“We all got fired or we quit because we weren’t getting paid,” he said. And yet in 2013, arguably the lowest point of the crisis, Theodosis was part of a collective that launched Popaganda, an online magazine that covers culture and city life through an Athenian lens. “The first thing we did to resist the crisis psychologically was to tell ourselves again and again: O.K., we are artists, we are writers, this is the best time for us, because when artists have nothing, they can do anything,” he said, adding that this isn’t actually true. “We told ourselves this so many times, that we started to believe it.”

Even on a shoestring budget, Popaganda managed to establish itself as a platform on par with the city’s top culture magazines. Theodosis also wrote a novel, Take the Show, loosely based on the Semitelou years that’s been an indie hit (A bit character in the book is an American backpacker inexplicably living in their apartment).

[Here’s how you can have an affordable vacation in Greece.]

“It’s not like oh, the crisis, I’ll start painting. That’s not happening!” said Konstantinos Dagritzikos, who opened Six d.o.g.s. with a partner, Panagiotis Pilafa, in 2009 in the space that used to hold Kinky Bar and four other venues. And yet the place they launched at the start of the crisis did evolve into the ambitious cultural venue they imagined, which now attracts droves to shows by Greek artists like the fuzz-rock outfit The Noise Figures and the chill-wave duo Keep Shelly In Athens, as well as international acts. This year, they’re launching an electronic music festival, ADD, which will bring artists like Apparat and Speedy J to Peiraios 260, a reclaimed 1970s-era furniture factory on the city’s outskirts.

The day after the party, I headed to Exarcheia, the graffiti-covered anarchist and student district that was the site of a scene I described in my 2006 journal, which now feels to me like an omen: “Saw a shop with a 10-foot hole bashed through the window, riot cops everywhere, employees crying.”