Introduction

Greece is a land of contrasts (Admiralty 1944, Bintliff 1977, Higgins and Higgins 1996: and see Color Plate 0.1). Although promoted to tourists for its sandy beaches, rocky headlands, and a sea with shades of green and blue, where Aleppo pine or imported Eucalyptus offer shade, in reality the Greek Mainland peninsula, together with the great island of Crete, are dominated by other more varied landscapes. Postcard Greece is certainly characteristic of the many small and a few larger islands in the Cycladic Archipelago at the center of the Aegean Sea, the Dodecanese islands in the Southeast Aegean, and the more sporadic islands of the North Aegean, but already the larger islands off the west coast of Greece such as Ithaka, Corfu, and Kephallenia, immediately surprise the nonMediterranean visitor with their perennial rich vegetation, both cultivated trees and Mediterranean woodlands. The Southwest Mainland is also more verdant than the better known Southeast.

The largest land area of modern Greece is formed by the north—south Mainland peninsula. At the Isthmus of Corinth this is almost cut in two, forming virtually an island of its southern section (the Peloponnese). Although in the Southeast Mainland there are almost continuous coastal regions with the classic Greek or Mediterranean landscape, not far inland one soon encounters more varied landforms, plants, and climate, usually through ascending quickly to medium and even higher altitudes. There are coastal and inland plains in the Peloponnese and Central Greece, but their size pales before the giant alluvial and karst (rugged hard limestone) basins of the Northern Mainland, a major feature of the essentially inland region of Thessaly and the coastal hinterlands further northeast in Macedonia and Thrace. If these are on the east side of Northern Greece, the west side is dominated by great massifs of mountain and rugged hill land, even down to the sea, typical of the regions of Aetolia, Acarnania, and Epirus.

Significantly, the olive tree (Figure 1.1), flourishes on the Aegean islands, Crete, the coastal regions of the Peloponnese, the Central Greek eastern lowlands, and the Ionian Islands, but cannot prosper in the high interior Peloponnese, and in almost all the Northern Mainland. The reasons for the variety of Greek landscapes are largely summarized as geology and climate.