The Travel Agent (UK)

Bargain Holidays to Greece and Greek Islands

With well over a hundred inhabited islands and a territory that stretches from the south Aegean to the Balkan countries, a bargain holiday in Greece offers enough to fill months of travel. The historic sites span four millennia, encompassing both the legendary and the obscure, where a visit can still seem like a personal discovery. Beaches are parcelled out along a convoluted coastline equal to France's in length, and islands range from backwaters where the boat calls twice a week to resorts as cosmopolitan as any in the Mediterranean.

Greece offers many cheap holiday deals, and Modern Greece is the result of extraordinarily diverse influences . Romans, Arabs, Latin Crusaders, Venetians, Slavs, Albanians, Turks, Italians, not to mention the Byzantine Empire, have been and gone since the time of Alexander the Great. All have left their mark:

• the Byzantines in countless churches and monasteries;
• the Venetians in impregnable fortifications in the Peloponnese;
• and other Latin powers, such as the Knights of Saint John and the Genoese, in imposing castles across the northeastern Aegean.
• Most obvious is the heritage of four centuries of Ottoman Turkish rule which, while universally derided, contributed substantially to Greek music, cuisine, language and way of life.
• Significant, and still-existing, minorities - Vlachs, Muslims, Catholics, Jews, Gypsies - have also helped to forge the hard-to-define but resilient Hellenic identity , which has kept alive the people's sense of themselves throughout their turbulent history.

With no local ruling class or formal Renaissance period to impose superior models of taste or patronize the arts, medieval Greek peasants, fishermen and shepherds created a vigorous and truly popular culture, which found expression in the songs and dances, costumes, embroidery, carved furniture and the white Cubist houses of popular imagination.

During the last few decades much of this has disappeared under the impact of Western consumer values, relegated to museums at best, but recently the country's architectural and musical heritage in particular have undergone a renaissance, with buildings rescued from dereliction and performers reviving, to varying degrees, half-forgotten musical traditions.

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Other holiday destinations within the European holiday section;

Corfu o Crete o Cyprus o Disneyland Paris o France o Fuerteventura o Canary Islands
Gran Canaria o Greece o Ibiza o Italy o Lanzarote o Majorca o Menorca o Spain o Tenerife Turkey