Village of Machairas, Central Greece. Photo: EV
Threatening Greek peasants
On April 15, 2025, the appointed president of Greece issued an order that is bound to have serious, nay, potentially catastrophic consequence on the countryside of Greece. The executive order says that any village of less than 2,000 inhabitants must accommodate with houses and schools at least 100 foreign legal or illegal immigrants as farm workers. Considering that Greece is suffering from dramatic demographic decline, there is no doubt that, should this order stand and Greek villages fill with foreigners, all of Greece will become a foreign country in less than 20 years. Yet, this sensible thought did not enter the calculations of the few people running Greece – in 2025.
According to Eugenia Sarigianni, a Greek psychologist with interest in the survival of rural culture and society in Greece, the presidential executive order, demanding that villagers accept foreign migrants living in their neighborhood as farm workers, was the culmination of a series of national policies that thoroughly degraded the countryside and village farming in particular.
“The governing class,” she says, “created the economic, political and social conditions that made life in the countryside useless. As a result, government policies funded by the European Union emptied the villages of young people, forcing them to impoverishment and pushing them to the far away islands and to the top of mountains. Rural schools closed.… Then the government, through its European Union subsidies, destroyed the traditional and sustainable production of food. This means fishing boats were burned, the raising of food by peasants, their planting the land with traditional crops, was literally uprooted because of EU subsidies. The number of farm animals became smaller and smaller. The goats and sheep grazed only at moonlight, primarily because EU subsidies started going to gangsters, not to small farmers… In addition, politicians sowed the grazing land with solar panels and the top of the mountains with giant wind turbines. Tourism became the heavy industry of the countryside and of all Greece. The children of the farmers went to the universities and did not get their hands dirty but worked in the tourist industry. This attitude and behavior gave rise to the notion that “I am not a Pakistani to work the land” — Δεν είμαι Πακιστανός να πάω να δουλέψω στο χωράφι.”
This series of astonishing and almost criminal policies and delusions and corruptions end up with the present sellout of Greece. Outsourcing the Greek countryside, the soul of sacred agrarian traditions and civilization, to foreign farm workers funded by madmen of the EU, not in exchange of “fat EU subsidies but for a miserly plate of lentils.”
Imagining extinction and Turkish occupation
If the Greek people allow this madness to take root, they will have the fate of Assyrians and other extinct people. The oligarchy in Athens, educated in the US and EU countries, demonstrates its alienation and hatred of all things Greek. In ancient Greece these oligarchs — men and women — would be subject to ostracism.
The experiment of replacing Greek villagers with illegal Moslem immigrants is bound to fail. Turkey keeps sending illegal Moslems to the Greek islands. Strangely, the Greek government accepts these immigrants. The reason is probably because EU funds the costs of these immigrants living in Greece. And since Greek debt repayments thoroughly exhausted the country, the EU funds were seen above the risks of housing enemies. Besides, the US-educated Greek elite wanted to impress EU and US contacts they pushed the policies they did.
What they conveniently forgot was medieval and modern Greek history. These eras embraced for centuries the fear and catastrophes of vicious crusades and Muslim-Christian antagonism, hatred and endless wars. Not only that, but no one can forget the Islamic Turkish occupation of Greece, 1453-1821. That period was one of dark ages for Greece. And despite 200 years of freedom, modern Greeks are still threatened by Muslim Turks next door. England the US keep supporting the Turks because of their fear of Russia, which essentially was responsible for Greek independence with its defeat of Turkey in the 1828 war. The Treaty of Adrianople between Russia and Turkey in 1829 confirmed Greek independence from Turkey. The British never wanted to see an independent Greece. They maintained they dislike of Greece to our days. They abandoned the Greeks in the 1920s in Asia Minor and, like Italy, France, the Soviet Union / Russia and the US, supported Kemal. They witnessed the disgrace of Western civilization, observing fanatical Turks violating and killing Greeks on the harbor of Smyrna in 1923 and they, only meters away on their warships, doing nothing.
In 1955, the British encouraged the Turks to go on with their horrific pogrom against the persons and property of 85,000 Greeks living in Istanbul.
The Patriarch emerging from the ruined church of the holy virgin at the Belgrade Gate, Istanbul, Turkey, Pogrom, September 6-7, 1955. From Dimitrios Kaloumenos, The Crucifixion of Christianity, 48th edition, Athens, 2001. Courtesy Leonidas Chrysanthopoulos
A gigantic government organized mob of Turks ripped through all that was Greek: houses, stores, schools, hospitals, churches, even cemeteries. Turks unearthed dead people and stabbed them. The Greek government complained but the British and the US sided with the Turkish government that pretended it had nothing to do with the violence. And, in 1974, British and American supported the Turkish invasion and occupation of Northern Cyprus.
Most Greeks of our time remember this history, and they are not about to repeat it by filling their villages with Moslems.
However, aside from the hostility between Christians and Islam, the very idea of planning to replace Greek population with foreigners is another criminal scheme of foreign occupation, equally repulsive to the Greeks.
Sacred and democratic farming
The solution to demographic decline and the absence of young people from the villages is to reverse the trends by investing in the Greek countryside. Make it prosperous with funding for couples to have large families, while raising traditional crops with agroecological methods, which produce healthy food and protect the natural world. If need be, Greece should abandon the EU, if the EU insists it must continue to fund the destruction of traditional farming for the benefit of agrochemicals and agribusiness.
Traditional Greek farming is a link with the ancient Greek gods. Zeus sent rains, Demeter represented wheat, traditional agriculture and civilization, Dionysos was vines and wine, Pan protected cattle, sheep, gods and other domesticated animals, Aristaios protected honeybees and wildlife.
Zeus, disguised as a shepherd, tempts Mnemosyne by Jacob de Wit (1727. Public Domain. Wikipedia Commons
Xenophon, a student of Socrates, Athenian general and historian, wrote a book, Oikonomikos, in which he argues that agriculture was a school for self-reliant food production, food security, bravery, cooperation, national defense and civilization. Besides, the gods made farming prosperous ( 5.6-14, 17-20).
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Evaggelos Vallianatos.