Greece has often been in the forefront of European revolutions, but is also a deeply conservative country. Admired abroad for its democracy, independent spirit, philosophy and culture, it has always been riven internally by contradictions and intractable divisions. Mythology and history inevitably tend to mix.

At the very outset and the very center of this warp and weft of Greek history and myth lies the concept of Europe. While it was the Greek city-states, through their experience of the Persian Wars, that first established the distinction between Europe and Asia, it has never been entirely clear where Europe ends and Asia begins. Much of Ancient Greece lay on or off the coast of what was then called Asia Minor, present-day Turkey, and much of its famed philosophy and scientific speculation can be traced to mystical roots much further to the East.

Even the Romans, who did so much, especially after Octavian’s defeat of Egyptian-based Anthony and Cleopatra, to foster a stark divide between Roman Europe and decadent Asia, regarded Greeks—for all their admiration—as somewhat Asiatic and effeminate. Neither, however, should we underestimate the extent to which the Roman Empire itself, especially under some of its more colorful rulers, was hardly as distinct from Asia as the orientalist discourse of Medieval and Modern Europe would later make it out to be.

In late Roman times, it was an ecstatic Asian religion—Christianity—that rose to predominance over the creaking practicalities of Stoicism, paganism and emperor worship that was the empire’s stock in trade. That religion came to Rome filtered through Neoplatonism and written in Greek.

When the Western Roman Empire came to an end, Rome continued to flourish in the Greek-speaking east for a further thousand years. The term Byzantium is, in many respects, a misnomer, imposed by an orientalism-inspired view of the world, not least because the Byzantines regarded themselves as Romans and were designated as such by their surrounding rivals.

With the Fall of Constantinople, in 1453, Greece and most of the Balkan peninsula came to be governed—albeit somewhat loosely—by the Ottoman Empire. In the jargon of the time, the Balkans came to be known as the Near East and the Asian Near East of ancient times was given the neologism Middle East. So far as Greece was concerned, the result of the Persian War and Alexander’s subsequent conquests seemed to have been reversed.

Greece, however, was set to rise again, if not in its former glory, at least as one of the first nominally independent nation-states to emerge in the wake of the Napoleonic War. I say ‘nominally’ because its freedom still depended in large measure on the goodwill of a Britain and Russia locked in their Great Game of scrambling for control of the crumbling margins of the moribund Ottoman Empire.

It would be wrong, however, for all the romantic rhetoric, to view Greece as a bastion of Western enlightenment and freedom in the east. Socially, Greece remained very conservative and turned towards Asian culture for many years to come, and certain illiberal practices, regarding women’s rights, for instance, persisted deep into the 20^th century.

Internally, in the wake of its war of independence, in the 1820s, Greece was also divided and, as had happened, shortly after the Persian Wars, and would again, after the defeat of the Nazis in the Second World War, be plunged into civil strife.

There has always been a tension in Greek politics—perhaps in the Greek psyche itself—between demos and tyrannos. In the Peloponnesian War, Athens, punctiliously democratic at home, acted like a colonial tyrant in international affairs, whilst Sparta, a rigid military dictatorship, fought to defend the independence of weaker city-states. Interestingly, most of the Athenian intelligentsia of the time, including Socrates and Euripides, tended to be sympathetic towards the Spartan cause, just as Plato and Aristotle would later prefer the patronage of foreign dictators over the messy parochial democratic politics of home.

This struggle was a curious precursor of the modern Cold War, with intellectuals supporting a militaristic domestically tyrannical Soviet Union/Sparta on account of its support for anti-colonial movements and criticizing more liberal democratic domestic régimes.

Of the various internecine conflicts that continued to plague Europe in the aftermath of World War II, that of Greece (with the exception perhaps of Yugoslavia and the Ukraine) was by far the bloodiest and most protracted. Different, however, from Yugoslavia and Ukraine, where the conflict fed on age-old ethnic rivalries, the civil war in Greece of the late 1940s directly reflected the coming Cold War ideological divide. This was, in part, a direct consequence, of Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt’s decision not to establish a clear “sphere of influence” in the country, but it also reflected deep ideological divisions within Greek society: those who looked back to the now largely lost cause of a Greater Greece embracing the Aegean run by strongmen, and those who looked forward (and perhaps further back also) to a utopian democratic socially-harmonious coexistence of communities. The Peloponnesian War continues to this day.

With some help from the British, who still regarded Greece as a semi-colony, and Stalin’s growing lack of interest in the fractious peninsula, the forces of the right—including many who had collaborated with the Nazi occupation—eventually prevailed; and, until the early 1980s, Greece was the most reactionary of the countries supposedly liberated from the Hitlerian yoke. Still an exception, with more in common, in some respects, with the dictatorships and social conservatism of the Arab Middle East than with the new freedoms, enjoyed in widely differing ways, of Western Europe and the Eastern Bloc.

In a euphoria of expectations on all sides, when the PASOK party came to power in the early 1980s, Greece was fast-tracked, first into the European Union and then into the Eurozone, despite the fact that it had not properly met the political and economic conditions for either. Different from Spain and Portugal, which were also, on hindsight, incorporated a little too hastily into the new integrated Europe, Greece did not go through the process of national reconciliation and re-invention that the restoration of the monarchy in Spain and the shedding of colonies in Portugal entailed.

In Greece—despite a nominally pro-European social-democratic government—business continued largely as usual, with traditional élites retaining their right to exploit and corrupt, while social-democratic politicians borrowed money from abroad to pay for welfare reforms. This, of course, would be a ticking time-bomb, in any country. In Greece, the ticker was speeded up when it ceded control of its currency to the European Central Bank, less than a decade before a worldwide financial crisis was set to explode.

As a result, Greece has been subjected to an austerity program the likes of which no other European country has seen. Five years later it is still on its knees, now in thrall not to Ottoman suzerains or Nazi thugs, but to German bankers and Brussels Eurocrats. Austerity has not improved the quality of life in Greece—far from it—nor has it done anything to alleviate the pervasive sense of imminent economic doom that hovers over the whole Eurozone.

With the likelihood of an election victory for Syriza (a genuinely left-wing anti-austerity party with a clear anti-establishment agenda) in the coming week, Greece yet again looks to be on the verge of deciding Europe’s fate. Just as Greece once prevented the European Mediterranean from becoming yet another satrap of a Persian King, just as it once upheld a Christian Roman Empire in the east for a thousand years, just as it spearheaded the wave of nationalist movements that created the modern global system of nation-states, and just as it stood up to both Nazism and Stalinism during and in the wake of World War II at great domestic cost, forming a crucial bulwark in the iron curtain, Greece now seems poised to open up a new chapter in the European story. It will not be easy, especially, as always, for Greece itself—Europe’s most far-flung yet influential corner and gateway to its Asian neighbors.