Greece won its freedom on the battlefield but was made a kingdom by diplomacy. The War of Independence, begun in 1821, secured a state - but it was an unstable one, short of money, allies, and recognition. When the first governor, Ioannis Kapodistrias, was assassinated in 1831, the chaos alarmed Britain, France, and Russia, who had backed the Greek cause partly to weaken the Ottoman Empire. Their solution, sealed at the London Conference of 1832, was a monarchy. Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg declined the throne; the crown went instead to Otto of Bavaria. Independence from nearly four centuries of Ottoman rule was confirmed by the Treaty of Constantinople. Greece was free - and ruled by a 17-year-old answering to a council of Bavarian regents.

Otto's reign curdled. The Bavarian regents imposed rigid German administration and kept Greeks from high office; the king was a Catholic in an Orthodox land, his marriage to Queen Amalia childless, and Greece had neither constitution nor parliament. Resentment built until the night of 3 September 1843, when the Athens garrison and crowds of citizens surrounded the royal palace and refused to leave until Otto granted a constitution. He did. The building they besieged - the Old Royal Palace - still stands on Syntagma Square, but its purpose changed: since 1929 it has housed the Hellenic Parliament. The very square is named for that day's demand, syntagma meaning 'constitution.' Walk across it today and you are walking over the spot where Greek democracy forced its first king to share power.

One dream drove Greek politics for generations: the Megali Idea, the Great Idea. Greece in 1832 was small, and millions of Greeks still lived under Ottoman rule. The Megali Idea held that the nation should expand to embrace them all - even, in its boldest version, reclaiming Constantinople as the capital. It was nationalism, ambition, and nostalgia braided into a single goal, and it fueled rebellion and war for a century. It brought real gains: Thessaly in 1881, the great victories of the Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913. It also brought ruin. The attempt to seize Greek Anatolia after the First World War ended in catastrophe in 1922, the burning of Smyrna, and a vast, forced exchange of populations. The Great Idea died in Asia Minor, but not before it had defined what it meant to be Greek.

After Otto was deposed in 1862, the Greeks imported another foreign king - a Danish prince crowned George I, who reigned for nearly fifty years before he was assassinated in 1913. The throne rarely sat easy. The bitter feud between supporters of King Constantine and the liberal statesman Eleftherios Venizelos split the nation in two during the First World War, a rupture so deep it was called the National Schism. Kings were exiled and restored; monarchs were confirmed by referendums that were sometimes openly rigged. The poverty of the country never quite lifted - bankruptcy was declared in 1893 - yet Athens still found the will to stage the revival of the Olympic Games in 1896, a triumphant success in the marble stadium below the city's hills.

The kingdom's final decades were violent. In 1936, Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas seized absolute power with King George's blessing, ruling as a dictator until his death from illness in Kifissia on 29 January 1941 — two months before the German invasion swept over Greece. Occupation, resistance, and a savage civil war followed. A postwar economic miracle - growth second only to Japan's between 1950 and 1973 - was cut short on 21 April 1967, when a group of colonels seized power in a coup and established a brutal military junta. King Constantine II's attempt to topple them failed, and he fled into exile. The Regime of the Colonels abolished the monarchy in 1973. When the dictatorship collapsed the next year, Greeks voted in a free referendum in 1974 to confirm the king's departure for good. After 140 years and a parade of foreign-born sovereigns, the Kingdom of Greece was finished, and the Third Hellenic Republic took its place.