Insight Guides - Insight Guides: Greece

How To Use This E-Book

Getting around the e-book

This Insight Guide e-book is designed to give you inspiration for your visit to Greece, as well as comprehensive planning advice to make sure you have the best travel experience. The guide begins with our selection of Top Attractions, as well as our Editors Choice categories of activies and experiences. Detailed features on history, people and culture paint a vivid portrait of contemporary life in Greece. The extensive Places chapters give a complete guide to all the sights and areas worth visiting. The Travel Tips provide full information on getting around, hotels, activities from to culture to shopping to sport, plus a wealth of practical information to help you plan your trip.

In the Table of Contents and throughout this e-book you will see hyperlinked references. Just tap a hyperlink once to skip to the section you would like to read. Practical information and listings are also hyperlinked, so as long as you have an external connection to the internet, you can tap a link to go directly to the website for more information.

Maps

All key attractions and sights in Greece are numbered and cross-referenced to high-quality maps. Wherever you see the reference [map] just tap this to go straight to the related map. You can also double-tap any map for a zoom view.

Images

Youll find hundreds of beautiful high-resolution images that capture the essence of Greece. Simply double-tap on an image to see it full-screen.

About Insight Guides

Insight Guides have more than 40 years experience of publishing high-quality, visual travel guides. We produce 400 full-colour titles, in both print and digital form, covering more than 200 destinations across the globe, in a variety of formats to meet your different needs.

Insight Guides are written by local authors who use their on-the-ground experience to provide the very latest information; their local expertise is evident in the extensive historical and cultural background features. All the reviews in Insight Guides are independent; we strive to maintain an impartial view. Our reviews are carefully selected to guide to you the best places to stay and eat, so you can be confident that when we say a restaurant or hotel is special, we really mean it.

Like all Insight Guides , this e-book contains hundreds of beautiful photographs to inspire and inform your travel. We commission most of our own photography, and we strive to capture the essence of a destination using original images that you wont find anywhere else.

2013 Apa Publications (UK) Ltd

Introduction: An Ancient Story

A heady mix of sun, sea and ancient sites bathed in brilliant Aegean light, Greece has enchanted travellers for centuries.

Modern Greece, which emerged during the 19th century from 500 years of Ottoman rule, occupies a rocky pile of peninsulas and islands at the bottom of the Balkans in the eastern Mediterranean, with a language and landscape redolent of its pre-eminent place in the development of the western world. History, drama, politics, philosophy: the words as well as the concepts have their roots here. Around its rugged terrain are the names of the city-states which vied for supremacy in this region 2,000 years ago: Corinth, Sparta, Mycenae, Rhodes, Athens. And here too are Delphi, the Parthenon and Mount Olympos, forever associated with the ancient gods.

Whether you arrive in Greece by boat, plane or overland, your first impression as you stretch your legs is likely to be of the sun. Glimmering on the water, reflecting off metal and glass, casting shadows, the Mediterranean sun is omnipresent. Like the flash of a hidden camera, the brilliant light catches you unawares and transfixes you.

From that minute, you seem effortlessly to become a part of the Greek landscape blue sky above, white sand below, ancient ruins, olive groves, a hillside vineyard It is easy to fall in love with this radiant country, not least because so many of its over 11 million people are emotionally open, unafraid of shedding a tear, either in sorrow or in joy. Many travellers first experience this passion in the warmth of the welcome they receive, and they may even feel a little uneasy at the exuberance of their hosts. Yet those travellers tend to return time after time for the mirror-smooth Aegean Sea shimmering in the still of the morning, for the kafena with their wooden, thatched chairs and rickety tables offering some shade from the blistering afternoon heat, and for the silvery green olive groves where the cicadas drone at evening time.

Minoan fresco, Crete.

Britta Jaschinski/Apa Publications

The countrys membership of the European Union and its capitals hosting of the 2004 Olympic Games have done much to accelerate modernisation. But modern is less a synonym for homogeneous than it is in many other rapidly changing countries. A sense of history and a respect for tradition remain powerful, and most Greeks are proud to share their culture with visitors. The Greek word xnos means not only stranger or foreigner but also guest, and a fortunate xnos will be invited into a Greek familys house to be lavishly supplied with food and drink and questioned with genuine curiosity. The aim of this book is both to guide visitors around Greece and its islands and to preview what is likely to be an entirely captivating experience.

The Fishermens Memorial, Smi.

Kevin Cummins/Apa Publications

Greeces Top 10 Attractions

From ancient sites steeped in history and sun-bleached islands or cool mountain villages to Venetian forts and cliffside monasteries.

Top Attraction 1

The Parthenon, Athens . Although still partly covered in scaffolding and studded with cranes, this treasure of the Classical city never fails to impress. For more information, .

Dreamstime

Top Attraction 2

Metora, Thessaly . Half-a-dozen-plus frescoed monasteries and convents perch bizarrely on sheer rock pinnacles in the Pndos foothills. For more information, .

Dreamstime

Top Attraction 3

Krkyra Old Town, Corfu . Venetian flair, domesticity and town planning at the far end of the Adriatic, bracketed by two imposing castles with eye-popping views. For more information, .