Sunday, September 2, 2012

Eco-commune flourishes as Greek economy withers


Web designer Apostolos Sianos and three friends startled Greek villagers when they quit well-paid jobs in Athens to set up a self-sufficient commune that lives in yurts and grows its own vegetables.
In California, or Scandinavia, such a move might have gone unnoticed. But in deeply conservative rural Greece - where green thinking is strictly the domain of urbanites - the project made suspicious locals uneasy, or was laughed off as ridiculous.
But now, two years and a brutal economic crisis later, Sianos and his friends are the ones laughing.
With Greece's economy in freefall, nearly one in four out of work and the desperate jobless turning to the land to survive, the group's focus on growing their own produce and cutting down their reliance on money and a bankrupt state suddenly make practical sense to many Greeks - and some are now turning to the vegan commune for advice.
"Even two years ago, everyone thought we were crazy. But not anymore," says Panos Kantas, 29, a pony-tailed former computer programmer who co-founded the Mount Telethrion Project with Sianos and two others. "The crisis validated a point that was obvious to us and now it's obvious to everyone."

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/30/us-greece-commune-idUSBRE87T11E20120830

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