History of modern Greece

The history of Greece’s political, social, and cultural development from the late eighteenth century to the present, including independence, state-building, war, and European integration.

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Greek War of Independence: The 1821–1829 uprising that ended Ottoman rule over much of Greece and led to an independent state. Its outcome created the kingdom whose borders and institutions defined early modern Greek history.
Greek Constitution: The fundamental legal framework defining Greece’s institutions, rights, and system of government. Successive constitutions and amendments record shifts between monarchy, republic, and parliamentary rule.
Rigas Feraios: An eighteenth-century Greek writer and revolutionary whose works advocated liberation from Ottoman rule. His political writings helped articulate the revolutionary ideas that preceded independence.
Ottoman Greece: The Greek lands and communities governed by the Ottoman Empire from the fifteenth century until the nineteenth-century wars of independence. Ottoman rule shaped the social structures and political circumstances from which the Greek state emerged.
Population exchange between Greece and Turkey: The compulsory exchange of Greek Orthodox and Muslim populations agreed by Greece and Turkey in 1923. It brought more than a million refugees to Greece and transformed its population and politics.
Megali Idea: A Greek nationalist project seeking to unite Greek populations and historic territories within one state. It shaped expansionist policy and national aspirations through the early twentieth century.
Greek monarchy: The institution of hereditary kingship in Greece, established in 1832 and abolished in 1973. Its conflicts with elected governments repeatedly destabilized political life before the republic.
Ioannis Kapodistrias: A Greek diplomat who became the first governor of independent Greece in 1828. His effort to centralize the new state exposed the difficulties of postwar state-building.
Modern Greek Enlightenment: An intellectual movement among Greek-speaking scholars in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that promoted education and national consciousness. Its ideas linked European Enlightenment thought to the movement for Greek independence.
Greek refugees: People displaced from or within Greek lands by war, forced migration, or political upheaval. Refugee settlement reshaped cities, labor markets, and political identities across the twentieth century.