These days, when I go down the steps from our apartment to collect the post from Hercules, our once cheery postman, he often looks anxious. After a year or so of severe pay cuts, postal workers’ salaries in Athens have gone from about €1,400 (£1,160) to €900 a month.
That doesn’t go far in an expensive country: supermarkets have retained prices that are higher than in many European countries. Hercules says he now avoids talking to people in the street because everyone wants to complain; there’s only one topic of chat — the crisis.
His friend, Nikos Chrysikos, is our local kiosk owner. He realised things were getting bad when several parents at his child’s nursery said they could no longer afford to give €3 a month for the cleaner/helper they had clubbed together to hire. “It’s not like saying, ‘I don’t have money to go for coffee’,” said Nikos. “It’s for your child. People always put their children first.”
Education is a kind of holy writ in Greece. Parents are ambitious for their children but some no longer have the funds to pay for the private extra lessons that most pupils take.
Many students studying abroad (tens of thousands in Britain) are being forced to return home because they can’t afford the fees. “Kostas”, a middle-class father, said he and his wife were devastated when they had to bring back their 23-year-old son from Edinburgh, where he was in the third year of a naval engineering degree. “We feel rage about the fate of our son,” he said. “It’s painful and humiliating when you can’t help your child.”
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The financial crisis has hit Greek society like a hammer, but the results are not merely brutal austerity and social dislocation. There are more interesting trends to be observed, ones that are sometimes lost on visiting journalists.
One consequence of huge youth unemployment (51%) and the reduction in salaries is “the new poor”. Another is a new family structure as young adults return to live with their parents — or never leave — and grandparents move in too.
“Until recently, people would hire a Bulgarian woman to look after Granny, as Greeks don’t like putting their elderly people in homes,” said Stella, my sister-in-law. “Now they can’t afford it, so Granny moves in with her children. We’re going back to the traditional Greek family of three generations.”
Sometimes, it all sounds a bit romantic — families getting together, young intellectuals moving to the villages to start growing vegetables or producing organic olive oil, a daily diet that is increasingly based on pulses rather than expensive meat. It sounds like a return to the kind of “authentic” Greece that looks good on tourist brochures.
The reality in Athens isn’t like that. A popular television series called Back Home depicts the young unemployed moving back in with their parents and, although it’s a comedy, it’s based on the inevitable tensions that arise when different generations are forced to rub along together.
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I recently spoke to a psychiatrist who works at Paidon, the largest children’s hospital in Athens. She says children are bearing the brunt of the crisis. “We’re seeing insomnia, anxiety and there’s more violence against children from stressed parents, who lose their temper. We see children whose parents have killed themselves because of debt — the fathers usually succeed, while the mothers try.”
Suicide rates have doubled in Greece and psychiatrists are handing out record numbers of antidepressants. Doctors are also seeing more cases directly linked to poverty.
“We get children being brought in by their parents because they haven’t eaten for days. We admit them to the hospital, put them on a drip for dehydration and feed them. In the past, social services would have dealt with this, but they’re all shutting down and there’s nowhere for people to go,” said the psychiatrist.
Parts of Athens are increasingly scary, especially at night. There are many hungry, illegal immigrants who are stuck in Greece and cannot find work. This has created “no-go” areas, where people openly take drugs, and crime has reached appalling levels.
The crisis has brought pain and anguish, but it has also increased the sense of solidarity in a population that has realised it must stick together and help itself. Soup kitchens have opened in the capital. While some already existed, mainly for immigrants, they are now also feeding pensioners and the unemployed.
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More popular with people in need has been the distribution of basic foodstuffs. Both the Greek Sky TV channel and the Orthodox Church have organised collection points where those who can afford it donate rice, pasta or tinned milk. There is also a charity called Boroume (We Can), which has created a network linking organisations that need food with those that have a surplus, such as restaurants.
Other groups, such as the youthful Atenistas, are taking action at a local level, from cleaning streets to handing out food and medical supplies. A friend of mine organised a coach trip to the countryside to pick unwanted oranges (the farmer couldn’t afford to pay pickers) and then handed them out free in Athens.
Although it’s grim, life goes on and there are still good things. Cafes are still full, even if some of the customers are unemployed people who nurse one coffee over three hours. Conversations are as impassioned as ever.
The State Theatre of Northern Greece has launched a series of international plays, but nobody will pay for tickets. Instead of money, audiences will take foodstuffs that can be donated to charities in need: a tin of tomatoes or a jar of jam will get you in to see Pinter’s The Collection or Jean Genet’s The Maids.
Increasingly, there is an awareness that the old cliché might be true and that at least some of the best things in life are free. You can’t take away the light that bathes grimy Athens in a rosy glow and makes the distant mountains crystal clear. The cycling movement is taking off and many brave the cold sea and banish the blues with swimming.
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The crisis may be having a devastating effect, but the Greeks are starting to show some of their best characteristics of bravery, ingenuity and generosity.
Sofka Zinovieff’s novel, The House on Paradise Street, is published by Short Books