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If I am not mistaken, topographic maps of Greece at the scale
1:50,000 are indeed strictly forbidden for export, to the extent that
we are talking about Greek national topographic maps (produced by the
Greeks themselves).  The Russians, the Turks, and of course NIMA also
produce 1:50,000-scale military-edition topographic maps of Greece.
I have never seen the latter two series, but the Russian (Soviet)
series has been on the market for some time, albeit not with the
permission of anyone in Russia.  Rather, all such maps made
available are at some point the result of smuggling
operations--1:50,000-scale topographic maps in paper format are
expressly illegal to export from Russia at present.  The
only exceptions to the best of my knowledge are in the cases where
customers would like to order individual sheets from the Russians in
either raster or vector format, in which case prices are very, very
high.
 
The same thing, by the way, holds true for Turkish territory at the
scale of 1:50,000.
 
And the situation gets crazier still with military-edition city plans
at scales of 1:10,000 and 1:25,000, which are now systematically
becoming available.  Military-edition topo maps are, after all,
military weapons of sorts.
 
My own feeling is "caveat emptor" when one considers travelling to
countries like this with the increasingly available large-scale
Russian topos.  I have not yet heard of any horror stories among our
customers, but to our knowledge we haven't yet sold to any
"soldier-of-fortune" types.  The very safest thing to do would be to
scan the needed portions of the maps into files readable on a laptop,
or better yet, have the data in vector form.  But this is still not
too practical for most folks.  Still, I think that most folks would
not face too serious of problems (confiscation at worst) for having,
say, 1:50k Russian topos of Greek territory in their possession in
Greece, as long as they appeared to be bona fide tourists, academic
researchers, or businesspersons.
 
Cheers,
 
Kent D. Lee
East View Cartographic
 
 
Kent D. Lee
East View Cartographic, Inc.
http://www.eastview.com