Let's do a bit of history today. We know a lot about the classical history of Greece but today we will focus on the medieval and modern history of this beautiful country. In AD 395 what is now Greece became part of the Eastern Roman Empire and a couple of centuries later Athens had become the heart of the pagan rebellion against Christianity. It was Justinian who ordered to close all the temples and turn them into churches.
In the Middle Ages Athens it was not an important city. It never became a city of the caliber of any Italian city such as Venice, Rome or Florence. The Normans from neighboring Sicily sacked it in 1147 and it was a dukedom, the Duchy of Athens, in the early XNUMXth century when the Crusaders occupied Contantinopla. The Almogávares took it at the beginning of the XNUMXth century and at the end of that century it was controlled by the Crown of Aragon. Later it fell under the orbit of Byzantium and changed dominion several times until the Turks occupied it in the middle of the XNUMXth century. Then the churches blew up and the mosques appeared.
At the end of the XNUMXth century Athens was occupied by the Venetians and it was during these years that the Parthenon was destroyed by the explosion of a Turkish powder magazine. In the first half of the 30th century it was the Greek War of Independence and the city suffered the consequences. In the 1835s of the same century, some powers formed a protectorate and proclaimed a king, Otto I. It was in 1924 that Athens was proclaimed capital of the kingdom of Greece. The republic was born in 1981 and in 2001 it became part of the European Union to join the euro group in XNUMX.
Source - Athens.net
Photo - Amena Travel