(Reuters) – Thirteen years after abandoning rural Greece for a career in graphic design, Spiridoula Lakka finds herself in the last place she expected to end up – watering a patch of lettuce and herbs in her sleepy village.
As Greece sank into its worst economic crisis since World War Two, Lakka had already given up her dream of becoming a web designer. Even waitressing seemed impossible. She faced a simple choice: be stranded without money in Athens, or return to the geriatric village where she grew up plotting to escape.
At age 32, Lakka, an office clerk who also juggled odd jobs, joined a growing number of Greeks returning to the countryside in the hope of living off the land. It’s a reversal of the journey their parents and grandparents made in the 1960s and ’70s.
Data is scarce on how many people have made the trek, but as people angered by austerity head to the polls on June 17, anecdotal evidence and interviews with officials suggest the trend is gaining momentum. In a survey of nearly 1,300 Greeks by Kapa Research in March, over 68 percent said they had considered moving to the countryside, with most citing cheaper and higher quality life. Most expected to move permanently.
“A year ago, I couldn’t imagine myself holding a garden hoe, or doing any farming,” said Lakka, as she watered the herbs she grows in the village of Konitsa, which nestles among snow-capped peaks near the Albanian border.
“I’ve always wanted to leave the village. I never imagined I would actually spend my whole life here.”
Her experience has been far from idyllic. The arrival of young, city-dwelling Greeks is being watched with a mix of pity and hope by those who never left.
“Those who have returned are desperate. They aren’t coming back because they wanted to,” said Stefanou Vaggelis, a 50-year-old distillery owner as he threw back tsipouro – a strong spirit favored by locals – with friends in the village centre dotted with taverns.
This summer, judging from the queries he has received from city-dwellers on vacation, Vaggelis predicts as many as 60 people will move to Konitsa, where over half of the population of about 3,000 is aged 60 or over.
“They usually ask whether there are state subsidies for agriculture and for growing pomegranates, snails and aromatic herbs,” he said, recounting how a 40-year-old acquaintance had returned to tend sheep in the hills. Greece’s farmers mostly run small operations and rely on EU subsidies to survive. They complain that over the past five years subsidies have halved.
TREMENDOUS INTEREST
In the northern city of Thessaloniki, a school for farmers says applications for its high school program have tripled this year. Cheese-making and bee-keeping have also filled quickly at the American Farm School, founded in 1904 by an American missionary who was keen to teach practical skills. Its courses run from pre-school to adult level.
“There is tremendous interest,” said Panos Kanellis, the school’s president. The trend, he said, is driven by both the crisis and a desire among many Greeks for a quality of life that’s impossible to find in the city.
Greek families have traditionally owned houses or plots of land in their native villages, often devoted to fragrant olive, lemon and orange groves or a mix of vibrant greens and tomatoes.
For those returning, rural life promises rent-free housing, backyard produce to fill dinner plates and support from a network of relatives and friends. The Kapa survey showed most people planned to count on family and friends to help.
“In Athens, I worked many jobs I didn’t like but I had to compromise,” said Lakka. “In the village, you have your own home and you can grow vegetables to eat.”
Five decades ago, one in two Greeks was employed in farming. The Pan-Hellenic Confederation of Unions of Agricultural Cooperatives, a farmers’ union, says employment steadily shrank in the early 2000s, but agriculture added 38,000 jobs between 2008 and 2010 as Greece slid into a recession that is now in its fifth year.
It lost jobs again in 2011 when the banking crisis squeezed lending to farmers, but people have continued to return to villages, said the union’s general manager Ioannis Tsiforos.
“We have a number of people, most of them middle-aged, entering the farming business,” he said: the trend is especially visible in Crete and the Dodecanese islands in the east.
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