Greece is closing 700 schools. Its low birth rate is to blame : NPR

Families in the U.S. and around the world are having fewer children as people make profoundly different decisions about their lives. NPR’s series Population Shift: How Smaller Families Are Changing the World explores the causes and implications of this trend.

The school day is just getting started, and 4-year-old Vasiliki Vourgou, a little girl with dark eyes and hair pulled back in a shiny ponytail with a hot pink scrunchie, is alone.

Most days, there are two pupils in this small classroom on the Greek island of Lemnos, with big windows and a view of the school’s front courtyard. But one student is sick, so today it’s just Vasiliki, going through the morning routine with her teacher.

The sky is gray, but Vasiliki’s teacher says when the weather is nice, she tries to get the girls outside to interact with the older children during their breaks.

“They wait for the kids from the primary school to get out and they join them also, so they can be more social,” the teacher, Maria Kokkinopliti, said through an interpreter.

Lemnos, in the northern Aegean, is home to roughly 16,000 people spread across a few dozen small villages. Vasiliki’s school, in the small village of Thanos, is one of many in Greece that’s facing declining student numbers, as younger people move away and those who stay have fewer children.

Vasiliki’s father, Stelios Vourgos, works long hours as a shepherd, but he can’t imagine raising Vasiliki and her baby brother anywhere else.

“Here, I fell in love with my wife; here is my job,” Vourgos said through an interpreter. “For the kids, it’s a paradise to be raised on an island, because big cities are like a jungle.”

But the way of life here faces increasing challenges. The primary school in the village where his wife grew up was shuttered decades ago, he said.

He attended the same school in Thanos where Vasiliki is now a student, as did his father. But now he worries it will be shut down. Without a thriving school, he said, there won’t be much left here.

“There’s a chain reaction after [a school closes], so people move into different places, and then just the old people are left there, and you see villages disappearing,” Vourgos said.

Across most of the world, people are having far fewer children than their parents and grandparents did. Greece’s birthrate is about 1.3 births per woman — well below the 2.1 level needed to maintain the population.

The low birthrate is especially visible in rural communities like Thanos and on Greek islands like Lemnos, where hundreds of schools are cutting programs or closing. Nationwide, Greece’s education ministry announced more than 700 schools would close this year alone, or about 5% of the nation’s schools.

“The island’s infrastructure and available services are also affected, plus limited employment opportunities,” Konstantinos Maditinos, president of the primary education teachers association on Lemnos, said. “This means young couples have little incentive to stay on the island and leave, even if they are originally from here.”

For those who stay, health care services can be limited. Vourgos said he and his wife spent thousands of euros to travel for medical care for each of her two pregnancies.

The island’s small public hospital has no neonatal ICU services, so many pregnant women make that choice, said Dr. Olga Katira. She has been working as a pediatrician on Lemnos for more than a decade. Katira said she’s noticed the birth rate shift in her own office.

“We used to have six, seven newborns per month, and now we have three,” she said. “That is a decline that we can see.”

While the problem is more pronounced in Greece’s small towns and island communities, Katira worries about the future of the country as a whole.

“We are a small country. If it continues declining, it will be very, very difficult,” she said.

As families have had fewer children or left the island, the population of Lemnos has plummeted by more than a third since the early 1950s, from a peak of more than 27,000 people to about 16,000 in the most recent census.

The mayor of Lemnos, Eleonora Georga, said shuttered schools around the island are one of the most obvious signs of the decline.

Switching back and forth between English and Greek, Georga said the overall population here is getting smaller — and older.

“It’s the contemporary lifestyle of the people nowadays. They’re not choosing to create families anymore,” she said through an interpreter.

In September, the Greek government announced new tax incentives designed to address the birth rate decline. Georga said she also would like the European Union to intervene.

Asked if she thinks more immigration to Greek islands like Lemnos could also be a solution, she hesitated.

“It depends on who,” she said.

In recent years, Greece has seen a sharp increase in the number of migrants traveling from eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East — as Europe has seen waves of anti-immigrant protests.

Georga said she’d rather see Greeks who’ve left the country move back.

Those worries are shared by Angelos Vlapas, the principal of another local primary school on Lemnos, who said he’s concerned about what immigration means for Greek identity.

“We’re not criticizing the people who came here to make a living,” Vlapas said through an interpreter. “On the contrary, those who have remained … have become valuable members of the local community.”

“However, that doesn’t change the fact that they belong to a different nationality.”

Alexandra Tragaki, a professor of economic demography at Harokopio University of Athens, said modern women are having fewer children, in part because they’ve taken on responsibilities in the workplace without having traditional, domestic responsibilities proportionately reduced.

“Women changed roles, but no one else did,” Tragaki said. “Neither the society, nor men, so part of the roles that used to be covered by women were left uncovered. And when that happens, obviously it’s the size of the family that is affected. … So obviously, when you have both things to do, parenting and working, what you cut down is the number of children you parent.”

Tragaki said many young Greeks — who grew up at a time when the country was struggling under a catastrophic economic downturn — worry about their own future.

“They have been brought up in consecutive crises,” Tragaki said. “They were born in crisis. They were brought up in financial crisis, in energy crisis, in pandemic crisis. So what they have learned is that they need to expect the unexpected.”

The idea that the culture around family life is shifting in a profound way also resonates with longtime residents of another smaller island, Fourni. The island, nearly 200 miles southeast of Lemnos across the Aegean Sea, is home to roughly a thousand people, depending on the time of year.

On a sunny, clear morning, a group of elderly men sit outside a small local market under the flawless blue sky.

Parthenios Flytzanis, 92, and Nikolaos Amorgianos, 86, are reminiscing about the past and, through an interpreter, say they worry about the country’s future.

“In 10 years, Greece will be a country of old people,” Amorgianos said.

Amorgianos believes younger generations are choosing to have fewer children because their values have changed.

“Now the young people, they only care about the bars, about going out, and they’ve abandoned the mountains, they’ve abandoned the countryside,” he said.

Flytzanis agreed. He believes women in particular have changed.

“Women back then had five, six, seven children,” he said. “And they still took care of the goats, and the garden.”

“The chickens,” Amorgianos added.

Amorgianos remembers his mother making her own bread, but now he believes younger people want everything to be convenient.

“So yes, life has become easier, and people have gotten lazier,” he said.

Women today have more choices, but for those who choose to raise children on a remote island, that choice comes with its own difficulties. 

Katerina Vrana lives on an even smaller island neighboring Fourni, Thymaina, with her husband and their three children. Through an interpreter, Vrana says she and her husband were both born and raised on the island. He’s a fisherman, and she owns a restaurant.

For her first two pregnancies, Vrana said she paid thousands of euros to travel off the island to see doctors and deliver her babies. She wanted another child, she said, but hesitated because of the cost.

Then, she found out about HOPEgenesis, an Athens-based nonprofit that pays for medical care and transportation for pregnant women from small islands and villages. It’s funded largely with corporate and philanthropic support. Vrana said the program allowed her to make her “dream” of a third child “reality.”

HOPEgenesis started by working with women in Fourni a decade ago and has since expanded services to some 500 small villages and island communities in an effort to help reverse the declining birthrate.

“When they felt secure, when they felt they had financial support, women started having babies again,” project manager with HOPEgenesis Eva Papadaki said.

But even with that financial help to have children, raising them on small islands is challenging. The primary school on Thymaina is down to just two grade-school students. There’s no school for Vrana’s two older children, who travel to Fourni for secondary school by ferry.

This year, Vrana said her youngest son would have been the only child in Thymaina’s kindergarten, so she’s decided to send him by boat to Fourni, to the kindergarten that serves all of that island’s children, so he won’t be alone.

Many days, Vrana and her son ride the ferry to Fourni for school, along with his older siblings and a few others. One of the secondary students, 16-year-old Georgia Gramatikou, said sometimes in the winter the weather is too dangerous for her and her twin brother to make the crossing and go to school.

While Georgia enjoys her island home, she doesn’t think she’ll stay here.

“It’s very nice here, and it’s peaceful, but I don’t see myself living here in the future because there aren’t many opportunities,” she said through an interpreter.

People are slowly leaving the island, she said, and the shops are closing.

Back on Fourni, Dimitris Markakis, a local business owner and city official, says family life has always been important in Greece, but it was once seen as essential. Many families were poor, he says, but they saw having children as a source of happiness, “as the meaning of the life.”

Markakis is in his mid-40s, with two children. He left the island to study abroad before returning to start his family.

He thinks the stresses of modern life are one reason people are having fewer children.

Still, Markakis said, his people are strong, and he is hopeful.

“Greek people are very hard, and they always face problems with responsibility,” he says. “I am optimistic.”

Kleitia Kokalari and NPR’s Brian Mann contributed to this story.