Then in 1832 they got the Germans, in the shape of a Bavarian princeling Otto, become Othon, with a team of advisers known as the "bavarocracy". By 1862 the Orthodox Greeks had enough of the Catholic Othon and deposed him, choosing instead a gentler Dane, George I. More wars ensued as the fledgling Greek state backed ethnic Greek uprisings against the Ottomans from Crete to Macedonia. The Germans returned in 1941 to bail out their Italian ally whose forces had invaded Greece and been defeated the year before.  Unpaid reparations for the havoc the Nazis caused during their occupation clearly rankle still. 

Conditions in contemporary Greece are very grim, as one can see from the numbers of elderly ladies silently begging for their family's next meal. Indeed, the unsung heroism of the elderly has become a pan-European phenomenon. In Spain, care homes report record numbers of vacancies as their aged occupants are retrieved so that three generations can subsist from a single pension. It's bad too at the bottom end of the age scale, with Greek children falling asleep at school because of lack of food. 

The Greeks are fully aware of their own responsibility for their predicament, much of it attributable to a corrupt political class.Interestingly, several Greeks acknowledged that Margaret Thatcher had been right all along in rejecting the rigidities of a euro whose main beneficiaries have been German exporters selling expensive products to southerners flooded with cheap money. Which companies, they asked, had most benefited from the huge infrastructural improvements you can see all around you?