Mass evictions of teachers on Greek islands, ahead of the tourist season

Teachers who rent houses especially in island regions of Greece are facing demoralizing conditions ahead of the tourist season. After the difficult task of finding a home at the start of the school year, and the exorbitant rents they had to contend with, they are now under threat of eviction even as early as mid-May as the owners want to turn the properties into Airbnbs for tourists.

According to the president of OLME Nikiforos Constantinou, “complaints have come to OLME this period about evictions, for Mykonos, Santorini, but also for other small islands of the Cyclades and the Dodecanese”.

Teacher, Theodoros Baxevanidis, who spoke on Open channel, his personal experience is also revealing: “I have been informed on an island that I will stay for 10 months, but there are cases of colleagues who were supposed to leave in June and were kicked out in May due to tourist reservations”. He added that “we have asked the mayors to rent small hotels in order to make them available to our colleagues for a small fee”.

“Degrading situations” in Mykonos

An image of what is happening is given by the complaint of the First local teachers union ELME of Cyclades, published on the local website cyclades24: “Early May and the world of education is once again faced with unprecedented, embarrassing and humiliating situations. Unfortunately, 25 teachers of all levels on the island are forced, gradually until mid-June, to leave their homes, as their owners intend to make them available as airbnb for the summer season! Our colleagues are already roaming around as guests from house to house, in order to see what they will do and how they will manage to stay on the island and at their jobs until the end of June”.

And while the Municipal Authority of the island was aware of the problem already last October (!), it mobilized only at the end of April, calling on owners of rooms and properties on the island to provide houses for rent to the Municipality, in order to house “homeless” teachers”.

The local union complains that “the state and the Ministry of Education are silent, they have not made any move and no initiative has been taken on the acute issue of teacher housing on the island of Mykonos and we are witnessing, for another year, the same ruthless policy against public school teachers”.