Greece - both islands and mainland is somewhere I've enjoyed visiting on and off over the years, have met quite a few people from there..
From late 2009 Greece was non stop in the news in Germany about being thrown off the Euro and returned to their previous currency the 'drachma' :
When that was happened, Angela Merkel seemed to push very hard to make Greece stay on the Euro currency, not have a 'Grexit' which they feared may have triggered some kind of chain reaction in the EU. Greece has all along been not only in the EU, but on the Euro currency and in the Schengen zone. Many other countries in Europe are not all three of those and none of them, especially some of the neighbours in the former Yugoslavia.
Not sure what kind of deal-with-the-devil bailout happened back then to allow Greece to retain the Euro currency but it obviously had unfortunate strings attached. I'm very sorry to hear this.. Western Europe leads the gay thing but there is unfortunately now a dark coloured region in the eastern Mediterranean on the gay map :
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There was high unemployment and some kind of attitude problem I heard, thinking that because of their link to the ancient Greeks, nothing could touch them.
Watch this space, it will be a happy day when the trend starts to reverse.