Greek Gods, Myths and Legends

Greek Gods

The Greek gods, myths and legends
The Greeks believed that all the gods descended Gae (Earth) and Uranium (the sky). Thought that the gods are very similar to people: that they love each other, get married, have children, play music, and they shall continue to strongly reflect the human characteristics. Each god had its influential area. The gods lived on Mount Olympus, where the world had a grand palace and the palaces. For many the most famous gods are focused on temples and other shrines, which is used to spending a lot of money and artistic capabilities. Religion has played in the lives of people important place. Indeed, the beautiful buildings that have been preserved to this day, is most temples.


Greek Gods

The Philosopher Pythagoras

During the same period when Polycrates was the tyrant of Samos,the island reached the height of its flourishing and glory and another renowned person gave it additional fame trough his wisdom and his works.This was the philosopher Pythagoras.The son of Mnisarchos and Parthenia he was born on Samos between 580-576 B.C.Like the births of all the famous men of antiquity there are a host of myths surrounding it.According to Porphyrios,Pythagoras was born of the god Apollo and Pythia.
He took his first lessons from the teachers on Samos.But his great thirst for knowledge made him travel far and wide.First of all he went to Miletus,the intelectual center of Ionian civilization.Later he moved on to Egypt where he studied with the Pharoah's wise men for twenty two years.From Egypt he went to Chaldaea where he was taken captive by King Camvysis and sent to Babylon.During his confinement he learned the wisdom and the magic of that strange land and also learned the secrets of its arts.


Pythagoras

About 530 bc Pythagoras settled in Crotona, a Greek colony in southern Italy, where he founded a movement with religious, political, and philosophical aims, known as Pythagoreanism. The philosophy of Pythagoras is known only through the work of his disciples.
Music was not the only field that Pythagoras considered worthy of study, in fact he saw numbers in everything. He was convinced that the divine principles of the universe, though imperceptible to the senses, can be expressed in terms of relationships of numbers. He therefore reasoned that the secrets of the cosmos are revealed by pure thought, through deduction and analytic reflection on the perceptible world. This eventually led to the famous saying that “all things are numbers.” Pythagoras himself spoke of square numbers and cubic numbers, and we still use these terms, but he also spoke of oblong, triangular, and spherical numbers. He associated numbers with form, relating arithmetic to geometry. His greatest contribution, the proposition about right-angled triangles, sprang from this line of thought:
The Egyptians had known that a triangle whose sides are 3, 4, 5 has a right angle, but apparently the Greeks were the first to observe that 3²+4²=5², and, acting on this suggestion, to discover a proof of the general proposition. Unfortunately for Pythagoras this theorem led at once to the discovery of incommensurables, which appeared to disprove his whole philosophy. In a right-angled isosceles triangle, the square on the hypotenuse is double of the square on either side.


The Philosopher Pythagoras

Athena- Greece's favorite Goddess

Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, war, the arts, industry, justice and skill.She was the Goddess of lots of other things, too.She had sprung fully grown out of her father's head.
She is the favorite daughter of Zeus; and that's why he let her use his insignia: the terrible shield, the aegis and his devastating weapon, the ray.


Athena- Greece's favorite Goddess

In poetry she is the incarnation of Wisdom, Reason and Purity.
Tritogeneia was another name of Athena's. It could have come from three different sources. Geneia means "born" in Greek, and so it could be a reference to the idea that Athena was born from the Lake Tritonis.


Athena- Greece's favorite Goddess

Greek Monasteries of Meteora

Facts about Greece presents: Monasteries of Meteora


Monasteries of Meteora

The Greek word Meteora means "suspended in the air"

The monasteries of Meteora are one of the world's most spectacular places.They are located in north central Greece.Most of this hanging monasteries were abandoned and today only six survive,of which four can be visited by way of bridges.


Monasteries of Meteora


Monasteries of Meteora

The isolated monasteries of Meteora helped keep alive Greek Orthodox religious traditions during the turbulent Middle Ages and Otoman Turk occupation of Greece.

Athens,the capital city

Athens,the capital city

Athens is the capital and largest city of Greece.Athens are one of the world's oldest cities.In 2008,Athens was ranked the world's 32nd-riches city's.Athens has been continuously inhabited for at least 4,500 years.


Athens,the capital city

Athens became the capital of Greece in 1834.The city is one of the world's main centres of archaeological research.Athens have a typical mediterranean climate.Athens has twice played host to the summer Olympic Games:in 1896 and in 2004!


Athens,the capital city

Presentation of Greece

Presentation of Greece

• Capital: Athens
• Area: 131,940 sq km
• Population: 10,707,135 (July 1999 est.)
• Currency: drachma
• Form of government: parliamentary republic; monarchy rejected by referendum 8 December 1974; unicameral Parliament or Vouli ton Ellinon (300 seats; members are elected by direct
  popular vote to serve four-year terms); president elected by Parliament for a five-year term; prime minister appointed by the president
• Languages: Greek
• Religion: Greek Orthodox (98%), Muslim (2%)
• National holiday: Independence Day, 25 March (1821)

Greece is a country with a hallowed past and an at-times turbulent present. Appreciation of the achievements of its classical past has tended to overshadow its development as a free nation since the War of Independence from the Ottomans in 1821. Many foreign Hellenists imbued with a romantic ideal of the Greece of Pericles and the Parthenon are blithely ignorant that Greece today is a vibrant modern European country. It is equally a land where the languages of recent migrant communities from the Balkans, Africa and Asia - not to mention the English and German of EU migrants and retirees - contribute to Greece's status as one of Europe's more recent multicultural societies.


Presentation of Greece

As recently as 1983, when it acceded to the EU, Greece was essentially a conservative, agrarian society famous for olive oil, coups, beaches and islands.Greeks boast more mobile phones than fixed-line phones. Internet hotspots pop up like mushrooms, while car ownership, once the privilege of the affluent few, is now a consumer commodity enjoyed by the majority. While sleeping on beaches was once de rigueur for travellers in the carefree '70s, tourism is now most definitely pitched to the middle to upper-end markets and sleeping rough is now oh-so out.


Presentation of Greece

Yet the fact that Greece continues to enjoy a steady influx of foreign visitors is easy to explain. The Greek people still have the welcome mat out. It is they who, after all, make Greece. Without the indomitable bonhomie of the Greeks themselves, Greece would be a different place altogether.


Presentation of Greece