The Hellenic orogeny is a collective noun referring to multiple mountain building events that shaped the topography of the southern margin of Eurasia into what is now Greece, the Aegean Sea and western Turkey, beginning in the Jurassic.
As the two continents continued to break up, Gondwana, pushed by divergent boundaries developing elsewhere, began to drift to the north, closing the sea.
Tectonic activity resumed in the early Cenozoic when the small Apulia plate collided with the Cimmerian-Eurasian rocks causing intense imbrication and the deposition of the Pindos flysch.
The final phase of the process came in the Miocene and Pliocene, during the Mesogean orogeny, when the combined Mesogean-African plate subducted beneath what is now Greece, the Aegean and parts of western Turkey.
[2] Apatite and zircon analysis in the southern Aegean suggests that metamorphism in the Cenozoic phase of the orogeny never exceeded 300 degrees Celsius.