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How Greeks have adjusted to the forever crisis

Kuper, Simon, (2017), “How Greeks have adjusted to the forever crisis”, Financial Times, 6 July

One recent balmy evening, a Greek friend took me around Athens on the back of his motorbike. We whizzed through traffic that has thinned during Greece’s eight-years-and-counting Great Depression. Here was the rare European city centre without gentrification: the local lower-middle-class has made way not for hipsters but for migrants from Syria and Pakistan. They don’t want to be here, but got stuck heading west. Outside parliament, a few dozen people were waving Greek flags, protesting against something. But such scenes have become rare: most Greeks have given up. “For me now, there is not a crisis,” shouted my friend from under his helmet. “This is how we live. And we’re learning to live with our fears.” Athenians have adjusted to a forever crisis.

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