2000 years. Greece separated by 500km of barbarian-slavic speaking territory from just as despised if not more, Latin. Vulgar Latin that is, real Rome is a hefty 2000Km from here.
Takes looking at Australia map superimposed upon Europe to realize why Turkey is so important. 90% of the economy at some point was concentrated in just that area.
That's hard to beat indeed. We had 2 world wars and some Barbary pirates around but gotta admit cannot beat Crocodile Dunde.