Kuva: Honoré Daumier: “La Note ou la Vie” Le Charivari, 15.2. 1850, lithograph.
Tässä Honoré Daumierin (1808-1879) karikatyyrissä kreikkalaisilta peritään velkoja, jotka olivat peräisin Kreikan itsenäistymissotien ajoilta. Velat kasvoivat entisestään vielä Kreikan-Turkin sodan vuoksi 1890-luvulla. Daumierin piirros ilmestyi Charivari-lehdessä 1850.
Piirros on julkaisut myös Richard Cloggin teoksesa A Concise History of Greece Clogg kertoo Kreikan veloista näin:
The insurgent Greeks had contracted loans, on disadvantageous terms, in the City of London during the war of independence and in 1832, the three Protecting Powers, Britain, France and Russia, guaranteed a loan of 60 millions francs, much of the proceeds of which were expended on the army, on King Otto’s Bavarian bureaucracy and on the service of the loan. In the 1880s, further loans totalling 630 million drachmas, were contracted, the service of which came to consume a third of the revenue of the state. When, in 1893, there was a collapse in world demand for her principal export, currants, Greece was forced greatly to reduce interest payments and was effectively bankrupt. Her economic condition was further weakened by defeat in the Greek-Turkish war of 1897, which resulted in the payment of a war indemnity of 4,000,000 Turkish pounds. The servicing of the loan raised to pay this indemnity and of Greece’s existing loans was placed in the hands of an International Financial Commission. This was based in Athens and consisted of representatives of the six ‘mediating’ powers, Britain, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, France and Italy. The repayment of these loans was to be assured by the assignment of receipts from government monopolies, tobacco duties, stamp taxes and the customs duties levied in the port of Piraeus. The arrangement, virtually without precedent, amounted to a serious breach of Greece’s financial sovereignty. (Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 64-65).