The ancient and the modern
The city-states of ancient Greece, above all Athens in the fifth century BC, gave the world the words democracy, philosophy, theatre and history, and a body of art and thought that Europe has claimed as its foundation ever since. But that classical world was followed by long centuries under Rome, Byzantium and then, from the fifteenth century, the Ottoman Empire. Modern Greece is a young state, born of a war of independence in the 1820s that romantic Europe rallied to, and it spent its first century expanding its borders and absorbing Greek populations from the collapsing Ottoman lands.
The twentieth century was turbulent: a catastrophic war with Turkey and population exchange in the 1920s, occupation and a brutal civil war in the 1940s, and a military junta from 1967 to 1974. Democracy returned in 1974, the monarchy was abolished, and Greece joined the European Community in 1981.
The same argument as the Bronzes
Greece's clearest link to Africa's story is not colonial but conceptual, and it is a powerful one. Early in the nineteenth century Lord Elgin, Britain's ambassador to the Ottomans, stripped roughly half the surviving sculptures from the Parthenon and shipped them to London, where the British Museum has held them ever since as the "Elgin Marbles". Greece has demanded their return for the best part of two centuries, built a purpose-made museum at the foot of the Acropolis to receive them, and refused to accept the British Museum's argument that a great "universal" collection justifies keeping them.
That is, almost word for word, the case Nigeria makes for the Benin Bronzes and Ethiopia for the Maqdala treasures. The same museum, the same defence, the same question of who owns a people's past. Greece's campaign has given the global restitution movement a European face and a respectable precedent, and African advocates have long noted that if the Marbles go home, the Bronzes have no reason to stay. Greece has also, in recent decades, become a front-line entry point for migrants and refugees from Africa and the Middle East crossing the Aegean, making it a hard border of Fortress Europe.
Crisis and recovery
Greece's modern reputation was scarred by the debt crisis that began in 2009, when years of borrowing and weak public finances collapsed into near-bankruptcy, forcing years of grinding austerity, mass unemployment and the loss of a quarter of national output. The country stayed in the euro, narrowly, and has since returned to growth under Kyriakos Mitsotakis, though the wounds of the crisis, and the strain of tourism and migration, still shape its politics.