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GREEK GEOGRAPHY
Greek geography has through its history been both a blessing and a curse. Blessing because it has
allowed Greece to dominate the “known Western world” for a good portion of Europe’s ancient
history via its control of Eastern Mediterranean, but a curse because it has imprisoned Greece
within the Mediterranean as the region’s importance waned with the collapse of the Roman
Empire and reorientation of the West towards the North European Plain.
Physical Geography: The Peninsula at the Edge of Europe
Greece is located in southeastern Europe on the southern-most portion of the mountainous
Balkan Peninsula, which extends into the Mediterranean Sea. Greece is bound by the Adriatic
Sea to the northwest, the Ionian Sea to the southwest, the Mediterranean Sea in the south, the
Aegean Sea to the southeast and east, and the Black Sea to the northeast.
Greece can be thought of as the area bound by the Mediterranean islands of Corfu, Crete and
Cyprus -- Corfu in the Ionian Sea off the western coast of Greece, Crete to south of Greece and
separating the Aegean and the Mediterranean seas, and Cyprus in the eastern-most portion of the
Mediterranean off the Turkish coast.
In the western portion of Greece, the Pindus Mountains form a spine stretching from the south of
western Greece northwards to where it connects to the Balkan mountain range. The Rhodopes
are the southeastern-stretching extension of the Balkan mountain range that separates Greece
from Bulgaria.
Key links between the Greek terminus of the Balkans and the rest of the peninsula are the Vardar
and Struma rivers which create valleys that are vital overland transportation routes between
Greece and the rest of Europe. The Vardar River originates in the Sar mountains near, flowing
east and south through Skopje and into Greek Macedonia, where it then flows south towards the
Aegean, emptying into in the Strimonoks gulf just west of Thessaloniki in northern Greece. The
Struma River originates close to the Bulgarian city of Sofia near the southern portion of the
Vitosha mountains, flowing west and then south through Greek Macedonia, emptying into the
Aegean Sea near the Greek city of Amphipolis, northeast of Thessaloniki.
One thing that Greece does not have to worry about -- relative to most other European nations -is an overland invasion, at least not one that is undertaken lightly. Rhodope Mountains in the
northeast and the expansive mountains of the Dinnaric Alps in the northwest means that there are
only few roads into Greece: via the lowland of Thrace in the east, and the two river valleys
described above. But even if one enters Greece via any of these paths, the roads through the rest
of the peninsula include countless mountain passages and coastal roads that hug mountain cliffs
that allow the Greeks to set up traps -- ala the famous battle of Thermopylae.
While providing relative security from overland invasion, lack of overland routes also means that
Greece is solely isolated from rest of Europe. The only true land link to the rest of Europe is via
the Vardar-Morava river valleys (all of which is non-navigable but does provide good land
route), but these go through the heart of the Balkans and leave Greece at the mercy of Serbia in
the north. Protection that mountain chains to the north provide and the difficulty of
communicating with Europe via overland links have historically oriented the Greeks towards the
Mediterranean, encouraging a maritime culture that depends on the seas for transportation.
Further forcing Greece towards the sea is overall difficulty of navigating the mountainous terrain
-- average terrain altitude if Greece is double that of Germany and comparable to the Alpine
country of Slovenia. Hilly terrain not only makes Greece difficult to conquer and hold, but also
impedes Greek own efforts to effectively rule the country -- impeding everything from post
service to tax collection.
As such, Greece’s maritime culture is not only a luxury and comparative advantage bred of its
Mediterranean geography, but also a vital asset for maintaining the coherence of the state. In this
way Greece is in many ways similar to Japan, where transportation between key population
centers is much easier via seas than overland. Greek internal coherence and ability to
communicate effectively with its own possessions therefore depends on control of the so called
internal seas, particularly the Aegean but also the Cretan and Ionian Seas.
Greek Core: The Aegean
The core of Greece is therefore neither the breadbaskets of Thessaly or Greek Macedonia, nor
the Athens-Piraeus metropolitan area where around half of the population lives. It is rather the
Aegean Sea itself – the actual water, not the coastland -- which allows these three critical areas
of Greece to be connected for trade, defense and communication. Without the control of the
Aegean Sea, most important Greek population centers -- Athens, Thessaoloniki and Larisa -- are
cut off and unable to communicate with one another. This also explains why control of the
Aegean and the islands that surround it has been the essential military strategy of Greece for
thousands of years. Control of the Aegean also gives Greece the additional benefit of influencing
trade between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean despite the loss of Sea of Marmara to the
Ottoman Empire. The Aegean is for Greece essentially what the Mediterranean was to Rome.
To accomplish control of the Aegean and the Cretan Seas, Greece fundamentally has to control
two key islands in its archipelago, namely Rhodes and Crete, as well as the Dodecanese
archipelago. With those islands under its control, the Aegean and Cretan Seas truly become
Greek lakes. The next two islands of importance to Athens are Corfu -- which gives Greece an
anchor in the Straits of Otranto and thus an insight into threats emerging from the Adriatic -- and
Cyprus -- which is a key control point for the Levant and the Anatolian land bridge. Cyprus’s
importance to Greece depends on whether or not Athens controls Anatolia and has therefore
waned with the loss of the area today controlled by modern Turkey. Nonetheless, a Greek
Cyprus keeps Turkey (at best) hemmed in Anatolia and (at the least) impedes Turkish links with
Egypt and rest of the Middle East.
Greek Isolation
Geography of modern Greece ultimately presents a serious problem for the country. Greece is
situated as far from global flows of capital as any European country that considers itself part of
the “West”. It sits at a terminus of the Balkan Peninsula on a smaller, rockier peninsula of its
own that is devoid of large food producing regions. It has plenty of sheltered ports, but most are
characterized by mountains and cliffs that literally meet the sea with very little room for
population growth.
Furthermore, Greece is nestled between two major Mediterranean power centers -- the Po river
valley and western Anatolia -- which have access to much larger food producing regions and are
better hooked into Europe’s capital flow networks with which to build countries capable of
projecting influence. The Po river valley is extremely agriculturally rich and has sheltered sea
access. It is also bound by the Alps, giving it perfect buffer against powers to the north. Anatolia
has access to both the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, control of the Bosporus Straits and
access to the Danube and the Don via the Black Sea. These two regions have provided modern
Italy and Ottomans/Turkey the rich core with which to dominate the Balkans and Greece in
particular. To counter them, Greece either needs a strong patron or has to rely on imported
capital.
Unfortunately for Greece, there is also usually a Balkan power to the north, which for all its own
geographical problems does have access to Danube and thus the rest of the European continent.
Examples of strong Balkan states that have vied with Greece for influence on the Balkans
peninsula are Bulgaria, Serbia and Yugoslavia. Belgrade played a crucial role in the Greek civil
war (1944-1949) and under Josip Broz Tito would have likely turned Athens into its puppet state
had it not been for intervention by both the West and Soviet Union.
Greek geography impedes capital formation, which is essential for power projection. The idea of
Ancient Greece, and its extensive control of the Mediterranean is today unimaginable
considering Athens’ limited resources. Only way for Greece to control pan-continental capital
flows is to somehow go for the control of the entire Mediterranean, which would necessitate
controlling Sicily -- the pivot of the Mediterranean -- something that Greece has been unable to
do since third century BC and even then it only ever controlled footholds via city state colonies
throughout the Mediterranean. Alternatively, Greece would have to control Sea of Marmara,
which it has been unable to do since it fell to the more numerous Ottoman Empire in the 15th
Century.
Despite the impossibility of controlling the Mediterranean as a whole, Athens still needs a large
navy to maintain control of its Aegean core. This creates considerably large outlays for a capital
poor country, assuring that Greece has to continually seek to acquire capital from abroad. The
problem lies in its utter lack of agricultural land like or of navigable rivers, without these features
Greece lacks the food production to create a large population, as well as lacking the basis for a
truly merchant-driven economy. The result is a relatively poor state with weak capital generation
capacity even as its mountainous terrain, exposure to a long coast and proximity to major powers
condemn it to needing massive amounts of capital to maintain independence and control over its
territory.
The cost of controlling the Aegean cannot be overstated. Navies are among the most expensive
national projects a state can undertake. However, the Aegean must be a Greek lake if Athens
wants to be able to quickly move military and capital resources between population centers. With
neighboring regional power Turkey considered an existential threat, Greece has been forced to
compete with Turkish economy and population over the Aegean.
In the modern context, this has also meant purchasing and maintaining one of the most advanced
air forces in the world, since without air superiority even the best navy is vulnerable to attack.
Greek air force boasts over 200 advanced fourth generation fighters, with F-16 C/D including the
advanced block 52+ variants and Dessault Mirage 2000. This gives Athens an air force
comparable to that of the U.K. and qualitatively and quantitatively superior to the German and
Italian air forces (which is incredible when one considers that Greek population is seven times
and economy is ten times smaller than German). Greek pilots are also considered to be some of
the best and most experienced in the world, with daily exposure to real life – albeit mostly non
lethal – dog fights over the Aegean against the Turkish air force and have even outperformed the
U.S. pilots in war game simulations.
But maintaining, owning and training such a superior military has meant that Greece has spent
proportionally double on defense than any European state, at over 6 percent of GDP prior to the
onset of the current financial crisis – it has since pledged to reduce it significantly to under 3
percent. With no indigenous capital generation of its own, Greece has been forced to import
capital from abroad to maintain such an advanced military. This is on top of a generous social
welfare state and considerable infrastructural needs. When a country is forced to import capital
from abroad it tends to concentrate it in the hands of few elites who control the access points for
capital generation. In Greece these are usually shipping and banking tycoons, which only further
exacerbates the strong left-right split and natural suspicion of government.
Geopolitical Imperatives
While Ancient Greece was in many ways the center of the known world, modern Greece is a
rocky island tucked away at the side of what is today essentially a Mediterranean “lake”. With
the advent of the Atlantic trade routes, establishment of Muslim power centers in Asia Minor and
Levant and orientation of European power and trade to the North European Plain, the
Mediterranean has essentially lost much of its luster. It certainly no longer deserves the moniker
of “middle of the earth”. Greece finds itself isolated in this “lake”, its destiny controlled by
powers that control the Gibraltar Straits, Suez Canal and the Sea of Marmara and its only land
bridge leading through the treacherous valleys of the Balkans.
From Greek geography we can extract the following geopolitical imperatives:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Secure control of the Aegean.
Establish control of Corfu, Crete and Rhodes.
Hold the Vardar river estuary and as far up the valley as you can.
Consolidate hold of mainland Greece.
Extend to outer islands such as Cyprus.
From Ancient Superpower to Vassal State
Ancient Greeks gave the Western world its first culture and philosophy. It also gave birth to the
study of geopolitics with Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, which is considered to
be a seminal work of international relations. It would do injustice to attempt to give the Ancient
Greek period a quick overview, it deserves a geopolitical monograph of its own. Suffice it to say
that the political geography of the period was vastly different from that of present era. Greek city
states operated in a geography where the Mediterranean was the center of the world and in which
a handful of city states clutching the coast of the Aegean Sea could launch “colonial” expeditions
across the Mediterranean.
From this period, however, we should note that control of the Aegean was of paramount
importance as it still is today. The Greeks -- faced with nearly impassible terrain on the
Peloponnesian peninsula -- were from the beginning forced to become excellent mariners.
Securing the Aegean was also crucial in repelling two major Persian invasions in antiquity; each
major land battle had its contemporary naval battle to sever Persian supply lines. Once the
existential Persian threat was to large extent eliminated Athens launched an attempt to extend
itself into an Empire. That Imperial extension essentially ended with a long drawn out campaign
to occupy and hold Sicily as well as the attempt to wrestle Cyprus from Persian control.
The attempts to control Sicily and Cyprus have to be understood in the context of Greek “islandhopping” strategy. The three key islands to holding the Aegean Sea are Corfu, Crete and Rhodes.
Corfu gives the Greeks an anchor in the Ionian Sea from which threats could emerge while Corfu
and Rhodes turn the Aegean into a Greek Lake if controlled. Once those three are controlled,
Greeks understood that with Cyprus in the east and Sicily in the west they would have control of
the entire Mediterranean. Greek base in Cyprus cuts communication links between Anatolia,
Levant and Egypt, while Sicily is the cockpit of the entire Mediterranean, allowing whoever
controls it to monitor east-west travel as well as the quickest south-north route between Africa
and Europe via the Tunisia-Sicily-Italy link.
While Athenians may have understood geopolitics of the Mediterranean well, they did not have
the technology -- namely the advanced bureaucratic and communication technology -- with
which to execute their plans. Athenian expeditions to Cyprus and Egypt were repulsed while
Sicily became Athens’ Vietnam, so to speak, causing dissent in the coalition of city states that
eventually brought about the end of Athenian power.
Bitter rivalries of the various Peloponnesian city states created a power vacuum in the 4th
Century B.C. that was quickly filled by the Kingdom of Macedonia. Despite its reputation as the
most “backward” -- in terms of culture, system of government, philosophy and arts -- of the
Greek regions, Macedonia had one thing going for it that the city states did not: agricultural land
of the Vardar river valley. Whereas Athens and other city states depended on the sea born trade
to access grain from regions beyond the Bosporus straits and the Black Sea for food, Macedonia
had domestic agriculture. It also had the absolute authoritarian system of government that
allowed it to launch the first truly dominant Greek foray into global dominance under Alexander
the Great.
This effort, however, could not be sustained because ultimately the estuary of Vardar did not
provide the necessary base to counter the rise of Rome. Rome first extended itself into the Greek
domain by capturing the island of Corfu, which had already fallen out of Greek hands in the 3rd
Century B.C.. With Corfu secured, Rome had nothing standing in the way between it and the
Greek mainland and ultimately secured control of entire Greece during the campaigns of one of
the most famous Roman generals Sulla in 88 B.C.
The fall of Greece to Rome essentially wiped Greece as an independent entity from annals of
history for nearly 2000 years and destined the Peloponnesian Peninsula to its backwater status
that it had for most of its history under Byzantine and Ottoman rule. While it may be tempting to
include Byzantium in the discussion of Greek geopolitics -- its culture and language being
essentially Greek -- the Byzantine geography was much more approximate to that of the Ottoman
Empire and later Turkey than that of Greece proper. The core of Byzantium was the Sea of
Marmara, which Byzantium held on against the encroaching Ottoman Turks until the very end.
In the story of the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, territory of modern Greece is essentially an
afterthought. It was Ottoman advance through the Maritsa river valley that destroyed Bulgarian
and Serbian kingdoms in the 14th Centuries, allowing the Ottomans to then concentrate on
conquering Byzantium in mid 15th century after a brief interregnum caused by Mongol invasions
of Anatolia. Greece proper wasn’t conquered as much as it one day essentially woke up severed
from the rest of the Balkans -- and therefore Christian Europe -- by the Ottoman power.
Independent Greece: Continuation of Vassalhood
History of modern Greece begins in 1821 with the
III.
Greece as center of the world in Mediterranean
a.
Greek political geography in the Classical time (super brief)
IV.
Loss of sovereignty to Ottomans and end of Mediterranean importance (super
brief again)
V.
Greece 1821-1990: Achieving imperatives via support of others.
a.
Greece as UK bulwark against Ottomans/Russians
b. Greece as US bulwark against Yugoslavia/Soviets
c.
VI.
End of Cold War
Modern Greece 1990-2010: (Not) Adapting to new political geography
a.
Turkey as an existential threat
b. Membership in eurozone
c.
Sovereign Debt Crisis.