get food, and come and go as they pleased, by sailing out of their port in their ships. The Spartans didn't have any navy, so they couldn't stop the Athenians from sailing around.

But in the summer of the Athenians began to die from a terrible plague. Because all the Athenian farmers had to leave the countryside and move inside the walls of Athens, it was very crowded inside the walls. A lot of poor people were living in wooden shacks, a lot of people in one room, and with no real protection from the weather, and not enough good food to eat. So it was easy for the plague to spread.

We don't know exactly what this plague was. Even though Thucydides described it, it doesn't sound exactly like any modern disease. Some people think it might be a stronger form of measles. But hundreds of people died. One of them was the Athenian general Pericles, who had been leading the war.

Gradually the Spartans began to win some battles.

The Athenians decided that, since the war was not going so well, they would try a really dramatic, aggressive move. A young Athenian general named Alcibiades (al-se-BUY-a-dees) convinced the Athenian Assembly to send nearly the whole Athenian army and navy to the island of Sicily. Sicily was where the Spartans were getting their food from. So if the Athenians could capture Sicily, they could cut off the supplies of the Spartans and make them stop fighting. The Athenians agreed to send the young Alcibiades and a very old general named Nicias (NICK-ee-ass) to lead the army in Sicily.

But a few days before they were supposed to leave, somebody broke a whole lot of good-luck statues all over Athens. People were very upset. Some people thought it was Alcibiades and his friends who did it. There was a lot of discussion, but finally they decided to let Alcibiades lead the army anyway. So they all sailed off to Sicily.

But once Alcibiades and Nicias had sailed off to Sicily, the Athenians began to think about it again, and this time they decided to make Alcibiades stand trial for breaking the statues. They sent a ship to bring him back to Athens. Alcibiades pretended to go along, but half-way home, when the ships put in for the night in southern Italy, Alcibiades ran away and joined the Spartans!

Without Alcibiades, the Athenians couldn't fight very well. And Alcibiades gave the Spartans good advice about how to fight the Athenians. In the end, the Spartans defeated the Athenian army in Sicily, and almost all of the Athenian men were killed. The Athenians who were taken prisoner were forced to work as slaves in stone quarries, where many of them died.

But by 412 BC Alcibiades had gotten very unpopular in Sparta as well as Athens. Plutarch says Alcibiades was suspected of sleeping with the Spartan queen, but we don't know whether that is true. In any case, Alcibiades left the Spartans and fled to the protection of a Persian satrap, Tissaphernes, in the old kingdom of Lydia. Alcibiades convinced Tissaphernes to give money to the Athenians, if the Athenians would let him be a general again and end the democracy, putting in an oligarchy instead run by the generals. The Athenians agreed to do this, if it would help them win the war against Sparta. The generals did take power, but in the end Tissaphernes didn't give the money he had promised, so Alcibiades didn't get to be a general. Some of the Athenian allies went over to the other side, and the Athenian oligarchy began negotiating with the Spartans for a surrender.

But just at this point, the Athenian navy, which was anchored off the island of Samos, heard about the oligarchs getting power in Athens, and wanting to surrender to Sparta. The soldiers were very angry about losing their democracy, and about surrendering, and they elected Alcibiades their general. They demanded that the Athenians put the democracy back in power immediately.

The Athenians were going to say no, but just at this point the negotiations to surrender to Sparta failed, and the Spartans attacked and the Athenian fleet in Athens was destroyed. So the Athenians agreed to do what the fleet at Samos wanted: they restored the democracy, let Alcibiades be their general, and stopped trying to surrender to Sparta. The Persians began to give money to Sparta instead of Athens.

Now the Spartans had a smart idea: they used their navy to block the Hellespont, where ships came through bringing food to Athens. Alcibiades tried to get the Spartans out, and he did win some victories, but in the end, thanks to Persian money, the Spartans got control. The Athenians started to fight among themselves, and by 407 BC they had fired Alcibiades. He was angry, washed his hands of the whole war, and retired.

Slowly the Athenians began to starve, as the Spartans stopped their food ships from getting through. By 404 BC, with many Athenians already dead of starvation, the Athenians surrendered unconditionally, and the Spartans made them pull down their city walls.