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Despite the long Ottoman administration, virtually all of the population belongs to the Church of Greece (Greek Orthodox Church). An autocephalous (ecclesiastically independent) Eastern Orthodox church, this body appoints its own ecclesiastical hierarchy and is headed by a synod of 12 metropolitans under the presidency of the archbishop of Athens. Almost all Cretans belong to a special branch of the Church of Greece headed by the archbishop of Crete, who is directly responsible to the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, as are the monks of Mount Athos, who constitute a semiautonomous entity with a Greek governor but with their own administration.

The Muslim (primarily Sunni) minority, which constitutes most of the non-Orthodox sector of the population, is mainly Turkish and concentrated in western Thráki and the Dodecanese. Roman and Greek Catholics, predominantly located in Athens and the western islands formerly under Italian rule, account for the rest, except for a few thousand adherents of Protestantism and Judaism. Greece’s Jewish population was almost wiped out by the Nazi genocide of World War II. (See Holocaust.)

Settlement patterns

In terms of human geography, Greece can be described as “classical Mediterranean” and “Balkan.” History, rather than the physical environment, accounts for the variations in settlement patterns, social composition, and demographic trends that cannot be explained by differentiating between “Old Greece” and the territories annexed in the early 20th century. For example, although Greece is considered an “old country”—relatively densely populated in prehistoric times and well settled and much exploited in and since ancient times (as the large number of Classical monuments and important archaeological sites testifies)—instability is as characteristic of Greece’s settlement pattern as it is of Greece’s history. New villages, associated not only with Ottoman colonization but also with agrarian reform in the first three decades of the 20th century, are neighbours to some of the most ancient towns of Mediterranean Europe, notably Khaniá (Chaniá), Pýlos, Thíra (Santoríni), Árgos, Athens, Spárti (Sparta), and Thíva (Thebes).

Traditionally, towns and villages have depended on the fertility of the surrounding land. Isolation, which contributes to this self-sufficiency (the autarkeia of the ancient city-states), survives in the remote villages of mountainous Greece. Only Corinth (Modern Greek: Kórinthos) and Athens were major trading centres in ancient times. The other trading areas were located where sea and land routes coincided with cultivable land. From the Byzantine period onward, fortification became an essential factor for both monastic and secular settlement, emphasizing the importance of the mountain regions and of “perched” sites above lowland. As late as the 1960s, about two-fifths of Greece’s population lived in mountain regions. A return to the plains took place during intermittent periods of relative stability, and the settlement pattern, dispersed or nucleated and often geometrically laid out, thus always seems to be “new.”

Greeks have preserved a strong sense of community, and village life remains a powerful influence. This holds true despite the decline of the rural population, which now constitutes about one-fifth of Greece’s total population. At the other end of the urban scale, Greece’s larger towns and cities have gained considerably in size and commercial importance since the 1970s. The Athens metropolitan area is by far the largest urban concentration, but towns such as Thessaloníki, Pátrai, Vólos, Lárissa (Lárisa), and Irákleio (on Crete) are all fast-growing centres. Of the three-fifths of the population that is urban, a relatively small slice is classified as semi-urban. Urbanization is extending into the countryside, where agrarian reform has severely fragmented landholdings and attracted urban-based financial and marketing entrepreneurs.

Demographic trends

Most of the country’s growth in the years after Greece gained its independence from the Ottomans in 1832 resulted from two factors: annexations of surrounding areas—the Ionian Islands (1864); Thessalía and Árta (1881); Ípeiros, Greek Makedonía, and Crete (1913); Thráki (1920); and the Dodecanese (1947)—and the influx of some 1.5 million Greek refugees from Asia Minor in the 1920s as a result of the Treaty of Lausanne. Emigration was significant in 1911–15, and it became particularly heavy after World War II. The most common destinations of the emigrants were the United States, Canada, Australia, and, somewhat later, Germany, Belgium, and Italy.

The 1950s and ’60s were demographically stagnant, but in the 1970s population growth was revitalized. This was, however, almost wholly because of international population movements rather than from an increase in natural growth rates, which remained low. At the middle of the first decade of the new millennium, the majority of immigrants were from central and eastern Europe, primarily Albania, followed by Bulgaria, Romania, and Ukraine. Within Greece the contrast between regions losing population (two-thirds of the southern Pelopónnisos; all the Ionian Islands except Corfu; the mountains of central, southwestern, and northeastern mainland Greece; and most of the islands of the eastern Aegean) and those rapidly gaining people (Attikí and other districts outside the major cities) held social and political implications. In the early 21st century, as the fertility rate remained below the replacement rate and as immigration slowed, the overall population growth rate declined. Although the life expectancy of Greek men and women was for some time slightly longer than that in other western European countries, the difference has been decreasing since the late 20th century because of changes in the diet and activities of Greeks.