Francis Noel-Baker (1920–2009) was an English Philhellene politician and self-proclaimed benevolent landowner in Euboea whose relationship in his later years with Greek governments and people descended into acrimony and litigation. This stemmed from the decision he took to effectively become an apologist for the military junta which seized power in Athens between 1967 and 1974. This was despite London being a centre for Greek resistance-in-exile, the opposition to the regime shown by many of his fellow MPs and Labour Party colleagues, and his own earlier left-wing sympathies, including his support for the communist-backed partisans in Greece during the Second World War. Noel-Baker's advocacy of the Colonels reflected not merely political reality and economic expediency, as with the similar stance of the British government, but stemmed from his outdated convictions that Greece required saving from international communism and internal weakness.

The Greek economic crisis has triggered a self-reflexive process and prompted a re-examination of political and cultural trends in Greece since 1974 in an attempt to rethink earlier cultural approaches and practices. This article argues that a cultural perspective on the crisis can be productive insofar as it revisits key concepts and dominant models of analysis and charts cultural change in Greece from the fall of the military junta in 1974 to the beginning of the crisis in 2009. Just as the fall of the junta encouraged a re-examination of the post-civil-war period, so the current economic crisis has prompted a rethink of the metapolitefsi era. Exploring the cultural developments that have taken place during this period, this article focuses on competing notions of culture and engages with the two dreams of the post-junta period: modernization and consumerism. The aim is not to reaffirm oppositions or reverse hierarchies but to rethink cultural dualisms and explore hybrid tensions within a broader political and cultural context.