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He characterizes Greece's banking sector as being "basically sound" and "in considerably better condition" than those in other EU countries and in the United States. He notes that Greece was the first EU country to provide a government guarantee for personal savings up to a total of €100,000.

now the European Commission has instigated disciplinary proceedings, because Athens has exceeded the euro zone budget deficit limit of 3 percent for the third time in a row. The results of audits carried out by Brussels look very different from the information in Livadas's glossy brochures. In EU statistics, Greek government debt is listed as amounting to 94 percent of the country's gross domestic product. Italy is the only other euro zone country which has a higher level of government debt. Greece also has the lowest credit rating of all the euro zone countries. It has to finance its government debt under terms which are worse than for any other euro zone country, with the exception of Malta.

He explains that in 2008 his country's economy expanded by 3.2 percent, "one of the highest growth rates in the euro zone." Over the past four years, he says, economic growth in Greece has been twice as high as the overall average in the currency union countries.

Georgios Provopoulos, the governor of the Bank of Greece, the nation's central bank, warned his countrymen against "self-satisfaction" and spoke of a looming danger of national bankruptcy. And Greece has still to feel the full effects of the global recession.

"The negative factors you see here are all leftovers from the past," says one EU diplomat, adding that most of them are homegrown. Economic experts are anxiously waiting to see what's going to happen this summer. They fear there could be a decline in the tourism sector, one of the most important pillars of growth in the Greek economy, accounting for 17 percent of gross domestic product. The volume of tourist bookings from the United States is reported to have dropped by up to 50 percent. The number of British vacationers, some 3 million annually in the past, alongside 2.3 million Germans, is expected to shrink by up to 30 percent.

The situation of banks that invested in Eastern Europe and in the Balkans is uncertain. Greek financial institutions invested billions of euros in bank takeovers or in setting up their own branches in Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia. Given that the value of the national currencies in some of those countries has fallen dramatically, what were originally seen as attractive investments in developing economies could well turn out to be huge losses.

That's what the crisis looks like in Greece. "Nobody wants to see it, but everybody is afraid of it," says Kalliope Amyg, a young political scientist. "The country is dancing on a volcano."