Supreme Council of the Ethnikoi Hellenes

YSEE was founded in Athens on 17 June 1997, at a point when small circles of Greeks had already begun independently reviving worship of the Olympian gods through study of Homer, Hesiod, the Orphic Hymns and the surviving archaeological and epigraphic record of ancient cult. The council's founding gave that scattered revival a single public and legal face, one able to negotiate with the Greek state, coordinate festival calendars across separate practising groups, and represent Hellenismos in the country's ongoing, often difficult, public conversation about what counts as a legitimate religion under a constitution that names Orthodox Christianity as the prevailing faith. Since its founding YSEE has been the most consistently visible Hellenic polytheist body in Greece, though it operates alongside other, smaller reconstructionist groups that do not all share its specific positions or its preferred name for the religion.

YSEE organizes its membership in two concentric circles rather than a single undifferentiated roll: an inner circle of active members who carry the organization's day to day work, and a wider circle of financial and moral supporters who fund and endorse its activities without necessarily practicing Hellenismos themselves. Members pay an annual subscription, and the council structure named in the organization's own title, the Ypato Symboulio, the Supreme Council, sits at the center of that structure, the body that speaks publicly for the movement to the Greek state and to the press.

The council's own estimate of its reach is candid about its limits: roughly 2,000 Greeks actively practicing Hellenismos, with a further 50,000 people it describes as having some level of interest, figures the organization states itself rather than an outside census. Doctrinally it represents a reconstructed polytheistic worship of the Olympian gods, drawn from Homer, Hesiod, the Orphic Hymns and the surviving archaeological and epigraphic record of ancient Greek cult, rather than a continuous unbroken practice; other Hellenic polytheist circles in Greece reconstruct the same religion independently of YSEE and do not all share its preferred name for it or its specific positions.

YSEE's reach extends beyond Greece itself. It was a founding member of the European Congress of Ethnic Religions, an umbrella network of European ethnic and indigenous religious organizations, and hosted the Congress's seventh meeting in June 2004. An American affiliate, the Hellenic Council YSEE of America, was established by members in 2007 and is based in Astoria, in New York City's borough of Queens, extending the organization's advocacy for Hellenic polytheist recognition into the Greek diaspora.