Product Description
INTRODUCTION With well over a hundred inhabited islands and a territory that stretches from the south Aegean to the Balkan countries, 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. 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. Of course there are formal cultural activities as well: museums that shouldn?t be missed, magnificent medieval mansions and castles, as well as the great ancient sites dating from the Neolithic, Bronze Age, Minoan, Classical, Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine eras. Greece hosts some excellent summer festivals too, bringing international theatre, dance and musical groups to perform in ancient theatres, as well as castle courtyards and more contemporary venues in coastal and island resorts. But the call to cultural duty will never be too overwhelming on a Greek holiday. The hedonistic pleasures of languor and warmth ? going lightly dressed, swimming in balmy seas at dusk, talking and drinking under the stars ? are just as appealing. And despite recent improvements to the tourism "product", Greece is still essentially a land for adaptable sybarites, not for those who crave orthopedic mattresses, faultless plumbing, Cordon-Bleu cuisine and attentive service. Except at the growing number of luxury facilities in new or restored buildings, hotel and pension rooms can be box-like, campsites offer the minimum of facilities, and the food at its best is fresh and uncomplicated.
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The Rough Guide to Greece
- Paperback: 1160 pages (2002-03-28)
- Publisher: Rough Guides; 2002-04-01
- Label: Rough Guides
- Studio: Rough Guides
- ISBN: 1858288665
- Average Customer Review:
 based on 5 reviews
- Sales Rank in Books: #1489971
Avg. Customer Review:
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Just OK 2001-09-04
Comment: This review compares the Lonely Plantet Greece (4th Edition) with the Rough Guide Greece (8th edition). We spent 2.5 weeks in July, 2001 in Greece, our first visit, and these were our guide books.
A relucant 4 stars to each, and a slight preference for RG. We certainly found the books serviceable, and they gave us good ideas of where in Greece we wanted to go. But they were much less valuable in their listings for individual destinations. They were the least valuable compared to the other LP and RG travel books we've used (Portugal, Italy, Thailand, Tokyo).As usual, they both overstate their hotel rankings which to me make sense only if you've been sleeping out on the beach from necessity, and now have finally scraped some money together for a room. An exagerration, but I've lost patience with gushing praise for facilities which are usually no better than serviceable and sometimes less than that. And, we're not into spending money on fancy accommodations. Occassionaly the books are on the money, but often not. On the smaller islands RG usually had more accommodation listings, but occassionally LP did. There were at least two instances when LP had none, just saying that rooms were available. The ferry schedules in the books, pretty much consistent between them, bore little relation to reality, even though we were there in the high season. I want to complete with my usual gripe about these and other guide books: we don't know which restaurants and hotels were actually visited by the writers (and by which one) and when. To paraphrase from my review of RG Portugal: LP is out front in saying that its reviewers do not stay at all the hotels or eat at all the restaurants they list. I would like it if the reviews would be initialized by the reviewers with the date. This would allow us to learn each reviewer's tastes and standards, not to mention seeing which places they actually visited. One LP writer (not I think an author of this book) in discussing restaurants wrote: "As one of those LP writers I can tell you that it is not physically possible to eat even a 'little bit of a meal' in each of those restaurants :-) What we all tend to do is eat at a broad cross-section within the norms of natural eating times and visit the other restaurants and talk to the owner or even the diners if it can be done discretely. In the same vein we don't sleep at every hotel!" Talk to the owners for your evaluation! Says it all.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Comprehensive, concise, relevant, practical! 2001-05-21
Comment: We just came back from a 3 weeks, modest-budget, partly backpacking, partly car-rental trip around Rhodes, Crete, and Peloponnese. We deliberately stayed off the beaten tracks as much as possible. We used this guide along with French "Guide du Routard" and Michelin guides. I picked this guide against the Lonely Planet one based on an excellent experience with the Corsica rough guide last year. This Rough Guide was above all very practical -- it simply is amazingly detailed, and what's more, it's mostly right. The rooms , hotels, and restaurants suggested were spot on. Very few outdated entries. This guide also includes much relevant background info on Greek history, politics, food, an so on. This made for a much more interesting trip. The paper was very thin yet high quality, making this guide even more worth its space in my pack. This is definitely not the guide for organized tours -- the authors make no secret of their disdain for package tourism and the spoiling it often brings. But, for the independent traveller, this is the best guide I have found in English or French.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating:
Summary: Capable enough to get you through high tide... 2001-01-25
Comment: Most of my friends often recommend the Lonely Planet books, especially for those of us who can't mortgage our homes for one-night stays in hotels listed by Frommer's and Fodor's guides. But I went with Rough Guide for my trip last summer to Greece, and while some of the maps weren't as detailed as they could might have been, most of the recommendations were spot on. Many nightspots get renovated; names get changed, etc. That's something the editors can't really help with. But any restaurant or bar I went to (listed in the guide) was above-average, if not better than they claimed. The historical data was also well-balanced; so you're not bored to tears with it, and yet it's detailed enough to keep you reading through it. Bonus marks for the great inclusion of the Greek music coverage (flawed, but excellent), and the price of the book is decent.
44 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating:
Summary: Brilliant! The best of the Greece books 1999-03-31
Comment: A terrific guide to both the Greek mainland and the islands. Spent several months trawling around the country, at first with several guide books, Fodors, Rough Guide, Lonely Planet, etc., but finally found that the Rough Guide knew the country best, and made for a more entertaining travel companion, so I ditched the other books about three weeks into the trip. Absolutely the only book for Greece if you (a) like good food and nightlife and (b) have a serious interest in the cultural context of Ancient Greece. Plus their commentary on modern Greek history was very helpful, must admit I didn't know much about it until I arrived. You can't go wrong with this book.
21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating:
Summary: humorous, informative, and insightful 1998-02-28
Comment: If you like self-depreciating English humor, you'll like the Rough guide to Greece. This book is densely packed with informative and interpretive pages. Not like the Fodor's, etc. which are mostly pretty pictures and ads disguised as recommendations. Even the most biting commentary turned out to be true. I consider this book to have been crucial to a very sucessful vacation/tour.
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The Rough Guide to Greece
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