Greece

Greece occupies the southern tip of the Balkan Peninsula in southeastern Europe, with more than two thousand islands scattered across the Aegean and Ionian Seas, some of the easternmost lying just a few miles off the Turkish coast. After centuries as part of the Byzantine and then the Ottoman Empire, Greeks rose in the War of Greek Independence of 1821 to 1832, a rebellion that won formal recognition as an independent kingdom in 1832. The country was occupied by Nazi Germany in the Second World War and endured a civil war afterward that lasted until 1949. Its capital, Athens, already described on this atlas as the birthplace of Western civilization, sits in the Attica region that is now home to about a third of Greece's entire population.