One curious feature of the Greek economic crisis is, despite the impression of unrelenting gloom, tourism has increased this year.
Dramatic footage of anti-austerity riots, and fears about crime, may have seriously affected visits to Athens.
But beyond the capital, the country has profited from its traditional allure, doubtless aided by the impact of the Arab Spring on Egyptian and Tunisian tourism.
A second strange element of the crisis is that for years, no one saw it coming. For the first half of the past decade, Greece gave the appearance of being one of the euro zone's more robust economic performers.
Foreign investment flowed into the country as the economy grew at an annual rate of more than 4 per cent. Even the simultaneous growth of public deficits failed to dull the shine; this had been familiar since the fall of the military junta in 1974.
But maintaining growth and managing debt depended on the strength of the key sectors of shipping and tourism, and both entered sharp decline as the world first began to be hit by economic downturn in 2007.
Trust in the country's leadership disintegrated amid allegations of systematically misleading statistics and concealment of the true scale of borrowing.
And by 2009, Greece's debt mountain was already estimated at €300 billion (Dh1.56 trillion) and it was among four euro-zone nations, in the company of Spain, Ireland and France, ordered by the EU to reduce budget deficits.
But the Greek deficit soared to more than 12 per cent of GDP, four times the EU-sanctioned maximum, and a damaging Brussels report accused the Athens authorities of serious accounting irregularities.
Tough austerity measures led to violence on the streets and, after emergency loans, the first bailout - a €110bn deal devised by the EU and IMF - was approved in May last year.
Yet Greece is only one of 17 states trading in euros. Why should its domestic difficulties, however acute - indebtedness having continued to grow to the current estimate of €350bn - have prompted such risk of contagion?
And why have the best financial brains in the world - from luminaries of the private sector and individual governments to experts at the IMF and European Central Bank - so far proved unequal to the task of resolving the immediate issues and removing the wider threat?
As euro-zone leaders prepared for yesterday's Brussels summit, one experienced commentator based in the city that is capital of both Belgium and the EU offered an assessment.
Peter Spiegel, the Brussels bureau chief of the Financial Times, portrayed the crisis in alarming terms: a debt burden that could rise to 172 per cent of Greece's GDP and potentially never be repaid.
But, he argued, the confusion that clouded debate on what should have been straightforward agreement on a second bailout stemmed from "interlocking, and sometimes conflicting, problems facing European leaders", aggravated by the different and sometimes mutually exclusive interests of almost every participant.
"Every time we resolve one issue, two more come up," he quoted one senior official as saying.
Among the national interests at play, consider the lengths to which Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, went to in their Berlin talks marathon to agree a united front.
The reason is simple: outright default on the Greek debt would hit their countries' financial institutions harder than most since they reportedly account for 70 per cent of the exposure, most of the remainder held by Greek banks.
Of course, Greece is not alone in the euro-zone intensive care unit. Ireland and Portugal's economies have been ravaged by ruinous levels of debt.
The first Greek bailout of €110bn led to action on Ireland and then Portugal, with packages of €85bn and €78bn, respectively. And now, concern about the core euro-area economies of Spain and Italy add to the nervousness felt by financial markets.
The stakes, for the euro could not be higher.
Small wonder yesterday's summit took place against a backdrop of stark words from Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission: If the summit and its aftermath did not somehow produce salvation for Greece, and the single currency, he warned, "history will judge this generation of leaders harshly".
