The year 2021 was meant to be special for Greece: an opportunity to celebrate the bicentenary of the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821, which led to the birth of modern Greece. It was also supposed to be an occasion to mark the country’s slow and painful, yet also real and tangible, emergence from a vicious and protracted economic crisis that had brought it to its knees. The festivities were to be orchestrated by Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, the woman who single-handedly brought the Olympic Games to Athens in 2004 and ran them successfully, to general acclaim. Alas, it was not to be. The coronavirus thwarted Greece’s grand plans.
