Odious debt and collapse of the state
The debt-strapped Greek government is not defending Greece from Turkey or factory tourism. Turkey continues its long-standing manipulation of NATO countries while threatening Greece. Turkish insults and aggressive actions in the Aegean continue. The Turks have the audacity and insolence to advertise to their NATO “allies” and to the world that the Greek Aegean belongs to them, at least half of it. Erdogan, president of this rogue and genocidal state, keeps talking about “our blue homeland,” by which he means the Aegean.
Orgy of destructive tourism
Equally passive and hiding, the Greek government says nothing about the orgy of development and criminal activities supporting factory tourism. This over tourism generates massive pollution and uncomfortable congestion. Too many foreigners are being dumped daily on the tiny islands of Thera, Mykonos and Astypalea by giant tourist ships. The situation is getting out of hand. For example, the English edition of the Greek newspaper, ekathimerini, reported that tourists at the Balos beach in Crete wade neck-deep water to climb a ferry to take them to Kissamos in the northwestern corner of Crete.
Worse things take place in the very small Cycladic islands of Thera and Astypalea. To accommodate more than 10,000 tourists daily, Thera deploys too many busses. Thera is becoming a tourist factory with a huge parking lot, which, according to a Greek report, employs “more than 500 large buses, 4,000 small passenger buses and vans… and hundreds of quad bikes joining the residents’ cars and rental vehicles as they navigate the inadequate road network and narrow streets of Oia, Fira, and other once peaceful villages.”
These buses and cars and bikes and narrow roads become nightmares and dangers. They deform Bronze Age Thera into a twenty-first century hotel for foreigners. Thera, of course, is the real name of the island, not Santorini, claimed by the government and tourist advertisements. Santorini was the name of Thera, which the Venetians dubbed the island during their control from the 13th to the 16th centuries. Yet, shamefully, the Greek government keeps calling Thera with its Venetian name of Santa Irene (Santorini). After my visit to Thera in the 1980s, I went to the tourist authority of Athens and complained about the foreign name of this magnificent Greek island. The official who heard me in silence asked me to send her a report. I never did. She should have known that for hundreds of years before the volcano explosion of 1650 BCE, Thera was a very advanced civilization of cobblestone streets, running drinking water, two and three story houses, athletics, beautiful women, jewelry, metallurgy, trade and sanitation.
Boys boxing, Akrotiri fresco, Thera, 16th century BCE. National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Public Domain
Congestion and pollution are not merely defacing beautiful Thera and Mykonos. They are embracing tiny Astypalea in the Cycladic islands. A real estate company in Athens, Greece, is pushing for building a tourist “village” in Astypalea, which will be larger than Hora, the capital of the island. This new “village” will have villas for renting and sale and a very large condominium and apartments for the less affluent foreigners. The Mayor of Astypalea, is against this proposed monstrosity. But the decision is not his.
Corruption and crime
The tourists visiting some of the Cycladic islands in southern Aegean are, in general, wealthy. They demand expensive hotels, beach clubs, and homes. This demand and availability of lots of money has given birth to criminals who, sometimes beat or kill people who try to prevent factory tourist development or illegal destruction of the local land that hides archaeological treasures. These gangsters murdered an engineer during the first week of July 2024. This man, Panagiotis Stathis, was an engineer with many years of experience in Mykonos. The killings are not limited to Mykonos. “Crime in certain islands of the Cyclades such as Mykonos,” says a Greek reporter, Yiannis Papadopoulos, “centered around building and illegal construction, has become entrenched in recent years, due to the lack of systematic crackdowns. However, over time these illegalities evolved and in some cases have taken on the characteristics of organized crime, as evidenced by a number of cases of beatings and extortion which remain open to this day and are still under review.”
Transform factory tourism
Foreigners have been visiting Greece for millennia. The most powerful of the Greek gods, Zeus, had, among other virtues, that of protecting foreigners visiting Hellas. He was known as Zeus Xenios. The word xenios, foreigner, became philoxenia, hospitality. This hospitality remains alive in Greece. But factory tourism is based not so much in hospitality but business, in fact aggressive business. The results are crimes and harms of this un-Hellenic practice.
Reforming this ruthless business will demand reforming the Greek government, electing Greeks who love Greece, patriots, not ethnonihilists who hate Greece and promote foreign interests.
Yes, tourists are supporting the economy. But too many of them moving from island to island for the enjoyment of pristine beaches and good food and entertainment, leave a trail of pollution and behavior that are deleterious to the environment and local communities.
The Greek government must realize that tourists are potential Philhellenes. But to bring that virtue out of some tourists, the Greek government must employ educated officials who will direct as many tourists as possible to the archaeological treasures of the country in museums and archaeological sites. They should also prevent factory tourism with regulations for ships and hotels for the orderly and friendly accommodation and education of foreigners visiting Greece. No gigantic ship should be allowed to approach Greek islands. These very large ships are floating ecological bombs. Their owners should dismantle them. Their very existence displays planetary hubris and extreme ignorance and indifference that we are living in an epoch of climate chaos.
But down to Earth, and ignoring for a moment the climate tsunami, is tourism helping Greece to lift herself from the horrendous conditions of the debt peonage? As I said, tourism helps the Greek economy. Experts call tourism the heavy industry of Greece. You would think with about 30 million foreigners visiting the country and spending billions, Greece would be a prosperous country. On the contrary. “Greece,” says the Greek reporter Kostas Kallitsis, remains at the bottom of the 27 EU member-states in productivity, with a unique archipelago of very small businesses, and a record of tax evasion (what was once a means of survival has now become a systemic tool of enrichment). The country also claims one of the first positions in Europe in outsized corporate profits, and one of the last in the real value of wages and the share of wage labor in GDP.”
In other words, the tourists-dominated economy of Greece is raising prices for food and other necessities all over Greece. This hardship continues the hated austerity of the European Union-International Monetary Fund of the first decade of foreign debt. This also continues the corrupt economy of billionaires. Most profits are siphoned by very few corporations / billionaires. And the Greek state modeled after American billionaire political economy pretends all is well.
