What stays hard once you can read it

Once you can read Greek, its sounds are kind to an English mouth: five plain vowels, almost nothing silent, and stress marked on every word that has more than one syllable. What stays hard is the grammar and the small words, and these are the ones a traveller actually meets.

The stress mark is not decoration — it changes the word. Πότε, said POH-teh, means when; ποτέ, said poh-TEH, means never. Γέρος is an old man and γερός is strong. Put the stress on the wrong syllable and you have not mispronounced a word so much as said a different one, which is why Greeks will sometimes look puzzled at a sentence where every sound was right.

Words change their endings, names included. Greek nouns shift their endings with the job they do, and the change you will hear first is the one used for calling someone. Γιώργος becomes Γιώργο! when you are speaking to him, Νίκος becomes Νίκο, and κύριος, sir, becomes κύριε when you address him. The same thing happens to places: Athens is Αθήνα, but going there is στην Αθήνα, and a bus sign or a ticket may show any of the forms. Read for the root and ignore the tail.

Three small words carry most conversations. Έλα, literally come, is how Greeks answer the phone, say come on, say hurry up, and say really? — all with different tunes. Εντάξει, okay, ends half of all exchanges. Ορίστε is the shopkeeper's what can I get you, the waiter's here you are, and the polite pardon? when somebody did not catch what you said. Learn those three by ear and a great deal of overheard Greek suddenly makes sense.

An alphabet you can learn on the flight

The Greek alphabet looks like a locked door and takes about an afternoon to open. There are twenty-four letters, and a third of them are already familiar from school maths and university sweatshirts — α, β, γ, δ, π, σ, Ω. Learning to read pays off here more than in most countries, because a great deal of Greece is still written only in Greek: the menu chalked outside a village taverna, the destination on the front of a local bus, the street names in an old town. Even where there is a Latin version underneath, it rarely agrees with itself. The Cretan town of Χανιά appears as Chania, Hania and Xania, sometimes on the same road, and only the Greek spelling stays put.

The trap is the letters that look like ours and are not. Ρ is an r, Η is an ee, Β is a v, Χ is a throaty kh, and the small ν that looks like a v is an n. Greek also has no single letter for b, d or a hard g, so it builds them from pairs: μπ is b, ντ is d, γκ is g. Your first word in a taverna proves the point: μπύρα, beer, is BEE-rah. Practise on the green-cross sign you will pass in every town, ΦΑΡΜΑΚΕΙΟ — far-mah-KEE-oh, the pharmacy — until you can read it without counting letters.

Six things that catch visitors out

Toilet paper goes in the bin, not the bowl. Across most of Greece the pipes are narrow and the old drains cannot take paper, so every bathroom — in tavernas, rooms to let and many hotels — has a small lidded bin beside the toilet for exactly that. A sign often says so in four languages; where it does not, the bin is the sign. Ignoring it is how a guesthouse plumber gets called out on a Sunday.

Never show someone your open palm. The μούτζα — an open hand pushed towards someone's face, fingers spread — is one of the oldest insults in Greece, and a friendly wave with the palm out, or holding up five fingers to order five of something, can land as one. Wave with the back of the hand outward, or with the fingers curled, and count on your fingers with the palm turned towards yourself.

The bill does not arrive until you ask for it. Dinner starts late, rarely before nine in summer, and a table is yours for the evening; bringing the bill unasked would be rushing you. Catch the waiter's eye and ask for τον λογαριασμό, παρακαλώ. Very often what arrives first is a κέρασμα, a treat on the house — fruit, a sweet, a small carafe of raki — and it is meant as thanks, not as an upsell.

Churches and monasteries ask you to cover up. Shoulders and knees for everyone, and for women at many monasteries a skirt rather than trousers; at Meteora wraps are lent at the door. Mount Athos, the monastic peninsula in the north, admits men only, and only with a permit arranged in advance. Inside any church, keep your voice down, do not turn your back on the altar for a photograph, and drop a coin in the box if you light a candle.

Easter outranks Christmas. The Orthodox Easter usually falls on a different Sunday from the Western one, and the week before it, Holy Week, changes the whole country: fasting, closed offices, and on Saturday night entire towns at church with candles, waiting for midnight. When the priest announces Χριστός Ανέστη, Christ is risen, the answer is Αληθώς Ανέστη, truly he is risen — and if you are in Greece that night, carrying a lit candle home without letting it go out is a small honour.

The early afternoon is quiet by custom. Between roughly three and half past five, the hours of the μεσημέρι, Greeks rest; you do not phone, do not make noise in an apartment block, and do not expect a small shop to be open. Many traditional shops also close on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday afternoons and reopen on the other evenings. Plan the errand for the morning and the walk for the evening, the way everybody else does.

English on the islands, less of it in the mountains

On the islands, in central Athens and anywhere tourism is the local economy, English is everywhere and usually very good; most Greeks under forty grew up with compulsory school lessons and years of American and British shows aired with Greek subtitles rather than dubbed over. It thins quickly in mountain villages, in Epirus and the interior, and among older people, many of whom learned German instead — a generation of Greeks worked in German factories in the 1960s and came home with the language. In a village kafeneío a word of Greek is not a courtesy, it is the conversation.

The greetings are the place to start, because Greeks use them by the clock. Καλημέρα, good morning, runs until about midday or a little after; from late afternoon it becomes καλησπέρα, good evening; and καληνύχτα is only ever goodnight as you leave. Γεια σας covers any hour and both hello and goodbye, which makes it the safest word in the language.

Behind the greetings sits an old idea. Φιλοξενία — literally love of the stranger — has been a duty in Greece since Homer, when Zeus himself was the protector of travellers, and it still shapes how a visitor is treated: the free dessert after dinner, the glass of something you did not order, the stranger who walks you three streets out of their way. Greeks are also quietly proud that English is full of their language. Point out that a word you know came from Greek and you will usually get its whole history back.

Εσείς for the stranger, εσύ almost at once

Greek has a formal you, εσείς, and a familiar one, εσύ, and uses the formal one for officials, older people and first meetings — the grandmother who runs the taverna, the man at the ferry office, the pharmacist. But Greeks drop to εσύ faster than almost anyone in Europe, and among people under about forty it is the default from the first word. Being formal too long is never an insult, merely a little stiff; using εσείς with someone seventy years old will always be noticed and liked.

Mr and Mrs go with the first name. Where English says Mrs Papadopoulou, Greek warmth says Κυρία Μαρία, Mrs Maria, and Κύριε Γιώργο, Mr Giorgos — respectful and personal at the same time. It is how you address a landlady, a neighbour or an older shopkeeper whose first name you know, and it is one of the nicest habits in the language to copy.

Loud is not angry. A Greek conversation at a café table can sound to an outsider like a quarrel about to come to blows, and is almost always nothing of the kind. Volume, interruption and hands are how Greeks show they are engaged. Silence and a polite murmur, the English way of showing respect, can read here as boredom.

The head goes up for no. A small upward tilt of the head, often with raised eyebrows and a click of the tongue, means όχι, no, and is easy to misread as a nod. A slight downward tilt to one side means yes. Add the classic trap that ναι, which sounds like no, means yes, and it is worth checking twice before you assume your offer was accepted.

The mainland, the islands, and a Crete that comes first

More than a third of the people of Greece live in and around Athens, and the capital looks at the rest of the country — and the rest looks back — in the way big cities and their provinces do everywhere. The real rival is Thessaloniki, the north's capital, which considers itself the better place to eat, and eats breakfast to prove it: μπουγάτσα, custard or cheese wrapped in filo, from a bakery that opened before dawn.

The islands are not one place. The Cyclades — Santorini, Naxos, Paros — are the white-and-blue Greece of the postcards, and in July and August the meltemi, the strong summer north wind, can cancel ferries for a day at a time; build a spare day into any island-hopping plan. The Ionian islands in the west, Corfu above all, were Venetian for centuries and look it, with green hills, arcaded streets and a sung music, the kantádes, closer to Italy than to Athens. The Dodecanese, Rhodes among them, were Italian as recently as the 1940s.

Crete is a case of its own. It has its own dialect, its own music in the fiddle-driven lyra and the improvised rhyming couplets called mantinádes, and its own name for the clear spirit poured after every meal — τσικουδιά, which the rest of Greece calls raki. Many Cretans feel Cretan first. Hospitality there is fierce in the good sense, and refusing it takes real effort.

In the north, the Greek region of Macedonia — with Thessaloniki as its capital — is a source of deep feeling. Since 2019 the neighbouring country has been called North Macedonia, and in Greece the name Macedonia on its own means the Greek region and its history. It is worth keeping the two apart in conversation; it matters here far more than a visitor would guess.

Greece, in sixty small pieces

Everything the card at the top of Start draws from — one a day, and here is the whole file. Read it on the plane.

• Vasilopita, the New Year cake, has a coin baked inside it. It is cut at midnight with slices set aside for the house and for absent relatives, and whoever finds the coin takes the year's luck.
• Loggerhead turtles haul out to nest on beaches in Zakynthos and the western Peloponnese, and the females return to the same stretch of sand they hatched on decades earlier.
• The everyday hello, yasou (γεια σου), is not really a greeting but a wish: it translates as your health.
• Laconic comes from Laconia, the region around Sparta, whose people were famous in antiquity for answering in as few words as the question would allow.
• The Peloponnese means island of Pelops, after a mythical king, though it is really a peninsula hanging off the mainland by an isthmus only a few kilometres across.
• Greek yoghurt owes its thickness to straining rather than additives: the whey is drained off through cloth, so it takes several litres of milk to make one litre of yoghurt.
• The Vikos Gorge in the Pindus mountains is among the deepest in the world for its width, with walls falling some 900 metres to a riverbed that runs dry in high summer.
• The theatre at Epidauros seats around 14,000 people, and its rows of limestone seats damp the low rumble of a crowd while passing the actors' voices through, so a speaker on the orchestra floor carries to the upper tiers.
• The Greek coastline is the longest in the Mediterranean, roughly 13,676 kilometres of it, and most of that length belongs to islands rather than the mainland.
• The Antikythera mechanism, brought up by sponge divers off a small Greek island, is a bronze case of at least 30 interlocking gears that modelled the sun, moon and planets some 2,000 years ago.
• Tsiknopempti, Smoky Thursday, falls in the run-up to Lent, and the entire country grills meat outdoors until the streets smell of charcoal.
• Both tragedy and comedy began as contests in Athens: playwrights entered them at festivals and were judged, and the plays that won are largely the ones copied often enough to survive.
• The volta is the evening walk. Whole families dress and stroll the seafront or the main street at dusk, going nowhere in particular and greeting everyone they pass.
• The frappe was improvised at the 1957 Thessaloniki International Fair, when a coffee salesman with no hot water to hand shook instant coffee, cold water and ice in a shaker instead.
• Lowercase sigma has two shapes, σ inside a word and ς at the end of one, so the same letter changes form depending on where it stands.
• Ostracism gave English a word: Athenians scratched a name onto a broken pot shard, an ostrakon, and whoever was named on the most shards left the city for ten years.
• The Samaria Gorge on Crete runs 16 kilometres from the Omalos plateau down to the Libyan Sea, squeezing at one point to a corridor about four metres wide.
• Delphi was held to be the navel of the world, marked by a carved stone called the omphalos, set where two eagles released at opposite ends of the earth were said to have met.
• The blue glass eye sold on every corner is a mati, a charm against the evil eye, which is thought to come from someone admiring you a little too warmly.
• Monday in Greek is Deftera, the second, and Tuesday is Triti, the third: the week is counted from Sunday, so most of the day names are simply numbers.
• Greeks call their country Ellada (Ελλάδα) and themselves Ellines; the word Greece descends from Graeci, the Latin name for one early tribe the Romans happened to meet first.
• Easter outranks Christmas in Greece. At midnight the church lights go out, a single flame passes from candle to candle, and families walk home shielding it to mark the doorway.
• The kri-kri, a wild goat with long swept-back horns, lives on Crete and a handful of nearby islets and nowhere else on earth.
• Roughly four fifths of the country is mountainous, which is why villages are stacked up slopes and hardly any road runs straight for long.
• Horta are wild greens such as dandelion, chicory and amaranth, gathered on hillsides, boiled and served warm with olive oil and lemon. Foraging for them is still an ordinary weekend outing.
• At Meteora, monasteries sit on top of sandstone pillars hundreds of metres tall, and for centuries the only way up was a rope net winched by hand from above.
• Retsina is white wine flavoured with Aleppo pine resin, a taste left over from the centuries when amphorae were sealed with resin and the flavour came with the wine whether you wanted it or not.
• Mount Olympus is a real mountain as well as a mythical address: its summit, Mytikas, rises about 2,917 metres and the climb starts close enough to the sea to see it from the beach.
• Bougatsa is a Thessaloniki breakfast, filo wrapped around semolina custard, chopped into squares with a blade on the counter and dusted with sugar and cinnamon before it leaves the shop.
• A pomegranate is smashed on the doorstep at New Year, and the further the seeds scatter, the more luck the household is meant to have in the year ahead.
• Name days count for more than birthdays: everyone called Giorgos celebrates on Saint George's day, and the house stays open to whoever drops in.
• The bouzouki, long-necked and pear-bodied, became the sound of rebetiko, the music of the Greek cities that UNESCO now lists as intangible cultural heritage.
• Sirtaki is not an old folk dance at all. It was put together for the 1964 film Zorba the Greek, when the lead actor's injured foot ruled out the quicker traditional steps.
• Greek coffee is ordered by sweetness rather than size: sketos has no sugar, metrios one spoon, glykos two, and the grounds settle at the bottom, so the last mouthful is left in the cup.
• Karagiozis, a shadow-puppet theatre played behind a lit sheet, still tours the Greek summer. Its hero is poor, hungry and quick-witted, and he never wins but never stops trying.
• The English word school comes from the Greek scholi (σχολή), which meant spare time: the leisure a citizen spent on lectures and argument, until the name slid from the free hours to the place where the talking happened.
• A horiatiki, the salad visitors call Greek salad, contains no lettuce at all, just tomato, cucumber, onion, pepper and olives with a whole slab of feta laid on top.
• Athens was not the first capital of the modern Greek state. The government sat at Nafplio in the Peloponnese until 1834, when it moved to Athens, then a town of a few thousand people clustered below the Acropolis.
• Santorini's crescent shape is the rim of a drowned volcano. The water inside the caldera is hundreds of metres deep, so ships moor by tying up rather than dropping anchor.
• In classical Athens most public offices were filled by drawing lots rather than by election, on the principle that any citizen ought to be able to take a turn at running the city.
• The Corinth Canal, imagined since antiquity and finally cut in 1893, slices 6.3 kilometres through solid rock, its walls rising as high as 90 metres over a channel barely 21 metres wide.
• Ouzo turns milky the instant water or ice hits it. The anise oil dissolves happily in alcohol but not in water, so it drops out as tiny droplets that scatter the light.
• There are around 6,000 Greek islands and islets, and only about 200 of them have anyone living on them.
• The Tower of the Winds in Athens is a marble octagon built as a weather station, with a sundial on every face, a water clock inside and a carved wind god above each wall.
• Chronia polla, many years, covers birthdays, name days, holidays and nearly any other occasion where English would need a different phrase every time.
• A single upward nod with a small tut means no in Greece, and ne (ναι), which sounds like the English nay, means yes.
• One of the oldest olive trees in the world stands at Vouves in western Crete. Its trunk is hollow and twisted with age, and it still produces olives every season.
• Mastiha is a resin tapped from mastic trees, and although the tree grows all round the Mediterranean, only the groves of southern Chios yield the resin in any quantity.
• A panigiri is a village saint's-day party: long tables in the square, a hired band, and dancing that carries on until the sky starts to lighten.
• The Greek alphabet was the first to give vowels letters of their own; earlier scripts wrote consonants and left the reader to guess, and every European alphabet in use today descends from that change.
• The ancient games ran at Olympia from 776 BC, and the modern revival opened in Athens in 1896 in a stadium rebuilt entirely from white marble.
• Feta has been a protected name across Europe since 2002: only cheese brined in certain Greek regions, from sheep's milk with up to 30 percent goat's milk, may legally be sold under it.
• The meltemi is a dry northerly wind that blows down the Aegean through the summer, cooling the islands and, on its strongest days, keeping the ferries in port.
• Kefi (κέφι) is the high spirit that lifts a table into singing. Greeks will say an evening had no kefi the way an English speaker says a party fell flat.
• Komboloi, the beads Greek men run through their fingers, look like a rosary but carry no prayers at all. They exist purely to keep the hands occupied.
• Filotimo (φιλότιμο) has no clean English translation. Literally love of honour, it means doing the decent thing without being asked and without expecting anything in return.
• The Parthenon has almost no straight lines in it. The columns swell at the middle and lean slightly inward and the floor curves upward, all so the building looks straight to the eye.
• The Mediterranean monk seal, one of the rarest seals alive, pups in sea caves along the Greek coast, and a marine park around Alonnisos in the Sporades was set aside for it.
• A Greek question mark is written as a semicolon, so the mark that signals a pause in English is the one that ends a question in Greek.
• Tsipouro is distilled from the skins and stems left after the grapes are pressed, so one harvest yields both wine and spirit. On Crete the same drink is called tsikoudia.