And where, in this grand picture, does Greece fit? Part of the logic of the eurozone involved the strong economies’ providing loans to the weaker ones, in order to build up their infrastructure so they could then buy products from the stronger countries — a kind of replay of what the U.S. did vis-à-vis Europe with the Marshall Plan. But while Greece took the loans, it didn’t invest wisely, and its own debt kept mounting.

As the weakest link in the eurozone, Greece gives us the clearest picture of what the larger economic downturn portends. And for all the hopefulness of some of the Greeks I met in my travels, others take a dimmer view of their future. Near Thessaloniki — Greece’s second-largest city — I visited a family home. Husband, wife and son were present. The woman is one of the top bankers in Greece. She spoke on condition that I not use her name or the name of her bank. When I asked for her views on the future, she said: “Last week, in the town of Larissa, I was sitting at an outdoor cafe, and a clean, well-dressed Greek man of about 60 passed by and politely asked if he could have the biscuit that came with my coffee. What you say about successful companies is good to hear. But the reality is that man who asked for my biscuit. You can’t see the crisis results fully yet because people have been living off their savings. Soon the savings will end. I believe that by the end of 2012, you will see a different Greece, a different country, with real poverty.”

According to Yanis Varoufakis, the future — for Greece and for much of the rest of the Western world, never mind recent upticks in the U.S. economy — is one of even more upheaval. “The Minotaur died, and that is what held everything together,” he said. “Until a new system is invented, we are in for turmoil.” As anecdotal evidence of the situation in Greece, he told me that all of his top Ph.D. students at the University of Athens were seeking jobs abroad. Then he added that he, too, would soon be leaving, possibly for a position in the United States.

Like many Greeks I talked to, Stelios Zacharias, the winemaker, insisted that as hard as it is, the crisis takes on a different character when put in local perspective. “For one thing, there isn’t a housing crisis,” he said. Economists echo this point: you don’t see homelessness in Athens the way you do in other hard-hit cities. That is because even as they were pursuing careers in Athens as stockbrokers or investment bankers, people maintained their ties to their villages. Astoundingly, about 80 percent of Greeks own a home. It may be on family land on a distant island, but it is still a home. Zacharias, for example, lives on land that his grandfather bought decades ago with coupons from a newspaper promotion. Many of those who have lost jobs in the city therefore have rural homes to retreat to, though whether there is income once they get there is another matter.

Family and community ties are certainly helping to hold Greece together thus far. When I asked the journalist Aris Hadjigeorgiou, two months after our meeting in the taverna, if he was getting a paycheck yet, he said the newspaper had completely stopped publication. “As a journalist, I don’t know if I’ll make it,” he said. But, he said, he was scraping by with the help of others. And he negotiated a lower rent with his landlady.

So maybe Paul Evmorfidis’s argument has some validity: Greece’s traditional infrastructure may not be the ultimate answer to its problems, given the global scale of things, but it may make difficult times less painful. The destination of my car trip with Evmorfidis was Volos, a vigorous port city in Thessaly and conduit for trade with Asia, where he had been asked to speak about the crisis to a group of business leaders. After the talk, as we walked out of the building, he was in the middle of telling me that what will save Greece is its still-vibrant sense of community when we saw a middle-aged woman coming down the steps. It was late, and we hadn’t eaten dinner. He asked the woman if she knew where we could get something to eat. “Come to my home, and I’ll cook for you,” she said. And so we did.