A heretic conclusion

If you scroll down my blog, you'll probably get the impression that Greeks live in crumbling stone houses with smashed windows and shaky roof. Of course this is not true. Those houses do exist but no one lives there any more. It is the homes of the generation that after the destruction of the country at World War II, moved to the cities in search for work or to new settlements closer to the sea and to new opportunities to make their living.

After 30 - 40 years of abandonment it become clear that there were 3 alternatives for those buildings.

1. The children or the grandchildren of the original owner have enough money to renovate it and drew by nostalgia for the homeland they do so. They continue to live at the city but they visit the village for a few days each year and they dream that when they are retired they'll come to live at their ancestors house, close to nature and old memories.

2. The area becomes a tourist attraction and the houses become an investment. They are renovated in a luxury way with all the amenities necessary for hosting well paying tourists. The owners either do the renovation themselves and still visit the place once in a while or they sell the property and move on with their lives.

3. The houses are considered as a hassle and they are left to decay, offering me the opportunity to take pictures of their decaying grace :)

There may be small variations but those are the main scenarios that apply all over the country. In all 3 alternatives there is something in common that I discovered when I moved to the countryside and I wanted to live in a house so old and beautiful.

Well in any case scenario you can't settle permanently at those houses. They are either in too bad shape to be inhabitable or the owners don't rent them or they are ridiculously expensive. So my reasoning is that the villages are doomed to remain eternally without permanent inhabitants, either as wrecks or as fully renovated vacation homes. If I want to extend this reasoning I might even come to the heretic conclusion that it is better to be left abandoned until someone wants to actually live in them!

But then again I have a tendency for heretic thoughts :)

The pictures are from a small mountainous village in Northen Greece called Palaioi Poroi. When I visited it, there must have been less than a handful of people living there.

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All the pictures and the words are mine.

Thank you for reading and if you want to know more about me you can check out my introduction post.

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