(17) GREECE?

 

Probably not too surprising that modern Greece would claim the mantle of the eastern Roman Empire as its former heartland.

Indeed, after Greece won its independence from the Ottoman Empire, it developed the “Megali Idea” or Great Idea “of recreating the Byzantine Empire, understood as an ethnic-Greek polity with capital in Constantinople”, or the “Greece of Two Continents and Five Seas” (Europe and Asia, the Ionian, Aegean, Marmara, Black and Libyan seas, respectively)”.

Apparently, the idea popped up in political debates in 1844, although of course it had older roots. And Greece took a swing at it in the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922 when the opportunity seemed to present itself with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. That didn’t work out too well for them, as while the Ottoman Empire was gone, the new republic of Turkey was not as down and out as everyone had first thought.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

X-TIER (WILD TIER)