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Since the crisis in 2008, more than 800,000 people in Greece have had their buildings seized for unpaid debts. Many are now working to organize themselves in a bid to stave off eviction.
By Thomas Jacobi,Athens | Greece
"I'm not leaving it for them! My friends will all camp in my home, day and night. It's my house. I don't have any other."
Mairi Orphanou, 61, is fighting with all her might. Her back bent, her lipstick faded, she pushes back her thick blond hair with a tired gesture and tells her story between two bouts of coughing.
"They took my house at the start of the crisis! My brother had taken a loan for € 60,000 to save his company. I was his guarantor and while I worked, we used to make the payments. We had already repaid half. But because of the remaining 30,000, Eurobank put my house up for auction…"
Mairi is among 839,056 people in Greece notified since 2008 that their properties have been confiscated. Since 2010, she and her brother have been hanging on to a last hope by taking up the fight within Den Plirono, an organization whose name means, literally, "I'm not paying". Every Wednesday, the two siblings stand outside the courts and, together with other people, prevent the properties of other debtors from being auctioned. This has been going on for months.
On February 1, fourteen properties were to have been auctioned. Not one was sold since there was no public notary – notaries have been acting as auctioneers here since the latter went on strike after some of them were attacked.
Ilias Papadopoulos, head of the Den Plirono movement, makes no attempt to hide his satisfaction. His banner with red letters against a yellow background says it all:
"They're cutting your electricity? Your water? They're taking your home? Call us!" Telephone number provided...
"Greeks are not thieves," he says, "No-one buys their house with the idea of not paying for it. We all obtained loans that we honestly thought we could repay.
"The crisis has trapped us. Transforming all these people from the middle class, which is collapsing, into homeless persons will not resolve the situation!"
For their part, Greek banks, such as Eurobank, say they never intended to repossess such a huge number of buildings. "What for?" asks banker Kostas Papanikolaou. "To resell them? That costs money and, in any event, the market has collapsed."
Sure, he admits, the banking system has a liquidity shortage and some sales could, therefore, be interesting, "but not primary residences. The risk of social implosion is too great".
Two state bankruptcies, multiple wars, and a dictatorship have long since taught Greeks that "only land stays" - a common obsession as well as popular wisdom.
This explains why the country has one of the highest rates of ownership in Europe, especially since access to property was for a long time facilitated by the State, which gave loans on very easy terms.
A decade later, however, a shortage of renters and skyrocketing real-estate taxes have turned what seemed to be a source of wealth into a burden. Now the walls of Athens are filled with "Polite" ["for sale"] signs, and prices are often ridiculously low: €10 000 € for a small city-centre unit …
One out of every two Greek taxpayers – 4.14 million persons – is indebted to the state. Bad debts, those unlikely to be repaid, now equal 45% of GDP – about 110 billion euros.
In these conditions, Greek banks have no choice but to cut their losses by proposing debt rescheduling to their clients or by resorting to auctions.
To prove its goodwill, the Greek government has proposed to carry out confiscations via the Internet, thus circumventing the blockades: 10,000 buildings are reportedly targeted in 2017, and 15,000 in 2018.
"We will fight back," threatens Papadopoulos. "We will occupy the notary offices and bank branches. We'll do like the Spaniards. We'll occupy the houses that are threatened. There is no question of allowing them to push us around."
The public debt crisis in Greece began in 2008.
Since 2010, the country has received 260 billion euros in loans from the Euro-zone countries and the International Monetary Fund.
Its creditors are sheltering behind the austerity memorandum signed by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras in July 2015, pointing to the need to reduce the country's bad debts by about a third by 2019.
This is one of the conditions imposed on Greece for the disbursement of the 86 billion euros in loans granted in 2015.
The other condition is to pass a law by next year allowing the sale of the bad debts remaining in Greek banks to foreign funds.
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