Greece. A depopulating village is looking for new residents. This is how it entices visitors

“A village in Evrytania (a historical region of Greece – ed.) is looking for one (or more) families with children who want to live in the village and enroll the children in (local) schools,” it was written on Facebook. The announcement on the internet was posted by a teacher and an Orthodox priest from Fourna – a village in the region Greece Central. They want their village, surrounded by forest and located 840 meters above sea level, to remain “alive”.

As Protothema wrote on Friday, since the publication a month ago, local authorities' phones have been ringing non-stop. One family has already decided to move to Fourna. A Greek couple and their six children will move from German.

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– I saw the ad on Facebook and after discussing it with my wife, we immediately agreed that we would change our lives for the better. We decided to leave Germany, where we lived and worked, and return to the nature that we love, Stefanos Kostopoulos told the portal.

The residents of the village involved in the project informed that two more families are expected. Over 100 families are interested in moving. – Our village has come alive again. (…) Our schools will be maintained. The authorities and the region have announced that they will help us. In recent years, our village has been dying out, the number of permanent residents has dropped from 158 to 118 in three years. I hope that we will grow – announced the local priest Konstantinos Dusikos.

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The falling population is a problem not only for Fourna, but for the entire country. “Empty villages, disillusioned young workers and civil servants looking for solutions: this is the grim reality in Greece,” wrote Euronews a week ago, reporting on the demographic problems there. It cited forecasts that by 2070, Greece's population of just under 10.5 million could fall by as much as 25 percent. Meanwhile, the average projected population decline in EU countries is 4 percent.

In 2022, fewer than 77,000 children were born in Greece, the lowest in 92 years, Reuters recalled a few months ago, explaining that the decline in births was influenced by the crisis and the resulting austerity, migration and a change in attitudes among young people. “The fertility rate in Greece is among the lowest in Europe: in some villages not a single birth has been recorded for years,” Reuters emphasized.

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