In a little brick-walled taverna in Athens, over a lunch of Cretan salad
and stuffed grape leaves, a Greek journalist named Aris Hadjigeorgiou
was holding forth one day in late November about the calamitous state of
his city and country as only a veteran metropolitan reporter could. He
explicated the insidious ways in which the upper echelons of Greek media
were intertwined with the political structure, which prevented
reporting of financial mismanagement and also clouded any hope for
resolving the crisis. And he noted little things, like the leaflets on
car windshields advertising moving companies: literal signs of the way
the economic crisis was affecting Athens, as people angled for escape
routes, either abroad or to the countryside. And how the mayor’s office
was at that moment considering a quaint but cockeyed approach for the
season’s Christmas lighting scheme: stringing lights around the city’s
hundreds of shuttered storefronts.
At some point, I asked Hadjigeorgiou how the crisis was affecting him
personally. Life was getting difficult, he acknowledged. Then, prodded a
bit more, he mentioned that he had not been paid by his newspaper, the
major left-leaning daily, in four months. Nor had any of his colleagues
at the paper. Yet despite the lack of paychecks, few if any employees
had left the paper (which has since filed for bankruptcy), for the good
reason that there was nowhere else to go.
Which pretty much sums up Greece. Everyone talks incessantly about the
economy — about Merkel and Sarkozy and the E.U., about the tightly knit
elite that has run Greece for so long and about their neighbors’
troubles and their own — but somehow everyday life rumbles on, in a
collective trance, shot through with gallows humor.
By many indicators, Greece is devolving into something unprecedented in
modern Western experience. A quarter of all Greek companies have gone
out of business since 2009, and half of all small businesses in the
country say they are unable to meet payroll. The suicide rate increased
by 40 percent in the first half of 2011. A barter economy has sprung up,
as people try to work around a broken financial system. Nearly half the
population under 25 is unemployed. Last September, organizers of a
government-sponsored seminar on emigrating to Australia, an event that
drew 42 people a year earlier, were overwhelmed when 12,000 people
signed up. Greek bankers told me that people had taken about one-third
of their money out of their accounts; many, it seems, were keeping what
savings they had under their beds or buried in their backyards. One
banker, part of whose job these days is persuading people to keep their
money in the bank, said to me, “Who would trust a Greek bank?”
The situation at the macro level is, if anything, even more
transformational. The Chinese have largely taken over Piraeus, Greece’s
main port, with an eye to make it a conduit for shipping goods into
Europe. Qatar is looking to invest $5 billion in various projects in
Greece, including tourism infrastructure. Other, relatively flush
Europeans are trying to make “Greece the Florida of Europe,” Theodore
Pelagidis, a Greek economist at the University of Piraeus, told me,
referring in particular to plans to turn islands into expensive
retirement homes for wealthy people from other parts of the continent.
Whether or not the country pays its debts, he went on, other nations and
foreign companies “now understand the Greek government is powerless, so
in the future they will take over viable assets and run parts of the
country by themselves.”
For months, Greece has sat at the epicenter of an economic crisis that
is threatening the foundations of Europe and that has the potential to
bring new waves of economic upset to America. The latest austerity plan
meant to satisfy Greece’s creditors and allow for new infusions of
financial aid may have averted involuntary default — and a global
economic downturn — but will nonetheless make life for ordinary Greeks
even more difficult. The plan reduces the minimum wage by more than 20
percent, mandates thousands of layoffs and reduces some pensions,
probably ensuring that strikes and demonstrations will continue to be a
feature of the Greek landscape.
Yet spending time in Greece presents a complicated picture of what is
going on. There is certainly anger and belt-tightening and dark clouds
of depression. It’s not uncommon to see decently dressed Greeks
discreetly rummaging through garbage bins for food. A new book about how
the country survived the Nazi occupation — “Starvation Recipes” — has
become a surprise hit. But there are also success stories that fly fully
in the face of the turmoil. Most surprising, there is a pervasive sense
of relief over the crisis that is upon them, as if a long, strange
dream is at last over.
My first impression of Petros Vafiadis was of a bear.
He’s a big, jowly man, and he sat hunkered by the grille of his
living-room fireplace. People in his town in northern Greece — Giannitsa
— told me that the rising price of heating oil forced residents to rely
on their fireplaces, and for the first time in memory, you regularly
smell wood smoke in the chilly air.
Vafiadis is 56 and has spent his life in construction. For the last 10
years, he has been a site supervisor for a company called Archi-Tek,
overseeing the building of big, mostly government-sponsored projects
like schools and museums. At its height, the company had 50 people on
staff and employed about 900 contract workers. Today it has two
employees: engineers who are basically putting finishing touches on
completed projects. All work in the Thessaly region, where the company
is based, has dried up. Vafiadis was laid off in September, two years
short of retirement. He took a drag on his cigarette and said, in a
mud-thick smoker’s voice, “There’s no brightening in the future.” He was
referring to both the Greek situation and his own. “I think things will
only get worse.”
His wife, Ekaterina, set a homemade cheese-and-leek pie on the table,
then took a seat. The room had peach-colored walls and a white-tiled
floor; one wall was covered with religious icons; a glass swan sat like a
sentinel on top of the Sony flat-screen TV. “There are families worse
off than us,” Ekaterina reminded her husband. “There are lots of
families where nobody is working.” She still had her job — as a cook at a
kindergarten cafeteria — though her salary was cut from $1,730 a month
to $1,260. The couple’s income has dropped from $43,000 a year to about
half that, and it will drop another $530 a month once Vafiadis’s 12
months of unemployment benefits run out.
They have no savings, they told me, because when they bought their home
in 2000, they used their life savings as a down payment. Plus they have
two sons in their early 20s, both of whom they put through college. One
son, Traianos, who studied electrical engineering, sat with us as we
talked, and when the subject of fallback financial reserves came up,
there was a sudden flurry of back-and-forth banter in Greek, tinged with
tension and dark laughter. Eventually Traianos explained to me that his
father’s sister died some years ago and left her savings to her two
nephews: Traianos and his brother. “So now our children can start giving
to us, for a change,” Petros Vafiadis said with a laugh. To which his
son replied, with an edgy chuckle, “If things get harder, then we’ll
give.”
The austerity measures imposed by the government as it tries to appease
distant bankers and governments have caused hardships for ordinary
people (to save money, residents of Giannitsa have taken to driving
across the border into Bulgaria for everything from dentist visits to
gas), but when I met with him some months before the February austerity
agreement, Vafiadis said: “Still I think this is the only way out of the
crisis. The government has to impose cuts in salaries and pensions.”
Anastasia Tsangarli, a family friend who showed up to take part in our
discussion, agreed that cuts were necessary, saying, “The Greek way of
life is to spend and then overspend.” She and her husband are also from
Giannitsa but lived for a long time in Jersey City, where she worked in a
factory making fake fur coats. When the factory closed, they moved
back, only to find life far more difficult than it used to be. Her
husband, an electrician, is out of work. She does some baby-sitting. “We
are afraid of the future, so we don’t spend anything without having a
good reason,” she said. But the couple have an escape plan. They became
American citizens while living in the United States. Her husband is 60.
When he is 62, they can return so he can claim Social Security benefits.
As the economy implodes, young people are leaving Giannitsa. Traianos
Vafiadis, who is 24, told me that of the group of six friends he has had
since childhood, he is the only one with a job, and the others have all
emigrated or are looking for work abroad. I heard over and over from
young Greeks that they are painfully aware of repeating the cycle that
most recently occurred in the late 1940s, when a great diaspora of young
Greeks left the country for work. The crucial difference is that now
well-educated young people — future doctors, teachers and engineers —
are leaving, suggesting that what is taking place is the hollowing-out
not only of an economy but also of a whole social system.
The loss of young people worsens another problem facing this country:
the birthrate is among the lowest in the world — and was even before the
crisis manifested itself — making it unable to maintain population
levels. This fact is much on the minds of ordinary Greeks. “And now it’s
even worse,” Petros Vafiadis said. “Young couples aren’t having
children because of the crisis.” He paused, then added, with a comic’s
timing, “Maybe I’ll get a second wife and work on this demographic
problem.” His wife gave out a high-pitched cackle, then shot back: “If
he’s serious, someone should save the women of Greece.” As the laughter
died down, I asked Petros the question that seemed most pressing. What
was his plan? What, given the sorry state of affairs, was he going to
do?
Things went quiet. The bearish man executed an elaborate movement of his
upper body that, when it was over, I decided you would have to call a
shrug. It was painful to watch. Earlier, when I talked to his son alone,
he summarized his father’s situation: he was in his late 50s, spoke
only Greek and knew only the kind of work he had done — work that won’t
be coming back anytime soon. The shoulder twist was the only possible
answer.
“Watch it! Watch out!” Paul Evmorfidis was driving up
to a toll plaza on the main road from Athens to Thebes. He slowed down
as he came to the toll arm blocking the road, but he was not paying the
toll and, to my alarm, was not stopping. “I’m showing you something,” he
said. He reached out his window, shoved the toll arm up out of the way
and drove off as an alarm shrieked behind us. “This is what we do here —
everybody who lives around here.” As the Greek government adds new
taxes and surcharges onto its citizens, they respond with protest or
evasion. After the government announced that there would be an
additional 2010 income tax — in effect, retaxing that year’s income —
people refused to pay, whereupon the government tacked a new property
tax onto electricity bills, which you could elude only at the cost of
having the power cut. Likewise, the toll plaza was installed to raise
money. The toll was about $3. “The problem is if you live around here,
you have to go down this road maybe five times a day,” Evmorfidis said.
“Crazy! What kind of planning is that? So we protest.”
Evmorfidis could pay the toll painlessly. He and his brother are owners
of a company called Coco-Mat, which specializes in all-natural bedding
and furniture (“Sleep on nature,” the ads say). Coco-Mat supplies hotels
around Europe with high-end mattresses, filled with layers of natural
rubber, coco fiber and seaweed, and has 70 stores in 11 countries. Since
last year, the company’s affiliate in China has been opening shops at
the rate of one per month. A Coco-Mat outlet inside the ABC Furniture
building in Lower Manhattan opened in 2010, and the brothers plan to
open 10 stores in the United States in the next two years. Global sales
for 2011 were $70 million, 15 percent higher than the year before.
Coco-Mat stores exude an airy, casual-chic vibe that seems the
diametrical opposite of “economic crisis.” There is generally a kitchen
area and a long sleek picnic table. If it’s around lunchtime, there
might be a big bowl of Greek salad on the table. Customers are offered a
glass of freshly squeezed orange juice or an espresso.
Coco-Mat is a Greek company, one that defies the crisis in the country
both in its efforts (of the 30 Coco-Mat stores in Greece, five opened in
the past year, in the very teeth of the crisis) and in its formula for
success. If Petros Vafiadis and his family represent a common situation
in Greece today — people who toiled diligently in the old system, only
to find that its collapse necessitates their own — Paul Evmorfidis is
atypical but also revealing of another path, one not generally taken but
apparently not entirely overgrown. As we drove through a landscape of
silvery-green olive trees set against gray-white hills, I wanted to know
how this very successful Greek businessman thought Greece had fallen to
such a state.
“This is a country with 300 days of sunshine per year,” he began,
proceeding into a rambling, fast-paced discourse, the central point of
which was that in buying into
the euro,
Greece tried foolishly to mimic other countries and in so doing shifted
away from its natural advantages and way of life. “Working in offices
is good in countries where there is lots of rain,” he said. “Greeks
don’t need to be in offices. Athens has doubled in size in a couple of
decades — it’s now half the population of the country! Two-hour traffic
jams, man! After we joined the euro, the mentality totally changed.
Suddenly it was like if you still live in the small village where you
were born, you must be retarded. So Greeks left their islands and their
villages and moved to the city, and they became maniacs. They started
expecting loans and handouts.”
The modern Greek mentality, according to Evmorfidis, is a hyped-up
version of the debt-ridden American consumerism of recent memory. “Greek
people would take out a loan to buy a luxury car so they could say, ‘I
have money,’ ” he said. “Crazy! I would run into someone I used to know,
and suddenly he’s talking to me about the stock exchange. I say: ‘Come
on, man! What do you know about the stock exchange? Let’s talk about
apples and olives!’ ”
Evmorfidis is a high-energy man (a few weeks later he and his son
executed a winter crossing of the Alps on bicycles), and as the
speedometer hit 90 miles an hour, my foot was involuntarily pushing the
nonexistent brake on the passenger’s side. “But you know what?” he
added. “This crisis is exactly what we need. Merkel and Sarkozy are good
for our health. I hope they don’t give us a penny!”
The standard short answer to how Greece got into its financial mess is
that it borrowed too much and spent unwisely. Beneath this, people like
to look for a cultural root. Most popular (outside Greece) is the
north-south explanation, which holds that Northern Europeans are
efficient and hardworking, and Southerners, while they may have better
food and better sex lives, like to relax too much to run an efficient
economy. But numbers don’t necessarily bear this out. Even the guy
selling you souvlaki in Athens can quote statistics from the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development showing that the
average Greek worked 2,116 hours in 2008, while the average German
worked 1,426 hours. Traveling around the Greek countryside provides lots
of anecdotal support to the notion that people do in fact work, and
work hard.
Still, there’s some value in looking at geography. Greece is part of
Europe — you might say the heart of Europe (the euro symbol itself was
designed after the Greek letter epsilon: a nod to the classical roots of
modern Europe) — but in another sense, Greece is a remnant of the
Ottoman Empire,
that realm famous for top-down rule, bribery and looking the other way.
Everyone I talked to seemed to feel that this interconnected triad of
features is indeed elemental and thus part of the reason for the crisis.
People on the left and people on the right agree that its bureaucracy
is a menace.
Fakelaki (literally “little envelopes”) are a
legendary feature of society. If you’re starting a business, there are
lots of signatures you need, and handing over the cash-stuffed envelopes
has traditionally been part of the process.
Then, too, the intense international focus on the country’s problems may
be obscuring the fact that since it became part of the eurozone, Greece
has actually made significant steps toward integrating with Europe.
Mike Evmorfidis, Paul Evmorfidis’s brother and co-owner of Coco-Mat,
made this point to me. “When we started 20 years ago, it took six months
to get through the bureaucracy,” he said. “And fakelaki were a
part of that. But that has changed. Among the younger generation now, I
would say that it does not exist at all, the business of the little
envelopes. Young Greeks are really a part of Europe.”
The Evmorfidis brothers’ story gives some perspective on the changes in
Greece in the past 50 years or so. They were born in a small town near
Sparta. In the 1950s, their father left home as part of the migration of
Greeks who went abroad seeking work. He found a job in Stuttgart,
Germany, working on the American military base, and was able to visit
his family only once a year. Paul, who is 53, acted as surrogate father
to his younger brother. Both did well in school, and both went on to do
graduate studies in a way that reflected the country’s dawning awareness
of its place within Europe. Paul studied business in Athens and earned a
master’s degree in Germany, and Mike earned a Ph.D. in law at the
Sorbonne in Paris.
Then, in 1989, while Paul was working in a jewelry shop in Plaka —
Athens’s tourist zone — a Dutch businessman asked if he knew of a Greek
company that made mattresses. The Dutchman owned a bed shop and wanted
to find a cheaper source. Paul took him to a Greek mattress company but
saw at once that its quality was low. Whereupon he had an idea: do it
right and ride what was then a growing wave of interest in all-natural
products. The company emphasizes its use of Greek materials: wool from
Thrace, cotton from Larissa, wood from Mount Athos, seaweed from Sparta.
Sparta, land of legendary warriors famed for their austerity and
discipline, figures heavily in Paul Evmorfidis’s thinking. When I asked
if there was one element of Coco-Mat’s strategy that he would like to
see other Greek companies emulate, he said: “Spartan thinking, man!
We’ve got to get lean and smart. All of these state subsidies that
Greeks got, they make you fat and lazy.” I tried to point out the
apparent contradiction of a company that sells ultracomfy beds insisting
that Spartan thinking is its underlying philosophy, but he seemed not
to notice. His brother echoed him in saying that a basic part of their
strategy involved a determination to avoid bank loans: “We have grown
step by step. We didn’t want to invest more than we had gained. Our
gains were not transformed into yachts or villas but were put back into
the business.”
As for the future of the country, the Evmorfidis brothers profess a
strange-sounding hopefulness, and their recent store openings in Greece
would seem to indicate that it’s not just talk. “I’m naturally
optimistic,” Mike said. “This is a cycle; things will come back. Plus
it’s smart business to expand now. There are always opportunities in
crisis.”
Those opportunities come at a cost to someone. Before the crisis, he
said, the owner of a space in central Athens that they had their eyes on
wanted $20,000 a month in rent; when they opened a store there in
December, it was for a monthly rent of $7,000. Likewise, where Coco-Mat
used to pay $1,700 per cubic meter of Greek oak, the price has dropped
to $640. Coco-Mat’s furniture has also gone down in price inside Greece,
Mike said, though not by as much. He told me that last year the
company’s domestic sales were down 15 percent, a figure that he was
quite upbeat about (“Not catastrophical!”) given the overall state of
the economy. And when you consider that a Coco-Mat bed costs anywhere
from $3,300 to $16,600, the fact that Greeks are still buying them gives
some corrective to the image of an entire country in a state of free
fall.
Then again, you could also look at this as evidence of a lingering state
of denial. Or the sales of deluxe beds could be a sign of a two-tiered
society that the economist Theodore Pelagidis sees developing in his
country. “You are going to see a part of the population, the middle
class, comprising say 30 to 50 percent, involved in some kind of
resurgence,” he told me. “But another part of the population will be
living on 300 or 400 euros ($400 to $500) a month. This part of Greek
society won’t be living a Western European lifestyle. It will be more
like Bulgaria.” Mike Evmorfidis admitted that where Coco-Mat’s Greek
customers used to be a cross section of the economic spectrum, now it’s
mostly the rich who buy his beds.
To the north of the Gulf of Corinth, Mount Helicon
slopes down into a broad valley that, in classical times, was the
location of a sanctuary devoted to the worship of the nine muses. I
stepped out of a car into the cold wind sweeping up the valley and began
hiking
through an area crosshatched with vineyards. With me was a 27-year-old
man named Stelios Zacharias, who talked about soil and slope and summer
sun and the varietal finickiness of grapes.
When Zacharias and his brothers were children, their father, Athanasios,
grew grapes here and sold the juice to neighbors, but he talked of
starting a proper
winery.
Stelios studied business, and his older brother, Nicos, studied
winemaking. Today they and their father run Muses Estate, which produced
200,000 bottles last year:
merlot,
cabernet sauvignon,
chardonnay, as well as a Greek variety called
mouhtaro.
We sampled each of these once we reached the winery, while a burning log
snapped on the hearth and Ioanna Zacharias, Stelios’s mother, laid out
platters of food. The Zacharias family’s business straddles the line
between corporate-cosmopolitan and Greek-traditional. Stelios has
pursued a strategy that involves combating the bad reputation of Greek
wine not by producing something chic but by stressing value: the wines
are soundly made and no bottle costs more than $30 retail. The strategy
is working, and with curious timing. Over the very years in which the
economic crisis has arisen and engulfed the country, the little winery
has taken off. The wines are distributed in four countries, including
the United States, and deals are in place with eight more. Stelios
Zacharias told me sales have doubled in each of the last five years —
and 80 percent of sales are still within their economically crippled
home country.
At the same time, the business remains steadfast to its village — the
place where Stelios and his brother grew up, went to school and played
soccer in the field down the street from the winery. In the fall,
cousins and villagers participate in the grape harvest. A neighbor, who
raises chickens, strolls across the road every couple of days with a
dozen eggs, which he trades for a bottle of the house white. Stelios
took me to the local olive-oil cooperative, something that many Greek
villages still maintain, where his parents bring olives from their own
trees. It was a simple husk of a building housing a noisy press. The
processing is free; the co-op keeps 2 percent of the oil, which it sells
in order to stay in business. The little gleaming green, black and
brown olives filled up a large metal tray waiting to be mashed. A stout
man with a vast gray mustache turned the spigot and gave me a taste of
the end result.
Zacharias says the troubles have rallied like-minded Greek
businesspeople. “The crisis gives us the opportunity to clean the market
of everyone who was trying to make something out of nothing. Then we
can focus on what works: creating a real product, using real methods.”
A lot of people seem to be coming around to Zacharias’s way of thinking.
According to the Greek farmers’ union, between 2008 and 2010 — even
before the crisis reached its height — 38,000 people lost or gave up
their jobs, as their dream of euro-capitalism died, and returned to the
land, often to their home villages on the islands. Former accountants
and Web designers are growing potatoes on Naxos, collecting resin from
mastic trees on Chios and tending wheat fields on Crete. On the
cloud-rimmed top of Mount Othrys, in the region of Magnesia, Ioannis
Tsokaras, who a year ago quit the civil-service job in Athens from which
he had endured one too many pay cuts, showed me what he is now, at 58,
staking his hopes on: little yellow-green clumps of an herb called sideritis,
or “mountain tea.” He was intent on turning what had been a sideline —
cultivating wild herbs on land his family owned — into a living. His
storage space, perched halfway down the mountain, was crammed with
large, aromatic, light-as-air boxes of his product, awaiting shipment to
markets in Athens. “This is a real business now,” he declared.
Such individual stories are signs of hope in a country that is searching
for a viable future. Yet no matter how many families find their way
back to the land, what ultimately happens to Greece depends more on what
happens in the wider world.
One of the grandest piles of ancient stones in a country full of glorious ruins lies on the island of Crete. It is called
Knossos,
and it was to Greece what Greece is to Europe: the cradle of its
civilization. At the core of its prehistory is the legend of King Minos,
who ruled over the Greek islands. Minos maintained his hegemony over
Greece by requiring that Athens, the second power in the Aegean world,
send him tribute in the form of young men and women, whom Minos fed to
the beast he kept in his labyrinth: the Minotaur.
Improbably enough, a Greek economist named Yanis Varoufakis has been
drawing attention in many of the hot spots of global finance lately,
offering the Minotaur myth as a metaphor for understanding recent
macroeconomic events. As Varoufakis writes in his recent book, “The
Global Minotaur,” the world in which we have been living until recently
functioned thanks to the voracious consumption of a different kind of
beast. After
World War II,
the U.S. built up the infrastructure of its European allies as well as
its former enemies, all of whom became trading partners. The U.S., with
its great industrial and financial might, became the world’s surplus
nation: its profits flowed out to its allies in the form of aid and
investments. By the early 1970s, however, other countries had robust
economies, and the U.S. was a debtor nation. “At that moment, certain
very bright men within the American financial hierarchy made a stunning
realization,” Varoufakis told me. The realization was that it didn’t
matter if the U.S. was the biggest surplus or biggest debtor nation.
What mattered was controlling the world’s primary currency, which would
allow the United States to continue to recycle the global economic
surplus. The idea was not unlike the thinking behind a casino —
whichever gamblers are winning or losing, the house, which sets the
terms and takes its cut, always wins.
So a new system came into being, in which a huge part of the world’s
capital flows went to service debt originating in the United States.
American debt, and the need to feed it, would be the modern Minotaur.
The Wall Street financial houses became the handmaidens of the Minotaur.
“The massive flow of capital into Wall Street gave it the impetus for
financialization,” Varoufakis said, referring to the creation of
derivatives and other risky financial vehicles. “And so Wall Street
created a great deal of private money, with which it flooded the world
and created huge bubbles, in the U.S. housing market and elsewhere.”
When that system came crashing down in 2008, Varoufakis says, “it was
then only a matter of time that the euro would come into crisis.”
Europe’s powerhouse economies — essentially, the northern countries — no
longer had a place to sell their goods.
And where, in this grand picture, does Greece fit? Part of the logic of
the eurozone involved the strong economies’ providing loans to the
weaker ones, in order to build up their infrastructure so they could
then buy products from the stronger countries — a kind of replay of what
the U.S. did vis-Ã -vis Europe with the Marshall Plan. But while Greece
took the loans, it didn’t invest wisely, and its own debt kept mounting.
As the weakest link in the eurozone, Greece gives us the clearest
picture of what the larger economic downturn portends. And for all the
hopefulness of some of the Greeks I met in my travels, others take a
dimmer view of their future. Near Thessaloniki — Greece’s second-largest
city — I visited a family home. Husband, wife and son were present. The
woman is one of the top bankers in Greece. She spoke on condition that I
not use her name or the name of her bank. When I asked for her views on
the future, she said: “Last week, in the town of Larissa, I was sitting
at an outdoor cafe, and a clean, well-dressed Greek man of about 60
passed by and politely asked if he could have the biscuit that came with
my coffee. What you say about successful companies is good to hear. But
the reality is that man who asked for my biscuit. You can’t see the
crisis results fully yet because people have been living off their
savings. Soon the savings will end. I believe that by the end of 2012,
you will see a different Greece, a different country, with real
poverty.”
According to Yanis Varoufakis, the future — for Greece and for much of
the rest of the Western world, never mind recent upticks in the U.S.
economy — is one of even more upheaval. “The Minotaur died, and that is
what held everything together,” he said. “Until a new system is
invented, we are in for turmoil.” As anecdotal evidence of the situation
in Greece, he told me that all of his top Ph.D. students at the
University of Athens were seeking jobs abroad. Then he added that he,
too, would soon be leaving, possibly for a position in the United
States.
Like many Greeks I talked to, Stelios Zacharias, the
winemaker, insisted that as hard as it is, the crisis takes on a
different character when put in local perspective. “For one thing, there
isn’t a housing crisis,” he said. Economists echo this point: you don’t
see homelessness in Athens the way you do in other hard-hit cities.
That is because even as they were pursuing careers in Athens as
stockbrokers or investment bankers, people maintained their ties to
their villages. Astoundingly, about 80 percent of Greeks own a home. It
may be on family land on a distant island, but it is still a home.
Zacharias, for example, lives on land that his grandfather bought
decades ago with coupons from a newspaper promotion. Many of those who
have lost jobs in the city therefore have rural homes to retreat to,
though whether there is income once they get there is another matter.
Family and community ties are certainly helping to hold Greece together
thus far. When I asked the journalist Aris Hadjigeorgiou, two months
after our meeting in the taverna, if he was getting a paycheck yet, he
said the newspaper had completely stopped publication. “As a journalist,
I don’t know if I’ll make it,” he said. But, he said, he was scraping
by with the help of others. And he negotiated a lower rent with his
landlady.
So maybe Paul Evmorfidis’s argument has some validity: Greece’s
traditional infrastructure may not be the ultimate answer to its
problems, given the global scale of things, but it may make difficult
times less painful. The destination of my car trip with Evmorfidis was
Volos, a vigorous port city in Thessaly and conduit for trade with Asia,
where he had been asked to speak about the crisis to a group of
business leaders. After the talk, as we walked out of the building, he
was in the middle of telling me that what will save Greece is its
still-vibrant sense of community when we saw a middle-aged woman coming
down the steps. It was late, and we hadn’t eaten dinner. He asked the
woman if she knew where we could get something to eat. “Come to my home,
and I’ll cook for you,” she said. And so we did.
