While spending part of my summer break away from the eurozone in downtown Detroit, I came across an old article by the Chilean-born writer and photographer Camilo José Vergara. In the mid-1990s he made what he called “an immodest proposal”: to turn a dozen city blocks of derelict pre-Depression skyscrapers into an “American Acropolis”.

Most Detroiters hated, and rejected, his idea for a “skyscraper ruins park” – although, looking at the sheer scale of dereliction today, one wonders whether it has ultimately prevailed. I have never seen a city so empty. About 40 per cent of its area is unoccupied, much of it covered in ruins.

For me, however, the interesting question is not so much whether Detroit should have emulated ancient Greece, but whether modern Greece will end up where Detroit is today. Could the indebted nation, too, face non-reversible long-term economic decline?