The Greek Family Surviving Without Electricity

From left to right: Nino, Maria and Koula

It’s Wednesday evening and I am stuck in traffic in the centre of Athens. A football game in the nearby stadium will begin in thirty minutes and the road is filled with fans – others by car and others by train.

I’m running late but Nino, the man I am meeting, is not in a hurry. “I never sleep anyway,” he says on the phone. “I am guarding the house.”

We go past Irinis Avenue and beyond the reservoir tanks, uphill of Eleftherias Avenue. We drive high up the road, towards the home of a family of five who have been surviving without any electricity for the past five years. Despite what you might assume, the electricity was not cut due to a lack of payments – it was never there in the first place. The family squatted an abandoned house.

I had visited the neighbourhood of Perama before, in 2008, the year the economic crisis started. A traditionally working class area, its first inhabitants were migrants from Istanbul, Pontous and Asia Minor who came to work in the nearby shipyards in the 1930s. Perama is all about workers unions, unemployment, hip-hop and Low Bap. I remember back then how surprised I was to meet a family whose members – the grandparents, the parents and the children all lived under one roof not by choice, but by poverty. But this is a whole new realm I’m about to enter.

Nino

As I get out of the car, dogs Frogki and Sadie bark to greet me and Rico, the cat, meows. Nino, his wife Koula and their youngest daughter Maria wait for me in the candlelight. “We are a family of romantics,” they laugh. Its 10PM and John and Christina, the older kids have just returned from school. “They go to night school so they can study through daylight,” Koula explains.

Nino used to work making tanks for trucks but when he lost his job in 2007 the family couldn’t pay rent anymore and got evicted from their home. Their clothes and a kitchen table were the only things they could save for the foreclosure of their three bedroom flat in the nearby Nikaia neighbourhood – the rest was seized by the banks. As Nino went from job to job, the family went from home to home. They even spent time at a homeless shelter, where they were allowed to stay more than they were entitled because, during that time, Koula gave birth to Maria.

For a while they lived in a car, which they kept parked outside cemeteries. Nino and his son would carry funeral flower wreaths for 10 euros a time, and Koula would clean the church toilets. By luck, a friend told Nino about the abandoned house in Perama.

John is now 20 years old, Christina is 14 and Maria seven. They sleep in the same room, their three beds next to each other. John’s bed has a Spiderman blanket, Mary’s has a Barbie one and Christina’s is decorated with flowers. Christina is the best student in the family and has even been awarded for her performance at school. “Poor children have a gift from God,” says her mum.

Before going to sleep, they make sure none of their candles are lit because John is worried about catching on fire. Nino is equally worried and cannot sleep at night. “Strange things could happen up here,” he says. He guards his home in order to protect his family. He also goes around the area to search for leftover cigarette butts on the sidewalks, which he then cuts to make his own tobacco to smoke.

Koula has an issue with cleanliness. Every two and a half months their family get a 200 euro benefit, which is basically their only steady income. Their first purchase is usually bleach to clean the house.

Nino is 53 now. “No one wants to hire me at this age,” he says. Koula is 39 and a cook but at the moment she cannot even get a job as a helper in the kitchen. She spends most of the day sitting at home and doing her nails to pass the time.

They have a refrigerator, a stove and a TV but these things only work with electricity, which they don’t have. They eat once a day at the soup kitchen in the neighbourhood and hours later, when the children say, “Mum, I am hungry”, Nino goes by the bakeries in the area to see if they can spare him any leftovers. “In Perama everyone is in a bad state, so you cannot really count on anyone’s help,” he says. “Nino is a diabetic and we usually leave his insulin on the balcony to keep cold. If we had any sort of relationship with the neighbours we could put it in one of their fridges but neighbourhoods in Athens are not what they used to be. People don’t have the same sense of solidarity.” A large supermarket in the area helps the family from time to time, by giving them bread, cheese or milk.

Koula washes the clothes by hand in the bathroom with cold water. In summer this is okay, but during winter things get tough. They sleep with thick blankets and the children study with their jackets on. Doors and windows were installed by charity volunteers and their home furnishings came from various ads in the newspapers by people (students leaving Athens after their studies, couples moving house) who wanted to get rid of them for free.

Maria and Koula

The interior is covered in religious icons. After the birth of their youngest, Koula spent a long time in bed and prayed. Her and Nino recently decided to split up but stay living together “because a house has two columns and our children will always unite us.”

Maria shows me her notebooks and it looks like she gets perfect grades in everything. In the morning she wakes up at 6AM to fix her hair because she doesn’t want to be late for school and the walk is long. Her sister, Christina, used to have a computer, which she had to sell to buy food. A few months ago she found a smartphone, but its owner called and she had to return it.

Their parents have mobile phones, which they charge wherever they can in order to contact each other in the case of an emergency. They have a small old car, yet no gasoline to move around. Maria has grown used to the dark now, but the other two have started to react – they need things like a laptop, a TV and a personal phone more than a plate of hot food or a bath, just like their peers do.