All posts by Stav Dimitrοpoulos

Stav Dimitropoulos is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in major US, UK, Australian, and Canadian outlets. A native of Greece, she received the Athens Medal of Honor at the age of seventeen and went on to receive a master's degree. She experimented with journalism along the way, and has been writing ever since. Facebook | Twitter: @TheyCallMeStav
After the birth of his daughter Adeline, Dustin Davis became a “work-at-home dad”—picking up his design career after a layoff by doing freelance work, but making his daughter his chief priority.
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Men at Work at Home

Today’s stay-at-home dads have little in common with Mr. Mom. Responsible, nurturing, and home by choice, they are eager to prove that—aside from the breastfeeding—they can do whatever a woman can.


Father holding laughing toddler at bottom of bouncy slide
Like many of today’s loud-and-proud stay-at-home dads, R.C. Liley has no qualms about saying he is good at running a household—something he’s done since the beginning of his marriage to his wife Kelley. After their daughter Avery was born, Liley chose to put a hold on his career as an accountant in order to care for her.

“W

e’re gonna be on this airplane,” R. C. Liley says, showing his two-year-old daughter a pink, two-seater toy plane. Twenty-nine, Liley is tall and fit and towers over Avery, a toddler in a light-green T-shirt with the words “Never Mess.” “We’re gonna start from the ground, and w-o-o-o-o-sh!” he says, mimicking the sound of the jet engines as he lifts the plane higher and higher.

Liley ends his demonstration. “Okay, Avery, that’s an airplane,” he says. “We’re gonna fly on it—are we gonna be good?”

“Yes,” Avery says, a bit hesitant, her dimples sinking into her cheeks as she smiles.

Liley is a stay-at-home dad. He looks after Avery when his wife Kelley, Avery’s mother, is working at the finance department of a large corporation. Unlike some stay-at-home dads, who feel awkward about taking on a role that many people still consider feminine, Liley is open about being the primary caretaker for his child—so open, in fact, that he regularly shares his experiences on his blog.

Since 1989, the number of stay-at-home dads, or SAHDs, has nearly doubled, according to the Pew Research Center. About two million fathers in America now care for children younger than eighteen while not working outside the home. They account for 16 percent of at-home parents. Likewise, across Europe and even in more traditional cultures around the world, men who take on this role are increasingly visible.

Black-and-white portrait of stay-at-home dad and his baby daughter
After the birth of his daughter Adeline, Dustin Davis became a “work-at-home dad”—picking up his design career after a layoff by doing freelance work, but making his daughter his chief priority.

In the United States, many men who lost their jobs during the recession wound up staying at home with their kids, at least temporarily. For a growing number of men, however, their choice to become stay-at-home dads is actually that—a choice. Surveys support this view that fathers’ attitudes are changing. For example, just 5 percent of stay-at-home dads in 1989 said that the main reason they were home was to care for their home or family; today, 21 percent do.

These fathers have little in common with Jack Butler, the hapless stay-at-home dad played by Michael Keaton in the 1983 comedy Mr. Mom—still the cultural reference many people turn to when thinking of men at work at home. Forced to care for his kids after being sacked, Butler seemed bent on wreaking havoc in the house.

Today’s more gender-equal generation of stay-at-home dads shoulder domestic tasks more responsibly. For his part, Liley grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Texas. He studied finance and got a well-paying job as an accountant at a mutual fund. But in 2013, he decided to quit his job and care for Avery. “My wife always made more,” he says. “I was already the one doing the cooking and the rest of the household.” Staying home with Avery wasn’t something Liley felt forced into. Quite the contrary, he says—“I was counting down the days till I became a SAHD.”

But as much as attitudes about parenting have changed, stay-at-home dads still find themselves facing skepticism and derision, often subtle in form—the ways that stay-at-home moms steer clear of them at the playground, or the media portrays them as clueless and dumb, or friends and family drop hints that what they’re doing is strange.

“Being the man, it sounded crazy for me to quit my job,” says Matt Dudzinski, thirty-six, a former interior designer for an architectural firm in Detroit who now cares for his two daughters, six and three. He and his wife Aya, a trim engineer for an automotive company, had each thought—to themselves—that having Dad at home would work best for them as a couple. But they avoided talking about it. “We were both worried about being judged—her, for wanting to keep her career while being a mother, and me, for not being a breadwinning man.”

Then Dudzinski was laid off. “The arrangement we both knew we wanted, but were afraid to voice, was decided for us.”

Father and toddler smiling as they sit on a swing
“My daughter will get more physical growing up with me,” Liley says. “She will get more practical, more assertive.”

In certain parts of the world, men (and women) have an easier time staying at home with their kids. For more than two decades, Canada has granted paid leave to fathers who want to be the primary caretakers of their children. In Japan, a country known for its stark gender divide, the law nonetheless requires employers to give their workers—men and women—time off after the birth of a child. In Sweden, one of the most SAHD-friendly countries, both moms and dads can receive government benefits for up to 480 days if they choose to care for their kids at home.

In America and Australia, there is much less in the way of support. Stay-at-home dads have fewer role models or resources to help them, and when government policies do exist to assist families with young children, they tend to treat these men as second-class parents.

Regardless of what their governments do, however, broad economic and cultural shifts seem to be pushing new dads in all these countries to consider what their own fathers would not.

In the United States, the number of stay-at-home dads peaked at 2.2 million in 2010, but then fell slightly once the economy picked up. Clearly, household decisions about who does what have much to do with the state of a family’s finances: in an uncertain economy, men who wouldn’t otherwise stay home are willing to do so when it seems practical. The massive unemployment of the economic downturn is only part of this story, though. Years after the official end of the recession, the typical American household makes less income, adjusted for inflation, than it did in 2007. Having a parent stay at home sometimes makes more sense than paying for a nanny or daycare—and now that women often make more than their partners, the sensible choice in some cases is for the dad, not the mom, to stay home.

Changing values may also be drawing men out of the workplace and into the home. Today, parenting is seen as both the cause and solution to a wide variety of social ills, says writer and sociologist Tiffany Jenkins, while “work is not as important as it used to be for one’s identity and purpose.” As work inside the home becomes, as Jenkins puts it, “professionalized,” more men may think of it a worthy life calling.

In turn, some of today’s new fathers may be reacting to what they think their own dads got wrong. GenXers and millennials, who grew up at a time when dual-income families were the norm, are already more comfortable with the idea of a woman breadwinner. Like every generation before them, they are finding their own ways to rebel—and in the case of the stay-at-home dads among them, this may involve rejecting their fathers’ workaholic schedules, which left little time for children. “I think a lot of people from my generation grew up without dads, or without good dads, and we are trying to change that—showing that we can be great dads,” says Josh Hardt, twenty-eight, a stay-at-home dad in Durham, North Carolina.

For his part, Hardt never felt close to his biological father, he says. After he moved away from home, he did find a fatherly role model in his stepdad, who was a more hands-on parent. Now that he’s a father himself, Hardt works on a freelance basis as a filmmaker but focuses on caring for his two-year-old daughter. His wife works as a retail store manager and provides most of the family’s income.

Hardt enjoys his role at home. The idea of a woman supporting a man financially isn’t that far a cultural leap for someone young like him, but Hardt knows that others—especially the older generation—think otherwise. “They come from a different time, so I understand why it’s hard to understand,” he says.

Parents laughing with their young son at a cafe
Stay-at-home dad Paul Schwartz with his wife Amy Wilson and son Malcolm. “I felt like a social movement of my own when I quit my lawyer’s job to stay at home with my son,” he says. Photo by Catherine O’Hara

If capable stay-at-home dads like Hardt are growing in numbers, though, you wouldn’t know it by watching TV. From Fred Flintstone to Homer Simpson, from Al Bundy to Alan Harper, the most popular on-screen dads of the past several decades have been roundly portrayed as doofuses. And the stay-at-home dads among them have not been spared the low expectations that both men and women have concerning male parenting skills. Even when TV dads are praised for being practically minded problem solvers in the home, the compliments are woefully backhanded—in a controversial 2011 detergent commercial, for instance, the savvy stay-at-home dad has to qualify his competence by calling himself a “dad-mom.”

Paul Schwartz knows the stereotype of the bumbling dad well: he was asked to play one on TV. Schwartz, a forty-two-year-old former labor lawyer, has gained a large following on his blog, which chronicles his adventures as a stay-at-home dad in Paris. A few months ago, a cable channel asked him if he wanted to be in a reality show they were developing about stay-at-home dads. The idea was interesting, but in the end Schwartz backed out. “They insisted that we act like morons,” he says.

Perhaps the negative portrayals of stay-at-home dads in the media aren’t so surprising, though, given how prevalent these stereotypes are in the public at large. It needs to be stressed that perceptions of stay-at-home dads tend to be much more hostile outside of America and Europe: in China, SAHDs often hide their status, fearing humiliation, and in many Muslim nations, such a role for men is considered religiously subversive. Nevertheless, large numbers of people in rich Western countries continue to have a lopsided view of who should be taking care of the kids. In a 2013 Pew survey, for instance, 51 percent of Americans said that children are better off if their mothers are home, while only 8 percent said the same of fathers.

Stay-at-home dads are regularly reminded that other people see them as, at best, an oddity. “I usually get one of two responses when people ask what I do for a living,” Dudzinski, the stay-at-home dad from Detroit, writes in an email. “‘Oh, that’s great’ (with a straight face, changes subject and stops talking to me). Or: ‘That’s awesome! If I didn’t have to work, I’d totally stay home all day!’ (assuming I watch TV and order pizza every day).”

Schwartz has stayed at home with his son Malcolm for a decade, but he still gets his share of clueless and patronizing questions from people he meets—inquiries along the lines of, “How does it work? Do you do laundry, too?” “Most are a bit shocked to learn that I have been a stay-at-home parent for all of Malcolm’s life,” Schwartz says. At PTA events, parent gatherings, and playdates, Schwartz is still frequently the only man in the room. “I don’t have a problem with it, although it occasionally means that my sense of humor doesn’t go over well.”

Toddler looking suspiciously at the camera as father and mother pose with her
Liley with his wife Kelley and daughter Avery. “My wife always made more,” says Liley. “I was already the one doing the cooking and the rest of the household.” But staying home with Avery wasn’t something Liley felt forced into. Quite the contrary, he says—“I was counting down the days till I became a SAHD.”

Schwartz and his family used to live in San Francisco. After Malcolm was born, he quit his job as a lawyer to take care of him. Then, in 2013, an international software company offered his wife Amy an executive position in Paris. She decided to take the job, and the family relocated overseas. Once in Paris, Schwartz immediately set to work establishing a new support network for Malcolm. He reached out to a local moms’ group about joining—only to learn that he, as a man, wasn’t invited.

When he did meet other stay-at-home parents, their interactions were “a bit weird,” he says. At a coffee for parents new to Paris, the group talked for half an hour about breast feeding, vaginal births versus C-sections, and similar topics. “You’d think that sitting around with a bunch of women talking about their intimate body parts would be terribly exciting, but to tell you the truth, I was bored.” To find more parents he could relate to, Schwartz eventually turned to the SAHD networks that have sprouted up around the globe in recent years. The people he’s met in this virtually connected community have been an important source of support, he says.

There is some irony to the fact that stay-at-home-moms can be some of the least understanding people whom SAHDs encounter. One obvious reason for the distance these women keep is apprehensiveness about sexual tensions—fears, for instance, that SAHDs must get lonely and want to hit on them. “Women are afraid they are forming a relationship that’s more [than] a friendship, so they don’t want any part of that,’” says Michelle P. Maidenberg, president and clinical director of Westchester Group Works, a community center in New York focused on group therapy.

The awkwardness, however, may have to do with more than just unwanted sexual attention. Women may see stay-at-home dads as threats—interlopers in a domestic sphere they thought was theirs alone, Maidenberg says. Or, they may see the SAHD as a sign of their own inferiority. The modern woman faces a daunting work-life balancing act: the need to juggle a thriving career and a thriving family. Meeting a stay-at-home dad, then, might raise some unsettling questions about how others have succeeded where she has failed—questions like, “Who is the high-powered female married to this man? How incredibly successful and rich is she that she has her husband at home?”

There is a joke going around his circles, Schwartz says. “The new status symbols for women are driving a hybrid car, and having a stay-at-home-dad for a spouse.”

Father with baby in sling snapping photo in the mirror of a bathroom/changing room
During the day, Davis cares for Adeline in their St. Louis home while his wife Jessica works as a designer at a marketing agency.

Among other things, skepticism about stay-at-home dads is rooted in the widespread view that women are just more caring and empathetic than men, and thus better suited to be caregivers. Science backs that view up—though the degree to which it does, and the degree to which any gender difference is due to nature or nurture, are hotly contested.

Women tend to have higher levels of activity in their mirror neurons, brain cells linked to the workings of empathy. But scientists disagree whether empathy is determined by mirror neurons alone. Furthermore, research finds that these mirrors neurons can be altered through simple and brief training tasks. This suggests that empathy is not impervious to the power of culture, and that the gender differences we see may be due, at least in part, to the way children are socialized, not their innate traits. Indeed, studies of infant boys and girls find that boys are equally sensitive and attentive to other people at this early stage in their development.

What happens, then, when men care for their kids at home? Not surprisingly, studies find that it is a good idea for fathers to get involved, generally speaking, in their children’s lives. For example, one British study gathered a sample of 11,000 adults and asked their mothers how often the children’s fathers had read to them, gone out with them, and otherwise spent time with them during their childhoods. The researchers found that, on average, adults whose fathers had been more involved when they were growing up had higher IQs, were more sociable, and enjoyed a healthier sense of self. Perhaps being raised by the most involved kind of father—a stay-at-home dad—can lead to even more benefits for children’s sense of self-worth.

That is a hypothesis that researchers are evaluating, says Dr. Michael B. Donner, president of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. Another is that men who care for their kids have personality traits that distinguish them from other men. For instance, there is anecdotal evidence that stay-at-home dads are more connected to, and comfortable with, their feminine side, Donner says. (For their part, many stay-at-home dads delight in the idea they are different: they want to show other people—especially their own children—that masculinity is also about compassion and nurturing, they told me.)

As interesting as this research can be, Donner is quick to add that the debate over gender differences can obscure the larger point: children just need supportive parents. “It’s not about gender or testosterone levels, or who nurtures or challenges. It is about feeling safe and secure in your parents’ hands, and these properties have no gender.” The bottom line is that children raised in nurturing environments exude confidence when they become adults, he says. “Two can play at that game, moms or dads.”

Don't worry, she's not actually driving the car.
Don’t worry, she’s not actually driving the car.

Dustin Davis has spent the last few years proving just how nurturing a dad can be. In 2013, Davis was laid off from his job as a designer. When his daughter Adeline was born two years ago, he decided he would use the opportunity to become—as he puts it on his personal blog—a “work-from-home dad.” During the day, his wife Jessica works as a designer at a marketing agency, while Davis cares for Adeline in their St. Louis home.

Davis, thirty-three, is as manly as you can get, as evidenced by his impressive ZZ Top beard. But like any stay-at-home parent, he revels in the milestones he’s been able to see first-hand—the other day, it was the five steps Adeline took, in a moment of particularly good coordination. Like many stay-at-home dads (and for that matter, like many stay-at-home moms), he has a career he continues to pursue. But now he is a freelancer working part-time from home, and his chief priority, he says, is Adeline.

“While I cannot breastfeed a child, I can do everything else a woman does. I can be nurturing and loving. I can raise a child.”

Stav Dimitropoulos is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in major US, UK, Australian, and Canadian outlets. A native of Greece, she received the Athens Medal of Honor at the age of seventeen and went on to receive a master's degree. She experimented with journalism along the way, and has been writing ever since. Facebook | Twitter: @TheyCallMeStav

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Daniel Okator lives on the streets of Athens. Fearful of Boko Haram, he left Nigeria in 2013 and crossed the Mediterranean on a rickety boat. Two of his fellow migrants drowned when the boat capsized.
Athens, Greece
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Send These, the Homeless, Tempest-Tost

In recent months, hundreds of migrants have died trying to cross the Mediterranean and slip into Europe. Even Greece, a country locked in a worsening financial crisis, is now drawing record numbers of desperate travelers from Africa and elsewhere. Once their journey is over, what happens next?


Nigerian immigrant Daniel Okator with a shopping cart full of scrap metal
Daniel Okator lives on the streets of Athens. Fearful of Boko Haram, he left Nigeria in 2013 and crossed the Mediterranean on a rickety boat. Two of his fellow migrants drowned when the boat capsized.

Me? No, I have papers!” the man yells when I ask him his name.

He is young, tall, and stout, dressed in a worn black bomber jacket and a pair of baggy corduroys, his hands covered by the scruffy grey gloves he uses to root through garbage bags.

I have run into him in Plato’s Academy, the vicinity of the philosopher’s storied school, now an Athens district filled with working-class flats and African migrants pushing carts full of trash. Probing his pockets to find papers he does not eventually produce, the man tells me only his first name: Blaise. Forty-three, he is an immigrant from Côte d’Ivoire—an illegal immigrant, it seems, given how he protests too much. “Me, Christian! Samaris good! I love Greece! Samaris good!”

I was talking to Blaise right before Greek prime minister Antonis Samaras was booted out of office in January. The national elections brought to power a leftist government, which immediately began demanding a new deal for Greece in repaying its international loans. Since the global financial crisis struck in 2008, Greece has been beset with double-digit unemployment and shriveling industry, a downturn deepened by tough loan terms that have required painful and abrupt economic reforms. The drama has heightened in recent weeks: Greece is currently negotiating with the International Monetary Fund and European creditors over the payment arrangements for its loans, which the new government claims needs to be relaxed in order for Greece to avoid defaulting on those loans and abandoning the Euro for its old drachma currency—an increasingly likely scenario. If this were to happen, rampant inflation and a banking crisis would ensue, experts say.

Throughout the ongoing financial turmoil, however, migrants have continued to come to Greece. Indeed, the EU’s border management agency says that Europe-bound migrants are increasingly choosing to go through Turkey and Greece rather than embarking from various northern African nations, which nowadays are seen as riskier launching points. According to the United Nations, so far this year 48,000 refugees and migrants have entered Greece—almost half of those who have come to Europe—a running total that already far outstrips the national figure for the entire previous year. Over the past several months, record numbers have landed on the shores of the country’s Aegean islands in rubber dinghies and wooden boats: half of the six hundred migrants who now arrive in Greece every day come to the island of Lesvos alone.

While the bulk of Greece’s immigrants in the nineties and aughts came from the Balkans, today they increasingly hail from countries outside Europe. A fifth now come from Africa, and more than half from Asia—mainly from war zones like Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. These latest waves of new arrivals have stoked xenophobic attitudes among native Greeks already anxious about the economy. Meanwhile, those migrants lucky to survive the often treacherous overseas journey to Greece find themselves struggling once here. African migrants like Blaise—whose continent is associated with poverty, war, and disease in the minds of many Greeks—encounter an economy and society that continually tells them it doesn’t much care for them.

Compared to some other countries in Europe—for example, Denmark, Switzerland, and Slovakia—Greece is less strict in accepting immigrants and asylum seekers from overseas. But clearly the supply of legal opportunities to move to Europe cannot match the demand, because every year an estimated 55,000 African migrants are smuggled in. Transnational criminal syndicates often get them here, shipping human beings across borders just like they do weapons and drugs.

Smuggling Africans is big business—estimated at $150 million a year—and poor immigrants seeking better economic opportunities or escaping violence or repression at home are willing to pay a great deal for a one-way ticket to Europe. For Blaise, the trip from his Ivorian hometown of Duékoué to Athens cost him 7,000 euros. In his case, the smugglers upheld their end of the bargain; other would-be immigrants wind up as sexual slaves or forced laborers, stealthily shunted through the same global networks by profit-hungry human traffickers.

The journey poses great risks, too. According to a report by the International Organization for Migration, over 22,000 migrants have died trying to cross the Mediterranean since 2000. Last year set a record for the number of deaths, which exceeded 3,000. This year’s tally will handily surpass it: in just the first four months of 2015, an estimated 1,770 migrants died. In April, at least five boats carrying migrants sank during the Mediterranean crossing, killing 1,200. The shocking death toll prompted a European Union summit later that month, where the continent’s leaders resolved to increase the number of ships patrolling the sea, ramp up law-enforcement efforts to quash human trafficking, and assist developing countries in tightening their borders.

As great as the risks are, the pressures pushing African migrants to cross over to Europe appear to be greater. While countries like China and India build a vibrant new middle class, almost half of Africans continue to live on less than a $1.25 a day, the World Bank’s threshold for extreme poverty. Although the continent possesses a wealth of oil, minerals, and other natural resources, corrupt government officials and unchecked multinational corporations have hoarded that wealth and left the populations of many African countries unemployed and desperate. And even as economic forecasts predict continued economic growth in Africa as a whole in the years ahead, water and food shortages, infectious diseases, climate change, and violent extremism pose existential threats to numerous communities.

Ivorian immigrant Blaise pushes a shopping cart down the street while pulling down his cap to avoid identification
Fearful of deportation, Blaise, an immigrant from Côte d’Ivoire, hides his face from a camera.

I ask Blaise about what brought him to Greece. Blaise can’t speak much Greek, so we chat in French, and eventually I persuade him to offer up some details about his personal background. Visibly nervous, he tells me he left behind his fourteen-year-old daughter in Côte d’Ivoire. He feels he had no choice. A disputed presidential election in his country sparked a civil war in 2010 pitting the soldiers of Alassane Ouattara, the election’s internationally recognized victor, against those of Laurent Gbagbo, the incumbent president. During the conflict, military forces on both sides allegedly killed and raped hundreds of civilians. When we start talking about the violence that brought him to Greece, Blaise becomes increasingly agitated. “Ouattara killed my father and mother!” he finally blurts out, raising his gloved hands to the sky.

The war ended just a year later—with Gbagbo defeated, captured, and brought before the Hague’s International Criminal Court to stand trial for crimes against humanity—but Blaise remains in Greece, hustling to survive on the streets. Like other African migrants, he sells the tin and plastic he picks out of trash cans to scrapyards. He eats at Catholic soup kitchens during the day, sleeping in parks or vacant buildings at night. And he watches, ever vigilantly, for the police. When I pull out a camera to snap his picture, Blaise lowers his cap and poses from behind—no face, please. He can’t take any chances.

“No police, Samaris good!”—he kneels—“Greece good, Samaris good!”

Many African migrants are smuggled into Greece from Turkey, crossing the Mediterranean by boat. The thousands of tiny islands sprinkled throughout the waters near the Greek mainland make it easy for smugglers to evade authorities. Their efforts to sneak migrants in by boat greatly intensified in the 1990s. Nowadays, Turkish organized crime runs a brisk business shuttling people across the sea.

Daniel Okator, a twenty-five-year-old Nigerian migrant, made this crossing to Greece in 2013. Tall and gregarious, he chats to me after parking a cart chock full of scrap on the curb. He earns two or three euros a day, he says, scavenging steel from whatever discarded items he can find—TV sets, tables, sewing needles, metal roofing. His line of work has become big business in Greece: a recent documentary reports that half of the country’s annual steel production comes from these sorts of salvaged materials. Scrapyard operators pay scavengers like Daniel for their metal harvest and then drive it to the foundries to be melted down again.

At a nearby chapel, about twenty Catholic nuns—themselves transplants from Switzerland, Rwanda, India, and elsewhere—give the migrants clothes and serve them breakfast and lunch. Daniel typically spends half his day there, helping the nuns with their chores. The nuns have chosen him and several other migrants to serve as guards at the chapel, providing security whenever an occasional fist or knife fight breaks out among the migrants. At midday, however, the chapel closes, and Daniel is left to roam central Athens by himself, pushing his cart down the street in search of scrap metal—or, in the winter, riding buses to keep warm.

Daniel used to be a music student in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, but then Boko Haram struck the city. (Over the last several years, the jihadist group has killed and kidnapped thousands in its drive to establish an Islamic state within Nigeria, whose population is split almost evenly between Muslims and Christians.) In 2011, a suicide bomber drove a car rigged with explosives into a United Nations building in Abuja, killing twenty-three people. Boko Haram claimed responsibility. That brazen attack convinced Daniel—a Muslim himself—to leave the country.

Daniel got in touch with a member of a smuggling network. His connection was a “recruiter,” what law enforcement calls a network’s low-level operatives, who answer to its manager, or “coordinator.” Recruiters usually come from the same country as the people they seek to recruit. They talk up life in Europe to potential migrants, sign them up, and then collect the fees. In Daniel’s case, the price of a one-way covert trip to Greece was 1,800 euros.

The recruiter obtained a visa for Daniel from the local Turkish consulate. (In some African countries, it is easy to find corrupt public officials—border police, immigration officials, consulate employees—who will issue visas in exchange for bribes.) Daniel’s ultimate destination was Greece, but first he flew to Istanbul. He continued by land to Izmir, where he and twenty other migrants boarded a rust-covered boat. The voyage was short, only an hour, but the sea was rough and the boat engines rattled. Near the shores of the Greek island of Chios, the boat tipped over. Most of the passengers managed to swim to the shore. Two did not. “Swim!” the smuggler yelled at the group. No one went back to help the man and woman left behind.

Years later, Daniel still thinks about them. He will picture them in his mind, two human beings drowning slowly in the roiling waters, groping desperately for someone to latch onto.

For the most part, Greece has not welcomed the African masses that have come to its shores, yearning to breathe free. More than half of Africans migrants questioned in a 2013 survey conducted by Harokopio University said that there is widespread racism in Greek society. (Only a third of them, however, said that there is widespread racism within their own neighborhoods.) Stereotypes about immigrants abound here, as in many countries, and African migrants from poor or war-torn lands endure much of the more invidious prejudices. Recent fears about the spread of Ebola—crudely identified with the continent—have not helped matters. But the lousy economy seems to be a key driver of the nativist rage directed at this group. Anti-immigrant parties like Golden Dawn have been doing better at the polls ever since the economic crisis struck.

Landry Mbida is a thirty-six-year-old migrant from Cameroon. He has been in Greece a little over a year. Even though Landry, like most Cameroonians, is a Christian, he feels intensely isolated from Greek society. “When I get on the bus, people turn the other way round,” he says. “Some hold their noses, others change seats.”

Landry is a big man with dreadlocked hair, a broad nose, and a slightly protruding jaw—someone whose fierce facial features might easily intimidate—and it’s not always clear what role his race plays in the way he’s treated from day to day. That said, it is abundantly clear to him that he’s not welcome, for whatever reason, wherever he goes. When he left his home country, he first went to Istanbul. He quickly learned that Turkey was not the country for him. “They wouldn’t give me a job once they learned I am Christian,” he says. So Landry took a boat to Greece. When he reached the shores of the island of Chios, he was arrested and put in a detention center. After a month, he was transferred to another camp in Komotini, where he spent three more months.

Greece’s detention centers are notorious. Migrants are routinely crammed into shipping containers, living among rats and receiving scant medical care while they wait—sometimes for more than a year—to be deported. “I fell sick every day there,” Landry says. “They only gave us bread, lots of bread.” The lack of nourishment gave Landry chronic stomach cramps, and he had to be rushed to an outside hospital three times. “I asked for medicine, but they wouldn’t give it to me.”

Syriza, the left-wing Greek political party that won power in the January election, has started emptying the detention centers. It has promised to speed up the process for deciding asylum requests. And it has called for a new framework for granting legal status to migrants. Even if Syriza is successful in reforming the nation’s immigration policy, however, global problems of poverty and war will continue to lead desperate African migrants to Greece’s shores. And there is little in the way of a plan to deal with those who have been evacuated from the government’s detention centers. (Asked where the released migrants go, Tasia Christodoulopoulou, Syriza’s minister of immigration policy, said nonchalantly that they head to other European countries.)

For his part, Landry applied for asylum six months ago. He dreams of the day he will be able to share a house again with the wife and two young kids he left behind in Cameroon. Right now, he lives in a two-room shack inhabited by ten men. “No, six now,” he says, correcting himself. “Four left for Northern Europe on foot.” They are now in Serbia.

“But I really want a chance here!” Landry exclaims, suddenly perking up. “Not with this …” He points at the pile of scrap he has collected. “This isn’t a job.” At the end of the day he will cart the bounty to his Lebanese buyer, who pays just eighteen cents for a kilo of tin. “Eighteen cents! Eighteen cents!” he says, practically shouting.

The anger passes. Landry glances at his clothes: scruffy jeans and muddy athletic shoes, treasures from a dustbin and handouts from a charity.

“I want to be clean,” he says, smiling sheepishly.

Kevin, a Nigerian immigrant, poses in front of the trash bins he is searching for valuable items
Kevin came to Greece with the hope he could start a business and send money back to his wife and children in Nigeria. Instead, he barely survives on his own, living in a garage and rummaging through trash bins for metal to sell at scrapyards.

A homeless man has to have a code. On the streets, African migrants take turns rummaging through the same garbage cans. Blaise knows the rules. He steps away from his bin when he spots another migrant approaching with a cart. Recognizing the man, Blaise beckons him over.

Kevin—who refuses to give his full name for fear of deportation—is a Nigerian migrant in his early forties. Short and compact, he has a warm smile and, unlike Blaise, an apparent affinity for cameras. In the winter chill, he wears a flimsy beige jacket over a bright blue T-shirt, along with a pair of woolen gloves. They are gifts, he says, from “my Catholic sisters”—the nuns at the nearby chapel.

Three years ago, when he was living in Nigeria, Kevin came up with a business idea: buy clothes at a low price in Europe and resell them in his home country. The overseas venture meant that Kevin had to leave behind his wife and two children. Nevertheless, his father gave Kevin his blessing to go. The family needed money.

Soon after he made it to Europe, Kevin’s dream fell apart. He had hoped to get to Italy, where he has relatives, but his recruiter sent him to Greece. (Recruiters will often not tell migrants the route that they will take, or the country where they will land.) Today, Kevin lives in a dilapidated garage. He makes his living not by reselling clothes, but by scavenging for scrap. It’s a tough way to survive, and yet some native Greeks, he says, won’t even give him credit for his hard work.

“Why do Nigerians sell drugs?” a police officer once asked him.

“I don’t sell drugs,” Kevin replied, offended. “All fingers are not the same.”

It is usually the older Greeks who will insult migrants on the street; according to Kevin, the young tend to be more “relaxed.” (That said, Kevin’s fellow scavenger Daniel claims to have received five stitches to his leg after a gang of young men—interestingly, second-generation Albanian immigrants—harassed him and then set their dog on him.)

Photo of a nun of Kevin's cell phone
Kevin holds up a picture of one of the nuns at the nearby chapel, one of the few sources of assistance the migrants trust.

From Kevin’s point of view, the only people who actually go out of their way to help migrants like him are the nuns. When there isn’t enough scrap to fill their carts, he and his fellow scavengers turn to the nuns for food, water, clothes, and even cell-phone charging (on the street, finding an electrical outlet they can use is a special challenge). “If it weren’t for the Catholic sisters, we would have died,” says Kevin, a Catholic. Government-run food banks will offer them food, and hospitals will treat them for emergencies, but the migrants I spoke to felt closest to the nuns, who knew them personally.

The mother superior, who will only identify herself as “Sister Maria,” is a native of Switzerland. She is devoted to her work in the community, to the point that she becomes anxious when migrants (Algerian drug addicts, in one case) go without socks. People in Europe cannot understand what these people have been through, she says. She cringes when she describes the overcrowded conditions at the Amygdaleza detention center, which she and the other nuns visit every week. (Under the new government’s orders, Amygdaleza was recently evacuated.) The nuns bring the migrants not only food and sweets but also markers and notebooks. Some of them  are so depressed by their confinement, she says, that they need a chance to work with their hands and find a creative outlet for their stress.

Of all his countrymen and women who have left their homeland in recent years, Kevin is one of the lucky ones. Hundreds have died at sea, but he survived. Many have traded poverty in Africa for poverty elsewhere, but he made it to Europe, a land of peace and prosperity. Nonetheless, things have not gone the way Kevin once hoped they would. These days, his bitterness threatens to overwhelm his good nature.

“Stay where you are,” he says when asked to give a word of advice to his fellow Africans on the other end of the ocean. “You don’t know what you’re getting into. You’re going to suffer.”

Postscript: A few months later, I learned that Kevin had been arrested and taken to the Petrou Ralli detention center. The nuns have visited him several times. As of April, he was still there.

Stav Dimitropoulos is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in major US, UK, Australian, and Canadian outlets. A native of Greece, she received the Athens Medal of Honor at the age of seventeen and went on to receive a master's degree. She experimented with journalism along the way, and has been writing ever since. Facebook | Twitter: @TheyCallMeStav

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Digging in the Dustbins of History

After the Soviet Union collapsed, Christos Gabriel and Yannis Lubovicki left the faltering Eastern Bloc and came to Greece in pursuit of a happier life. But as the energy and promise of Greece’s once-fiery economy has dwindled away, immigrants like them have experienced homelessness and hostility—as well as a peculiar yearning for the old communist ways.


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Homeless Polish immigrant sitting on the sidewalk next to a moped
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Yannis Lubovicki left Poland and came to Athens in search of work. He lost his job during the Greek economic crisis and now lives on the streets.

In the Athenian neighborhood of Skouze Hill, a pair of shabbily dressed men, Polish immigrants, sit on a doorstep across the street from a supermarket, wearily asking passersby for change as they wait for store employees to throw away the day’s unsold food. Once the food has been tossed into the supermarkets’ dustbins, they will compete with the area’s other dumpster divers—ethnic Roma—for the stale bread and leftover vegetables.

When he illegally immigrated to Greece two decades ago, Yannis Lubovicki, forty-three, dreamed of a better life than what Poland—then struggling to adjust to a post-Berlin Wall world—could offer. Instead, he and his companion Christos Gabriel, fifty-three, found poverty. Now they spend their days panhandling and their nights sleeping on park benches. They survive on food from church soup kitchens and trash cans and the water from park fountains. Once a week they walk downtown to Koumoundourou Square and use the public baths there, well frequented by the homeless.

“Don’t give them any money,” says a well-dressed middle-aged woman heading into the supermarket.  “They’ll spend it on wine in a split second.” If harsh, her words are perhaps true: their breath smells of alcohol, their eyes are bloodshot, and Lubovicki—the woman points to him emphatically—is timidly taking a corkscrew out of his bag.

An estimated one person in twenty is an undocumented immigrant in Greece, a country of eleven million. Many of them, like Lubovicki and Gabriel, are transplants from the former Eastern bloc. Having moved to Greece in search of the economic opportunities that an integrated, prosperous Europe once offered, they have instead struggled to survive, one of the groups hardest hit by financial crisis in Greece—itself one of the countries hardest hit by the global recession that struck in 2007. At the same time, they have been scapegoats for the country’s ongoing malaise, with high unemployment and political turmoil—along with a humiliating dose of international ridicule for the former continental success story turned basket case—feeding  a brutal, anti-immigrant backlash within Greek society, just as they have in other immigrant magnets such as Italy, Malta, and Spain.

Yet in few corners of Europe have ultranationalism and xenophobia gained as much traction as they have in Greece. Golden Dawn, a far-right Greek political party, has seen tremendous growth since the economic crisis hit. In 1996, it received just 0.07 percent of the vote in national parliamentary elections; in 2012, it won 7 percent. Halting immigration is the party’s chief goal. Its leaders declare that “illegal alien-invaders” amount to an irregular foreign army, one bent on attacking the country’s social fabric and corrupting its national identity. The party’s extreme rhetoric has, in turn, fed violence, from the murder of a Greek antifascist rapper by a party member, to the stunning attack that Golden Dawn MP Ilias Kasidiaris unleashed on two leftist members of parliament during the live taping of a morning talk show. (After their argument grew heated, Kasidiaris—who has called Greece’s undocumented immigrants “human garbage”—punched Communist MP Liana Kanelli and threw a glass of water in the face of SYRIZA MP Rena Dourou.) Golden Dawn members have frequently harassed immigrants, going so far as to pose as police in order to intimidate street vendors.

Even in Athens, Greece’s cosmopolitan capital, Golden Dawn has substantial support. It won 16 percent of the vote in last May’s mayoral elections, a huge jump from its share of just 5 percent in 2010. “We have been swarming with Albanians, Pakistanis, Africans, and Eastern Europeans,” says the middle-aged woman at the supermarket, who did not give her name. “Now we have the Gypsy gangs, too.” Her once-affluent neighborhood used to be populated by high-ranking military officers and their families, but in recent years the poorer immigrant enclaves in the bordering downtown areas have spilled over here as well.

“That’s why they wanted us in Europe, “she adds—referring to wealthy northern European nations like France and Germany—“to keep the Third Worlders away from them so they can continue their petty little lives.”

Two Greek illegal immigrants
Christos Gabriel and Yannis Lubovicki, undocumented Polish immigrants, survive by panhandling and scrounging in dustbins for food.

Gangling and gray-haired, Gabriel walks with a limp and speaks with a thick accent. In his halting Greek, he notes happily that he recently discovered a new hideout, a tiny covered alley alongside a newly built apartment building, where he lies down on the pavement at night to sleep. He and Lubovicki have spent the last five years living in close proximity to the supermarket and its surplus food. Until a few months ago, they had been squatting in a nearby abandoned house, but then the landlord drove them out.

Gabriel has been in the country for twelve years. Back in Poland, he lived through the early years of his homeland’s transition from communism. Post-Soviet Poland quickly reformed its economy to woo investors, privatizing its coal and steel industries and knocking down regulatory hurdles. Thanks to vigorous economic growth and rising standards of living, Polish households were optimistic and exuberant, and credit flowed easily. Gabriel, then a coal miner, decided to take out a loan to buy a two-story house in the southern Polish city of Katowice for himself, his wife, and four children.

The Polish “miracle,” however, failed to curb the country’s high levels of unemployment. Laid off and unable to find a new job, Gabriel struggled to pay his 50,000-euro mortgage. Desperate, he immigrated to Greece in 2002, joining a wave of illegal immigrants drawn by the global image of pre-crisis Greece as flourishing and full of promise. (Today, there are about 50,000 Polish immigrants in the country.) Gabriel has not seen his children since he left.

But today’s moribund Greek economy—now in its seventh year of recession—now offers little in the way of hope for Gabriel and immigrants like him. In Athens, about 5,000 undocumented immigrants live in derelict buildings unfit for human habitation. When they can find work, conditions are often extreme: migrant strawberry pickers, for example, earn $26 to $33 a day for about ten hours’ work, living in makeshift huts with no access to toilets. Meanwhile, government officials warn of a “public-health time bomb,” with large numbers of new immigrants not inoculated for tuberculosis, polio, measles, and other communicable diseases.

Until the 1990s, Greece was an extremely homogenous society. The wave of Eastern European immigrants that flooded Greece after the fall of the Soviet Union was followed by another wave of immigrants from Africa and Asia in subsequent years, gradually ratcheting up anti-immigrant sentiment among the broader population. Today, as unresolved economic and immigration problems worsen an already festering resentment; Greece continues to vie for the title of Europe’s “most racist” nation.

In recent years, the government has had some success in stanching the flow of illegal immigrants into the country, which it credits in part to an eight-mile barbed-wire fence it erected along its border with Turkey, completed two years ago. The number of illegal immigrants that the government detained fell from 77,000 in 2012 to 43,000 in 2013.

These days, Gabriel stays on constant alert for police raids—not for fear of deportation (European countries, Poland and Greece included, signed the 2007 Schengen agreement that allows citizens of each country to move and work freely throughout the union), but for fear that he may be arrested for failing to pay his bank loan back in Poland. For the most part, thought, the police tend to ignore him and other homeless immigrants.

Golden Dawn wishes it were otherwise. These foreigners must be deported, the party argues, in order to save the culture and community of the “pure” Greeks. (Ironically, in spite of his slogan of “work for Greeks only,” Golden Dawn’s leader, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, happens to own a hotel in an immigrant Athens neighborhood staffed by low-wage foreign workers.) Beyond its anti-immigration platform, Golden Dawn has argued for building closer ties with Russia at the expense of the US (particularly in regards to energy resources), erasing the “illegal” Greek debt and voiding the terms of the country’s internationally funded bailout, purging the public sector, and walling the Greek economy off from global trade.

In recent months the party’s brazen militancy seems to have backfired to some extent, with two of its leaders now in jail awaiting trial—Michaloliakos for forming a “criminal organization” and a spokesperson for gun charges. Nevertheless,Nikos Kyriakidis, a forty-seven-year-old plumber from Athens, insists that Golden Dawn is the only party that will fight against Zionism, imposed multiculturalism, and the growing erosion of Greek culture. Economic anxieties also seem to be at the root of Kyriakidis’s anger. He rails against the “scumbags” of PASOK and New Democracy—the major political parties that have long run the country—that he says destroyed the Greek economy. Although he has a quarter-century worth of work experience, right now Kyriakidis is unable to support his family. They just moved to avoid living in a part of the city that has recently seen an influx of immigrants. Kyriakidis doesn’t want his children to grow up in such a rundown neighborhood, he says.

In Greece, Eastern European immigrants tend to fare better than other immigrants in one area: racist attacks. Three weeks ago Gabriel and Lubovicki witnessed a gang of thirty young men dressed in black beating Asian immigrants. “They shouldn’t have hit them, it’s not right,” says Lubovicki, a stubby and gregarious man who fills in the silences of his tall and taciturn companion. The beating took place out in the open, in a public square with numerous passersby. Four police officers were nearby but did nothing, Lubovicki claims. Fortunately, the gang did not bother the two Poles. “It is the dark ones they are after,” he notes—that is, the Pakistanis, Afghanis, Syrians, Bangladeshis, Somalis, and Eritreans who have built up the country’s largest Asian and African immigrant enclaves.

“The men were huge—real giants,” Lubovicki adds. “If one of them punched me in the face, my head would fall off.”

Homeless Polish immigrants sitting on curb
Lubovicki and Gabriel sit on a street corner in the Skouze Hill neighborhood of Athens.

A group of young men walk down the street, stopping when they notice Lubovicki and Gabriel—half-drunk and reeking of alcohol—sitting on the doorstep. “I’ll give you ten bottles of wine if you kick this car door,” says one of the men. He is short and fair-haired, in his early twenties.

“Ten more bottles if you sing,” says another, a hulking man with a humpback.

Lubovicki bursts into laughter and says he can’t do it. Gabriel cracks a smile.

The young men seem to know the Poles. They, too, are immigrants—second-generation Albanian Greeks. Many of their parents immigrated to Greece after the Soviet Union collapsed. (Today, those of the country’s unauthorized immigrants who hail from the former Eastern Bloc are chiefly from Albania: in 2013 they were almost a third of all illegal immigrants arrested that year, and Albanians also comprise a majority of the country’s total foreign-born population.)

Lubovicki has a daughter of his own, now seventeen years old. (Her name is Despoina, a Greek Orthodox name; Lubovicki converted to the Greek Orthodox faith after arriving in the country.) His marriage ended after his wife, who had moved out to Greece with him, found out about an affair. “We had a brawl,” he says. “My wife left Greece in the middle of the night with my daughter.”

Things really got bad when Lubovicki lost his job during the crisis. “I haven’t worked in five years … I was a construction worker,” he says. (The construction sector—which used to employ both men, and whose workforce is a third foreign-born—has shrunk by half since 2009.) “I’ve been a vagabond all these years, sleeping on the benches of the parks.” He smirks as he admits it.

Their descent into poverty has soured their attitudes toward the free market and made the two Polish immigrants nostalgic for Poland’s communist era—however repressive it was. They would never have left Poland if the Soviet Union had not collapsed, they point out. Back then, life was good, and they lacked nothing. Thanks to the government, Lubovicki adds, he attended a trade school.

These are views shared by a significant number of older Eastern Europeans, according to a 2009 Pew survey. While those under the age of forty tend to favor the economic and political reforms their countries have gone through over the past two decades, the older generations are more skeptical. Clearly, many have painful memories of the USSR: not just the absence of freedom and dissent, but also the frequent shortages of food and toilet paper, the constant lecturing about Marxist-Leninist creeds, the degrading monotony of Soviet life. But like Lubovicki and Gabriel, some of those who grew up under communism point out that unemployment and homelessness were virtually unknown back then. Their salaries were nowhere near American ones, but the cost of living was negligible. The Soviet educational system was excellent, ranking among the best in the world.

In recent years, Poland has, like Greece before it, seen rapid economic growth. While many Poles continue to go abroad in search of the higher wages to be found out west, living standards have improved back in their home country. Lubovicki points out that his mother, a professional chef, enjoys a pension and a cozy house of her own. Meanwhile, he lives on the streets.

Lubovicki misses his hometown, a village outside Warsaw. He misses his daughter, who speaks to him by phone every other week. He misses his mother’s cooking. But he does not believe he will go back to the old country anytime soon. “My mother calls me up all the time asking me to return to Poland, but I can’t because I can’t afford it. I need eighty-five euros to renew my passport and about 200 euros for travel expenses.”

It’s not just about the money, Lubovicki adds. Born “Yannus,” he has lived as “Yannis” since he came to Greece—now half his life. “If I go to Poland, I won’t know a thing. I’ll be unable to adjust there …. I have been living in Greece ever since I came of age, how am I supposed to start all over again?” Gabriel—who used to go by the name “Yaroslav”—nods in approval.

“Have I told you I am also a mechanic for all kinds of machines and can do some plumber work?” Lubovicki says, moving on to another, more hopeful, topic. “I may find a gig like this in the future. I know the tools of the trade.”

Then his eyes light up. The sliding doors of the supermarket have opened. Employees bearing huge trash bags head for the dustbins. Lubovicki walks over to find his next meal.

Correction, September 27: An earlier version of this article misidentified the man in the first photo. It is Yannis Lubovicki, not Christos Gabriel.

Stav Dimitropoulos is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in major US, UK, Australian, and Canadian outlets. A native of Greece, she received the Athens Medal of Honor at the age of seventeen and went on to receive a master's degree. She experimented with journalism along the way, and has been writing ever since. Facebook | Twitter: @TheyCallMeStav

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Fields of Dreams Deferred

Young college-educated workers have struggled to find jobs in the wake of a devastating global recession. In Greece, the European epicenter of the economic crisis, the hardship is on a whole different level: college graduates are giving up on the careers they planned and heading home — to work on the family farm.


Various photos of farmers and the farmers' market in Kalamata, Greece
Photos from the farmers’ market in the Greek coastal city of Kalamata, where veteran farmers sell vegetables alongside college graduates. Young Greeks like Demetra Psonis (above left) had no luck finding jobs after the country’s economy collapsed. Photos courtesy of Eleftheria

In the last several years, stories have abounded in the American press about the struggles of recent college graduates. Unable to find jobs, overeducated young workers end up waiting tables, brewing espressos, and living with their parents. In Europe, the joblessness of the young — long an issue throughout the continent — has become desperate: Spain, for example, now has a youth unemployment rate of 56 percent, 17 percentage points higher than its rate four years ago, with no relief in sight.

And yet Greece — the country worst hit by the recession in Europe — offers a new twist on this woeful tale of well-educated but luckless youth. With no good job prospects, some college grads there are turning to one of the world’s oldest professions: farming.

Foteini Kollias is one of them. Now twenty-five-years old, she graduated with a degree in physical education from the National University of Athens around the time Greece’s economy collapsed five years ago. Unable to get a full-time job in her field, she eventually turned to growing fruit in Nafplio, a seaport town to the southwest of Athens.

Once a week, Kollias makes the hour-and-a-half trip to Athens to sell her fruit in the city’s central market. Over four years of farming, the hard labor has taken a toll on Kollias’s health, leaving her with a meniscus tear in her right knee that gives her constant pain. “Imagine lifting a box loaded with forty-five kilos of cucumbers every day while weighing no more than fifty kilos [110 pounds] yourself,” she says.

It is a grim outcome for a young woman who had been on track to get a well-paid government job before the economic crisis hit. “Torturing my body for so little money and no future prospects really depresses me,” she says.

Of course, youth unemployment is not just a problem for people in rich countries. The global recession has damaged the prospects of young workers throughout the world, and even as economies have recovered, the jobs have not come back. The problem is much worse for those without college educations.

Yet facts like these provide little consolation to young, educated workers like Kollias, whose careers have been permanently scarred by the country’s deep recession, which began in 2008 and has yet to end. Last year, the economy shrank by 6.4 percent. The nation’s unemployment rate currently stands at 27.6 percent, more than twice the average rate in the Eurozone and more than three times what it was when the crisis struck in October 2008. Other countries in Europe have also been beset by severe economic problems in recent years, but Greece has been hit the hardest, becoming the focus of international efforts to stop the spread of its economic ailments throughout the continent’s interconnected market.

There are many reasons given for the collapse of Greece’s economy and the massive unemployment it unleashed. One school of thought argues that huge budget deficits and expensive government benefits — in Greece, excessively generous worker pay and pensions — were at the heart of a crisis accelerated by the global recession. Other economists point to evidence that the economic collapse had more to do with the destabilizing rush of foreign dollars into those rapidly growing economies. Regardless of why it happened, the damage is clear: In 2004, Greece’s national debt was 99 percent of its GDP. Last year, it was 157 percent.

In Greece itself, much attention has been focused on political mismanagement. According to one popular account, one-party governments led alternately by the center-right New Democracy party and the center-left PASOK spread a pandemic of corruption and incompetence within a nepotism-plagued public sector, which had been growing unsustainably up until the crisis. Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs helped the government to fudge statistics and conceal its rising debt levels from European regulators. Meanwhile, the allure of fast money had eroded ethical standards in the country to the point that tax evasion became rampant.

Amid the country’s recent decline, it is difficult to remember the Greece of the fifties, sixties, and seventies — a period called the “Greek economic miracle” — when the country’s economy was roaring. Occupied during World War II and devastated by the civil war that followed, Greece began its rebuilding in the fifties with an ambitious campaign to “urbanize” its rural communities. En masse, Greeks living in the countryside moved to the expanding concrete landscape of the cities, rapidly expanding the workforces and consumer markets to be found there. The Greek “miracle” ended in the seventies, but healthy economic growth continued over the next few decades — until 2008.

Vassilis Psonis poses at his stall in the farmers' market
Vassilis Psonis sells vegetables that he and his sister grow on their family’s farm. After he graduated from a cosmetology school, Vassilis couldn’t find work and didn’t have the funds to start his own business. Stav Dimitrοpoulos

Now the same process seems to be happening in the other direction, as young urbanites dash back to the fields. According to a survey conducted for the country’s Ministry of Rural Development in the populous counties of Attica and Thessaloniki, 68 percent of respondents — representing over one million Greeks, in a country of just ten million — are considering leaving the city. Two-thirds of them are college graduates, and a majority of them under the age of forty. Nineteen percent of those surveyed said they have already initiated their moves.

The Greek press likes to call the country’s legions of unemployed young workers its “Lost Generation” — a term also used in the US and UK, among other countries, to identify their own struggling youth. It may be hard to compare their experience to that of the iconic Lost Generation of young men and women traumatized by the bloodbath of World War I. That said, these young Greeks have been traumatized by a cataclysm of an economic kind: a massive contraction of the nation’s economy on the order of 20 percent over five years. Their job prospects remain bleak even as the global economy has recovered: youth unemployment — for workers aged twenty-four and under — now stands at 64.9 percent, triple the rate five years ago. (Among those aged twenty-five to thirty-four, the rate is 38 percent, but for those thirty-five to forty-four, it is much smaller — 25 percent — proving that unemployment is wasted on the young.)

Greece, once one of Europe’s rising stars, now looks to be headed in the same direction as Japan during its “Lost Decade” of the nineties — into an age of diminished expectations, with swelling ranks of unemployed youth, and no simple way out of its economic malaise.

In the elegant coastal city of Kalamata, sister and brother Demetra and Vassilis Psonis tend to a stall in the farmers’ market, where their many wares are on display: chestnuts, peaches, tangerines, cherries, onions, cabbages, corn, and a variety of greens. When the recession struck five years ago, Demetra was just beginning her studies at the Technological Institute of Crete, where she majored in accounting. Up until the country’s crisis, Demetra had been confident that she would land a job in a field that — back then — was highly paid and secure. “Trying to find decent employment in the recession turned out to be a wild goose chase,” says Demetra, twenty-three. “I soon ended up working in a cafeteria.”

At the time, Demetra considered moving to a wealthier country in northern Europe to seek out better employment opportunities. But she had no idea about what city to move to, much less how to transplant herself there — even within the borderless European Union, labor is not as mobile as capital. “Going abroad? Where and with whom?” she asks. “I didn’t have to dwell a lot on the decision.” So Demetra ended up returning to her family’s farm in Kalamata. She knew the work well; she had been growing vegetables there ever since she was ten years old.

Her brother soon joined her. Vassilis, twenty-five, had trained to be a hairdresser. But when he graduated from school, he couldn’t find a job, and he lacked the capital to open his own business. Even if he did have a salon, he says, it was obvious then that few people would be paying good money for haircuts in that economic climate.

Like his sister, Vassilis worked the fields of his family’s farm as a child. “I always felt I had an alternative in case things didn’t go as planned,” he says. “I like it. I like everything that involves my hands. I tell myself I hold the hoe instead of the brush.”

Oddly enough, when the siblings decided to return to Kalamata, the people most opposed were their parents. Farmers for life, they and their generation had suffered through the misery of hard manual labor. They had cheered Greek’s meteoric ascent to economic power. They had dreamed of raising future academics, lawyers, and scientists who would lodge their families — and the children and grandchildren to come — within the well-paid professional classes.

“They sacrificed their lives to offer us a good education,” Vassilis says. But when the economy fell apart, those newly minted educations became worthless. And Vassilis, Demetra, and many of their peers headed for the fields — the familiar trend of urbanization played in reverse.

Demetra and Vassilis Psonis stand next to a table of vegetables
Siblings Demetra and Vassilis Psonis inspect the onions they are selling at the farmers’ market in Kalamata. Stav Dimitrοpoulos

The ancient Greek playwrights, who developed the concept of irony, would find much to write about concerning modern Greece’s travails. Older generations of farmers who once exhorted their children to seek out more and more education now find themselves advising the same kids — off the record — to take up farming again to “fill their stomachs.”

And yet Tassos Papaphilis, a thirty-four-year-old farmer, is reluctant to advise anyone, however desperate, to follow his path. Tassos grows crops in Corinth, an hour’s drive west of Athens. He is somewhat of a celebrity in the Athenian market where he sells his fruit, a long-haired jokester who teases and compliments passersby as he implores them — sometimes aggressively — to smell the sweet fragrance of his oranges.

A trade-school graduate, Tassos used to work as an estate agent for a large Corinthian firm, but he lost his job five years ago when the recession annihilated the country’s real-estate markets overnight. Unwilling to leave his birthplace, he decided to take up his father’s profession of farming. These days, he grows oranges, tangerines, and zucchini, and rears hens to sell their eggs.

His father died around the same time that Tassos lost his job. Farming became a way of coping — more than just financially. When plowing the soil, Tassos says, he feels an intimate connection to his dead father.

But his decision to go into farming has not yet paid off with a stable income, in spite of how hard Tassos works his fields. Taking over the family farm was “the biggest self-entrapment of my life,” he insists. Early on, Tassos received a European Union farm loan of 35,000 euros to enhance his business. But the country’s consumers cut back on their spending much more than expected, and with the markets so sluggish, his plans to expand his farming business came to naught. He has yet to repay the loan, and with his payments on it now exceeding his profits, he is doubtful that his crops will ever bring in enough money to do so.

In fact, Tassos is still dependent on his grandmother’s pension to make ends meet. In this regard, he is like a growing number of young Greeks, who, unable to keep up with their monthly rent and bills, have retreated to the family nest, living off the incomes of more secure parents and grandparents.

Now well into his thirties, Tassos knows he cannot start a family when he can barely feed himself. And there is no telling if and when the troika of European and international lenders who now prop up Greece’s economy with loans will decide to pull back, leaving Greece to implode. “The worst is yet to come,” Tassos warns.

Even though his farm is doing poorly, even though he has lost his business career, Tassos the farmer keeps greeting his customers in the market with a smile and a joke. “People are grumpy and sober nowadays,” he says. “Making others laugh is an antidote to depression that comes free of charge.”

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith once observed that unemployment in the days before industrialization was unheard of: “In traditional agriculture it did not exist; there was always work to do on the farms and in the supporting rural services.” During the Depression, he added, “farm employment or farm existence of a sort was the resort of some millions of urban workers in the United States.”

The Great Depression may offer this and other practical lessons for those struggling through the Great Recession. And yet it is also true that farming has become a less reliable last resort for families, with less bread to go around to their many breadwinners.

The rise of huge corporations has transformed the practice of agriculture and drastically lowered prices — and profits. It has become abundantly clear to Kollias, the farmer from Nafplio, how much things have changed. Her parents are both well educated: her mother studied medicine and her father is a mechanical engineer. In their thirties, they chose to become farmers because they valued their freedom, Kollias says. A family farm, back then, could actually support a family. “They worked hard, but their profit was in proportion to their labor hours,” she says. “If you had been eager to devote your body and soul to the land, you could have made good money in the past.”

Not anymore. Kollias puts it bluntly: “My brother, father, mother, and four workers live in the same house and struggle to scrape together a living,” There are no more “happy farmers,” she says — nothing like the yeomen farmers of Romantic poetry and Thomas Jefferson’s writings, tilling the soil and communing with nature — just jaded, overeducated young workers like her, anxious about their unsold merchandise and demoralized about their futures.

In between her trips to the farmers’ market in Athens, Kollias works occasionally as a lifeguard and gym instructor. The jobs pay little, but they help her retain the skills she learned studying physical education in college. When she was a student, she planned to take the civil-service exams and get a government job in her field. But when the crisis hit, the exams were called off. They have yet to be unfrozen. With no one willing to hire her, Kollias continues to grow her fruit.

With the years they spent in college amounting to nothing, and their work in the fields offering diminishing returns, the talents of Greece’s younger generation are being squandered. Who is to blame for the country’s modern tragedy? Kollias is unsure. She believes everybody shares some of the fault, even if she singles out Greece’s politicians for special scorn. “Still,” she adds, “we eat what we sow.”

Stav Dimitrοpoulos would like to thank Eleftheria for the newspaper’s help in finding interviewees and photographs for this story.

Stav Dimitropoulos is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in major US, UK, Australian, and Canadian outlets. A native of Greece, she received the Athens Medal of Honor at the age of seventeen and went on to receive a master's degree. She experimented with journalism along the way, and has been writing ever since. Facebook | Twitter: @TheyCallMeStav

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