By Elise Dalley and Ben O’Halloran

University students Pavlos Happilos and Anna Maria Karagiorgi are ready to 'get out' of Greece. Image: Ella Richmond

THESSALONIKI: As Greece’s second largest city descends into social and financial chaos, the younger generation are seeking opportunities abroad.

Educated young adults have expressed their willingness to work but fear the government will be unable to satisfy their career ambitions.

Alexandros Filippopoulos, an undergraduate student at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, believes that young Greek students have a desire to succeed that the government does not value.

“Young people want to change things. They want to try, they want to really try, but they don’t get any opportunities from the government, the universities, their parents.

“We have people that want to work and we can’t find a job. We have dreams and we can’t find a way to make them real,” he said.

Anna Maria Karagiorgi, a fellow undergraduate at Aristotle, shares this anxiety about her future in Greece.

“The opportunities here are zero.”

“There is no hope…I have to enter our corrupt system and that is against my morals,” she said.

“This is not my fault for what is happening. They don’t help me to improve my studies, improve our education levels, in order to make this country better, so they push me into moving abroad.”

Soitiris Kapetanopoulos, President of the Municipal Council of Thessaloniki, is concerned about the situation graduates will face in the future.

He told Reportage Online that Thessaloniki’s unemployment figures are almost double that of Athens, with 27 percent of university graduates unable to find work.

“We have a lot of people graduated from universities but most of them are not employed… everybody is worried,” he said.

Greek students are heading overseas for further studies. Image: Ben O'Halloran

The way forward for Greece is to invest in their future, but the sentiment is clear: if the government continues to push these young people out, there will be no future.

“I don’t want to be respected for the old days, the ancient Greece, about Socrates and Pythagoras,” Filippopoulos said.

“I know that the work they did was amazing, but I want to be respected for these days, I live in 2010, I’m not living in 5000 BC.”

“I am very eager to do things, I want to do things… but I want to be respected for myself, for the things I do now.”

The graduates do not rest on the academic laurels of their past. In fact, they say they want nothing more than to be recognised for their own achievements and independence.

Pavlos Happilos, studying honours in chemistry, is planning on pursuing further studies in London at the end of his degree.

“If I stay here for a PHD, I won’t be paid. In London, I will be paid 1000 pounds a month,” he said.

Happilos fears he will not be able to establish a successful career for himself in Greece and will have to rely on his parents for support.

“I can’t imagine living here. I can’t imagine being thirty and calling my parents up to pay my rent because I won’t be able to.

“A lot of people that you see going to coffee all day and not studying and not caring is because they live on the money their grandparents made and their fathers made, but we’re coming to a point where those monies are going to be gone and we’re going to have a very serious problem,” he said.

“Old money won’t let the new generation go that easily, so as long as there is old money, people are going to stay in Greece and do nothing.”

Filippopoulos agrees that the younger generation must rise above this crisis in order to gain their independence and rewrite the history books with their own success.

“The old people, the old way of thinking, is haunting Greece – they really don’t want anything to change.

“This is a waste, Greece can evolve, can be better, can grow,” he said.

Elise Dalley is studying Journalism and Law at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.
Ben O’Halloran is a Journalism student from Murdoch University, Perth, Australia.