They actually were in the midst of some mild rioting at the time, and there was a lot of speculation about a revolution and a wave of fascism sweeping over the Balkan tip*. Getting to Greece was a chore in and of itself, but navigating Greece was just a pain. I walked around Thessaloniki for a few hours and waited for my train to depart for Athens, where I was to connect to another train to Corinth in the evening. When the conductor asked for my ticket, he started freaking out and kicked me off the train because I was on an "Express" train or whatever and the Balkan pass was only good for milk-run trains. I was subsequently escorted off the train at the next station and told to wait.
The town I was deposited in was called Platy and was hardly worthy of express-stop status but it was a nice enough place to wait, only a bit deserted. I walked around for two hours and got harassed by high school students (par for the course these days) and then boarded the train to Athens. I was seated next to a very glamorous woman who talked loudly on her phone to a woman talking even more loudly and then suddenly, mid conversation (I could hear the other woman screaming) she decided to snap her phone shut, smile and me, reach into her purse and hand me an enormous pomegranate. Perhaps she was sent by the Ministry of Tourism to apologize for the terrible treatment I had earlier with the conductor. I took it.
*Greece is the most Balkan of the Balkans. I know a lot of times political geographers and travel brochures will try to glaze over this fact and title things "Greece and the Balkans" or strangely leave out Greece when referring to the Balkans, but Greece is the only country in the Balkans that didn't have to own up to its own chronic under-productivity and start massive industrialization programs at the hands of postwar communist governments and instead got to go the Mediterranean tourism-focused route.
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