After a serious financial crisis and on the way to development, Greece faced the coronavirus pandemic, which may have altered the mortality regime in the country. Thus, the question addressed in this paper is how the mortality regime in the country changed between 2020 and 2021 if we compare this period to the year before the pandemic, i.e. 2019. Results of the analysis indicate that a mortality counter-transition occurred. In this scheme, life expectancy at birth and various other ages decreases. That is due to a dichotomic effect of temporal trends of the probabilities of death. Any changes play a minor role in the younger ages; the most important effects come from the middle-older ages. At the same time, the old age heap migrates towards younger ages of the human life cycle and becomes wider. Consequently, survival curves become less rectangular. In that way, Greece constitutes a unique paradigm of a country in crisis on retreat, facing a very intense pandemic like Covid-19 and exhibiting a short counter-transition in mortality.