Have you ever been to Greece? How many times? Were you on summer vocation or a business trip? Were you alone or with family members or friends? Share your personal experience, your impressions, your facinating pictures from the sites you have visited. Tell me about yor friends there, your favourite places, poeple you have met. Tell me your story about Greece, things that one can not read in tourists' leaflets, encyclopedias or hear from the news. Share your opinion about Greek history, culture and music, just anything you know. I would be really happy to learn more from you, to discuss any subject about Greece, or any other subject you find interesting. To start with here are some facts about the country copied from "wikipedia", http://www.wikipedia.org/:
Greece (Greek: Ελλάδα, transliterated: Elláda) , historically Ἑλλάς, Hellás, also known as Hellas and officially the Hellenic Republic (Ελληνική Δημοκρατία, Ellīnikī́ Dīmokratía,), is a country in southeastern Europe, situated on the southern end of the Balkan Peninsula. The country has land borders with Albania, the Republic of Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, and Turkey to the east, totaling 1,160 km (721 mi) in length. The Aegean Sea lies to the east of mainland Greece, the Ionian Sea to the west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. Greece has the tenth longest coastline in the world at 14,880 km (9,246 mi) in length, featuring a vast number of islands (approximately 1400, 227 of which are inhabited), including Crete, the Dodecanese, the Cyclades, and the Ionian islands. Eighty percent of Greece consists of mountains, of which Mount Olympus is the highest as 2,917 m (9,570 ft).
Modern Greece traces its roots to the civilization of ancient Greece, generally considered to be the cradle of Western civilization. As such, it is the birthplace of democracy, Western philosophy, the Olympic Games, Western literature and historiography, political science, major scientific and mathematical principles, and Western drama, including both tragedy and comedy.
A developed country with a very high Human Development Index, Greece has been a member of what is now the European Union since 1981 and its Economic and Monetary Union since 2001, NATO since 1952, and the European Space Agency since 2005. It is also a founding member of the United Nations, the OECD, and the Black Sea Economic Cooperation Organization. Athens is the capital; other major cities include Thessaloniki, Patras, Heraklion and Larissa.
The flag of Greece (Greek: Σημαία της Ελλάδος, popularly referred to as the Γαλανόλευκη or the Κυανόλευκη, the "blue-white") is based on nine equal horizontal stripes of blue alternating with white. There is a blue canton in the upper hoist-side corner bearing a
white cross; the cross symbolizes Greek Orthodoxy, the established religion of the people of Greece and Greek Cypriots. According to popular tradition, the nine stripes represent the nine syllables of the phrase "Ελευθερία ή Θάνατος" ("Freedom or Death", " E-lef-the-ri-a i Tha-na-tos"), the five blue stripes for the syllables "Έλευθερία" and the four white stripes "ή Θάνατος". There is also a different theory, that the nine stripes symbolize the nine Muses, the goddesses of art and civilization (nine has traditionally been one of the numbers of reference for the Greeks). The shade of blue used in the flag has varied throughout its history, from light blue to dark blue, the latter being increasingly used since the late 1960s.
