There was smoke in the air, and a police van pulled up at the curb. Blue-suited cops were everywhere, with sub-machine guns. It was nine in the evening, and someone had just bombed J.P.Morgan’s Athens office.

Luckily the kiosk was still open. The cops were all buying Fanta.

“Where did the bomb go off?” I asked.

They chattered among themselves — “bo? Boerhh ahhh bombba! It was up there, about 250 metres”.

The smoke was dust from an asphalt cutter.

Up the road, near Kolonaki Square, a plush, Parisienesque area full of embassies and upmarket shops along Patriarch Joaquim st, Caritas Street had been roped off, and the entrance was surrounded by vans.

The bomb had gone off around 8.30 in the evening, a warning called into the papers about half an hour before.

The device was small but perfectly formed. One hundred metres up the street, the baristas at Costa hadn’t even heard it go off.

In the nearby Embassy Cinema they’d heard it.

“It go boom … I feel a slight ummmm …” the ticket chicks conferred, “vibration.”

“Did they stop the film?” I asked. They looked at me as if I was crazy.

“Thetth. No of course not.”

If the locals were relaxed about it, the cops weren’t. As your correspondent lined up to take a shot, a chubby officer stood in front of me. “No here,” he barks. “You go.” I went.

Bombing banks is an ancient and venerable tradition in Greece. Though property attacks aren’t as common as they were in the ’70s and ’80s when there could be literally hundreds of car torchings and small explosions a year.

Since the days of rage in December 2008, following the police shooting of a 15-year-old, there’s been a non-lethal bomb every few months, most recently against the Ethniki Insurance Building at Christmas, by the group “Conspiracy of Fire Nuclei”, who were protesting — and I quote from their manifesto — “the Christmas consumer spirit”. It was the Ethniki — i.e. National — insurance office that was festooned by cops, south of Kolonaki.

Across the city, cops with sub-machine guns were posted in the doorway of prominent targets. Some of them were blonde girls. So hot.

Whether the JP Morgan Chase bombing heralds a more concerted campaign against financial institutions, or is simply part of the “eternal flame” of low-level European unrest, remains to be seen.

One indication that it may be part of a well-planned campaign was that the blast came almost the moment that the EU finance ministers announced the results of their two-day meeting, most of which was about Greece. Effectively they required the country to present its homework by March 16, demonstrating that it was well on the way to financial rectitude.

Prime Minister George Papandreou has already committed the country to reducing its 13% deficit by 4% this year, and back to 3% by 2012. That means a steady squeeze on the public sector, at a time when unemployment has started to rise into double figures.

Half-a-dozen other countries inside the eurozone have to make deficit reductions as well — the upshot is a steady deflation of the less developed part of the Eurozone, at a time when the northern sector benefits from a stronger euro.

The question for Papandreou is whether he can hold public support through the process, or whether he will eventually come to look like Brussels’ bitch, for relentlessly enforcing the EU’s will. Should Greece fail to get its house in order, it will lose its vote on the EU finance ministers committee, making it to some degree an EU dependent territory.

Euro-sceptics have been making all sorts of noises about how proud Greeks won’t bend to the EU jackboot, etc, etc — when they aren’t caricaturing the country as a bunch of excitable waiters. That’s entirely overstated — PASOK was partly voted in to sort out the long-standing mess of Greek finances.

Nevertheless, there must be a point at which getting lectured by Germans,,of all people, starts to stick in the craw. The country has not had a happy experience with previous examples of European integration. The Nazis destroyed more than 2000 villages, imposing a 50:1 ration of civilian executions for every German soldier killed.

When the war was over, Churchill and Stalin’s back of the napkin Yalta deal gave the West 90% control of Greece — and the round-up of Communists who had formed the backbone of the Resistance sparked the civil war, which devastated the country and, among other things, gave the West a chance to experiment with the use of napalm in buttressing a regime.

Such history undergirds the militant tradition —  the organised Communist dimension, and the wilder shores of violent anarchism and red urban guerrilla movements. The Greek Left is not Lord Monckton or similar goggle-eyed, thyroid crazed loonies — they know that the EU is not the fourth reich.

But in Patriach Joachim Street of the aptly named Kolonaki, it is hard to find a shop with a sign in Greek lettering. And Caritas is now a bomb site.

And the head of the EU finance ministers committee supervising the Greek package is named Junckers.

There’s a limit …