Omri Barzilay / Forbes
​The news from Greece over the past few years has been quite dire as the country is on the verge of bankruptcy. However, despite seemingly desperate economic conditions there is a real estate market where many properties are being purchased at a healthy rate--in particular purchases by Russian investors.

By Matthew A. Winkler / Bloomberg
Remember last February, when former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said Greece would leave the euro and that the common currency would collapse? Remember that a month later, investor-philanthropist George Soros said Greece was going down the drain? Or that just this July, the president of the German Institute for Economic Research, Marcel Fratzscher, characterized Greece as a "political and economic catastrophe" that would revert to the drachma in desperation?

Alexis Tsipras, Greece’s prime minister, has made an unexpected appeal to private investors to help revive the struggling economy, promising “it will be mutually beneficial both for you and for our country.” In a speech outlining the Syriza government’s economic priorities at the weekend, Mr Tsipras for the first time appeared to set aside his party’s entrenched suspicion of private enterprise which has delayed the completion of several large infrastructure deals that were agreed by the previous conservative administration.