Exploring Hot, Strongly Interacting Matter with the PHENIX Experiment at RHIC

This work summarizes the context and the main milestones of RHIC achievements which culminated in the official announcement of the discovery of the perfect fluid in 2005 and the strongly interacting Quark Gluon Plasma in February 2010. Also several subfields including Bose-Einstein correlation measurements of the bulk matter in PHENIX and connected theoretical work, as well as PHENIX measurements of soft and hard photon and hadron properties are reported.