Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Countries

Greece

Also Known As Greek
Europe

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Greece is the historical home of the classical Greek pantheon, whose myths, oracles and temple cults, including the Oracle at Delphi and the Eleusinian Mysteries, shaped later Western religious and philosophical thought far beyond the country's borders. Christianization from the early centuries CE onward made Greece a center of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and Mount Athos, an autonomous monastic republic on a peninsula in northern Greece, remains one of Orthodox Christianity's most significant living monastic communities, closed to women by longstanding tradition. The Greek Orthodox Church remains constitutionally recognized as the country's prevailing religion, with smaller Muslim, Jewish and Catholic communities also present. Modern revivalist Hellenic polytheism, a small but organized movement seeking to reconstruct ancient Greek religious practice, is also active in the country today.

Facts
Law and State
Establishment Status
Established 3
The constitution names Orthodox Christianity the prevailing religion and requires the head of state to be Orthodox.
State Funding Mechanism
Clergy salaries are funded from the state budget under arrangements tied to Orthodox Christianity's constitutional status as the prevailing religion. 3
Apostasy or Blasphemy Law
Greece's Penal Code criminalized malicious blasphemy against God under Article 198, punishable by up to two years' imprisonment, and public irreverence toward sacred objects under Article 199, punishable by up to three months. Both articles were repealed when a new Criminal Code took effect in July 2019, ending decades of prosecutions over art, theatre and social media posts deemed insulting to Orthodox Christianity. A conservative government announced plans that November to reinstate the offense but withdrew the proposal after public and international criticism. 4
Registration or Recognition Regime
Article 13 of the Constitution protects the free practice of any "known religion," defined as one with open rather than hidden doctrine and worship. Three communities, the Orthodox Church of Greece, the Jewish community and the Muslim minority of Western Thrace, hold public law status and need not register at all. Law 4301/2014 created the country's first legal personality pathway for other religious minorities, through an application and court confirmation process; before that law took effect every other religious group could hold only private-law legal status, the ordinary status of a nonprofit rather than a status recognizing it as a religious body. 4
Ban or Official Watchlist
Greece's constitution, Article 13 paragraph 2, prohibits proselytism, a term Greek law leaves undefined but which its courts have applied against active attempts to convert people away from the majority Greek Orthodox faith. In Kokkinakis v. Greece, decided 25 May 1993, the European Court of Human Rights delivered its first ever finding against a state for violating Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, ruling that the criminal conviction of a Jehovah's Witness for proselytism was not justified by a pressing social need, even though the underlying constitutional ban on proselytism was not itself found to violate the Convention. 5
Concordat Basis
Greece has no concordat with the Holy See. Its church-state instrument runs domestically instead: Article 3 of the 1975 Constitution names the Eastern Orthodox Church of Christ the prevailing religion and describes the Church of Greece as indissolubly united in doctrine with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, a constitutional establishment of the Orthodox Church itself rather than a treaty with Rome. Freedom of religious conscience for everyone else is stated in the same article, but the relationship the Constitution actually formalizes is with the Church of Greece. 6
Demographics
Religious Composition
About 90% Orthodox Christian; small Muslim (concentrated in Thrace), Catholic and religiously unaffiliated minorities (Pew Research Center, Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020). 1
Geography
Latitude
39.1 degrees north 2
Approximate reference point, rounded to one decimal place; a country's extent has no single center, so this coordinate is conventional, not a survey measurement.
Longitude
21.8 degrees east 2
Approximate reference point, rounded to one decimal place; a country's extent has no single center, so this coordinate is conventional, not a survey measurement.
Government
Capital
Athens 2
Government Type
parliamentary republic 2
Sovereignty Status
Sovereign UN member state 2
Established Year
1830 2
3 February 1830 (from the Ottoman Empire)
Status
Legal Status
Constitution names Orthodox Christianity the prevailing religion and requires the head of state to be Orthodox, funding clergy salaries from the state budget; the Muslim minority in Thrace is separately protected under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. 3
Location
Location of Greece Afghanistan Albania Algeria Angola Argentina Armenia Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Benin Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Brazil Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cabo Verde Cambodia Cameroon Canada Chile China Colombia Costa Rica Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czech Republic Democratic Republic of the Congo Denmark Dominican Republic Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Estonia Eswatini Ethiopia Federated States of Micronesia Fiji Finland France French Polynesia Gabon Georgia Germany Ghana Greece Guam Guatemala Haiti Honduras Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Israel Italy Ivory Coast Jamaica Japan Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kuwait Laos Latvia Lebanon Libya Lithuania Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Mali Malta Mauritius Mexico Moldova Mongolia Morocco Mozambique Myanmar Namibia Nepal Netherlands New Zealand Nigeria North Macedonia Norway Oman Pakistan Palestine Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Puerto Rico Qatar Romania Russia Rwanda Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Samoa Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands South Africa South Korea South Sudan Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Sweden Switzerland Syria Taiwan Tanzania Thailand Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom United States Uruguay Uzbekistan Vanuatu Vatican City Venezuela Vietnam Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe
Learn More
Religion and History in Greece

Greece is overwhelmingly Orthodox Christian, around 90 percent per most estimates including Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, with small Muslim, Catholic and religiously unaffiliated minorities; the Greek Orthodox Church remains constitutionally recognized as the country's prevailing religion, a formulation distinct from full establishment but granting it privileges including state salaries for clergy.

Ancient Greek religion, the polytheistic worship of Zeus, Athena, Apollo and the wider Olympian pantheon centered on sanctuaries such as Delphi and Olympia, gave way gradually to Christianity following the conversion of the Roman Empire from the fourth century CE, and Greece became a core territory of the Byzantine Empire, whose Orthodox Christianity, liturgy and theology it inherited directly after Constantinople's 1453 fall to the Ottomans left the Church as one of the few surviving institutions of Greek national identity during four centuries of Ottoman rule.

The Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, though physically located in modern Istanbul rather than Greece, remains the historic senior see of Orthodox Christianity and retains close ties to the Church of Greece, which gained formal autocephaly, administrative independence, in 1850. Greece's small Muslim minority, concentrated in Thrace near the Turkish border, is one of the few religious minorities specifically protected under an international treaty, the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.

Constitutional Establishment and Religious Minorities in Greece

Greece's constitution names Orthodox Christianity the country's prevailing religion and requires the head of state to be Orthodox, an arrangement funding clergy salaries from the state budget and giving the Church of Greece a formal advisory and ceremonial role in public life, though the constitution also guarantees freedom of religious conscience and worship for other faiths. Until a 2017 legal reform, Greek Orthodox monastic communities including Mount Athos, an autonomous monastic republic under Orthodox Church authority that bans women from entering entirely, retained special legal privileges reflecting the Church's constitutional standing.

Greece's Muslim minority in Thrace, protected under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne alongside a reciprocal protection for Greek Orthodox Christians remaining in Turkey, retains rights including Islamic religious courts for family law matters and Turkish-language minority education, an arrangement that has occasionally strained given broader Greek-Turkish tension.

Jehovah's Witnesses, whose refusal of military conscientious objection led to lengthy prison sentences and legal battles in Greek courts through the twentieth century, secured recognition as a legitimate religion only through a landmark 1997 European Court of Human Rights ruling against Greece, a case that also helped establish broader European jurisprudence protecting minority religious practice against majority-Orthodox state pressure.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

This source names Greece directly: "Religious Freedom Report on Greece, published August 15, 2017, relaying a 2015 poll by the Kappa Research Firm finding 81.4 percent of the population self-identified as Greek Orthodox, 2.9 percent..."

This source names Greece directly: "law governing places of worship, when Greece's General Secretariat of Religion, part of the Ministry of Education and Religion, granted a licence for an official place of worship in Athens."

Source 2017 Report on International Religious Freedom: GreeceUnited States Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor

This source names Greece directly: "Religious Freedom covering Greece is a primary government document, an official annual assessment required by American law, compiled from embassy reporting, meetings with religious communities and..."

Source 2017 Report on International Religious Freedom: GreeceUnited States Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor

This source names Greece directly: "Religious Freedom Report on Greece, published May 15, 2023, stating that according to research polls, 81 to 90 percent of the population identifies as Greek Orthodox, 4 to 15 percent as atheist, and..."

This source names Greece directly: "Archbishop of Athens and the Church of Greece."

Source Ioannis Sakellarides and the Cherubic Hymn (Archesbookhouse and Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America)Archesbookhouse bibliographic listing; Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America church music editors

About 90% Orthodox Christian; the historical home of the classical Greek pantheon before Christianization.

Source Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020Pew Research Center

This source names Greece directly: "Wikipedia's article on the Church of Greece, read directly for this pass, which states that King Otto's Bavarian regency ratified a royal decree declaring the church's independence on 25 July 1833..."

This source names Greece directly: "by Apostolos Lakasas on the Church of Greece's financial difficulties, quoting Father Salonon Antonios, general director of the Church's Central Ecclesiastical Financial Service (EKYO), on EKYO's..."

This source names Greece directly: "Article 3 of the Constitution of Greece, in English translation, which names the Eastern Orthodox Church of Christ the prevailing religion and defines the Church of Greece's constitutional..."

Source Constitution of Greece, Article 3, on the Prevailing ReligionHellenic Republic, Seventh Revisionary Parliament

This source names Greece directly: "Description of Greece, Pausanias's second century CE travel and geographical account, records the sanctuaries, cult sites and local religious traditions he personally visited across Greece."

This source names Greece directly: ""Figurine of Demeter with Pig," from Greece, Athens, 400s BCE, showing the grain goddess holding a piglet, the animal sacrificed in her honor at the Thesmophoria festival."

This source names Greece directly: "with Pig," a terracotta figurine from Greece, Athens, 400s BCE."

This source names Greece directly: "the Greek state and the Church of Greece moving roughly 10,000 clergy off the civil service payroll while the state continues to fund their pay through an annual subsidy of around 200 million euros."

This source names Greece directly: ""Greece's Old Gods Are Ready for Your Sacrifice" is freelance journalism reporting on the revival of Hellenic polytheism in Greece."

This source names Greece directly: "Canada, France, Great Britain, Greece, Japan and the United States as its first member states."

Source International Astronomical Union (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Greece directly: "When Xerxes I invaded Greece in 480 BCE, Leonidas led the Greek force sent to hold the narrow coastal pass at Thermopylae, taking with him the three hundred Spartans Spartan law assigned a king on..."

Source HistoriesHerodotus

The Aegean and Ionian coasts carried the earliest Christian mission into Europe

This source names Greece directly: "directly rather than this study of Greece."

This source names Greece directly: "and Derbe, then across the Aegean into Greece, founding congregations at Philippi, Thessalonica and Corinth, with an extended residence at Ephesus."

Phoebe, Figures

This source names Greece directly: "makes Delphi the most famous oracle in Greece."

Source The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th editionSimon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow (eds.)

This source names Greece directly: "Wikipedia article on Religion in Greece, community edited, stating 43 percent Greek Orthodox identification in 1912 rising to 89 percent in 1924 after the Greek-Turkish population exchange under the..."

Source Religion in Greece (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Greece directly: "recognition as a known religion in Greece in 2017."

Those expelled held Greek citizenship, and the measure was itself a tool of pressure against Greece within the Cyprus dispute.

This source names Greece directly: "the greater part of his army from Greece within the year, leaving a reduced force under Mardonius that was defeated the following year at Plataea."

Source HistoriesHerodotus

This source names Greece directly: "coastal pass of Thermopylae in central Greece, where a mixed Greek force under the Spartan king Leonidas I attempted to hold the invading army of the Persian king Xerxes I."

Source HistoriesHerodotus

This source names Greece directly: "recognition as a known religion in Greece in 2017, and this document is its own account of what it stands for."

Source The Hellenic Ethnic Religion: statement of principlesSupreme Council of Ethnikoi Hellenesthe holders' own account

This source names Greece directly: "Thought rather than ancient Egypt or Greece."

Source The Kybalion: The Definitive EditionPhilip Deslippe (ed.)

This source names Greece directly: "Attyah Flower's The Seer in Ancient Greece, published by the University of California Press in 2008, is a scholarly study of the mantis, the professional Greek diviner, examining the hereditary seer..."

Source The Seer in Ancient GreeceMichael Attyah Flower

This source names Greece directly: "When Xerxes invaded Greece in 480 BCE, Themistocles led the Athenian envoys who consulted the Delphic oracle, and his reading of its second response, that the wooden wall meant the fleet rather than..."

Source HistoriesHerodotus

Contains

Namesake Of

Magnesium is named for Magnesia, a district of Thessaly in Greece. The district gave its name to several distinct minerals, and the resulting confusion is why magnesium, manganese and the magnet all trace to the same place name.

Manganese is named, by a tangled route, for the same district of Magnesia in Greece. Magnesia nigra, the black ore, yielded manganese; magnesia alba yielded magnesium. The two names were used interchangeably for centuries before the metals were told apart.

Originated Here

Modern Greece holds Delphi, Eleusis, Olympia and Olympus.

Spread Events Here

Issued from Thessalonica, effect empire-wide.

Source Codex Theodosianus (The Theodosian Code)Compiled under Theodosius II
Sources
1. Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020
Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 2025View the Source
2. The World Factbook (Central Intelligence Agency)
Central Intelligence Agency, Central Intelligence AgencyView the Source
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2024View the Source
4. International Religious Freedom Report
United States Department of State, Office of International Religious Freedom, US Department of State, 2023View the Source
5. Kokkinakis v. Greece, Application No. 14307/88, European Court of Human Rights, 25 May 1993
European Court of Human Rights
6. Constitution of Greece, Article 3, on the Prevailing Religion
Hellenic Republic, Seventh Revisionary Parliament, Hellenic Resources NetworkView the Source
The Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition
Oxford University Press, Oxford University Pressdemonym / adjectival formView the Source
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.