Financially wounded Greece votes in an election that might not heal
Having paid the price of the biggest bailout in Western history, Greeks are preparing to vote in an election that could lead to more pain
"I will drive you to the wound of Greece. It won't take long."
Tall, muscular and dark, Antonis is not a man given to hyperbole but he is, by his own admission, very angry. Now, staring into his rear-view mirror - ahead of tomorrow's election that could make or break Athens' tumultuous ties with Europe - there is no hiding how incensed he is. "What has happened to this country is a catastrophe," he fumes. "Our politicians, Europe, the IMF, they have stopped us having dreams."
The journey to the wound of Greece does not take long. For Antonis, a photographer with an eye for the unusual, it is not at the end of the pot-holed road we are driving down.
It is everywhere: in the scavenging through the rubbish bins, the broken pavements and shuttered shops, the abandoned cars and derelict houses, the new poor who mutter to themselves on graffiti-stained streets. "It is the loss of hope," he says with a thump of his steering wheel. "I see it every day, a wound that will not heal. Please write that I, Antonis, hate this country, I hate everything about it."
For the 43-year-old, rage has been shaped by fate, one shared by over 1.3 million Greeks since their debt-stricken nation's financial meltdown.
In 2010, under the punitive effect of austerity - the price of the biggest bailout in Western history - the Athenian photographic studio that employed him unexpectedly collapsed. Overnight, he found himself out of work, another statistic in the record number of jobless thrown up by a crisis born in Athens that has reverberated through every EU capital since.