Greece at war, room by room

Welcome to the War Museum. Before you go in, step back far enough to take in the building, because it's part of the story. It's a hard, grey, modernist block, and the upper storey juts out wider than the floor beneath it, so the whole thing seems to balance on a stalk. People call it the mushroom. It was designed by a team led by Thucydides Valentis, a Cairo-born architect and professor who spent his career bringing modern architecture to Greece, and it went up on the site of an old artillery barracks, which seems fitting.

The idea of a national war museum goes back to nineteen sixty-four, to honour, in the government's words, everyone who fought for the country's freedom. But the museum was actually founded in nineteen sixty-nine, by decree of the colonels who had seized power in a coup two years earlier. The junta liked its history heroic and uncomplicated. In nineteen sixty-eight it staged a huge military-history exhibition at the Zappeion, in the National Gardens, and that show, together with a private arms collection you'll meet on the ground floor, became the core of what's here. The foundations went down in nineteen seventy. Then history overtook the builders. In the summer of nineteen seventy-four the junta's coup in Cyprus provoked a Turkish invasion of the island, the regime collapsed within days, and democracy came back. So the museum the colonels began was opened on the eighteenth of July nineteen seventy-five by the elected President, Konstantinos Tsatsos, a year after they fell. Hold that irony in your head as you go round. This is a museum of national courage, and it still largely tells the story the way it was planned in the late nineteen sixties: Greeks defending Greece against outsiders, with very little room for the times Greeks fought each other. I'll point out the gaps when we reach them.

In the forecourt is a monument to the unconscripted fighter of the Battle of Crete: the farmers, priests, women and boys who took up old rifles and kitchen knives against German paratroopers in May nineteen forty-one. The ceremony for the battle's eighty-fifth anniversary was held right here this May, and you'll get the story properly upstairs. On the terraces around the building are the aircraft, the field guns, a torpedo and a little two-man submarine. You can look at them without a ticket, and I've left them for the end of the tour, when you'll know who flew and fired them. One aircraft you won't see: a Spitfire stood in this courtyard for decades, until it was taken away in nineteen ninety-five, and you'll hear what became of it.

Here's how to walk it. Buy your ticket in the lobby, leave any big bag in the cloakroom, then take the lift or the stairs right to the top, to the floor the Greeks call the first floor. The story starts there with prehistory and runs in order, hall by hall, to the spring of nineteen forty-one. Then you come down to the mezzanine for the rest of the Second World War, Korea and Cyprus, and finish on the ground floor and in the basement, with a great collection of arms and a life-size scene from the siege of Messolonghi. Each hall has its name and dates over the door, and these clips follow that order. Allow two or three hours if you listen to them all. It's the largest museum of military history in Greece, and it's easy to underestimate.

One last thing before you go up. A war museum can feel like a cabinet of trophies, and some of this one does. But look out for the small, personal things: a general's revolver, a singer's stage costume, a field telephone made out of an enemy shell case. Those are where the people are.

Before the halls begin, there's a touchscreen kiosk out here in the anteroom, added in January twenty twenty-six, all about the Evzones. If you've been to Syntagma you've seen them: the tall soldiers of the Presidential Guard outside the Parliament, in white kilts, tasselled caps and red clogs with enormous black pompoms, who stand perfectly still in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and then change the guard every hour with a slow, high-kicking step that looks like ballet in slow motion.

It's easy to find them comic until you know where the costume comes from. This was the everyday dress of the mountain men of mainland Greece, the klephts and armatoloi, half bandits and half militia, whom you'll meet a few rooms on as the captains of the revolution of eighteen twenty-one. The white kilt is the fustanella. It's said to take about thirty metres of cloth and to have four hundred pleats, one for each year of Ottoman rule; the arithmetic is generous, but it's the story every Greek child hears. The shoes are tsarouchia, red leather with nails studding the soles, heavy enough that you start to see why the ceremonial step is so deliberate. The pompom, some will tell you, once held a twist of wool or oiled cloth for cleaning a musket; others say it was only ever decoration. And the red cap trails a long silk tassel.

The unit dates from the twelfth of December eighteen sixty-eight, when the young kingdom formed battalions of light infantry and dressed them in the old clothes of the irregulars. Evzone comes from an ancient word meaning well-girded, which Greek writers used of lightly armed, quick-moving troops. They weren't only for show. In the Balkan Wars and in the mountains of Albania in nineteen forty, evzone regiments were among the hardest fighting units Greece had, and you'll see their uniforms further on. The ceremonial guard protected the king; since the monarchy ended in nineteen seventy-four, it has guarded the President, the Parliament and the tomb.

The slow step has a practical side too. The guards stand motionless for an hour at a time, in summer heat and winter rain, and the exaggerated movement, the leg lifted high, held, and lowered, is partly a way to get the blood moving again. They're chosen for height and stamina, they train for weeks, and they serve as conscripts like any other soldier. If you can, catch the full ceremony at Syntagma on a Sunday morning at eleven, with a band and the whole company in their best uniforms.

The tomb they guard is worth a closer look too. It was unveiled in nineteen thirty-two, and its marble relief shows a dying ancient warrior lying on his shield, modelled on a temple sculpture from the island of Aegina. Around it are lines from the funeral speech of Pericles, the one Thucydides records for the Athenian dead of the first year of the Peloponnesian War, and the names of battles from across the centuries. So the most modern soldiers in Greece stand guard over a hoplite. You'll meet the real ones, and their helmets, in a few minutes.

Why start a war museum here? Because the Evzones are how Greece likes to see its soldiers: rooted in the mountains, linked unbroken to eighteen twenty-one, and, behind the pompoms, very tough. Keep that self-image in mind as you go round, and notice when the story fits it and when it doesn't. Now go into the first hall, where the story starts not with muskets but with stone.

The first hall begins in a long corridor, and it begins long before anything you'd call an army. The black, glassy flakes are obsidian, volcanic glass from the island of Milos, which people were sailing out to collect more than ten thousand years ago. It made the sharpest cutting edge in the Stone Age world, and finding it on the mainland is one of the earliest proofs that people here were already going to sea. Next to it are polished stone axes, and then the bronze. A word of warning that holds for this whole hall: much of what you'll see is copies, casts and models, because the originals belong to the archaeological museums. That's fine. This museum isn't trying to be the National Archaeological Museum; it's telling a story, and it uses copies to tell it.

The copy of the fresco with ships comes from Akrotiri, on Santorini, the Bronze Age town buried by the great eruption of the volcano, around sixteen hundred BC; the exact date is still argued over. Its long frieze shows a fleet of slim, decorated ships sailing between harbour towns, with people watching from the rooftops. It might be a festival, or the return of an expedition, but it's the oldest detailed picture of an Aegean fleet. The clay disc with a spiral of stamped signs is a replica of the Phaistos Disc, found in a Minoan palace on Crete in nineteen oh eight. Nobody has ever read it. Hymn, list, prayer or game, nobody can say, and it's a good reminder that some of what came before the Greeks we know is still a closed book.

The bronze swords and daggers belong to the Mycenaean world, roughly fourteen hundred to eleven hundred BC: the palace kingdoms of Mycenae, Pylos and Thebes, whose kings were rich enough to be buried with gold masks, and whose scribes kept accounts of chariots and armour on clay tablets. This is the world that later Greeks remembered, or half remembered, as the age of heroes. Look at the shapes. The long, narrow blades were made for thrusting; later ones are shorter and heavier, made for hacking. And around eleven hundred BC that whole palace world burned and collapsed, for reasons still debated: invaders, earthquakes, drought, revolt, very likely several at once. Writing disappeared from Greece for some four hundred years.

Homer's Trojan War is set in this world, and the museum has shown a lit map of the chain of beacon fires that carried the news of Troy's fall home; if it's still here, find it. The story comes from Aeschylus, the Athenian playwright, whose tragedy Agamemnon opens with a watchman on the palace roof at Argos, who has spent a whole year waiting for one fire to appear on the horizon. Then the queen, Clytemnestra, describes the relay: a fire on Mount Ida above Troy, answered on the island of Lemnos, then on Mount Athos, and on across the sea and the mountains of the mainland, peak to peak, until it reached the hills above Argos, all in a single night. It's poetry, not a signals manual, but fire signals over long distances were real. And Aeschylus knew war at first hand. He fought the Persians at Marathon, where his brother was killed, and very probably at Salamis, which is two stops along.

Look back down the corridor before you move on: obsidian, bronze, ships. Over a few thousand years, the people of this corner of the world went from paddling to an island for sharp stones to sending fleets across the Aegean. Almost everything in this museum, right up to the submarine torpedo outside, is built on that sea.

Stop at the helmets, because these are the real thing. Most of the bronze in this hall is reproduction, but these Corinthian helmets were made and worn twenty-five centuries ago. Look at the shape: hammered out of a single sheet of bronze by a smith with nothing but fire, anvil and patience, curving down over the cheeks and the back of the neck, with a nose guard between two almond-shaped eye holes and a narrow slot for the mouth. When a man put it on, his face disappeared. What the enemy saw across the field was a row of bronze masks.

It was also very hard to hear in, and not easy to see out of, which tells you something about how these men fought. They were hoplites, from hopla, the word for their gear, and the most important piece of it wasn't the helmet but the shield: a great round, bowl-shaped shield almost a metre across, held on the left arm by a band at the elbow and a grip at the rim. It covered the left half of your own body and the right half of the man beside you. So hoplites fought in a phalanx, a block of men eight or more ranks deep, shoulder to shoulder, spears forward, and the whole thing depended on nobody breaking. You didn't need to hear orders in a phalanx; you needed to hold your place. Between battles a man pushed his helmet back on top of his head, and that's how you see generals like Pericles in their portrait busts, helmet tipped up and face showing.

Armour was expensive, and each man bought his own. So the hoplites weren't the very rich, who fought on horseback, or the poor, who couldn't afford the kit, but the middling sort: farmers with enough land to pay for a shield, a spear, a helmet, and if possible a bronze breastplate and greaves for the shins. And because they were the men who stood in the line, they expected a voice in the city that sent them there. Many historians think the rise of the phalanx and the rise of citizen politics in Greece went together. You'll see that idea again, with a twist, at the ship models.

The great test came in four ninety BC at Marathon, about forty kilometres from where you're standing. A Persian army landed on the beach there to punish Athens for helping a Greek revolt across the Aegean in Ionia. The Athenians, with a small force from Plataea and nobody else, marched out, waited for days, and then, Herodotus says, attacked at a run across the plain, which no Greek army had done before. Persian archers had decided battles across half of Asia; hoplites in bronze who closed the distance fast took the arrows on their shields. Herodotus counts six thousand four hundred Persian dead, and a hundred and ninety-two Athenians. The Athenian dead were buried on the battlefield under a mound you can still visit. The story of a runner carrying the news to Athens and dying as he arrived was told much later, but it gave the world the marathon.

Look too for the simpler pointed helmet, the pilos, a cone of bronze with no face guard at all. By the later fifth century BC many soldiers preferred it: lighter, cooler, easier to see out of. War was getting faster, and more men were fighting on the move. The Corinthian helmet lived on as a symbol, on statues and coins, long after soldiers stopped wearing it, and it's still the shorthand, on badges and logos all over Greece, for an ancient warrior. And the helmet from Epirus is a reminder that Greece was always bigger than Athens and Sparta. The northwest had its own wars then, and it will have many more before you reach the end of this floor.

Ten years after Marathon the Persians came back, and this time the Great King came himself. Xerxes brought an army so big the ancient figures are impossible, and a fleet that Herodotus puts at more than twelve hundred warships, probably too many, but it tells you how it felt. The model in front of you shows where it ended: the narrow strait between the island of Salamis and the coast, just west of Piraeus, in September four eighty BC.

Athens was ready only because of a lucky strike and a stubborn man. In four eighty-three BC the miners at Laurion, the silver mines near the southern tip of Attica, hit a rich new seam. The usual thing would have been to share the windfall out among the citizens. Themistocles talked the assembly into spending it on ships instead, about two hundred new triremes. When the Athenians asked the oracle at Delphi what to do about Xerxes, the god told them, darkly, to trust in a wooden wall. Some thought that meant a palisade around the Acropolis. Themistocles said it meant the fleet. So the Athenians abandoned their city, took their families across to Salamis and the Peloponnese, and watched from the island as the Persians burned the temples on the Acropolis.

Look at the trireme model. It's long, low and narrow, about thirty-five metres, with a bronze ram at the bow, right at the waterline. The ship itself was the weapon: you rowed hard into the side of an enemy and stove it in. It had three banks of oars and about a hundred and seventy rowers, packed in so tightly that the men of the top bank sat almost above the heads of the men below. The smaller penteconter, with fifty oars, is the older type, the kind of ship the Greeks sailed out in to found colonies around the Mediterranean. The stone cast nearby is the Lenormant relief, from a slab set up on the Acropolis around four hundred and ten BC, and it's the best picture we have of the rowers themselves: a line of men, bodies straining, arms reaching forward, half hidden by the hull.

The battle was a trap. Themistocles sent a trusted slave across to the Persians with a message that the Greeks were about to slip away in the night. Xerxes believed it, sent his fleet to block the exits, and kept his crews at the oars all night. In the morning they found the Greek fleet waiting for them, in water too narrow for numbers to count. Xerxes had a throne set up on the slope of Mount Aigaleo above the shore, with secretaries ready to record which captains fought well. What he watched instead was his ships jammed together, fouling each other's oars, and smashed by the heavier Greek triremes. Aeschylus, who very probably rowed or fought that day, put it on stage eight years later in The Persians: the sea hidden by wreckage and bodies, and the drowning Persians clubbed with broken oars like a catch of tuna. By evening the fleet was broken, and Xerxes went home.

Here's the twist I promised at the helmets. The hoplite line was for men who could afford armour. But each trireme needed a hundred and seventy rowers, and those came from the poorest citizens, the thetes, men with nothing to bring but their arms and backs. After Salamis the city's power rested on them, and in the following decades Athenian democracy grew more radical, with pay for jurors and power firmly in the assembly. Ancient critics grumbled that the navy had made the democracy, and they had a point. The anchor in this case belonged to a ship of that ancient world. It's a strange thought that the most radical government of antiquity was, in a sense, rowed into existence.

The panels on the wall are plaster casts of metopes, the square sculpted blocks that ran above the columns of the Parthenon. There were ninety-two of them, and on the south side they told a myth: the wedding of the Lapith king Pirithous, where the centaurs, half man and half horse, got drunk and tried to carry off the bride and the other women, and the Lapiths fought them off. Look at the pairs: a centaur rearing over a fallen man, a Lapith with his knee in a centaur's back. On the other three sides the metopes were deliberately hacked away centuries later, probably when the Parthenon became a church, but the south side survived better. Then, in the first years of the eighteen hundreds, Lord Elgin's men took most of the best of them to London. So the originals of these casts are in the British Museum, and you're looking at copies in Athens, half an hour's walk from the empty places they came from. I'll leave that there. You can make up your own mind, and most Greeks have.

Why put the Parthenon in a war museum? Partly because it was paid for, in large part, out of the treasury of the Delian League, the alliance the Athenians led after Salamis to keep fighting Persia, and which they turned, year by year, into an empire. And partly because the metopes are war art. The centaur fight was a way of talking about the Persian Wars without showing a single Persian: civilised Greeks against wild invaders, order against chaos. Around the building other panels showed gods against giants, Athenians against Amazons, Greeks against Trojans. Every one of them makes the same argument.

The real enemies are in the case nearby. The Persian sagaris was a slim battle-axe; the light crescent-shaped shield, the pelta, was carried by Thracian skirmishers and gave its name to the peltasts, light troops who could run rings around a phalanx on rough ground. The Greeks learned from both. Then come the Romans: the big curved rectangular shield, the scutum, and the pilum, a heavy javelin with a long soft-iron shank that bent when it struck, so it couldn't be thrown back and it dragged an enemy's shield down. In one ninety-seven BC at Cynoscephalae, in Thessaly, a Roman army broke a Macedonian phalanx on broken ground, and over the next half century Rome swallowed Greece. In one forty-six BC it destroyed Corinth outright, and in eighty-six BC the Roman general Sulla stormed Athens. Greek armour went on being made, but now for other people's wars.

The iron sword is Celtic, of the type named after Hallstatt in Austria, where a huge Iron Age cemetery was dug up. The Celts reached Greece too. In two seventy-nine BC a Celtic army under a leader the Greeks called Brennus poured down through Macedonia and made for the sanctuary of Delphi and its treasure. The Greek accounts say the god defended his own, with earthquake, thunderbolts and a night of bitter snow, and that the Celts were driven back down the mountain; the Greek soldiers on the slopes probably deserve some of the credit. Either way it was the kind of story Greeks loved: barbarians at the gate, turned back from the holy places.

This little cabinet of other people's weapons is a useful corrective to the rest of the hall. Greek warfare was never a sealed tradition. It was always borrowing, from Persians, Thracians, Macedonians and Romans, and always fighting somebody who did things differently. Next door is a jump forward in time, a digital room about the War of Independence, and after that comes Alexander, who took a borrowed idea and conquered the known world with it.

This room jumps you forward more than two thousand years. It opened in May twenty twenty-four, it's numbered as the second hall even though its story belongs much later, and it's the museum's most modern space: screens, three-dimensional reconstructions and virtual-reality headsets. It was created with the foundation of Captain Vassilis Constantakopoulos, the shipowner behind the Costa Navarino resort near Pylos, and the Eugenides Foundation. It tells the War of Independence through the Peloponnese, which the Greeks of the time called the Morea, and it's a taster: the full story of eighteen twenty-one, with the real muskets and portraits, comes in halls six and seven. Here I want to tell you how this room's story ends, because it ends with the battle that made Greece possible.

The route runs through four places. Kalamata, where on the twenty-third of March eighteen twenty-one the chieftain of the Mani, Petrobey Mavromichalis, and Theodoros Kolokotronis entered the town and the revolt in the south became open war. Tripoli, the Ottoman capital of the Morea, besieged and stormed that autumn. Nafplio, the great fortified port, which the Greeks took in eighteen twenty-two, and which became the first capital of the new state. And Pylos, the deep bay on the west coast that the Venetians had called Navarino.

By eighteen twenty-five the revolution was losing. The Sultan called on his powerful vassal Mehmet Ali of Egypt, whose son Ibrahim Pasha landed in the Morea with a modern, French-trained army and spent two years sweeping through it, burning villages and cutting down the olive groves, and he went on to help take Messolonghi after its terrible siege. The Greeks were divided, bankrupt and fighting each other. But in Europe public opinion had swung their way, and in July eighteen twenty-seven Britain, France and Russia signed a treaty in London to force an armistice on the Sultan. They sent their fleets to make it stick.

In October eighteen twenty-seven Ibrahim's combined Ottoman and Egyptian fleet lay at anchor in the bay of Navarino, dozens of warships in a great horseshoe. The allied commander, the British admiral Sir Edward Codrington, led some two dozen British, French and Russian ships into the bay on the afternoon of the twentieth, as a show of force; officially, nobody was at war. Accounts differ on who fired first, perhaps a musket shot at a boat. Within minutes it was a full battle at point-blank range, ships still at anchor, and it went on for about four hours. When the smoke cleared, some sixty Ottoman and Egyptian ships had been sunk, burned, or blown up by their own crews. Not one allied ship was lost, though many were badly cut up. It was the last great battle fought entirely between sailing ships.

In London the government was embarrassed; the King's speech to Parliament the following January called it an untoward event. But nothing could undo it. Ibrahim's sea link to Egypt was cut, a French army landed in the Morea to see his troops out, and within a few years Greece was an independent kingdom. If you put on a headset in here, you may find yourself standing on the shore of that bay. When you're done, step back into antiquity. The next hall belongs to Alexander.

Back to the ancient world, and to the north. The screens in this hall trace a march of more than twenty thousand kilometres, from Pella in Macedonia, where Alexander was born in three fifty-six BC, to the river Indus in what is now Pakistan. He did it in about eleven years, and he never lost a pitched battle. But start with his father, because Alexander inherited the machine.

Philip the Second took over a weak, bullied kingdom in three fifty-nine BC and rebuilt its army. His infantry carried the sarissa, a pike of cornel wood five or six metres long, held in both hands, so that the points of the first five ranks of a Macedonian phalanx all stuck out in front of the leading man: a hedgehog of iron that an old hoplite line, with spears less than half as long, simply couldn't reach past. The phalanx pinned the enemy in place; the hammer was the heavy cavalry, the Companions, who rode for the gap. And Philip hired engineers. The siege towers and artillery modelled here belong to that moment, when Greek engineers learned to store power in twisted skeins of sinew and hair and throw bolts and stones further than anyone before them. The arrow-shooting catapult is, in effect, a giant crossbow on a stand. At Chaeronea in three thirty-eight BC Philip beat Athens and Thebes, and the free cities of Greece were finished as great powers. Alexander, eighteen years old, led the cavalry charge.

Two years later Philip was murdered, and Alexander took the army east. The reliefs and maps follow him: the Granicus, Issus, then Egypt, where he was greeted as son of the god Zeus Ammon. Then Tyre, the island city off the coast of Lebanon, which refused to open its gates. For seven months in three thirty-two BC his engineers built a causeway half a mile out across the sea, under fire, and rolled siege towers along it. Tyre fell, and the causeway is still there: sand built up around it over the centuries, and the island is a peninsula to this day. In three thirty-one, at Gaugamela, in what is now northern Iraq, he broke the last great army of the Persian king Darius, and the Persian empire was his.

He kept going, through Afghanistan and Central Asia into India. At the Hydaspes he beat the Indian king Porus and his war elephants, and then, at the river Hyphasis, his exhausted Macedonians simply refused to go any further. On the way back he tried to fuse his empire. At Susa, in three twenty-four BC, he held a mass wedding, marrying Persian royal women himself and dozens of his officers to Persian noblewomen, while thousands of his soldiers' marriages to Asian women were made official. Most of the officers' marriages didn't outlast him. The museum shows that wedding, and the death of his friend Hephaestion, which broke him.

He died in Babylon in June three twenty-three BC, aged thirty-two, of fever, or drink, or poison, depending on whom you believe. Asked on his deathbed who should have the empire, he is said to have answered: the strongest. His generals spent forty years fighting over it. For Greece itself his conquests cut both ways. Greek language and Greek cities spread from Egypt to Afghanistan, while Athens and Sparta became small places in a very big world. Notice, too, how firmly this hall claims him. In the nineteen nineties and two thousands, who owned Alexander and the name Macedonia was a bitter argument between Greece and its northern neighbour, settled only in twenty eighteen, and a war museum is not a neutral place to hang his portrait.

For a thousand years after Rome fell in the west, the Greek-speaking world was the Roman empire, ruled from Constantinople. We call it Byzantium; its people called themselves Romans, and modern Greeks still sometimes use the old word Romios for a Greek of the plain, unshowy kind. This hall is about how that empire lasted so long, and three of its models give you the answer: walls, ships and fire.

Start with the walls. The model shows the land walls of Constantinople, built under the emperor Theodosius the Second in the year four hundred and thirteen: a moat, a low outer wall, and a tall inner wall studded with towers, so that attackers who got over one line found themselves trapped under the next. In four hundred and forty-seven an earthquake brought down long stretches just as Attila and the Huns were approaching, and the city's rival chariot-racing fans, the Blues and the Greens, were set to work side by side and rebuilt them, the story goes, in about two months. For more than a thousand years no army broke through those land walls by assault. Even the crusaders, in twelve oh four, got in over the harbour walls instead. When the land walls finally fell, which is the next stop, it took gunpowder.

Then the ships. The dromon was the Byzantine war galley, long and fast, with two banks of oars, and in the seventh century it gained a weapon nobody else had. The chronicler Theophanes says that around six hundred and seventy-two an architect named Kallinikos, a refugee from Heliopolis in Syria, brought a sea fire to Constantinople, just as the fleets of the Arab caliphate were closing on the city. Historians argue about the dates, and about whether one man really invented it, but the weapon was real. A liquid was heated and pumped under pressure through a bronze tube in the bow, often made in the shape of a lion's or a monster's head, and lit as it came out: a jet of flame that clung to whatever it hit and kept burning on the water. In the sieges of the six seventies, and again in seven hundred and seventeen, when a vast Arab army and fleet camped outside the walls for a year, Greek fire burned the attackers' ships, and Constantinople held. Plenty of historians think it saved more than one city that year.

The model here is the cheirosiphon, the hand-held version, a portable flamethrower mentioned in an imperial military manual of around nine hundred, meant to be used from behind shields or from the walls. What was in it? Nobody knows. Probably crude oil from natural seeps around the Black Sea, mixed with resins and who knows what else, but the recipe was a state secret, held by a few families of specialists. The emperor Constantine the Seventh told his son that the secret had been given by an angel to the first Christian emperor and must never be shared with foreigners. It was kept so well that in the end the Byzantines seem to have lost it themselves, and by the time the crusaders came it was a memory.

Look at the siege engines too. Byzantine generals wrote handbooks, practical and unromantic, on how to fight Arabs, Bulgars, Pechenegs and Franks, each according to their habits, and on how to avoid a pitched battle altogether if bribery, delay or a well-arranged marriage would do the job. That was the empire's other secret weapon, and you can't make a model of it: patience.

The man in the painting is Constantine the Eleventh Palaiologos, the last emperor of Byzantium, and to many Greeks he's the most important figure in this hall. By the time he came to the throne, in fourteen forty-nine, the empire that had once run from Italy to Mesopotamia was the city of Constantinople, a few islands, and a corner of the Peloponnese ruled from the hill town of Mystras, where Constantine had been governor. His mother was a Serbian princess, Helena Dragaš, and Greeks often still call him by her family name, Dragasis. He was proclaimed emperor there, not in Hagia Sophia, and he came to a city of perhaps fifty thousand people rattling around inside walls built for one ten times the size.

The shield beside him is a replica, with the device of his family: a cross with a letter like a B, a Greek beta, in each of its four corners. It's usually read as an abbreviation for King of Kings, reigning over those who reign, which sounds grand for the emperor of one city, but that was Byzantium: the titles stayed long after the territory went. The curved sword is a paramerion, a single-edged cavalry sabre that hung at the hip; that's a replica too.

In the spring of fourteen fifty-three the Ottoman sultan Mehmed the Second, twenty-one years old, came with an army of perhaps eighty thousand men and the newest weapon in the world: enormous bronze cannon, one of them cast by a Hungarian founder named Orban, who, the story goes, had offered his services to the Byzantines first and been turned away because they couldn't pay him. Constantine had about seven thousand men to hold some fourteen miles of walls, among them a few hundred Genoese under a professional soldier, Giovanni Giustiniani. A great iron chain was stretched across the mouth of the harbour, the Golden Horn, to keep the Ottoman fleet out. Mehmed's answer was one of the boldest tricks in military history. On the twenty-second of April his men laid a road of greased logs over the hill behind Galata and hauled some seventy ships overland, sails up, and slid them into the harbour behind the chain.

The cannon battered the old walls for six weeks, and every night the defenders patched them with earth, timber and barrels. In the small hours of Tuesday the twenty-ninth of May came the final assault, in three waves. Giustiniani was badly wounded and carried away, his men followed him, Ottoman soldiers got in, and the city fell. Constantine was last seen, by most accounts, throwing off his imperial insignia and charging into the fighting at the walls. His body was never certainly identified. That afternoon Mehmed rode to Hagia Sophia, and the great church became a mosque. And to this day Tuesday is thought of as an unlucky day in Greece.

Because nobody saw him die, he became a legend. At the last moment, the story goes, an angel turned the emperor to marble and hid him in a cave beneath the Golden Gate, and one day he'll wake, take up his sword and win the city back. Through four centuries of Ottoman rule the marble emperor was a promise. When the Greeks rose in eighteen twenty-one, the dream of the city, which came to be called the Great Idea, went with them, all the way to the catastrophe of nineteen twenty-two, which you'll reach on the far side of this floor. The empire died here. The longing for it lived a very long time.

This hall's title runs three ages together: Frankish rule, Ottoman rule and national awakening. Start with the Franks, because the shields of a Knight Hospitaller and a Teutonic Knight look out of place in a Greek museum until you know the story. In twelve oh four the knights of the Fourth Crusade, who were meant to be on their way to Egypt, were steered by debt and Venetian politics to Constantinople instead. They stormed it, over the harbour walls, and sacked the greatest Christian city in the world. The bronze horses on Saint Mark's in Venice are part of the loot. Then they carved up the empire.

Greece became a patchwork of crusader lordships. The Villehardouins, a family from Champagne, ruled the Peloponnese as the Principality of Achaea, and built castles you can still climb, at Chlemoutsi and Mystras. A Burgundian knight, Othon de la Roche, became lord of Athens and Thebes, and the Parthenon became a Catholic cathedral of Our Lady. The military orders were given estates, the Teutonic Knights among them, in the Peloponnese, and the Hospitallers took Rhodes in thirteen ten and held it for two centuries, until Suleiman the Magnificent besieged them out in fifteen twenty-two. Venice, cannier than any of them, took the ports and islands, and held Crete until sixteen sixty-nine. Much later, in sixteen eighty-seven, it was a Venetian army besieging the Ottomans on the Acropolis whose mortar shell set off the gunpowder stored inside the Parthenon and blew it apart. For Greeks, the Frankish centuries are remembered as foreign Catholic rule, and the bitterness of twelve oh four went deep. One Byzantine grandee is supposed to have said he'd rather see the sultan's turban in the city than the cardinal's hat.

Then came the Ottomans, who took most of the Greek world in the century around fourteen fifty-three, and the Acropolis of Athens in fourteen fifty-eight. For most Greeks, Ottoman rule lasted about four centuries, though the Ionian Islands, under Venice, hardly knew it, while Thessaloniki and Crete stayed Ottoman into the twentieth century. It was not one experience but many. Christians paid a special tax and couldn't bear arms, and in some centuries boys were taken in the child levy, the devshirme, converted to Islam and trained as janissaries or officials. But the Ottomans also ruled through the communities themselves. The Orthodox Church, under the Patriarch in Constantinople, ran the Christians' courts and schools, and Greek merchants and shipowners grew rich on the empire's trade. The Phanariots, Greek families from the Phanar quarter of Constantinople, served the sultans as interpreters and governors.

In the mountains a different sort of Greek grew up. The klephts were bandits who raided from the hills; the armatoloi were Christian militias the Ottomans paid to keep order and hunt the klephts. Often they were the same men, changing sides as it suited them, and the folk songs made heroes of them all. These are the men in fustanellas you met at the Evzones kiosk, and in eighteen twenty-one they will become the captains of the revolution.

The last part of the hall's title, national awakening, is the subject of the next two stops. By the late eighteenth century Greek merchants abroad were reading about the French Revolution, Greek scholars were printing books in Venice and Vienna, and a few people were starting to imagine that the Greeks could be a nation, and not just the Orthodox flock of the Sultan. The most dangerous of those people drew a map, and it's in this room.

Somewhere in this hall, given pride of place, is the thing the museum itself calls the dominant exhibit, and at first glance it is just a very large old map. Go and stand in front of it. This is the Charta of Rigas Feraios, printed in Vienna in seventeen ninety-seven on twelve sheets that join into one enormous picture of the Greek world, and this is a real printing, not a copy. Only about thirty-four are known to survive. A lot of what you've seen on this floor so far has been models, casts and reconstructions. This is the actual paper that a man was killed for.

Rigas was born around seventeen fifty-seven in Velestino, in Thessaly, close to the ruins of ancient Pherae, which is where the name Feraios comes from; Greeks also call him Velestinlis, the man from Velestino. As a young man he went north to Bucharest, to work for the Greek princes who governed Wallachia and Moldavia on the sultan's behalf, and there he picked up languages, French books and a dangerous idea. Then came the French Revolution, and Rigas moved to Vienna, the city of the Greek merchants who traded across the Habsburg border, where there were Greek printing presses and no Ottoman censor.

What he printed was not a map of a country that existed. It is a map of a country he wanted. It spreads across the whole southern Balkans and the coast of Asia Minor, with the old Greek names written in beside the modern ones and the battlefields of antiquity marked out, so that anyone who unfolded it could see Marathon and Thermopylae as their own inheritance, laid over the villages where they actually lived. It is propaganda, on a grand scale, and very beautiful propaganda.

Alongside it Rigas wrote a war song, the Thourios, which a generation later became the marching song of the revolution. Its best-known line says, roughly, better one hour of free life than forty years of slavery and prison. He also drafted a constitution, modelled on the French one of seventeen ninety-three, for a republic that would take in everybody in the region: Greeks, Albanians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Armenians, Muslim Turks too, all equal citizens, with Greek as the common language. It was wildly optimistic, and in its way more generous than anything the Balkans actually got.

He never had the chance to try it. In December seventeen ninety-seven he travelled to Trieste, with crates of his pamphlets sent on ahead, and a Greek merchant named Dimitrios Oikonomou opened one of the crates and went to the Austrian police. Rigas was arrested outside a café. The Austrians had no wish to quarrel with the sultan, so they handed him and his companions over at the Ottoman frontier in Belgrade, where they were held in the Nebojša Tower above the Danube. On the twenty-fourth of June seventeen ninety-eight they were strangled, and their bodies were thrown into the river. Rigas was about forty.

Greeks call him the protomartyr, the first martyr of an independence that wouldn't come for another thirty years, and his marble statue stands in front of the University of Athens. But the map kept working long after him. Copies were smuggled, hidden and unfolded in schoolrooms and merchants' back offices, and the idea you watched being built in the first halls of this floor, that the people living under Ottoman rule were the heirs of Pericles and Leonidas, travelled as much on this sheet of paper as in any book. Before you move on, look at the place names for a moment, and imagine opening this in a back room in Vienna, knowing that owning it could get you hanged.

Look for three portraits of three rather ordinary-looking men. They are Nikolaos Skoufas, Emmanouil Xanthos and Athanasios Tsakalov, and in eighteen fourteen, in Odessa, the Russian port on the Black Sea where Greek grain merchants had grown rich, they founded the Filiki Eteria, the Society of Friends: a secret society with a single purpose, to free Greece by force. Skoufas was a hatmaker; Xanthos had been made a Freemason in the Ionian Islands, and borrowed a good deal of the ritual. None of them was rich, famous or a soldier.

The Society ran on secrecy and on a magnificent bluff. New members swore an oath, often in a church at night, and rose through grades with passwords and codes, and the lower ones were told only that the whole thing was directed by a mysterious Authority. Everybody assumed that meant Russia, perhaps even the Tsar himself. It did not. The founders offered the leadership to Ioannis Kapodistrias, the Corfiot who was then one of the Tsar's two foreign ministers, and he turned them down flat. But the rumour kept recruiting. The membership list in this hall is full of merchants, priests, ship captains and fighting men, and one of the pictures here, a copy of a painting by Dionysios Tsokos, shows a burly captain from the Peloponnese taking the oath. That is Theodoros Kolokotronis, sworn in during eighteen eighteen, while he was living on Zakynthos. You'll meet him properly in a few rooms.

In the end the Society found its leader in Alexandros Ypsilantis, a prince from an old Greek family of Constantinople and a general in the Russian army, who had lost his right arm at the Battle of Dresden. On the twenty-second of February eighteen twenty-one he crossed the river Prut into Moldavia with a proclamation calling on the Christians of the Balkans to rise. It went badly almost at once. The Tsar disowned him, the Romanian peasants had their own grievances and their own leader, and in June the Sacred Band, a few hundred young Greek volunteers, many of them students, in black uniforms with a skull and crossbones, was cut to pieces by Ottoman cavalry at Dragatsani. Ypsilantis fled into Austria, spent years in prison there, and died in Vienna in eighteen twenty-eight. The paintings by Falireas and Dupré show that northern rising. Remember the name Sacred Band; it comes back downstairs in the Second World War.

Now the darkest picture in the hall, by Nikolaos Kessanlis. In Constantinople the sultan, Mahmud the Second, held the Orthodox Patriarch responsible for the loyalty of his flock. Gregory the Fifth had excommunicated the rebels, under heavy pressure, and it saved nobody. On Easter Sunday, the tenth of April eighteen twenty-one, after the liturgy, he was seized and hanged in his vestments from the gate of the Patriarchate. His body was left hanging for three days, then dragged through the streets and thrown into the sea. Greek sailors fished it out and carried it to Odessa, and fifty years later, in eighteen seventy-one, it was brought to the Metropolitan Cathedral in Athens.

Two details are worth taking away. The gate where he died, at the Patriarchate in Istanbul, has been kept shut ever since; more than two hundred years on, visitors still go in by a side door. And when you pass the University of Athens, look at the two statues in front of it: one is Rigas, from the last stop, and the other is Gregory. The hanging of an old churchman on Easter Day did more than anything yet to turn the Greek revolt, in European eyes, into a Christian cause, and that's where the next hall begins.

Here the revolution itself begins, and the museum spreads it over this hall and the next, through art, manuscripts and weapons. Start with the picture every Greek child knows: Bishop Germanos of Patras raising the banner of revolt at the monastery of Agia Lavra, in the mountains above Kalavryta, as kneeling fighters swear to die for freedom. This version is by the Italian painter Ludovico Lipparini. The scene is supposed to have happened on the twenty-fifth of March eighteen twenty-one, and that is why the twenty-fifth of March is Greece's national day, with parades in every town.

Historians will tell you, gently, that it probably didn't happen quite like that. The first full account came from a French writer, François Pouqueville, who wasn't there, and Germanos's own memoirs don't describe the scene. Fighting had already started in several places: on the twenty-third of March, Petrobey Mavromichalis and Kolokotronis marched into Kalamata, and Patras rose within days. But in eighteen thirty-eight the young kingdom fixed the date for good, and the choice was deliberate. The twenty-fifth of March is the feast of the Annunciation, when the angel told Mary she would bear a child. A nation reborn on the day of the good news was too good a story to pass up, and the painting is that story.

Now the big, dark, crowded canvas: a copy of Eugène Delacroix's Massacre at Chios, made by Pierre Andrieu, who worked for years as Delacroix's assistant. The original hangs in the Louvre. Chios was one of the richest islands in the Aegean, full of merchants and mastic groves, and it had mostly stayed out of the revolt. In March eighteen twenty-two a force of fighters from neighbouring Samos landed and tried to raise it anyway. The Ottoman fleet arrived in April, with troops brought over from the mainland, and the reprisal was appalling: tens of thousands killed, and tens of thousands more, many of them women and children, sold in the slave markets of the empire. The island took generations to recover.

Delacroix was in his twenties and had never been to Greece. He worked from reports and from models in his Paris studio, and showed the painting at the Salon of eighteen twenty-four. Look at the foreground: the exhausted families waiting, the old woman staring at nothing, the child reaching for its dead mother's breast, and the Ottoman horseman dragging a naked woman away behind. The establishment was shocked; the painter Antoine-Jean Gros is supposed to have called it the massacre of painting. The French state bought it anyway. Victor Hugo wrote a poem about a Greek boy on Chios who, offered any gift he wants, asks for powder and bullets.

This is what the museum means by philhellenism, and it is a large part of how Greece won. Revolutions are fought with muskets, but also with pictures, and paintings like this brought volunteers, loans, donations and, in the end, the fleets of Britain, France and Russia to Navarino, which you heard about in the digital room. Two honest footnotes, though. The Greeks took their own revenge for Chios that June, with a fireship, which is a story for the hall next door. And the violence of eighteen twenty-one did not run only one way. In the first months of the war, Greek fighters across the Peloponnese killed Muslim civilians in large numbers, and nobody in Paris painted that. You'll hear about it at the Kolokotronis corner. Keep both pictures in your head; the war was both.

Find the diorama first: a mountain pass in miniature, with fighters in white kilts firing down from the rocks onto a long column of horsemen, pack animals and baggage strung out along the road below. This is Dervenakia, the passes between Argos and Corinth, in July eighteen twenty-two. Then turn to the case nearby and the cast of a face: heavy brows, a great hooked nose, the famous moustache. It is the death mask of the man who planned that ambush, Theodoros Kolokotronis, the Old Man of the Morea, Morea being the old name for the Peloponnese.

He was born in seventeen seventy into a family of klephts, the bandit-rebels of the mountains, and his father was killed fighting the Ottomans when he was a boy. He grew up as a klepht and an armed guard, was outlawed in a crackdown in eighteen-o-six, and escaped to Zakynthos, then in British hands. There he did something unusual for a mountain captain: he joined a regular army. He served in a Greek light infantry regiment raised by the British, rose to major, and learned how real armies drilled, supplied and manoeuvred. He kept a souvenir, a British-style helmet with a crest, and he wore it right through the revolution. If you've seen his bronze statue on horseback outside the Old Parliament on Stadiou Street, that is the helmet.

His first great success was the siege of Tripolitsa, the Ottoman capital of the Peloponnese, in the summer of eighteen twenty-one. And here this tour has to be straight with you. When the city fell, on the twenty-third of September, the Greek fighters massacred its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants, men, women and children, over several days; historians usually put the dead at around eight thousand. Kolokotronis described it himself, years later, in his memoirs: from the gate to the citadel, he said, his horse's hooves never touched the ground. The museum's story is a heroic one, and he was a hero; this was also the same war.

Then Dervenakia. In the summer of eighteen twenty-two the sultan sent the biggest army yet, perhaps twenty thousand men or more under Mahmud Dramali Pasha, down through central Greece into the Peloponnese. It swept into the plain of Argos, and the infant Greek government fled. Kolokotronis did the opposite of standing to fight. He had the plain stripped of food, burned what couldn't be carried off, and waited in the hills while a large army sat in the summer heat with nothing to eat. When Dramali had to fall back towards Corinth, his columns had to go through the narrow passes, and the Greeks were waiting for them. Over several days at the end of July the army was cut to pieces. One of Kolokotronis's captains, Nikitaras, fought so ferociously that he was known ever after as the Turk-eater. Dramali himself died at Corinth that winter.

What came afterwards is less tidy. The Greeks soon turned on each other, in two small civil wars between the captains of the Peloponnese and the islanders and politicians, and in eighteen twenty-five the government locked Kolokotronis up in a monastery on Hydra. They let him out in a hurry when Ibrahim Pasha landed from Egypt with a modern army, because nobody else could fight him. Under King Otto he was tried for treason in eighteen thirty-four and sentenced to death, then pardoned. He spent his old age in Athens, dictating his memoirs, because he was no great writer, and they're still one of the most vivid books in the language. He died in February eighteen forty-three, after an evening at the palace, aged seventy-two, and somebody pressed plaster to his face. Take a last look at the mask: this is as close as you will get to him.

The revolution had a navy because of three small, dry, rocky islands: Hydra, Spetses and Psara. There was little to farm on them, so their people went to sea, and during the Napoleonic Wars they made fortunes running grain past blockades. By eighteen twenty-one they had fleets of fast merchant brigs that already carried cannon against pirates. The ship models here are their kind of ships, like the galiot from Psara. Against the big Ottoman ships of the line, with two and three decks of heavy guns, they could not win a straight fight. So they used fire.

Look at the painting of a Turkish two-decker burning, by Economos. A fireship was an old merchant vessel packed with pitch, tar and powder, sailed by a tiny volunteer crew straight at an enemy ship, grappled to it, set alight, and abandoned at the last possible moment for a rowing boat. The most famous attack came in June eighteen twenty-two, two months after the massacre on Chios. The Ottoman fleet was anchored off the island, and on the last night of Ramadan its officers were celebrating aboard the flagship. Konstantinos Kanaris, a young captain from Psara, steered his fireship into it in the dark, fixed it fast, lit it and rowed away. The flames reached the powder magazine and the flagship blew up, with a large part of its crew and the admiral, Kara Ali, who had commanded at Chios. Kanaris lived another sixty years and served as prime minister several times. His own island was less lucky; Psara was destroyed by the Ottomans in eighteen twenty-four.

The model of the brig Ares has its own story. In May eighteen twenty-five, Ibrahim Pasha's Egyptian fleet attacked the island of Sphacteria, in the bay at Pylos, where Ares was anchored with other Greek brigs. Her captain, Anastasios Tsamados, was fighting ashore and was killed there, along with an Italian revolutionary exile and philhellene, Santorre di Santa Rosa. Ares fought her way out alone under another captain, Nikolaos Votsis, with the politician Alexandros Mavrokordatos sent below for safety, running past some thirty enemy ships to the open sea with two men dead. She served the navy for nearly a century, and in nineteen twenty-one, on the revolution's hundredth anniversary, she was sunk off Salamis with full honours.

The frigate Hellas was the opposite: the proper warship the Greeks had always wanted. She was built in New York, at a cost that ballooned amid a financial scandal, arrived in eighteen twenty-six, and became the flagship of Thomas Cochrane, the hard-driving British admiral the Greeks had hired. Five years later, in the bitter politics after independence, the government ordered her handed over, and Admiral Andreas Miaoulis, the greatest Greek sailor of the war, blew her up at Poros rather than let that happen. Few navies have destroyed their own flagship on purpose.

And two portraits of women who paid for ships. Laskarina Bouboulina of Spetses was born, the story goes, in an Ottoman prison where her mother was visiting her father; she was twice widowed by the age of forty, inherited a shipping fortune, and built her own warship, the Agamemnon. She blockaded Nafplio and rode into Tripolitsa with the fighters. In eighteen twenty-five, back on Spetses, her son eloped with a girl from another island family, the girl's relatives came to her house to have it out, and somebody in the street shot her dead. Nobody was ever named. Manto Mavrogenous, from Mykonos, spent her whole inheritance on ships and men, fought off a landing on her island, and had a famous romance with Dimitrios Ypsilantis, the brother of the general you met two halls back. She died in poverty on Paros in eighteen forty-eight. Beside them, the mannequin of an armatolos in kilt and sash, with the long muskets the Greeks called karyofilia, is the land war: men like this did most of the fighting, and most of the dying.

The hall opens with a portrait of Lord Byron, and he earns his place. The most famous poet in Europe sailed for Greece in eighteen twenty-three with money, guns and a rather romantic idea of what he would find, and spent his last months at Messolonghi trying to hold quarrelling captains together. He died there of a fever in April eighteen twenty-four, aged thirty-six. His death did more for the cause than anything he managed alive; it made Greece a fashionable thing to die for. Messolonghi's own terrible ending is waiting for you in the lobby downstairs.

After Navarino, the country got its first head of state: Ioannis Kapodistrias, the Corfiot diplomat who had once refused to lead the Filiki Eteria. He arrived in January eighteen twenty-eight to find a land burned flat, an empty treasury and a hundred local strongmen who had won a war and expected to be paid. He built schools, quarantine stations, a mint and an army, and he is remembered for making Greeks grow potatoes; the story goes that he had a field of them guarded, so that people would conclude they were valuable and steal them. He also ruled like an autocrat and jailed powerful men, among them Petrobey Mavromichalis of the Mani. On the ninth of October eighteen thirty-one, at the door of a church in Nafplio, Petrobey's brother and son shot and stabbed him dead.

So the Great Powers chose a king, and they chose a teenager. Otto was the second son of King Ludwig of Bavaria, and he arrived at Nafplio in eighteen thirty-three, aged seventeen, with a council of Bavarian regents and a few thousand Bavarian troops. The portrait here was painted in eighteen forty-two. Next to him is his wife, Amalia of Oldenburg, and a small work table that belonged to her; she was the queen who laid out the National Garden you may have walked through behind Parliament. They moved the capital to Athens, then a battered little town under the Acropolis, and built a neoclassical city around it. But the Bavarians ran everything, and on the night of the third of September eighteen forty-three the army and the crowd gathered in front of the palace and made Otto grant a constitution. The square has been called Syntagma, constitution, ever since. In eighteen sixty-two he was deposed, and the couple went home to Bavaria, where he is said to have gone on wearing Greek dress until he died.

Find the sword of Panos Kolokotronis, dated eighteen sixty-eight. It carries a family story. The Old Man's eldest son, Panos, was killed in the civil war of eighteen twenty-four. When another son was born, in eighteen thirty-six, the father was sixty-six, and he named the baby Panos too. That second Panos grew up to be an officer in the regular army his father had never quite trusted, and commandant of the Military Academy in the eighteen-eighties. From kilted mountain rebel to the man running officer training in one generation is the story of this whole hall.

The rest of the room is about the Greeks the kingdom hadn't freed. The new state held only a minority of the Greek-speaking Orthodox people of the region, and the Great Idea, of gathering them all in, drove its politics for ninety years. Crete rose again and again. In November eighteen sixty-six hundreds of fighters, women and children shut themselves in the monastery of Arkadi; when the Ottoman troops broke in, the defenders set fire to the powder store and blew up the building with themselves inside. Europe was outraged once more. Thessaly came to Greece peacefully in eighteen eighty-one, but in eighteen ninety-seven a war over Crete ended in a quick and humiliating defeat. That humiliation is what the next rooms set out to answer.

Look for the photograph of a young officer with a dark beard and a steady gaze. This is Pavlos Melas, and in Greece his face is as familiar as any in this museum. Beside it is the uniform of a Makedonomachos, a fighter of the Macedonian Struggle: something between an army kit and a mountain bandit's, which is exactly what the job was.

To understand him, you need to picture Ottoman Macedonia around nineteen hundred. It was one of the most mixed places in Europe. Thessaloniki was a mostly Jewish city with large Greek and Turkish quarters; the villages around it spoke Greek, Bulgarian and Slavic dialects, Turkish, Albanian and Vlach, often in the same valley. Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia all wanted it, and for decades they fought over it with churches and schools rather than guns. In eighteen seventy the sultan had allowed a separate Bulgarian church, the Exarchate, and village after village had to choose: stay with the Greek Patriarch, or go over to the Exarch. Whoever controlled the priest and the schoolteacher, the thinking went, would one day control the map.

In nineteen-o-three the Bulgarian-backed revolutionary organisation raised a rising, and armed bands began to roam the hills, enforcing loyalty with threats and worse. Greece answered with bands of its own, officially nothing to do with the government. Army officers took leave, grew beards, put on fighters' kit, adopted false names and crossed the border. Melas was one of the first. He was born in Marseille in eighteen seventy into a wealthy family; his father had been mayor of Athens, and his wife, Natalia, was the sister of Ion Dragoumis, the young diplomat and writer who was the movement's great champion. In nineteen-o-four Melas went into the mountains of western Macedonia under the name Captain Mikis Zezas, with a few dozen men.

He lasted a few months. On the thirteenth of October nineteen-o-four, he and his men stopped to rest in the village of Statista, near Kastoria. Someone gave them away, a much larger Ottoman force surrounded the village, and Melas was killed in the fighting, aged thirty-four. Athens went into mourning; shops and schools closed for his memorial service, and a flood of new volunteers went north. The village where he died is now called Melas, and half the towns in Greece have a Pavlos Melas Street.

Look again at the fighter's uniform, and then at the regular infantry corporal's beside it. The corporal's is the army as it wanted to be seen, buttoned and drilled. The other is the kit of men who lived out of doors for months, moved by night, slept in sheepfolds and monastery outbuildings, and depended on villagers who might feed them or might sell them. Officially, these men did not exist; the Greek government denied for years that it had anything to do with them. Years later the state struck the commemorative medal you can see here, a formal thank-you for a war it had spent so long pretending it wasn't fighting.

It is worth being clear about what kind of war this was. The Macedonian Struggle was fought in villages, among neighbours, and all sides murdered priests, teachers and headmen who had chosen the wrong church. It ended only in nineteen-o-eight, when the Young Turk revolution in the Ottoman army briefly promised everyone equal citizenship, and four years later the Balkan Wars settled the question by force. Greeks still know this world through a novel, The Secrets of the Swamp, published by Penelope Delta in nineteen thirty-seven, about the Greek bands hiding in the reed beds of the lake of Giannitsa; generations of schoolchildren have grown up on it. Delta, as it happens, was the sister of Antonis Benakis, whose museum is just up the avenue.

This hall belongs to the drawings that cover its walls: quick, sure sketches of soldiers in camp, wounded men, prisoners and refugees on the road. They are by Thalia Flora-Karavia, and they are the work of a woman who simply went to the war. She was born in eighteen seventy-one in Siatista, a town in western Macedonia that was still Ottoman when she was a girl, trained as a painter in Munich, and married a journalist, Nikolaos Karavias, in Alexandria in nineteen-o-seven. When war came in nineteen twelve she was about forty-one, and she followed the Greek army as a correspondent for her husband's newspaper there, the Ephimeris, sending back reports and drawing everything she saw. She is usually called Greece's first woman war correspondent, and she went to the front again in Asia Minor nine years later.

The war she drew was the one Greece had been preparing for since the humiliation of eighteen ninety-seven. The army had been rebuilt with French help, a new prime minister, the Cretan Eleftherios Venizelos, had taken charge in nineteen ten, and in October nineteen twelve Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and Montenegro attacked the Ottoman Empire together. The Greek army under Crown Prince Constantine pushed north through Thessaly into Macedonia and won a race that mattered enormously. On the twenty-sixth of October, the feast day of Saint Demetrius, the patron saint of Thessaloniki, the Ottoman commander surrendered the city to the Greeks, a matter of hours before a Bulgarian division arrived wanting it too. Meanwhile the armoured cruiser Averof, under Admiral Pavlos Kountouriotis, beat the Ottoman fleet twice at the mouth of the Dardanelles and kept it bottled up for the rest of the war, while the navy picked up the Aegean islands one by one. Averof is still afloat, a museum ship at Faliro.

The other side of the front was Epirus, and that is where the second star of this hall comes in. Look for the personal belongings of Ioannis Velissariou. He was born in eighteen sixty-one in Romania, to Greek parents from Euboea, and was a career officer, a major by the time the war started. The city of Ioannina was protected by a ring of forts on the heights of Bizani, and through the winter of nineteen twelve the Greek army threw itself at them and failed, in snow and mud, again and again. In February nineteen thirteen, as part of a new offensive, Velissariou led his battalion of evzones through a gap in the line by night and got right round behind the forts, almost to the edge of the city. Within hours the Ottoman commander, Esat Pasha, surrendered Ioannina unconditionally.

Velissariou didn't have long to enjoy it. The allies of nineteen twelve fell out over the spoils, and in June nineteen thirteen Bulgaria attacked Greece and Serbia. The Second Balkan War was short and savage, and on the thirteenth of July Velissariou was killed in the Kresna gorge, in what is now Bulgaria. There was another death that year: King George the First, who had reigned for fifty years, was shot by a lone gunman while out walking in newly Greek Thessaloniki in March nineteen thirteen.

By the peace of that August, Greece had almost doubled in size, taking in Epirus, Macedonia, Crete and the islands. It's a triumphant story, and the museum tells it that way. But have another look at Flora-Karavia's drawings before you go. She drew very few charges and banners. She drew tired men, bandaged men, and families with their belongings on their backs, which is what a war looks like to someone who is paying attention.

Start with the red shirts. In eighteen sixty Giuseppe Garibaldi had led a thousand volunteers in red shirts to free Sicily and southern Italy, and the red shirt became the uniform of anyone who went to fight for somebody else's liberty. In nineteen twelve his son, Ricciotti Garibaldi, brought a legion of Italian volunteers to fight for Greece in Epirus, very consciously following the philhellenes of the eighteen-twenties. At the end of November they fought at Driskos, on the heights above Ioannina, alongside Greek volunteers, and among the Greeks who died there was Lorentzos Mavilis, a poet raised on Corfu who is often called the finest writer of sonnets in the Greek language, and who also composed chess problems. He was fifty-two, far too old for the front, and had insisted on going. A fellow poet recorded his last words: he had expected honours from this war, he said, but not the honour of dying for Greece.

Then a flag with a more complicated story. When the Balkan Wars ended, the Great Powers drew the border of the new state of Albania to include the region the Greeks call Northern Epirus, around Argyrokastro and Korytsa, where much of the population was Greek-speaking and Orthodox. The local Greeks refused, declared an Autonomous Republic of Northern Epirus in nineteen fourteen, and raised this flag at Korytsa that March. Next to it is the War Cross the little republic awarded. A treaty that spring promised them autonomy inside Albania, and then the First World War swept it all away. The Greek army will be back in these same towns in nineteen forty, a few rooms from now.

Now the two portraits that don't really belong together: Venizelos, the Cretan prime minister, and King Constantine, the commander who had taken Thessaloniki. When the First World War began, they disagreed about everything. Constantine, who had trained in Germany and was married to the Kaiser's sister, Sophia, believed Germany would win and wanted Greece to stay neutral. Venizelos wanted to join Britain and France and collect the reward. The king dismissed him twice, and in nineteen sixteen Venizelos set up a rival government in Thessaloniki, under the protection of Allied troops. In December that year there was fighting between royalist troops and Allied marines in the streets of Athens, and in June nineteen seventeen the Allies forced Constantine off the throne in favour of his second son, Alexander. The Greeks call this the National Schism, and it split families, the army and politics into royalists and Venizelists for a generation. You'll see what it cost in the very next room.

With Venizelos in charge, Greece joined the war. In May nineteen eighteen Greek divisions stormed the Bulgarian positions at Skra, on the Macedonian front, and in September the Allied offensive there knocked Bulgaria out of the war, the first of the Central Powers to give up. Greek pilots flew too, in French and British aircraft like the models of the Breguet, the DH four and the Nieuport in this room. Greek military flying had begun only six years earlier, in a flimsy biplane you can see a copy of outside.

And then the flag the museum is proudest of in this room. On the fourteenth of July nineteen nineteen, the Allied armies held a victory parade in Paris, through the Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs-Élysées, and a Greek detachment marched in it under this flag. It must have felt like the moment when the Great Idea came true. Venizelos was at the peace conference, the most admired statesman of the smaller Allies, and he had already secured the right to land Greek troops at Smyrna, on the coast of Asia Minor. That is the next hall, and it is where everything goes wrong.

The object to find first is a field telephone built into the brass case of a Turkish artillery shell. It belonged to General Anastasios Papoulas, the commander-in-chief of the Greek army in Asia Minor for most of the campaign. Somebody at headquarters took a piece of the enemy's ammunition and turned it into the general's line to his front, which tells you something about soldiers' humour, and also about how far from home and short of everything that army was.

The campaign began in triumph. In May nineteen nineteen Greek troops landed at Smyrna, the great port on the Aegean coast of Anatolia, with the blessing of Britain, France and the United States. It was one of the great Greek cities of the eastern Mediterranean, and the Treaty of Sèvres in nineteen twenty gave Greece the city and its hinterland, at least on paper. But the Ottoman Empire was being replaced by a new Turkish national movement under Mustafa Kemal, who had not signed anything. Then the Greek politics you heard about in the last room came back to bite. In November nineteen twenty Venizelos lost an election, King Constantine came back, and the Allies, who had never much liked him, began to lose interest.

The army went on regardless, deeper and deeper into the dry interior of Anatolia, with supply lines stretched back hundreds of kilometres. In the summer of nineteen twenty-one it marched on Ankara, Kemal's capital. On the river Sakarya, some fifty kilometres or so short of the city, the two armies fought for three weeks in the August heat, and the Turks held. The Greeks fell back to a long defensive line and sat on it for a year, while the army's morale drained away and the money ran out.

At the end of August nineteen twenty-two the Turkish army struck, and the front broke within days. Look now at the revolver. It belonged to Major General Nikolaos Trikoupis, who commanded one of the main groups of corps trying to fight its way back to the coast. His columns were surrounded, and he surrendered with several thousand men. He was taken to Mustafa Kemal himself, and it was Kemal who broke the news to him that the government in Athens had just appointed him commander-in-chief of the whole Greek army in Asia Minor. They didn't know he'd already been captured. The rest of the army streamed back to the sea. In September the Turkish army entered Smyrna, and fire destroyed the Greek and Armenian quarters while Allied warships watched from the harbour. Many thousands died, and hundreds of thousands fled on anything that would float.

The consequences are all around you in modern Athens. Under the Treaty of Lausanne in nineteen twenty-three, around one point two million Orthodox Christians left Turkey for Greece and around four hundred thousand Muslims went the other way, in a compulsory exchange of populations. Greece, a country of about five million, took in refugees amounting to roughly a fifth of its population. They built whole new suburbs, many named for what they had lost, like Nea Smyrni and Nea Ionia, and they brought the music that became rebetiko. In Athens itself, the army rose in revolt, King Constantine abdicated, and after a hurried trial six leading politicians and generals were shot at Goudi as scapegoats. Papoulas, the owner of the telephone, was not one of them; he became a convinced republican and was himself executed in nineteen thirty-five, after a failed Venizelist coup. Trikoupis came home from captivity in nineteen twenty-three.

Before you move on, find the model of the battleship Kilkis, a former American ship bought in nineteen fourteen, which served through all of this; she was sunk at her moorings at Salamis by German bombers in April nineteen forty-one. That date is a hint. The museum puts the end of this story and the start of the next in the same room, eighteen years apart. Turn the corner and it is October nineteen forty.

Every Greek schoolchild can tell you what happened just before three in the morning on the twenty-eighth of October, nineteen forty. A car pulled up outside a modest house in Kifisia, in the northern suburbs, and the Italian ambassador, Emanuele Grazzi, got out with his military attaché and knocked. The man who came to the door in his dressing gown was Ioannis Metaxas, the prime minister. Grazzi handed him an ultimatum from Mussolini: Italian troops were to be allowed into Greece to occupy certain strategic places, unnamed, and the deadline was six o'clock that morning.

Metaxas read it and answered in French, the language of diplomacy: Alors, c'est la guerre. Well, then, it is war. He is said to have added that he could hardly sell his own house on a few hours' notice, so how could he be expected to sell his country? He never actually said the word that gives this day its name. Ochi, no, was what the newspapers and the crowds made of it, and by the afternoon it was written on walls all over Athens. Grazzi, a career diplomat who admired Greece, made it clear in his memoirs that he hated the errand.

There's an awkwardness here that Greeks know perfectly well. Metaxas was himself a dictator, who had ruled since August nineteen thirty-six with censorship, exile islands and a youth movement borrowed from the fascist playbook. Mussolini may have expected one strongman to understand another. Instead, the Italians had already torpedoed the old cruiser Elli in the harbour of Tinos that August, on the feast of the Virgin, with the island full of pilgrims, and Greece was in no mood to bend. When the sirens sounded at dawn, people poured into the streets, not in panic but in something close to joy. Men queued at the mobilisation centres before their call-up papers arrived. The church bells rang.

Look now for the diorama of the women of Epirus. The Italians attacked out of Albania into some of the roughest mountain country in Europe, where there were almost no roads, and the Greek army's supplies had to go up the paths on mules and on human backs. Villagers did a great deal of that carrying, and women most of all: they loaded ammunition boxes, shells and sacks of food onto their shoulders and climbed through snow and mud to the gun positions, and carried the wounded down again. They're remembered in a thousand songs and statues as the women of the Pindus, and the scene in front of you is their monument in this building.

And then there is the glittering costume in the case, which belonged to Sofia Vembo. She was born in nineteen ten in Gallipoli, on the far side of the Aegean, and came to Greece as a refugee in the great uprooting you heard about in the last room. By nineteen forty she was the country's favourite popular singer, and when the war began she turned her stage show into a weapon. Her songs mocked Mussolini mercilessly, as a strutting buffoon in a feathered hat, and one of them, Children of Greece, became the anthem of that winter, sung in tavernas, on the radio and in the trenches. The story goes that Mussolini, who did not care to be laughed at, put a price on her head. She gave a large part of her own savings to the war effort, and Greeks still call her the singer of victory.

The twenty-eighth of October is a national holiday, with school parades in every town in Greece and Cyprus, and on that day, entry to this museum is free. In the next room the war moves into the mountains of Albania, and the story becomes, for a few months, the most surprising good news of the whole Second World War.

Mussolini expected a parade. His generals had promised him that Greece would fold in a fortnight, and he wanted a victory of his own to show Hitler, who had been taking capitals without telling him. What he got instead was the first serious defeat of the Axis on land anywhere in the war.

The Italians came through the mountains of Epirus in late October, and their crack Alpine division, the Julia, pushed deep up the Pindus range before Greek troops cut it off in the gorges and drove it back. By the middle of November the Greek army, under its commander-in-chief Alexandros Papagos, whose gala uniforms you can see here, had thrown the invaders back over the border and kept going. On the twenty-second of November, nineteen forty, Greek troops took Korytsa, as Greeks call it, the biggest town in southern Albania. Then came Argyrokastro and the port of Agioi Saranta, and in January the Klisura pass. All over occupied Europe, people who had heard nothing but bad news for a year and a half listened to the BBC and learned that a small, poor country was beating a great power. Churchill said that from now on we would not say that Greeks fight like heroes, but that heroes fight like Greeks. He probably said something like it, at any rate; the line has been polished a good deal since.

The cartoons and posters on these walls are from that winter, and they're worth a slow look. The Greek cartoonists of that winter drew Mussolini again and again as a strutting bully and a buffoon, and the Greek soldier as a lean young man with a moustache and a bayonet, chasing him back towards the sea. It's propaganda, of course, but it's also the sound of a country laughing, which is rare in a war museum.

Somewhere in these rooms, if it's still on display, is a small diorama of an aircraft taking the tail off a bomber. It shows the most extraordinary single moment of the air war. On the second of November, nineteen forty, near Thessaloniki, a young second lieutenant named Marinos Mitralexis, flying an obsolete Polish-built fighter, ran out of ammunition while chasing an Italian bomber. So he flew his propeller into its tail. The bomber went down, Mitralexis crash-landed in a field beside it, climbed out, drew his pistol and took the four surviving crewmen prisoner. He survived the war and died in a training crash in nineteen forty-eight.

The Italian motorcycle here is a Benelli, the kind of thing an army of motorised columns expected to ride into Greece on. It didn't help much in the mountains. The real enemy that winter was the cold. It was one of the worst Balkan winters in living memory, and the Greek army fought in snow up to the waist, often in summer boots, with too few blankets and supply lines of mules. Frostbite cases ran into many thousands, more than ten thousand by some counts, and many young men came home from Albania without their toes, or their feet.

In March nineteen forty-one Mussolini came over to watch a great spring offensive that was supposed to settle things. It failed within days, at a terrible cost to both sides, and the front stayed frozen deep inside Albania. But by then everyone knew that Hitler would not leave his ally humiliated, and that Germany would come down through the Balkans in the spring. In the next room, it does.

Look into the cutaway model of the fort and you'll see what looks, from above, like a quiet hillside. That's the point. Below it are concrete galleries, magazines, barracks, kitchens and machine-gun posts, linked by tunnels and buried deep enough to shrug off heavy bombs. This was the Metaxas Line, a chain of forts built from nineteen thirty-six along the mountain border with Bulgaria, and named, as most things in those years were, after the prime minister you met at the start of this war.

On the sixth of April, nineteen forty-one, at dawn, the German army came across that border. Hitler had decided to clear up the Balkans before turning on the Soviet Union, and the attack on Greece and Yugoslavia came the same day. In the Rupel Pass, where the river Strymon cuts through the mountains, the Germans expected a few hours' work. Fort Roupel held, and kept holding. Its garrison was shelled and dive-bombed, and German assault troops tried again and again to get onto the roofs with explosives, and still the machine guns kept firing from the embrasures. When the Germans demanded surrender, the fort's commander, Major Georgios Douratsos, is remembered as answering that forts are not surrendered, they are taken.

The forts were never actually taken. The Germans simply went round them. A panzer division drove through southern Yugoslavia, which was collapsing, came down the Axios valley and entered Thessaloniki on the ninth of April. The Greek army in eastern Macedonia was cut off, its best troops still deep in Albania facing the Italians, and its commanders had no choice but to sign a capitulation. The forts were ordered to stop firing. The German commander, Field Marshal List, made no secret of his respect, and Greek accounts say the garrisons were allowed to march out with honours, their officers keeping their swords, and their flags not lowered by German hands. Some of that may be polished in the retelling, but the respect was real enough to become part of the legend.

If the headsets are free, put one on. The museum built a virtual tour of Fort Roupel, and it is a fair way to get a sense of how cramped and how dark it was in those tunnels, and how little the men inside could see of the battle they were fighting. The real fort is still there, near the border north of Serres, and you can visit it.

After that, things fell apart quickly. The army in Albania, which had fought the Italians to a standstill all winter, was now outflanked from behind and had to surrender. The prime minister who had succeeded Metaxas, who died of illness in January, was Alexandros Koryzis, and on the eighteenth of April, as the front collapsed, he shot himself. A British and Commonwealth force of some sixty thousand men, Australians, New Zealanders and British, which had landed in March to help, fought a series of rearguard actions down the length of the country, at Vevi, at the pass of Thermopylae, of all places, and then got most of its men away from the beaches of the Peloponnese by night. German troops drove into Athens on the twenty-seventh of April and raised the swastika on the Acropolis. The king and the government left for Crete. And Crete, as you'll hear around the corner, was the next target.

The parachute in the case is the clue to what made this battle different from every one before it. On the morning of the twentieth of May, nineteen forty-one, the sky over the north coast of Crete filled with hundreds of transport planes and gliders, and then with thousands of white canopies. It was the first attempt in history to take a major objective almost entirely from the air, and the man behind it, General Kurt Student, believed that his paratroopers, the Fallschirmjäger, could seize the island's airfields in a day.

The first day was a massacre, and mostly of the Germans. Paratroopers in those years jumped with little more than pistols and knives; their rifles and machine guns came down separately in canisters, and men who landed among the olive groves were shot before they could reach them. Some battalions lost more than half their strength before nightfall. The Mauser rifle here is the kind of weapon they were trying to get to, and their helmets, cut low with no brim, were designed for the jump.

And here is the part that the monument in the forecourt is about. Crete's own army division, the fifth, was not on the island. It had been sent to the mainland and was trapped there after the surrender, so the defence fell to British, Australian and New Zealand troops evacuated from Greece, a few Greek units, and the Cretans themselves. Old men came out with hunting guns and rifles left over from the uprisings against the Ottomans, with knives, with farm tools and with sticks. Priests fought, and women, and teenagers. The Germans, who had been told the Cretans would welcome them, were shocked, and the statue outside, To the Unconscripted Fighter, is for those people, who were in nobody's army.

What decided the battle was one airfield. At Maleme in the west, a New Zealand battalion on the hill overlooking the runway pulled back during the first night, in a confusion of broken radios and misread orders, and the Germans began landing planeloads of mountain troops on the runway under fire. Once they had a way in, the island was lost. Over the next week the defenders were pushed back across the White Mountains to the south coast, and the Royal Navy, losing ships to dive-bombers every day, took off as many men as it could from the little harbour at Sfakia. Many thousands were left behind. Some of them were hidden by Cretan villagers for years.

The Germans won, but at such a price, some four thousand dead lie in the German cemetery above Maleme, that Hitler never again ordered a major airborne operation. Then came the reprisals. On the second of June, at the village of Kondomari, German paratroopers lined up the men of the village and shot them, and a German army photographer recorded the whole thing; his pictures are among the most chilling of the war. The next day at Kandanos, about a hundred and eighty people were killed and the village burned to the ground, and the Germans put up a sign saying that Kandanos had been destroyed and would never be rebuilt. It was rebuilt. The sign, in a manner of speaking, is the monument now.

Before you leave the hallway, find the German war flag. It's one of many taken in the war, but on this floor it's a sort of full stop. The first floor ends here, in the spring of nineteen forty-one, with all of Greece occupied. The rest of the story, the armies in exile, the occupation and the resistance, is one floor down.

On your way down the stairs you passed a case of weapons that the Greek army has been given over the years by friendly governments, the sort of presentation pieces that change hands at state visits. Visitors have reported gold-plated submachine guns from Saudi Arabia among them, if they're still there. It's a slightly surreal way into this floor, because the story down here is about Greeks who had almost nothing and had to borrow everything.

In the spring of nineteen forty-one, as Greece fell, thousands of soldiers, sailors and airmen got out, by fishing boat, by caique across to Turkey, over the mountains of Crete, and made their way to Egypt and Palestine. They joined the large Greek communities already living in Alexandria and Cairo, and with British weapons and British uniforms they built an army in exile. These rooms are about that army and its war.

The strangest unit in it was the Sacred Band. There were so many officers among the escapers, and so few men for them to command, that colonels and captains found themselves with nothing to do. In the summer of nineteen forty-two some of them formed a company of volunteers in which officers served as private soldiers, and that September its new commander, Colonel Christodoulos Tsigantes, gave it its name. It was borrowed twice over. The first Sacred Band was the elite of ancient Thebes, three hundred men who died almost to a man fighting Philip of Macedon at Chaeronea. The second was the band of students that Alexandros Ypsilantis led into the Danubian revolt in eighteen twenty-one, which you met upstairs. Naming a commando unit after two famous last stands is a very Greek kind of optimism.

In March nineteen forty-three the Sacred Band had its first battle, in southern Tunisia, at a desert fort called Ksar Rhilane, fighting off a German armoured column alongside the Free French of General Leclerc. Then it was retrained as a raiding force, in parachuting and small boats, and for the rest of the war it worked with the British Special Boat Service in the Aegean, landing at night on German-held islands, cutting telephone lines, blowing up stores, taking prisoners and vanishing again. By the end there was hardly an island in the Dodecanese they had not visited, and in May nineteen forty-five, when the German commander of the Dodecanese signed his surrender on the island of Symi, men of the Sacred Band were among those there to see it.

Meanwhile the First Greek Brigade had gone into the line in the Western Desert. At the second battle of El Alamein, in October and November nineteen forty-two, it held a sector on the southern part of the front under a British division, and the troops facing it, by a coincidence both sides appreciated, were the Italian paratroopers of the Folgore division. For the Greeks it was a return match from Albania. Alamein turned the war in North Africa, and the plaque here is for the Greek dead who lie in the Commonwealth cemetery out in the desert there.

It's worth knowing, before you go on, that the army in exile was not a happy family. Its soldiers had all the politics of occupied Greece in their kitbags, royalists and republicans, conservatives and men who sympathised with the left-wing resistance at home, and the arguments grew sharper as the war went on. In the next room you'll see where that led.

In April nineteen forty-four, the Greek forces in Egypt mutinied. It began with petitions and committees, and it was about politics at home. In the mountains of Greece the left-wing resistance had just set up a provisional government of its own, and many soldiers in Egypt wanted the government in exile to come to terms with it, and wanted nothing more to do with the king, who had backed the Metaxas dictatorship. Ships of the navy in Alexandria were taken over by their crews. Officers loyal to the government were locked up. Churchill, who was determined that Greece would come back to the king, had British troops surround the camps, and after some weeks of standoff and some shooting the mutiny collapsed. Thousands of men were disarmed and sent to internment camps in the desert and in East Africa, and most of the Greek army in exile simply ceased to exist.

Out of what was left, about three and a half thousand men judged politically reliable, the British and the Greek government built a new unit, the Third Greek Mountain Brigade, under Colonel Thrasyvoulos Tsakalotos. It was trained in Lebanon that summer and shipped to Italy, where the Allies were grinding their way north against the German Gothic Line along the hills above the Adriatic coast.

In September nineteen forty-four the brigade was given its big task: to fight its way up the coast into Rimini, the old Roman town at the start of the Via Aemilia, alongside tanks and infantry of the New Zealand Division. For about a week the Greeks fought for the villages, the airfield and the ridges outside the town, against the German First Parachute Division, the same kind of troops the Greeks had last seen falling on Crete. It cost them dearly: more than a hundred of them lie in the Greek war cemetery at Riccione, just down the coast. On the morning of the twenty-first of September they walked into Rimini, and a committee of the town's antifascists came out and formally surrendered the city to them. The brigade was given the honorary name it carries to this day: the Rimini Brigade. There's a Greek flag, a mayor's thanks and a memorial in Rimini still, and every September the two cities remember it.

The great grey model nearby is of a German railway gun, a Krupp K5, the kind the Allied soldiers at Anzio, south of Rome, nicknamed Anzio Annie. It ran on its own railway line, hid in a tunnel by day, and came out to throw a shell weighing a quarter of a tonne more than sixty kilometres. The Greeks didn't face this particular gun, but it's here as a reminder of what the Italian campaign was like: slow, muddy, mountain by mountain, under artillery from somewhere you couldn't see.

Here's why Rimini matters to the rest of the story. Within weeks of its victory the brigade was taken back to Greece, and it marched into Athens in November nineteen forty-four as the liberated country's only reliable regular army unit. A few weeks later, as you'll hear in the Liberation room, Athens itself turned into a battlefield, and the Rimini Brigade fought against ELAS, the left-wing resistance army, in the streets of the city. The men who had been interned after the mutiny, and the men who took Rimini, had been in the same army a year before. That is one of the quiet ways this floor tells you that something worse was coming.

When the Germans came in April nineteen forty-one, the Greek navy was caught in harbour under an air force it could not fight. German dive-bombers sank ship after ship in the bays of Attica and the Saronic Gulf, a large part of the fleet and dozens of merchant ships in a matter of days. What could get away, did. About a dozen ships, destroyers, submarines and a few auxiliaries, escaped to Alexandria, and among them was the oldest and proudest of all, the armoured cruiser Averof, the flagship that had won the naval battles of the Balkan Wars. Her officers would not hear of scuttling her, and she sailed out under the noses of the Luftwaffe. She spent the rest of the war on convoy duty in the Indian Ocean, which is a long way from the Aegean, and today she's a museum ship at the Flisvos marina, down on the coast of Athens.

In exile the navy was rebuilt with ships lent by Britain, and its best story belongs to one of them, the destroyer Adrias. In October nineteen forty-three, during the British attempt to hold the Dodecanese islands after Italy changed sides, she struck a mine off Kalymnos, and the explosion tore away her entire bow, everything forward of the bridge. Twenty-one of her men were killed. A British destroyer coming to help hit another mine and sank. Her commander, Ioannis Toumbas, was ordered to abandon ship. Instead he got her, half flooded, into a bay on the neutral Turkish coast, patched her up as best his crew could, and then, at the start of December, sailed her without a bow, across waters full of German aircraft and submarines, some seven hundred nautical miles to Alexandria. When she came into harbour, the story goes, the ships of the fleet sounded their sirens and their crews lined the decks to cheer her in.

The submarines had a harder war. Several were lost, among them the Katsonis, sunk off Skiathos in nineteen forty-three in a gunfight with a German submarine chaser. Another, the Papanikolis, scored the navy's first successes of the war against Italian shipping in nineteen forty; one of her torpedoes is waiting for you outside, on the terrace.

Now the air force. In nineteen forty, the Royal Hellenic Air Force went to war against the Italians with a few dozen fighters, mostly Polish-built PZLs that were already out of date, and fought far above its weight until it had nothing left to fly. The pilots who reached Egypt were re-formed into squadrons of the Royal Air Force's Desert Air Force: the three hundred and thirty-fifth and three hundred and thirty-sixth fighter squadrons, flying Hurricanes over the desert and then Spitfires over Italy, and a light bomber squadron, the thirteenth, flying patrols over the sea. Their aircraft carried British roundels, and their pilots learned to wear two uniforms at once. You'll see some of their flying suits in the uniform corridor further along this floor.

There's a pattern in these rooms worth noticing. Every one of these units, at sea and in the air, was full of men who had escaped from an occupied country and had no idea what was happening to their families. Letters came rarely, if at all. What was happening at home is the subject of the next room, and it's the hardest one on this floor.

Find the notice printed in two languages, German and Greek, side by side. It's an announcement of executions, the kind that went up on walls all over Greece during the occupation. When a German soldier was killed, the order was that hostages would be shot in return, fifty Greeks for each German, sometimes more, and the names were posted afterwards so that everyone would know. It is a very ordinary-looking piece of paper, and that's what makes it frightening.

Greece was occupied three times over. The Germans kept Athens, Thessaloniki, Crete and the places that mattered to them; the Italians took most of the mainland and the islands; and Bulgaria annexed eastern Macedonia and Thrace, and set about making it Bulgarian. A puppet government sat in Athens. The occupiers took food, fuel, livestock and transport for their own armies, and the British blockade of the occupied continent stopped imports. Greece had always had to buy much of its grain from abroad. Within months, the cities had nothing to eat.

The winter of nineteen forty-one to nineteen forty-two in Athens and Piraeus was one of the worst famines in modern European history. The price of bread rose almost ninety times over in a year. People ate weeds, boiled grass, and cats. By December the dead were being collected from the streets each morning by municipal carts, and families hid deaths so as to keep the dead person's ration card. Nobody knows the true number, because the registers broke down, but historians estimate tens of thousands of deaths in Athens and Piraeus that winter alone, and across the whole occupation, from about a hundred thousand to as many as three hundred thousand Greeks died of hunger and the diseases that came with it. In nineteen forty-two the blockade was eased to let Red Cross grain ships in, run by neutral Sweden and Switzerland, and things got slowly less terrible.

Yet the first act of defiance in Athens came almost at once. On the night of the thirtieth of May, nineteen forty-one, two students, Manolis Glezos and Apostolos Santas, climbed the Acropolis by the old cave path on its north side, past the sleeping guards, and pulled down the swastika flag that had flown over the Parthenon for a month. The Germans sentenced them to death in absence, without knowing who they were. Glezos lived to be ninety-seven, and was still marching in protests in his nineties.

One more story belongs here, though this museum has little to say about it, and it's the darkest of all. Thessaloniki had been one of the great Jewish cities of the world for four hundred years, since Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain settled there; around fifty thousand Jews lived in the city in nineteen forty-one. From the middle of March nineteen forty-three, the Germans deported them by train to Auschwitz, some forty-six thousand people in a few months. Most were murdered on arrival. Across Greece, more than eight in every ten Greek Jews were killed, one of the highest proportions anywhere in Europe. There were people who helped. In Athens, Archbishop Damaskinos protested in writing to the Germans, and the police issued false identity cards; on Zakynthos, the story goes, the mayor and the bishop gave the Germans a list of the island's Jews that contained only their own two names. If you want the full story, the Jewish Museum of Greece, in Plaka, tells it.

In the next room, the people who fought back.

By nineteen forty-three, much of mountainous Greece was no longer really occupied at all. The Germans and Italians held the towns, the roads and the railways; the villages and the high ground belonged to the guerrillas, the andartes, and they called it Free Greece. These cases hold the clothes and personal things of some of the men who ran it, and the honest thing to say at the start is that they did not all like each other.

The biggest movement by far was EAM, the National Liberation Front, set up in September nineteen forty-one by the Communist Party together with smaller left-wing and agrarian parties. Its army, ELAS, the Greek People's Liberation Army, grew from a few bands into a force of tens of thousands, led in the field by a hard, charismatic communist organiser who called himself Aris Velouchiotis. EAM ran schools, courts and village councils across the mountains, and in the spring of nineteen forty-four it held elections for a provisional government in which, for the first time anywhere in Greece, women voted. For hundreds of thousands of people it was the most hopeful thing that had ever happened to them.

The second force was EDES, the National Republican Greek League, strongest in the mountains of Epirus, under a big, moustached, theatrical general called Napoleon Zervas; the museum looks after his old house in Athens. And the third, small but respected, was EKKA, National and Social Liberation, a republican group around Colonel Dimitrios Psarros, whose medals you can see here.

For one night they all fought together. On the twenty-fifth of November, nineteen forty-two, guerrillas of ELAS and EDES, led by Aris and Zervas, with a dozen British saboteurs who had parachuted in under Brigadier Eddie Myers, attacked the great railway viaduct at Gorgopotamos in central Greece and blew it up. It cut the line that carried supplies down to the port of Piraeus for Rommel's army in Africa, and it was one of the biggest sabotage operations anywhere in occupied Europe. The twenty-fifth of November is still remembered in Greece as the day of the National Resistance.

The occupiers answered resistance with collective punishment. At Kalavryta in the Peloponnese, on the thirteenth of December, nineteen forty-three, German troops gathered the men and boys of the town on a hillside and machine-gunned them, nearly five hundred people, and some seven hundred in the whole district; then they burned the town. At Distomo near Delphi, in June nineteen forty-four, an SS unit killed more than two hundred villagers, women and babies among them, in an afternoon. And not all the guns pointed one way. The collaborationist government raised Greek units, the Security Battalions, to hunt the left-wing guerrillas alongside the Germans.

The resistance groups turned on each other too. From late nineteen forty-three ELAS fought EDES in Epirus, and in April nineteen forty-four it attacked and destroyed EKKA. Psarros was captured and killed; whether in the heat of the fighting or murdered afterwards is still argued over. ELAS meant to come out of the occupation as the only armed force in the country, and its rivals, and the British, meant to stop it. That story is the one this museum finds hardest to tell, and it's waiting for you in the next room.

The photograph at the centre of this room shows a happy morning. The Germans pulled out of Athens on the twelfth of October, nineteen forty-four, after three and a half years, and a few days later the prime minister of the government in exile, Georgios Papandreou, arrived from Italy with British troops and went up to the Acropolis to raise the Greek flag over the city. The crowds in the streets of Athens that week were the biggest anyone had ever seen. The little pistol beside the photograph is his. He carried it in his pocket, which tells you something about how safe the politicians of nineteen forty-four expected to be.

They were right to be careful. Look at the dates on the room after this one, and you'll see that the museum's story goes straight from this happy morning to Korea in nineteen fifty. Between them, there's no section here at all for the Greek Civil War. So let's tell it, briefly and fairly, because it is the thing this whole floor has been walking towards.

On the third of December, nineteen forty-four, just seven weeks after liberation, a huge rally of supporters of EAM, the left-wing resistance front, filled Syntagma Square, and police fired into the crowd. More than two dozen people were killed. Within days ELAS fighters and the British army, with the Greek government's forces including the Rimini Brigade, were fighting street by street through Athens, for over a month. Greeks call it the Dekemvriana, the December events. British aircraft strafed districts of the city; ELAS took thousands of hostages and marched them north in midwinter, and its secret units killed people they decided were enemies. A truce at Varkiza in February nineteen forty-five disarmed ELAS, and what followed for the left was the White Terror: right-wing bands and the state took revenge, and thousands were arrested, beaten and killed. By nineteen forty-six there was war again, this time between the communist Democratic Army in the mountains and the national army, backed first by Britain and then, under the Truman Doctrine, by the United States.

It lasted until nineteen forty-nine and ended in the mountains of Grammos and Vitsi, on the Albanian border, under American-supplied aircraft; there's an American napalm bomb on the terrace outside, and napalm was dropped on those mountains too. Estimates of the dead across the whole conflict range from tens of thousands to more than a hundred and fifty thousand. Both sides took children: the Democratic Army sent thousands across the borders to communist countries, and the queen's foundation put thousands more into children's towns. Tens of thousands of leftists spent years on prison islands like Makronisos, in camps meant to re-educate them, and many fled to Eastern Europe and were not allowed home for decades. Officially, it wasn't even a civil war. Until a law of nineteen eighty-nine, the Greek state called it the war against the bandits.

Why is it missing here? This museum was founded under the colonels, whose regime defined itself by that anti-communist victory, and its story was set in the late nineteen-sixties as one of a united nation defending itself against outsiders. Historians who have studied its origins say that framework has never really been rewritten, and the museum's planned redesign with the Imperial War Museum in London may be the moment it finally is. For now, as you walk into the next room, it's worth remembering that the Greek soldiers who went to Korea in nineteen fifty had, almost all of them, just fought other Greeks.

Find the map of the voyage first, because it explains how strange this was. In the autumn of nineteen fifty, a country that had just come out of a civil war, with its villages burned and its economy in ruins, sent a battalion of infantry halfway round the world, through the Suez Canal and across the Indian Ocean, to fight in Korea under the flag of the United Nations. There were political reasons, of course. Greece wanted to be in NATO, and to show the Americans who had paid for its army that it could be counted on. But the men who went were volunteers, and they arrived in the port of Busan on the ninth of December, eight hundred and forty-nine of them, in a Korean winter that made Albania look mild.

They called themselves the Sparta Battalion. They were attached first to the American First Cavalry Division and later to the Third Infantry Division, and they quickly got a reputation among the Americans for holding on to ground in the worst conditions. In January nineteen fifty-one they held Hill three eighty-one against wave after wave of Chinese attacks through a freezing night. In October they took Scotch Hill. Many of them had fought guerrillas in the Greek mountains a year or two before, and the labels here mention that experience; it was a very particular kind of training.

The most famous of their fights, though it isn't certain it's named in this room, came at the very end of the war, in June nineteen fifty-three, at an exposed hilltop the Americans called Outpost Harry. Night after night, thousands of Chinese troops came up the slopes, and the Greek company holding it on the worst night, with the Americans, did not let it go. The Greeks renamed it Outpost Haros, after Charon, the ferryman of the dead. A plaque shared with the American Third Infantry Division was added to this room in twenty twenty-four.

Over the course of the war, ten thousand two hundred and fifty-five Greeks served in Korea, as the battalion's companies were rotated home and replaced. About a hundred and eighty-six of them were killed and more than six hundred wounded. Every one of the dead was brought home to Greece. There was an air force contingent too, a flight of seven old Dakota transport planes, which flew nearly three thousand missions, including the evacuation of wounded Marines from the Chosin Reservoir, and carried more than nine thousand wounded men out of the battle zone. It lost twelve men and two aircraft.

And now the decoration in the case. South Korea gave the Greek force its Presidential Unit Citation, and it gave its Order of Military Merit, one of its highest honours, not to a general but to the Greek unknown dead. There's a bronze bust here of one of the battalion's men, Spyridon Koutsoukos, and you'll find the force again downstairs, in the big diorama in the lobby: soldiers in the snow, and medics bent over a wounded man.

It's a small room for a long journey. The Korean War is often called the forgotten war, and for Greeks, with so much else to remember from those years, that is doubly true. In South Korea, they haven't forgotten. The Korean government has flown Greek veterans back to see the country they fought for, which went from rubble to riches in their lifetimes.

The last section of this floor is the Cyprus Hall, in two rooms, and it's worth slowing down here, because this is the most recent war in the building and, for a great many Greeks and Cypriots, it isn't quite history yet. The first room goes back a long way, with ancient and church material and a bronze helmet from Cyprus itself: a reminder that Greek was spoken on the island for some three thousand years before anyone drew a line across it. In the second room is a replica of a banner from the Cypriot rising of eighteen twenty-one. That rising barely began. In July of that year the Ottoman governor in Nicosia hanged the island's archbishop, Kyprianos, and put hundreds of leading Greek Cypriots to death, and Cyprus sat out the rest of the War of Independence. When the borders of the new Greek state were drawn, the island was left outside them.

Britain took over the running of Cyprus in eighteen seventy-eight and annexed it outright in nineteen fourteen. By the nineteen-fifties most Greek Cypriots wanted enosis, union with Greece, and in April nineteen fifty-five an underground organisation called EOKA, led by a Cypriot-born colonel of the Greek army, Georgios Grivas, opened a campaign of bombs and ambushes against British rule. Britain answered with curfews, detention camps and the gallows. Nine young EOKA fighters were hanged in Nicosia, and their faces still look down from the walls of a great many Cypriot classrooms. The campaign also killed British soldiers and civilians, and Greek Cypriots accused of working with the British, and it drove a wedge into the Turkish Cypriot minority, who wanted anything but union with Greece. The settlement of nineteen sixty gave nobody what they had fought for: not union, but an independent republic under Archbishop Makarios, with Britain keeping two military bases.

It didn't hold. Fighting between the two communities broke out at Christmas nineteen sixty-three, Turkish Cypriots withdrew into armed enclaves, and United Nations peacekeepers arrived the next spring. They are still there. Then comes the part this museum can't really avoid, because it was made in Athens. On the fifteenth of July nineteen seventy-four, the colonels' junta, by then run by the hardliner Dimitrios Ioannidis, staged a coup in Cyprus to overthrow Makarios and push the island towards union. Makarios got away. Five days later Turkey invaded, citing its right as one of the island's guarantor powers, and in a second offensive in August it took more than a third of Cyprus. Somewhere around two hundred thousand Greek Cypriots lost their homes in the north, tens of thousands of Turkish Cypriots moved the other way, and the island has been split along a ceasefire line ever since. More than fifteen hundred Greek Cypriots, and around five hundred Turkish Cypriots, were listed as missing, and families are still being handed remains identified by DNA.

The coup destroyed the regime that ordered it. Faced with a war it could not fight, the junta collapsed within days. On the twenty-fourth of July Konstantinos Karamanlis flew home from exile in Paris and was sworn in that night, and Greece has been a democracy ever since. Which brings this building's own story full circle. The colonels founded this museum and laid its foundations; less than a year after Cyprus brought them down, a civilian president opened it, in July nineteen seventy-five. And the junta's military police, Ioannidis's own power base, kept their headquarters and their cells a few hundred metres up this same avenue, in what is now called Freedom Park.

As you leave, the corridor along the east side is a long parade of uniforms, from eighteen twenty-one to the present: a fighter from the Pontus, the Greek coast of the Black Sea; leather flying suits from the First World War and the war in Asia Minor; Royal Hellenic Air Force kit from the years just before nineteen forty; naval whites. At the end is a big case of medals. Medals are the hardest things in any war museum to look at properly, because behind glass they all blur together. The trick is to pick one ribbon and imagine the single bad afternoon that earned it. Then take the stairs down to the ground floor, where the largest object in the building is waiting.

Back on the ground floor, the scene that fills one side of the lobby is the Exodus of Messolonghi, built at full scale, some fifty square metres of it, for the two hundredth anniversary of the revolution in twenty twenty-one. It's a three-dimensional version of one of the most famous paintings in Greece, by Theodoros Vryzakis, and the timing of your visit is good: this year, twenty twenty-six, is the two hundredth anniversary of the night it shows.

Messolonghi is a small town on the edge of a lagoon at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth, and it was the revolution's great fortress in western Greece. You met Lord Byron upstairs; this is where he came to spend his money and his fame on the cause, and where he died of fever in April eighteen twenty-four. A year later, in April eighteen twenty-five, an Ottoman army under Reşid Mehmed Pasha settled down in front of its earth walls. The town held out all summer and autumn. Then, in the winter, Ibrahim Pasha arrived from the Peloponnese with his Egyptian army, artillery and ships, and closed the lagoon. By the spring there was nothing left to eat. People ate the horses, then the dogs and cats, then the rats, then boiled leather and seaweed.

The defenders decided to break out. On the night of the tenth of April eighteen twenty-six, in the old calendar, some seven thousand people, fighters and townspeople together, women with children on their backs, gathered at the gates and went out across the ditch in the dark, meaning to cut through the besieging lines and reach the mountains. By most accounts the Ottoman commanders had been warned. The column was caught in the open. The story goes that someone shouted to turn back, and panic did the rest. Most of those who went out were killed or captured. Perhaps a thousand reached safety. Many of those too weak to walk had stayed behind in the town, and the story every Greek child learns is that, as the enemy came in, an old notable called Christos Kapsalis set light to the powder in the house where they had gathered, and the bishop of the town did the same at a windmill, taking themselves and the attackers with them. Whatever the exact details, Messolonghi ended in fire.

It did more for the Greek cause as a ruin than it ever had as a fortress. The news went round Europe in weeks. In Paris, Delacroix painted Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, a young woman in white kneeling on broken stone with a hand sticking out from the rubble beneath her. The poet Dionysios Solomos, who wrote the words of the national anthem, spent years on a poem called The Free Besieged, which he never finished. And the governments that had been content to watch began to feel the pressure of their own public opinion; eighteen months later, their fleets were at Navarino. The stone stele beside the diorama lists philhellenes who came from abroad to fight, many of whom are remembered in the Garden of Heroes at Messolonghi.

The painter has his own story. Vryzakis was a boy from Thebes whose father was hanged by the Ottomans in the first year of the revolution. He grew up in the orphanage founded by Kapodistrias on Aegina, was spotted there by a Bavarian scholar and taken to Munich to train, and painted his Exodus in eighteen fifty-three. The original is in the National Gallery, a short walk from here. Across the lobby, the other life-size scene shows Greek soldiers in Korea, a medic bending over a wounded man; and in the cases around you are uniforms from an officer of the eighteen-thirties to a Presidential Guard sergeant of nineteen ninety-five. When you're ready, the big arms hall opens off the lobby.

This big hall is the arms collection of Petros Saroglou, and the most famous private collection of weapons in Greece. Saroglou was an artillery officer who lived around the turn of the twentieth century; even the museum's own texts give him different dates. He spent his life and his money gathering swords, guns and armour from everywhere, and his collection came to this museum by way of the officers' club of the armed forces. Upstairs, the guns of the revolution are mostly props for the paintings. Here they are the main event, and the first thing that strikes you is how beautiful they are.

Start with the small silver boxes. These are palaskes, cartridge cases, worn on the belt or on a cord across the chest, and they were often the most valuable thing a fighter owned. They are worked in silver, embossed and chased, sometimes gilded, sometimes set with coloured glass or coral. In the Greek mountains a man carried his wealth on his body, partly for safety and partly for show, and a fighter of eighteen twenty-one went to war dressed to be seen: silver at the waist, a pair of pistols with silver grips in a broad sash, and a long gun over the shoulder.

That long gun is the karyofili, the musket of the klephts. The name is said to come from an Italian gunmaker's mark that Greeks read as a word, and it stuck to a whole family of long, slender muskets, flintlocks with barrels often longer than a metre and stocks inlaid with bone, mother of pearl or brass. They were not accurate by modern standards, but in the hands of a man who had hunted with one since boyhood, firing from behind a rock on a hillside, they were deadly enough, and the whole Greek way of fighting in eighteen twenty-one was built around them: ambush from cover, a volley, and then the swords.

And the swords are here too. The yatagan is the short, forward-curving blade with no guard and a handle that flares into two ears at the end, so it won't slip from a sweaty hand. It was the side-arm of Ottoman janissaries and of the Greeks who fought them alike, because the two sides came from the same world, wore much the same clothes and bought from the same smiths. The heavier, broad-bladed sabres are what Greeks called pales. And the guns with the trumpet-shaped muzzles are blunderbusses, trombonia, which threw a handful of shot at short range and were a favourite on ships, for clearing a deck at the moment of boarding.

Where did all this come from? Very little of it was made in what is now Greece. The finest silverwork came from the workshops of Ioannina in Epirus, and from Albania and Bosnia; good gun barrels were often imported from Italy and fitted to locally made stocks; and a great deal was simply taken from the dead after a fight, which is why the same musket can carry a Venetian barrel, an English lock and a Greek owner's initials. A fighter's weapons were patched, re-stocked and passed down for generations, so many of the guns in these cases are older than the revolution they fought in.

Then look at the Ottoman scimitars of the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, made for officers and grandees; the finest of their kind have blades of watered steel and inscriptions inlaid in gold. It's a slightly disorienting thing to find in a Greek war museum, the enemy's swords displayed with as much love as Greece's own. But that's a collector's eye for you, and it's also honest. The revolution was fought between people who shared a great deal, including a taste for very fine weapons. Saroglou's hall carries on round the corner, and the next case takes you a long way from the Peloponnese.

Saroglou collected the way people did in his day, which means everything, from everywhere, and this side of the hall is a tour of the world's armour in a few cases. Start with the most theatrical piece: the breastplate and helmet of the Russian Tsar's Horse Guard Regiment, one of the heavy cavalry regiments of the imperial guard in Saint Petersburg, dated here to between the eighteen-forties and nineteen fourteen. By then a steel breastplate was no use at all against a rifle bullet. These regiments wore them because they were the guard, they rode escort to the emperor, and they were meant to glitter. In nineteen fourteen they went to war in East Prussia, and three years later the empire they guarded was gone.

Near them are the European pieces: French noblemen's swords from the seventeen-hundreds, armour of the French cuirassiers, and cased pairs of duelling pistols, matched, balanced, and kept in fitted boxes with their powder flasks and bullet moulds. A duel was supposed to be fair, so both guns had to be the same; the elegance is the point, a very polite way of trying to kill a man at twenty paces. Look too for the wheel-locks. The wheel-lock, invented around fifteen hundred, spun a serrated steel wheel against a piece of iron pyrite, like a cigarette lighter, and threw sparks into the powder. For the first time a gun could be carried loaded and fired with one hand, and that made the pistol possible. It also made it possible to hide one, and the Holy Roman Emperor promptly tried to ban them. Wheel-locks were expensive and fiddly, and the cheaper flintlock replaced them, but for a century they were the rich man's gun.

Further on, the helmets with a spike, a sliding bar down the nose and a curtain of mail hanging behind are Persian, of a type called kulah khud, mostly from the nineteenth century. The bowls are often etched or inlaid with gold, sometimes with lines of poetry, and there are little sockets either side of the spike for plumes. They come with round shields and arm-guards of the same steel, and they make a neat bookend to the Persian axe and shield you met in the very first hall upstairs.

And at the far end of the world, the samurai armour. The label dates it to the fourteenth century, which would make it very old indeed; most Japanese armour that survives in collections is much later, from the long peace after sixteen hundred, when armour became something a family displayed as much as wore. Treat the date with caution and enjoy the object anyway. Japanese armour is built from hundreds of small lacquered plates laced together with silk cord, so that it moves with the body, and the colours of the lacing were chosen with as much care as a coat of arms. Beside it are the swords, the long katana and the shorter wakizashi worn with it, and the tsuba, the sword guards, which were made by specialist craftsmen and are often small works of art in iron, with a pine tree, a wave or a dragonfly worked into a disc the size of your palm.

It's a strange mixture to find under one roof in Athens, Russian guardsmen next to Persian helmets next to a samurai, and the reason is Saroglou himself. A collector around nineteen hundred wanted to show the whole human story of the weapon, and a Greek officer of his generation also wanted to show that Greece belonged in that story. You'll find more of his world downstairs.

This is the atrium, the open-air courtyard at the heart of the building, and it's a good place to sit for a minute. Around you are busts and statues of Greek fighters from antiquity to the twentieth century, generals and captains of the revolution, in bronze and marble, all looking resolute. Look up as well, and you can see how the architect, Thucydides Valentis, built the upper floors out wider than the ground floor, which is why people say the building looks like a mushroom.

A courtyard of heroes tells you a lot about when and why this museum was made. The idea goes back to the early nineteen-sixties, and the collection was shaped in the late sixties, under the colonels, around a story of a single nation defending itself, again and again, from Marathon to Crete. Busts are the perfect form for that story: one face, one name, one virtue each. You'll have noticed upstairs what that story leaves out, most of all the civil war, and the scholars who have studied the museum's founding say much the same thing.

The museum's emblem carries a line from the most famous war speech ever made, the funeral oration that Pericles gave for the Athenian dead in four thirty-one BC, as Thucydides records it, a speech you may have seen quoted on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Syntagma. In that same passage Thucydides describes the funeral itself: a coffin of cypress wood for each of the ten tribes, and one empty bier, carried for the missing whose bodies could not be found. Even the Athenians, with all their hero-making, kept a place for the nameless. Hold on to that thought; it comes back at the very end of the tour.

None of that makes the people on these plinths less real, and many of them did extraordinary things. But it's worth knowing that a museum is an argument as well as a collection, and this one is about to change its argument. In twenty twenty-five it signed an agreement with the Imperial War Museum in London to redesign the whole exhibition, and one of the plans is to roof over this courtyard and turn it into a new entrance hall, with a shop, a café and a library. There's no date yet, so for now the heroes still have the sky over them. When you've rested, there's one more room indoors, down in the basement, and it's one most visitors miss.

Take the stairs down towards the toilets, and keep going, because the second half of Saroglou's collection lives down here, and one visitor's verdict was that you should venture into the underground toilets and be blown away. It's a fair description. This room holds arms and armour from the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Pacific, and it's the least visited room in the building.

Start with the shields, because they show how many different answers there are to the same problem. There's one of tortoiseshell, light and surprisingly tough. There's a big African shield of buffalo hide, the kind that was soaked, stretched and dried until it would turn a spear. Cases of blades come from the Malay world, from India and from Arabia. Look for the kora, a heavy sword from Nepal and northern India, with a blade that widens towards the tip and curves forward, so the weight goes into the cut; it was a temple sword as well as a fighting one. And the jambiya, the curved dagger worn at the front of the belt from Yemen to Oman, where it was, and in places still is, as much a sign of a grown man's standing as a weapon. The quality of the hilt told you who you were dealing with, rather as the silver cartridge boxes upstairs did in the Greek mountains.

There are also cases of firing mechanisms, the locks of flintlock and percussion guns from the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, laid out the way an engineer would lay them out, to show how the idea developed: from the wheel-lock you met upstairs, to the flint striking steel, to the little copper percussion cap that made guns work in the rain. It's the dullest-looking case in the room, so most people walk straight past it, and yet it's the one that did the most to change the world, because once a gun fired reliably in any weather, the long age of the sword was over.

It's worth asking what a collector of nineteen hundred thought he was doing, gathering all this up. Part of it was the simple pleasure of fine workmanship. Part of it was the habit of the age: Europe was carving up Africa and much of Asia, and the weapons of conquered peoples were flowing into European collections as souvenirs, trophies and curiosities, often labelled with little more than a continent. A Greek officer collecting in that market was doing what officers in Paris and London did. Today museums are much more careful about where objects came from and how, and about naming the people who made them, and you may notice how thin some of the labels are down here.

Down here too are the museum's meeting rooms and lecture halls, named after Kapodistrias, Korais and Rigas Feraios, whom you met upstairs. They are used for conferences and temporary exhibitions; until the twenty-eighth of October twenty twenty-six there are small Second World War shows here, from Greek archives and from the museum's partners in London and Warsaw, so if a door is open, it's worth a look.

But the objects themselves deserve better than a basement, and someone, somewhere, made every one of them with great care. When you've seen enough, head back up and out of the main doors. The last part of the tour is outdoors, around the terraces, beginning with the strangest aircraft on the site.

The fragile thing of wood, wire and fabric among the jets is a replica of the Daedalus, a Henri Farman biplane, and a copy of the first aircraft ever flown by the Greek armed forces. Spotters argue about exactly which Farman model it represents, and it is a copy, not the original. But it's the right place to begin, because it belonged to one of the great characters of early aviation, Lieutenant Dimitrios Kamberos, known to everyone as Trelokamberos, crazy Kamberos.

Kamberos was an artillery officer, born in eighteen eighty-three, whose grandfather had fought in eighteen twenty-one from the island of Hydra. Around nineteen eleven the Greek government, watching its neighbours, decided it needed an air arm, and sent a handful of officers to France to learn to fly. Kamberos came home with a Farman called the Daedalus, after the mythical inventor who made wings for himself and his son, and on the thirteenth of May nineteen twelve made the first official military flight in Greek history. The name was a cheerful bit of nerve. The last famous Greek flight had ended with Icarus in the sea.

He wasn't quite the first Greek in the air over Greece. That honour went to a young civil engineer, Emmanouil Argyropoulos, who in February nineteen twelve flew his own little monoplane around Athens and over the Acropolis, and an hour later took the prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, up for a ride. Argyropoulos joined the military effort too, and in April nineteen thirteen he became the first Greek airman to die in a crash. These were very dangerous machines. Look at the Daedalus and you'll see the engine sits behind the pilot, pushing rather than pulling, with the pilot perched out front on what is basically a chair, so that in a crash he had a heavy engine coming forward to meet him.

Kamberos, meanwhile, wasn't content with simply being airborne. With help from a professor at the Polytechnic, he fitted the Daedalus with floats and turned it into a seaplane, and on the twenty-fourth of June nineteen twelve he flew it from Phaleron, on the Athens coast, to Hydra, his family's island. On the way back the next day he covered the distance at about a hundred and ten kilometres an hour, which was, for a couple of months, a world speed record for a seaplane. Imagine the scene: a man sitting in the open air in front of the engine, no cockpit, no instruments to speak of, skimming across the Saronic Gulf faster than any seaplane had ever gone.

A few months later it was no longer a game. The First Balkan War began in October nineteen twelve, and on the fifth of that month Kamberos flew one of the Greek army's first reconnaissance missions over the Ottoman lines in Thessaly. Early in the next year, two other Greek aviators, Michael Moutoussis and Aristeidis Moraitinis, flew a Farman seaplane over the Dardanelles to report on the Ottoman fleet, one of the first times anywhere that an aircraft worked with a navy at war. Greece, small and poor, was right at the front of the new technology.

Kamberos went on to run the military flying school after the First World War and died during the German occupation, in nineteen forty-two. His brother Notis was one of the founders of the Piraeus football club Olympiacos, so somewhere in the family there was a talent for things that go fast and draw a crowd. From this little biplane, follow the line of aircraft along the terrace. Half a century of Greek military flying stands between it and the jets.

These aircraft are the Cold War in a row, and nearly all of them are American. That's no accident. In nineteen forty-seven Britain told Washington it could no longer afford to prop up the Greek government in its civil war, and President Truman stepped in with money, weapons and advisers, the Truman Doctrine. In February nineteen fifty-two Greece joined NATO, and for the next forty years its air force flew what the United States sent it. You can read Greek history in this line almost as well as in the halls upstairs.

Start with the oldest, the North American Texan, the trainer that taught a whole generation of Western pilots to fly. Greece received them during its civil war, and the air force flew them not only as trainers but armed with rockets and machine guns, against the guerrillas in the mountains of the north. The civil war doesn't get a room inside, but this type of plane flew in it. It's a big, noisy, forgiving propeller aircraft, and pilots of many countries remember it fondly.

Then the jets arrive. The big swept-wing fighter-bomber is a Republic Thunderstreak, which carried bombs and rockets on NATO's southern flank for some thirty years. The Sabre with the black radar dome above its intake is the all-weather version that pilots called the Sabre Dog; sources disagree whether this one is the D or the closely related K model, and only an enthusiast will mind. It was built to find Soviet bombers at night and in cloud, and shoot them down with a salvo of rockets.

The slim one with the stubby little wings is the Lockheed Starfighter, the missile with a man in it, as the advertising put it. It could climb and run faster than anything else in its day, at twice the speed of sound, but its tiny wings made it unforgiving, and in West German service it crashed so often, nearly three hundred lost, that German newspapers called it the widowmaker. Greece flew it from the mid-sixties into the nineties. Next to it is the Northrop Freedom Fighter, a light, cheap fighter that the United States designed specifically for allies like Greece and Turkey, and which served in Greece for decades. And the little helicopter with the glass bubble is a Bell Sioux, the type you'll know from the opening credits of the television series MASH, carrying wounded men in Korea on stretchers bolted to its sides.

Walk the line from the Texan to the Starfighter and notice the leap. Barely twenty years separate the designs, and in that time fighters went from a propeller and a top speed of a little over three hundred kilometres an hour to rockets, radar and twice the speed of sound. Greek pilots had to keep pace, and many of them learned to fly these types in the United States before bringing them home.

One aircraft is missing. For decades a Spitfire stood in this courtyard: Mark Nine MJ seven five five, built in Britain in nineteen forty-three, one of about seventy-seven Spitfires given to Greece after the war. It flew for the last time in nineteen fifty-three and was put on display, first at the air base at Tatoi and then here. In nineteen ninety-five it went to the new Hellenic Air Force Museum north of Athens, and it was taken apart, shipped to Biggin Hill in England, rebuilt, and on the nineteenth of January twenty twenty it flew again, for the first time in sixty-six years. In twenty twenty-one it came home to Greece, and it has flown over Athens since. So if you wanted to see the most famous plane that ever stood on this terrace, you would have to look up.

The long, dark cylinder lying here is a British twenty-one-inch torpedo, and it came from the Greek submarine Papanikolis, which has one of the best stories of the winter of nineteen forty. Papanikolis was built in France in the nineteen-twenties and was already elderly and cramped when Mussolini attacked Greece. She was named after Dimitrios Papanikolis, a hero of the revolution who burned an Ottoman ship of the line with a fireship in eighteen twenty-one, which gives you a sense of what the navy expected of her.

In December nineteen forty, under Lieutenant Commander Miltiadis Iatridis, she slipped up the Adriatic towards the Albanian coast, where Italy was pouring men and supplies into the war in the mountains. On the twenty-second of December, according to most accounts, she sank an Italian motor ship, and on the twenty-third, near the island of Sazan off the port of Vlorë, she torpedoed the troop transport Firenze, of nearly four thousand tons. In a winter when the army filled every front page, the navy suddenly had a hero of its own. When the Germans came in April nineteen forty-one, Papanikolis escaped to Egypt with the rest of the fleet, and from there she carried commandos and agents to occupied Crete and the islands. Her hull was scrapped after the war, but her conning tower survives, in the maritime museum at Piraeus.

The pale blue thing that looks like a torpedo with seats is something different, a swimmer delivery vehicle built by an Italian firm in Livorno. Two divers in breathing gear ride it underwater to a harbour, and do whatever needs doing to the ships inside. It's the descendant of a famous Italian wartime idea. In December nineteen forty-one, Italian frogmen rode slow-running torpedoes of this kind into the harbour at Alexandria, the same harbour where the Greek fleet was sheltering, and fixed charges that put two British battleships on the bottom. After the war the Italians kept building such craft and selling them, and the Greek navy's special forces used four of them from the late nineteen-seventies to the mid-nineties. It's a nice twist for a navy that had sat in Alexandria harbour in nineteen forty-one while the Italians tried the idea out on its hosts.

Also on the terrace are a German naval mine from the First World War, a depth-charge launcher, and the fire-control and radar sets of a Second World War ship, the brains that went with the guns. The long, rounded canister nearby is an American napalm bomb, a later model of the weapon the Greek air force first dropped on its own mountains in the last battles of the civil war, in nineteen forty-eight and forty-nine. And then the tall white missiles. The Nike, labelled in Greek with the name of the hero Ajax, was the first guided anti-aircraft missile to enter service anywhere, designed in America in the early nineteen-fifties to shoot down Soviet bombers before they reached a city. Its successor, the HAWK, was built to catch lower, faster aircraft. Missiles like these stood in batteries around Greek bases and cities through the Cold War, pointing at a war that, mercifully, never came.

It's a good spot to think about the difference between the two ends of this terrace. The torpedo was fired in anger by men whose names we know. The missiles never were. Most of what a modern armed force owns is meant to be a reason for nobody to attack, and the best possible outcome for any of it is to end up here, on a plinth, admired by schoolchildren. One last terrace to go, round on the south side, where the guns are.

The south terrace is a crowd of guns, and you can spend a long time here sorting out who made what for whom. Start with the light mountain guns, because they are the most Greek objects outside. One is a Schneider-Danglis, made in France by Schneider but designed in large part by a Greek artillery officer, Panagiotis Danglis, who first worked on the idea in the eighteen-nineties. It was built to be taken apart into loads that a mule could carry up a mountain track, and then put back together and fired; in a country that is mostly mountains, that mattered more than range or calibre. It was the Greek army's mountain gun from the Balkan Wars through to nineteen forty. Danglis himself became a general, and in nineteen sixteen he joined Venizelos and Admiral Kountouriotis in the rebel government at Thessaloniki that dragged Greece into the First World War.

The odd squat steel pillbox on wheels is a Fahrpanzer, an armoured turret designed in Germany in the eighteen-nineties and built by Krupp. It had no engine. It was pulled by horses, or pushed along rails, into a prepared emplacement, and there two men sat inside it, cramped beyond belief, with a quick-firing gun of about fifty-seven millimetres, according to the label. Visitors' counts differ as to whether there's one here or two. The label says this one was Bulgarian and was captured by the Greek army in nineteen eighteen, the year the Macedonian front finally broke and Bulgaria dropped out of the war. Nearby are a South African-built Marmon-Herrington armoured car of the Second World War, and the turret of a British Centaur tank of the kind the Greek army used after the war.

And then there's the one I wanted to end with: a Škoda seventy-five millimetre mountain gun, made at Plzeň, whose carriage is riddled with shrapnel holes. It was cleaned up for display by an army workshop in twenty eighteen, but nobody chose to fill the holes. What nobody seems to know is its story: where it was hit, in which war, and what happened to the crew who were standing around it when the shell burst. Škoda mountain guns were hauled by mule and by hand up into the Albanian mountains in the winter of nineteen forty by both sides, Greek and Italian, so we can't even be sure which army it served. A gun crew stands close to its gun, so whatever made those holes in the steel almost certainly made holes in men too.

It's the right object to finish on. You've just walked through three thousand years of Greek war, and almost all of it was arranged around names: Themistocles, Kolokotronis, Bouboulina, the Sacred Band, Papanikolis. The building was conceived, in the nineteen-sixties, as a hall of heroes, and the heroes are real. But most of the people who fought these wars left nothing behind that anyone could put in a case. They are the crew of this gun. We don't know their names, which side they were on, or whether they lived. That isn't a failure of the museum. It's simply what war mostly is, and it's worth carrying out of the gate with you.

That's the end of the tour. The museum café was put out to new tender this summer, so it may or may not be open when you visit; if not, Kolonaki is a short walk uphill, and there's no better place in Athens to sit for an hour over a freddo espresso and think about what you've seen.