Greece | Remote islands and villages in search of inhabitants

(Potamos Antikythiron) “In winter we are 20 to 25 people, no children, no bakery […]but I am not giving up my arms! “. On the tiny Greek island of Antikythera, village president Giorgos Harhalakis is fighting to bring life to this lost piece of land in the Aegean Sea hit by desertification.

Located between the islands of Kythera and Crete, Antikythera is losing its inhabitants like other island and mainland regions of Greece. It only had 39 in the 2021 census, compared to 120 in 2011.

With 22.7% of its population aged 65 and over in 2021, Greece is fourth on the list of the 27 EU members with the highest number of elderly people, after Italy (23.8 %), Portugal (23.7%) and Finland (23.1%), according to Eurostat.

Giorgos Harhalakis, 37, remembers his early years at primary school on the island before his family, like others, left Antikythera for urban centers due to “financial problems”.

At the time, “farmers, fishermen, breeders” lived there, he told AFP. The island “included around fifteen localities, but today only the Potamos port is inhabited”.

On the heights, the dry stone walls of the terraced crops are still visible between abandoned and collapsed houses.

Schools closed

Closed for two decades, the Antikythera school was able to reopen in 2018 for the three children of Despina and Dionysis Andronikos, an Athenian family in search of a return to their roots.

“But in 2021, when my eldest daughter finished primary school, we had to leave so that she could go to college in Cythera,” explains Dionysis Andronikos. The school has since closed its doors.

Across Greece, the start of the school year was marked by the closure of dozens of schools due to a lack of sufficient numbers of students.

The fertility rate of 1.43 children per woman in 2021 is below the EU average (1.53 in 2021), according to Eurostat.

And for the first time in 2022, the number of births fell below 80,000, compared to 150,000 in 1980, according to the statistics office Elstat.

In 2022, more than half of the population was over 46 years old.

A recent study by the Greek Institute of Demographic Research (IDEM) notes that “one in three municipalities among the country’s 1,035 has fewer than ten births per year”, one of the consequences of “the extremely unequal distribution of the population”.

Athens is home to more than a third of the country’s 10.5 million inhabitants.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis spoke in spring of the risk of a “demographic collapse” and decided to increase birth bonuses.

In September he also presented a battery of measures to try to revive the birth rate, including tax exemptions for new parents.

According to the IDEM, the drop in the number of births “has a direct relationship” with the regions affected by the rural exodus or the departure abroad of 20-49 year olds, the age when people generally start a family. .

During the financial crisis, more than half a million young people left Greece.

What future?

In Fourna, a mountainous village in the center of the country, the local church, to prevent the closure of the school, urged large families to come and settle. In September, a couple and their six children took the plunge.

But a similar attempt in Antikythera has not yet borne fruit.

For Giorgos Harhalakis, “the main problem is the lack of infrastructure. The State must offer incentives to encourage the construction of houses and businesses.

The planned construction of a Climate Change Observatory on the island “will create jobs,” he hopes.

In winter, the island only has one café which serves as both a tavern and a small store run by an octogenarian.

“The indigenous population is aging and the problem of the future of the island arises,” laments Catherine Dechosal, a retiree who divides her life between the island and France.