Things About Greece You're (probably) Getting Wrong

Things about Greece you're (probably) getting wrong

When you say "Greece" or "Greek", that's automatically referring to Modern Greece and Modern Greek. It's an existing country with a population of around 10 million people. The Modern Greek language is spoken natively by those 10 million along with 1 million people in Cyprus and around 2 more million in diaspora. If you want to refer to Ancient Greece or its history/culture, just add the word "ancient" to it.

The Greek name for the country is "Hellas". "Hellenic" is an adjective used for non-human nouns. Don't call yourself "hellenic" even if you have Greek roots, you're basically calling yourself "Greek thing".

There is no one correct way of pronouncing Ancient Greek as a whole. That language spanned over a thousand years and across places that didn't communicate easily or were outright hostile to each other. It's like claiming that Shakespeare's works should be pronounced with an Australian accent.

Along with the famous 300 Spartans, in the battle of Thermopylae there were also 700 Thespians (not actors, people from the town Thespiae) and according to some sources, also 900 helots (slaves) and 400 Thebans.

The town of Sparta exists in modern day. However, if you visit Greece, unless you actually are from Sparta, do NOT call yourself a Spartan, no matter what school/university you went to. "Spartans" is the name of a far-right, outright neo-nazi political party, so calling yourself that here equals to associating yourself with that.

Greek houses in American campuses sound weird. Do those letters (some of which are wildly mispronounced, btw) even mean anything

Democracy in Ancient Athens was not fair by today's standards. It was mostly a glorified, expanded aristocracy. The "demos" that had the authority to vote only consisted of land-owning Athenian men. If you were a woman, a slave, poor, an immigrant, or a child of immigrants, along with other descriptions I might be forgetting right now, you didn't have the right to participate in the ruling.

Oh yeah, the "birthplace of democracy" very much did have slaves. Some whom were prisoners of war.

Greece is on the southern end of the Balkan peninsula, located in South-Eastern Europe. However, many Greeks are wildly racist and will not admit we're part of the Balkans or Eastern Europe. There are cultural differences due to Greek not belonging in the Slavic languages (the most common language family in Eastern Europe) and for political reasons, but the main reason this distinction happens is very much racism. They prefer to be called a "Mediterranean country" (because then we're associated with countries like Italy and Spain, you know?)

Greece never recovered from the financial crisis of 2008, and has only been going downhill since then. However, the war reparations that Germany never paid Greece for the damages and the deaths it caused in WW2 is estimated to be over 200 billion euros. The German government considers this matter "to be in the past" (since they never paid them, I guess, we can forget about it!), yet is one of the countries that most strongly demands Greece to keep paying back the loans it took over the years from the EU. This is a very painful matter for all of us (especially considering there are people still alive who witnessed the destruction and death the nazis brought to the country, and now they along with their descendants are paying taxes that'll eventually reach German pockets), yet racism centers around hate for other Balkan countries and Turkey. Divide and conquer I guess.