Publicity:
| So you’re a city banker, you’re in your 50s and suddenly the floor drops from under your feet. A national economic collapse has taken your job and has dramatically narrowed any prospect of you getting another one. Your savings are evaporating fast, city costs are biting and social security offer not much more than $80 Euros a week and even then you’ll have to meet a strict raft of conditions. |
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| Thessaloniki banker Kostas Bozos went back to basics. He returned to his family village for an education in farming from his ageing father and then on to a local agricultural college to finesse those skills into winemaking and marketing. |
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| Evangelos Vergos runs The American Farm School and is seeing his students greying before his eyes. Young enrolees are fast becoming outnumbered by mature aged students – city professionals dispossessed by the cities and their shrinking opportunities and who are trying to adapt and survive in a flight to Greece’s rural reaches and archipelago of islands. How many of his older students will return to the cities when and if the economy changes for the better? |
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| "None. They’ve got a new way of life, there’s good opportunity to exploit and they’re going to get stuck to that .” DR EVANGELOS VERGOS American Farm School, Thessaloniki. |
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| Ironically, agricultural scientists Alex Tricha and Nicos Gavalas took their skills to the city where they landed government contracts and planned a future in the capital, Athens. But when Greece’s financial plates began to shift and rock those contracts ended and their hopes and dreams were crushed. But not for long. |
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| Alex and Nicos headed back to family on the island of Chios – about as far from Athens as you can get and still till Greek soil – and set about establishing one of the more novel survival businesses you could ever imagine. |
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| "Everyone said you are definitely crazy my girl. Now they think they were damn stupid that they didn’t decide to do it." ALEX TRICHA, Entrepreneur |
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| On a trail through some of Greece’s more stunning countryside Europe Correspondent Philip Williams paints a very different picture of the nation than we’ve become used to in recent times. |
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| “What if I said to you could have your old life back? No! I wouldn’t go back. (This life) is blessed, I love it very much. I love it and I hope to go on with this with the family”. |
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| Chios scenery. Rocky villagers/coastline | Music | 00:00 |
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| WILLIAMS: [Chios, Greece] “Well what a stunning place. It’s this sort of beauty that attracts people from around the world to islands in Greece – this one, | 00:15 |
| Williams on beach to camera | Chios – which is about as far from Athens as you can get. In fact it’s just a few kilometres from Turkey. | 00:22 |
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| WILLIAMS: But for many decades people living here have been forced to go to the mainland to find jobs because there simply haven’t been the opportunities here. Now thanks to the financial crisis, they’re coming back and they’re bringing with them their ideas that they hope will solve not just their personal crises but Greece’s as well”. | 00:31 |
| Man walks with goat | Music | 00:48 |
| Couple gardening/ Aggelina with kid | WILLIAMS: It’s an exodus back to basics. Professionals, high achievers, dumped and burned in the economic firestorm that’s taken city jobs, now are doing things they thought they’d never be doing and even enjoying it. | 01:00 |
| Aggelina | “What if I said to you, you can have your old life back, what would you say to me?” AGGELINA KYRIAKOPOULOU: “No I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t go back”. | 01:17 |
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| Music | 01:24 |
| Cows/Vegetable gardens | WILLIAMS: We’ve heard and seen a great deal of the protests, the unrest, the anger in Greece, this though is a story about very enterprising Greeks trying to turn that loss into a new way of life. | 01:34 |
| Tractor | Music | 01:47 |
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| ALEXANDRA TRICHA: “You know, | 01:49 |
| Alexandra | as they say that what doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger”. | 01:51 |
| Chios farm | Music | 01:55 |
| Alex and Nikos on farm | WILLIAMS: Alex Tricha and Nikos Gavalas thought their future was in the capital Athens. They’re agricultural scientists but their government contracts had dried up and city costs were crippling. So what to do? A relocation back to Nikos’ village on Chios and a niche agricultural enterprise funded by savings, family support and sheer determination. | 02:03 |
| Nikos holds snails | Their crisis-busting answer? Snails, the eating kind. | 02:32 |
| Snails | Music | 02:37 |
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| ALEXANDRA TRICHA: “Everyone said you are definitely crazy my girl. Now | 02:46 |
| Alex | they think that they were damn stupid that they didn’t decide the same”. | 02:51 |
| Snails | WILLIAMS: “You must feel very proud of what you’ve done”. | 02:58 |
| Nikos. Super: | NIKOS GAVALAS: “I thought that I wouldn’t be so strong to survive all this crisis, but eventually I did. Ah yes now after one and a half years, yes I think it’s a nice job”. | 03:03 |
| Alex and Nikos tend snails | WILLIAMS: And business is booming. This year they’ve already harvested eight tonnes of the gourmet gastropods, destined for Italian and French plates. But as with any farming business, the work never stops. Before the next crop of baby snails arrives, stragglers must be rounded up and the enormous greenhouse prepared as a kind of giant snail nursery. | 03:19 |
| Alex. Super: | ALEXANDRA TRICHA: “The work is labour work, it was very difficult for me. I’m a girl. I was raised in Athens. I was having everything done for me and now I have to dig. You know I feel like Scarlett O’Hara. The land is my strength. I think that when you have the land you can feed yourself. You can produce anything. You can be happy”. | 03:56 |
| Alex and Nikos tend snails | WILLIAMS: And while this whole operation is now turning a profit, Nikos and Alex have plans – a new high tech high volume snail farm, herb flavoured snails and even a line in snail slime cosmetics. ALEXANDRA TRICHA: “I think my | 04:28 |
| Alex | tries to stop the crisis, my share of stopping the crisis here” [laughs]. WILLIAMS: “So this is your own personal battle…” ALEXANDRA TRICHA: “Yes”. WILLIAMS: “…but also for the country”. ALEXANDRA TRICHA: “Yes, yes. I think everybody should have done the same because we can’t expect nothing from the government. They have proven so many years that they are useless, so we have to do it by ourselves”. | 04:46 |
| Yiannis standing on beach | WILLIAMS: Yiannis Makridakis was also making a life in Athens, as a successful writer and moonlighting as a maths teacher. | 05:17 |
| Yiannis walking with dog | Now he’s making a life on the other side of Chios, as a subsistence farmer where his biggest calculations are how much food he must grow | 05:26 |
| Yiannis into house | to get through the coming winter. YIANNIS MAKRIDAKIS: “In the old days, people had a cellar to live off during the winter months where they used to preserve their foods, tomatoes, sauces, trahana… Those of us who want to live in the traditional way, and don’t depend on salaries any more prepare these – our oils, our raki, our suma… We can produce everything except pasta and rice. We can have everything. WILLIAMS: “So this is your supermarket?” YIANNIS MAKRIDAKIS: “Yes, my supermarket”. | 05:34 |
| Yiannis exits house and sits/ Volissos | WILLIAMS: Yiannis Makridakis will continue to write but in this move to the small village of Volissos, he’s learning how to farm. Taught by the older folk who never left and never forgot a simpler way of life. YIANNIS MAKRIDAKIS: “When you open your eyes and see the sights | 06:13 |
| Yiannis | – the sea, the mountains… you get the feeling of strength within nature, you become optimistic and renewed every morning”. | 06:36 |
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| WILLIAMS: “What would be your message to people in places like Athens that are feeling very desperate right now?” YIANNIS MAKRIDAKIS: “What can I say? I can only say what I have understood personally – that the system we have put in place to live our lives by, is fake… false. It exploits us as long as it wants to – as long as it can and has a need for us and then disposes of us and calls us unemployed. | 06:46 |
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| WILLIAMS: “What do you miss about the big city?... Nothing”. | 07:13 |
| Thessaloniki general views | Music | 07:27 |
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| WILLIAMS: Yiannis isn’t wrong. Nothing is fast becoming the most accurate way to describe the appeal of the cities, like Greece’s second largest, Thessaloniki, in the north of the country. | 07:31 |
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| On the surface at least it looks prosperous enough, but the nation’s deep crisis is clearly reflected in the windows of hundreds of empty shops, businesses gone bust. | 07:50 |
| Empty shops | This is the sign of the times around here “to let” but few takers. | 08:07 |
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| Music | 08:13 |
| General views people | WILLIAMS: One frightening estimate has a thousand workers losing their jobs every day. Now more than a million Greeks are unemployed, a quarter of the workforce. If you’re starting out it’s easy to feel helpless, facing a youth unemployment rate of fifty eight per cent. And even if you’re between your thirties and fifties, one in five are looking for a job. | 08:18 |
| Religious festival | For some, there’s little to do but hope and pray for a change of luck. | 08:50 |
| Williams walks with man at festival | GREEK MAN AT FESTIVAL: “We believe that only God and the Virgin Mary can help us”. | 08:58 |
| Religious festival | WILLIAMS: This is considered the most miraculous icon of Axion Esti. It’s normally kept at the holy site of Mount Athos, but on rare occasions like a war, a natural or economic disaster, it’s paraded in the hope a greater power will intervene. | 09:05 |
| Williams at parade to camera | “If you believe in miracles and many here do, then this would be an ideal time for one for Greece – a very big one given all the problems – but some Greeks are not waiting for divine intervention, not even for the government to act. They’ve decided they have to do it for themselves”. | 09:28 |
| Greek flag | Music | 09:46 |
| Kostas cycling | In the countryside near Thessaloniki there are a hell of a lot of Greeks doing it for themselves. Up until a month ago, Kostas Bozas was a city banker. Now he’s unemployed. | 09:53 |
| Kostas with father | He’s moved to his father’s house in a village outside Thessaloniki, going back to his roots in search of a future. | 10:04 |
| Grape vines | Music | 10:13 |
| Kostas | KOSTAS BOZAS: “I’m going from a steady job, a permanent job as we can say and | 10:21 |
| Kostas cycling | now at the age of fifty that I am I think in the right opportunity to become a farmer”. WILLIAMS: Never ones to trust institutions, even in good times, Greeks always invested in real estate, often in and around their original family villages. For years much of this land lay unused, unwanted, but now these plots are providing a lifeline for the dispossessed in the cities. | 10:26 |
| Stefanos | STEFANOS BOZAS: “I must say that I feel very proud. I always expected my son to come back to the village one day because his roots are obviously here. The land is here – we haven’t sold anything and we won’t sell anything. We have everything – you don’t need money to live here – nothing is needed”. | 10:55 |
| Kostas. Super: | KOSTAS BOZAS: “I would like to be an oil producer and a wine producer. I love wine. I like drinking good wine and for this I like the production of it”. | 11:17 |
| Stefanos and Kostas look at grape vines | STEFANOS BOZAS: “Here’s a nice bunch, one of the last. Very nice!” WILLIAMS: Stefanos Bozas worked hard to ensure his son had a good education and job prospects in the city. Now he must teach Kostas the secrets of the soil he learnt from his father – ancient skills to overcome a very modern crisis. | 11:34 |
| Kostas | KOSTAS BOZAS: “My father will help me with the things he knows by father from father”. | 11:57 |
| Kostas and Stefanos work among grape vines | WILLIAMS: Thousands have taken the road back to farming in recent years. While the rest of the economy is in free fall, the farming sector is actually adding jobs. KOSTAS BOZAS: [showing son how to dig the soil] “Look how it’s done – like so, like so, like so!” STEFANOS BOZAS: “Well, don’t shout”. | 12:03 |
| Kostas and others at American Farm School | WILLIAMS: But Kostas knows that to really make it as a farmer, you also need to be an entrepreneur and for that he needs more than fatherly advice. Lucky for him, Thessaloniki is home to an extraordinary institution – the American Farm School. | 12:27 |
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| For over 100 years it’s taught young farmers the latest in agricultural and marketing practices. Now it’s fast becoming a retraining school for city slickers. | 12:45 |
| Dr Vergos walks with Williams | DR EVAGGELOS VERGOS: “They come from urban areas mainly. Perhaps they lost their job, they’re unemployed and they’re trying to find their way out in order to survive”. | 12:56 |
| Interior. Cheese making at American Farm School | WILLIAMS: “How many of your students that are successful, do you think will return to the city as soon as the economy is better?” DR EVAGGELOS VERGOS: “None”. WILLIAMS: “Really?” | 13:05 |
| Dr Vergos. Super: | DR EVAGGELOS VERGOS: “Yes, none. And I put my signature down because they got a new way of life. They saw that there is a good opportunity there to exploit and they’re going to get stuck to that”. | 13:18 |
| Vergos and Williams meet Aggelina | WILLIAMS: Dr Evaggelos Vergos introduces me to one of his star entrepreneur pupils. | 13:30 |
| Aggelina and Williams with sheep |
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| Aggelina Kyriakopoulou and her husband used to run a machinery business. They got out just before the crash as farmers stopped paying their bills, but perhaps counter-intuitively they ignored the signs and became farmers themselves. | 14:02 |
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| This is lambing season. For two months it becomes a twenty four hour a day operation. Aggelina does the day shift, while her husband is the night shepherd and with a little help from CCTV, he can do the books and watch the flock at the same time. It’s not glamorous but it has one enormous advantage in troubled times, it pays. | 14:22 |
| Aggelina with Williams | AGGELINA KYRIAKOPOULOU: “Now in Greece there’s no many jobs to have profits. My daughter she works for four hundred Euros per month”. WILLIAMS: “Four hundred Euros a month?” AGGELINA KYRIAKOPOULOU: “Four hundred Euros a month, twelve hours every day. This is, I can’t say the word. Now this is hard and difficult but we have profit… we have profit”. | 14:48 |
| Aggelina milks sheep | WILLIAMS: Until now it’s all been about selling the milk, but Aggelina has grand plans to make her own cheese on site and so create jobs and a future for her children. Like many remaking their lives, she finds the new job far more rewarding than the old. | 15:17 |
| Aggelina | “What if I said to you, you can have your old life back, what would you say to me?” AGGELINA KYRIAKOPOULOU: “No, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t go back”. | 15:37 |
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| WILLIAMS: “You really love these sheep, don’t you?” AGGELINA KYRIAKOPOULOU: “Yes, yes, yes. I | 15:46 |
| Super: Aggelina Kyriakopoulou | think it’s the best animal, the best animal in the world and she gives you meat, lamb, milk – all these things – even money”. | 15:49 |
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| WILLIAMS: “And a bit of love too?” AGGELINA KYRIAKOPOULOU: “It is blessed. It is blessed. Yes, I love it very much. I love it. I love it and I hope to go on with this, with the family”. | 16:03 |
| Mountains | Music | 16:14 |
| Eleni walks and picks herbs | ELENI BOUBOULI: “It is very quiet and when I come here I’m alone on the mountain and just me and my herbs. I don’t see anybody, I can’t hear anybody, just the birds”. | 16:21 |
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| Music | 16:32 |
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| WILLIAMS: A couple of hundred kilometres south of Thessaloniki, these rugged mountains near Mt Olympus offer Eleni Boubouli not just inner peace, but a basic living. Gathering herbs here help her make ends meet. | 16:40 |
| Eleni | She’s held many city jobs over time, taught English, managed restaurants, now this is her office. | 16:55 |
| Mountains | Music | 17:02 |
| Eleni and Williams in village | ELENI BOUBOULI: “For those people here I don’t think things have changed much because they were poor and they are still”. WILLIAMS: Eleni takes me to her favourite mountain village and reflects on a crisis that somehow seems far removed from a place like this. “I’ve talked to many Greeks who say, you know | 17:08 |
| Super: Eleni Boubouli | first of all the politicians, it’s their fault”. ELENI BOUBOULI: “Okay the politicians, but the politicians I think are people who we voted for, so if we people hadn’t voted for them they couldn’t be there to do all this bad stuff that they did”. WILLIAMS: “So are Greeks not taking responsibility for their own actions? Are they to blame themselves to some degree?” ELENI BOUBOULI: “Some Greeks do, some Greeks don’t as it happens all over the world. I don’t think that Greeks are something special, they are just people like everybody else and some people take responsibilities for what they do and some others don’t”. | 17:26 |
| Eleni with herbs at market | WILLIAMS: Already this part is part of the answer, for some at least including Eleni Boubouli. In the port city of Volos in a rundown abandoned municipal building, a new market, a new take on a very old idea is flourishing. | 18:14 |
| Eleni with woman at market | ELENI BOUBOULI: [to woman at market] “Now, I’ll tell you… these are the flowers of Flomos”. WOMAN AT MARKET: “Yes, I know a bit about it”. WILLIAMS: It’s called TEMS – everyone here | 18:1 |
| Market | trades with everyone else. It’s a form of barter with its own currency. Each trade is registered with a central database. The credit can then be used to buy something else. No cash, no tax. “Is this part of the new Greece?” | 18:38 |
| Christos. Super: | CHRISTOS PAPAIOANNOU: “Well I mean it’s part of the beginning of some different organisation of people. You know people who try to take their lives into their own hands, don’t expect from governments or people in power to save them and just a general different attitude towards things”. | 18:58 |
| Eleni at market | WILLIAMS: While this is useful, Eleni Boubouli acknowledges its limitations. The cash demands of the world outside these walls still beckon. ELENI BOUBOULI: “Part of the answer. Of course | 19:21 |
| Eleni | you know that it can’t be the answer because TEMS don’t pay bills, don’t pay petrol, don’t pay rent, loans and so on, so it’s not the answer”. | 19:34 |
| Soup kitchen | WILLIAMS: Nor is Greece’s social security system. It’s not surprising charity-run soup kitchens are busy. Unemployment benefits here are 360 Euro a month but there are conditions and a twelve month limit. And the size and duration of government benefits are being targeted in the latest austerity round – old age pensions are also being cut. | 19:49 |
| Chios general views | Music | 20:19 |
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| WILLIAMS: Of course not everyone fleeing the cities are doing it willingly. Some are making a strategic retreat, taking refuge in family villages like Olympi back on the island of Chios just to get by, but hopeful one day they’ll return to urban careers. | 20:31 |
| Williams greets Christos Rozakis |
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| Christos and wife | Christos Rozakis always thought he’d return here one day, but when his business selling luxury cars in Athens collapsed he and his wife felt they had no choice but to move back to Olympi. | 21:24 |
| Christos | CHRISTOS ROZAKIS: “It feels great. It feels you know it’s like... it takes you back. You know you feel connected, you feel that you have roots here and that’s one of the good things”. | 21:35 |
| Christos and Williams greet villagers |
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| Church interior | WILLIAMS: Legend has it Olympi is the place Homer was born, but Christos’ personal odyssey back here involves a complex mix of emotions. CHRISTOS ROZAKIS: “Listen it’s always a good thing to | 22:03 |
| Christos and Williams in church | reunite with your roots and connect with your roots but the only difference is it’s I just wanted it to be on my own terms. The only thing that makes me bitter is that somebody else decided that for me and I just, I was forced to come earlier”. | 22:14 |
| Christos and Williams walk in village |
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| Christos with Mrs Maria in village | MRS MARIA: “You haven’t had a baby yet?” CHRISTOS ROZAKIS: “Anytime now”. MRS MARIA: “With God’s help”. WILLIAMS: What he doesn’t tell Mrs Maria is that while he would love to have a baby, he feels he can’t afford one. A victim he says of corrupt politicians who’ve destroyed the economy and his best laid plans. | 22:37 |
| Christos | CHRISTOS ROZAKIS: “Somebody else is keep deciding if I’m going to have a child. You know how frustrating that is because I want to have a kid with my wife and I don’t have the means to support it. If I was a lazy bum it would be righteous for me not to have a kid, but I work my ass off”. | 22:55 |
| Christos washing cars | WILLIAMS: Christos still is in the car business here on Chios, but no longer at the luxury end. His car wash is a crisis survival plan. CHRISTOS ROZAKIS: “Don’t get me wrong, work is not a problem. You know I would wash cars, I would even shine your shoes. I don’t care what it’s going to be. Just let me do it. You know I will pay you your taxes, just let me make a living to support my wife and my kid”. | 23:14 |
| Christos with Williams and friends | WILLIAMS: Back in the privacy of his own home, with just his wife Kasia and fellow newcomers Alex and Nikos, the raw emotion takes hold. CHRISTOS ROZAKIS: “I’m going to say | 23:44 |
| Christos | something to you which is.... I hope you understand it. My background and my blood is Greek. I come from people that they invented democracy and I am wishing that I had a dictator now and do you understand how bitter that makes me? | 23:57 |
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| It’s breaking my heart because actually if, because this is a small country and if you read your history you will understand probably that if I lift your chair up and dug a metre down you would see a bucket of blood – for sure . They were a very brave people came from this country and everybody are turning in their graves right now because of these arseholes and this is my country. We are not thieves, we’re not people who doesn’t pay their taxes and we’re not lazy. We’re not lazy. [upset] I’m sorry”. | 24:32 |
| Chios coastline/rocky villages | Music | 25:19 |
| People who have appeared in program | WILLIAMS: The steady shift to the farms and villages appears to be an unstoppable force, fuelled by desperation in the cities, inspired by hope for a better less anxious life. Some will flourish, others may fail, but all have taken a bold decision not to wait for the government or anyone else. Their futures are now in their hands. | 25:32 |
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| Reporter: Philip Williams Camera: Cameron Bauer Editor: Garth Thomas Producer: Mavourneen Dineen | 26:07 |