"I don't want to leave the eurozone, but then when I think about staying in the eurozone under austerity and the country still being in debt after all those years, I think, what's the point?" Papadopoulos said Thursday during a protest march commemorating a 1973 student uprising against a military junta. He was marching with members of the Den Plirono, or We Won't Pay, movement, which refuses to pay toll and public transportation tickets to protest austerity measures.

"We will be poor whether we use euros or drachmas," he said.

Katerina Petrucci, a 21-year-old bookshop employee, says her heart sank when German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy demanded that any referendum on the austerity measures be a question about whether Greece wanted to stay in the eurozone.

"It seemed very clear to me that they don't want us in the euro anymore," she said. "I thought, well, we're doomed. We're going to be the poor cousins of Europe. We're going to be branded the bad people who brought down the euro. And it's a shame, because being part of Europe is what gives me hope for Greece."

Vitsounis, the maritime economist, says Greeks must try to hang on and build an even more open and productive economy, if only to show the rest of Europe that Greeks are resilient and far more substantive than the caricatures promoted by some in northern Europe.

"We have done a lot of stupid things as a country, but we are also being killed by austerity," he said. "And yet people think we're a bunch of lazy guys who don't pay our taxes. They're wrong. And I want us to show them that we belong in Europe just like the rest of them."

(Kakissis is a McClatchy special correspondent.)

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