But these cultural differences are not the sole source of British misapprehension of Greece. It is, of course, in the nature of most tourism to focus on a country’s timeless aspects — its safely-past history, or its nature — rather than its political near-past and present. This is especially the case if the latter are painful, and/or the climate is pleasant; one visits Berlin, for example, in a different kind of tourist mode. In Greece, this dynamic is exaggerated by the fact that many tourists visit the islands, where contemporary political and economic events are less manifest than in Athens. I would say that in Greece, by European standards, there is a particularly great discrepancy between the apolitical idyll purveyed by the likes of Gerald Durrell and experienced by many visitors, and the exceptional grimness of its 20th- and 21st-century history.

I was on a steep learning curve on my first visit, when I approached it as a country that had had its rough patches in the 20th century, certainly, but which but was now essentially one among other picturesque South European countries; not as rich as north Europe, to be sure, but not so different either. It was in small details that I realised that I was wrong, and that I whiffed not so much the Middle East as Latin America. The man with the machine gun who stood on permanent guard outside the house next to my future parents-in-law, which was inhabited by a former minister. The holes in the traffic signs part way up Mount Hymettus, which I slowly, horrifyingly, realised had been made by bullets. The ubiquity and anger of the grafitti of central Athens. The high, barbed wall which surrounded the villa of the  family lawyer, despite the fact that it was located inside a gated community that was itself surrounded by a high, barbed wall. In explanation of this last, my husband told me about November 17 — a terrorist organisation named after the date of the 1973 student uprising against the junta, which every year had published a hit-list of wealthy Greeks in the national press. It was understood that if these targets left Greece they were safe, but of those who stayed, two would be killed each year. My mother-in-law herself had witnessed two such assassinations — drive-by motorbike shootings in the Athenian district of Kolonaki. All these were aspects of modern Greece that my Greece-loving friends and relatives, with their taste for retsina and rembetika, seemed to have missed or overlooked.