Greece the Hellenic Republic also known as Hellas, is a country located in Southeast Europe. Its population is 10.7 million as of 2018. Situated on the southern tip of the Balkan Peninsula, Greece is located at the crossroads of Europe and Africa, it shares land borders with Albania to the northwest, North Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, Turkey to the northeast. The Aegean Sea lies to the east of the mainland, the Ionian Sea to the west, the Cretan Sea and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. Greece has the longest coastline on the Mediterranean Basin and the 11th longest coastline in the world at 13,676 km in length, featuring many islands, of which 227 are inhabited. Eighty percent of Greece is mountainous, with Mount Olympus being the highest peak at 2,918 metres; the country consists of nine traditional geographic regions: Macedonia, Central Greece, the Peloponnese, Epirus, the Aegean Islands, Thrace and the Ionian Islands. Greece is considered the cradle of Western civilisation, being the birthplace of democracy, Western philosophy, Western literature, political science, major scientific and mathematical principles, Western drama and the Olympic Games.

From the eighth century B. C. the Greeks were organised into various independent city-states, known as poleis, which spanned the entire Mediterranean region and the Black Sea. Philip of Macedon united most of the Greek mainland in the fourth century BC, with his son Alexander the Great conquering much of the ancient world, from the eastern Mediterranean to India. Greece was annexed by Rome in the second century B. C. becoming an integral part of the Roman Empire and its successor, the Byzantine Empire, which adopted the Greek language and culture. The Greek Orthodox Church, which emerged in the first century A. D. transmitted Greek traditions to the wider Orthodox World. After falling under Ottoman dominion in the mid-15th century, Greece emerged as a modern nation state in 1830 following a war of independence; the country's rich historical legacy is reflected in part by its 18 UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Greece is a unitary parliamentary republic and developed country with an advanced high-income economy, a high quality of life, a high standard of living.

Its economy is the largest in the Balkans. A founding member of the United Nations, Greece was the tenth member to join the European Communities and has been part of the Eurozone since 2001, it is a member of numerous other international institutions, including the Council of Europe, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Trade Organization, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie. Greece's unique cultural heritage, large tourism industry, prominent shipping sector and geostrategic importance classify it as a middle power; the native name of the country in Modern Greek is Ελλάδα. The corresponding form in Ancient Greek and conservative formal Modern Greek is Ἑλλάς; this is the source of the English alternate name Hellas, found in archaic or poetic contexts today. The Greek adjectival form ελληνικός is sometimes translated as Hellenic and is rendered in this way in the formal names of Greek institutions, as in the official name of the Greek state, the Hellenic Republic.

The English names Greece and Greek are derived from Latin Graecia, which in turn originates from Ancient Greek Γραικός and meant'the land of the Greeks'. The earliest evidence of the presence of human ancestors in the southern Balkans, dated to 270,000 BC, is to be found in the Petralona cave, in the Greek province of Macedonia; the Apidima Cave in Mani, in southern Greece, contains the oldest remains of anatomically modern humans outside of Africa, dated to 210,000 years ago. All three stages of the Stone Age are represented for example in the Franchthi Cave. Neolithic settlements in Greece, dating from the 7th millennium BC, are the oldest in Europe by several centuries, as Greece lies on the route via which farming spread from the Near East to Europe. Greece is home to the first advanced civilizations in Europe and is considered the birthplace of Western civilisation, beginning with the Cycladic civilization on the islands of the Aegean Sea at around 3200 BC, the Minoan civilization in Crete, the Mycenaean civilization on the mainland.

These civilizations possessed writing, the Minoans writing in an undeciphered script known as Linear A, the Mycenaeans in Linear B, an early form of Greek. The Mycenaeans absorbed the Minoans, but collapsed violently around 1200 BC, along with other civilizations, during the regional event known as the Bronze Age collapse; this ushered from which written records are absent. Though the unearthed Linear B texts are too fragmentary for the reconstruction of the political landscape and can't support the existence of a larger state, contemporary Hittite and Egyptian records suggest the presence of a single state under a "Great King" based in mainland Greece; the end of the Dark Ages is traditionally dated to the year of the first Olympic Games. T

Gabriola Island is one of the Gulf Islands in the Strait of Georgia in British Columbia, Canada. It is about 5 kilometres east of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, to which it is linked by a 20-minute ferry service, it has a land area of about 57.6 square kilometres and a resident population of over 4,000. Gabriola has public beaches and forests, shopping centres, restaurants, a library, an elementary school and a museum, its is known as the Isle of the Arts due to its high percentage of working artists, its many cultural events include annual festivals related to art, gardens, music and fishing. The Gabriola Arts Council produces three large annual events: the Isle of the Arts Festival, Gabriola Theatre Festival and Thanksgiving Studio Tour. Gabriola is part of the traditional territory of the Snunéymux; the earliest archeological record on Gabriola is a cave burial dated to about 1500 BCE. The pre-contact population of Gabriola is difficult to estimate, but in mid-Marpole times—between about 0 and 1000 CE—several thousand people lived in the village at False Narrows, the site of today's El Verano Drive.

Archaeologists have found that infant mortality at that time was low and that the population was well adapted to its environment. Other smaller villages on Gabriola were scattered around the coast. After contact, as early as 1500 CE, the population of the Snunéymux declined drastically from smallpox and other diseases brought to North America by Europeans; the island is famous for its petroglyphs, while believed to be thousands of years old, are impossible to date. Because they are carved in soft sandstone, they are eroding rapidly; the first European visit to Gabriola was by the Spanish schooner Santa Saturnina under José María Narváez in 1791. Narváez is said to have given the name Punta de Gaviola to the southeastern end of the island, it may have been Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, rather than Narváez, who bestowed the name. Over time, "Gaviola" may have been applied to the whole island. Gaviola is sometimes said to be a misspelling of gaviota, but it may refer to the Spanish surname Gaviola.

In 1792, the island was again visited under Galiano and Valdés. Galiano and Valdés stayed at Pilot Bay for several days, to repair their vessels and explore the vicinity of what is now Nanaimo, they called the anchorage Cala del Descanso. This site was wrongly identified as the present Descanso Bay by British cartographers; the British expedition of George Vancouver may have visited the island briefly in 1792. While the Spanish explored and charted the Strait of Georgia, they left no permanent settlements. In 1827, fur traders of the Hudson's Bay Company established a post at Fort Langley on the Fraser River, but no Europeans settled in the Nanaimo area until the discovery of coal there in 1852. From the mid-1850s on, coal miners and ex-gold miners began to move to Gabriola, where they started farms to supply the growing population of Nanaimo. By 1874, 17 settlers were working the land on Gabriola, two-thirds of those had First Nations wives and young families. In the early 20th century, the population of Gabriola grew slowly.

By the 1950s, fewer than 400 people lived full-time on the island. Electricity came to Gabriola in 1955, but then the population grew only about one percent a year until the 1970s. In the next 10 years, the population tripled, in part due to hippie immigration from the United States. By the mid-1980s, the population was half the current figure. In summer, the island's population increases. In the first half of the 20th century, families came from Nanaimo or Vancouver to spend weeks or months living a simpler, rural life on the island. In the 21st century, about 2,000 "summer people" come to Gabriola each year for the sun, music and relaxed pace, they raise the population temporarily to about 6,000. Apart from farming, Gabriola experienced industrial development in the 20th century. A brickyard produced 80,000 high-quality bricks a day in the early part of the century, they were sent principally to Victoria and Vancouver; the brickyard ceased functioning in the 1950s. In the 1890s and early twentieth century, sandstone blocks were cut from a quarry near Descanso Bay and shipped for architectural use in public buildings in Vancouver and Victoria.

In the early- to mid-1930s, millstones were cut from the sandstone and sent to towns along the west coast and as far away as Finland for use in the pulp and paper industry. A small diatomaceous earth industry flourished in the 1930s. After World War II, the shipyard at Silva Bay became the major employer on the island until the 1970s. Gabriola, part of the Regional District of Nanaimo, is the most northerly of the Southern Gulf Islands in the Strait of Georgia between mainland BC to the east and Vancouver Island to the west; the Gulf Islands are an archipelago consisting of hundreds of islands of various sizes stretching from the San Juan Islands in the United States to the Northern Gulf Islands, north of Gabriola. The biggest of the Southern Gulf Islands are Gabriola Island, Galiano Island, Kuper Island and South Pender Island, Saltspring Island, Saturna Island, Thetis Island, Valdes Island; the Southern Gulf Islands consist of former seabed sediments crumpled and thrust upward by tectonic plate movement between 55 to 42 million years ago.

Subsequent periods of glaciation scraped away topsoil and some of the bedrock. During the peak of the Fraser Glaciation, 30,000 to 11,000 years ago, Gabriola was covered with ice up to 2 kilometre

Basqueian is a Canadian Thoroughbred racehorse best known for winning two of the 1994 Canadian Triple Crown races. Basqueian raced by prominent businessman and major stable owner Frank Stronach. Racing at age three in 1994, at Toronto's Woodbine Racetrack Basqueian finished second by less than a nose to Bruce's Mill in the 1994 Plate Trial Stakes; the two horses reversed their positions in Canada's most prestigious race, the Queen's Plate. The win was the first in the Queen's Plate for trainer Dan Vella and the second for jockey Jack Lauzon; the two horses again ran one-two in the second leg of the Canadian Triple Crown, the Prince of Wales Stakes, this time Bruce's Mill came out on top. In the final leg of the series, Basqueian won on turf in the Breeders' Stakes; that same year, he won the first of three straight editions of the Durham Cup. Basqueian went on to race in the United States. In 1995, he won his second Durham Cup and at the Hawthorne Race Course near Chicago, ran second in the Hawthorne Gold Cup.

His performances that year earned him the 1995 Sovereign Award for Champion Older Male Horse. In 1997 at Monmouth Park in Oceanport, New Jersey, Basqueian won the Red Bank Handicap and Longfellow Stakes Retired from racing with earnings in excess of $1 million, Basqueian, a gelding, now serves as a pony horse used to calm the young colts and fillies undergoing race training at owner Frank Stronach's Adena Springs South in Williston, Florida. Basqueian's pedigree and partial racing stats Article in the September 2008 issue of The Florida Horse