Greece is a country in southeast Europe, on the Mediterranean Sea. Its capital is Athens. It is a member of the EU. About eleven million people lived there in 2014; the number moves a little with time. The land is mountains, a long coast, and a great many islands — and those islands, with the old cities, draw huge numbers of tourists. When people say Greece they may mean the modern country, with its present life and government; or they may be thinking of ancient Greece, whose ideas about how to live together, how to think, how to make art and buildings and stories and science, still shape how Europe thinks. Those two “Greeces” get mixed in speech, though actually they are thousands of years apart. English took the name through French and Latin, from an ancient Greek name for the people, and mostly stopped using the older English name Greekland. Formal when you talk about the state; warm and ordinary when you talk about a holiday there.