On July 2nd, Panagiotis Stathis, a 54-year-old civil engineer, was shot dead outside his office in Athens. While there have been several killings related to both terrorism and drugs this is the first in a dispute over building on Mykonos, an island which has become a mecca for the super-rich.
Police are investigating Stathis’s connections with local business interests since he had been involved as a surveyor in land deals in Mykonos since the 1990s, including what may be unlicensed constructions. He also worked on the islands of Paros and Ios, which have also been adversely affected by over-tourism. Stathis’s assassination comes at a time when Mykonos and other hotspot islands are in public focus due to a police crackdown on, for example, illegally-built beach bars.
This was not the first time that Stathis had been attacked: he was beaten up on Mykonos by unknown assailants in 2021. An archaeologist whose work involved examining proposed building sites on the island for ancient remains was also savagely beaten in 2023, and an Albanian building contractor was assaulted last year.
The media are widely linking the killing of Stathis to a Greek mafia-type operation. So much so that the day after the killing Kathimerini newspaper asked in an editorial, “Who truly governs Mykonos – the Mafia or the Hellenic Republic?”
As for the “Mafia”, the Italian writer Andrea Camilleri frequently referred to Mafia-led illegal building in Sicily, while novelist Jeffrey Siger has weighed into the current debate with a “I told you so” since one of his Mykonos-based crime thrillers, The Mykonos Mob, predicted a killing like Stathis’s five years ago.
But equally disturbing is the escalating problem of over-tourism. While tourists wilted throughout July under temperatures of over 40 degrees and high levels of humidity, there is another and wider tragedy unfolding, as I reported here last month. This is the likely collapse of the overall tourism business in Greece due to three factors: greed, lack of infrastructure and, most of all, lack of planning and control.
Greed because there seems to be no end to the “get rich quick” mentality of both locals and foreign investors.
Lack of infrastructure because, especially in the islands, water shortage is acute, and waste management cannot cope with the detritus of tourism. In Corfu, where I live, we are often without water, and the landfill cannot accept the extra garbage created by hotels and restaurants.
And lack of planning because as soon as the government had announced its plan for a new vision for planning and development in tourism, the plan was shown to be shortsighted and self-contradictory. Journalist Giorgos Lialios, who writes frequently on environmental issues, says “tourism is the absolute dominator in Greece’s zoning plans”.
He points out three flaws in the new plan: the emphasis is on large resorts, which are permissible even on uninhabited islands; very few areas are designated as “saturated”; and there are no restrictions on size – in fact the plan seems to say “the larger the better”.
This will cause a downward spiral in income since the all-in resorts are prepaid, mostly to operators outside Greece. It is also due to the high cost of accommodation (especially on Airbnb) which reduces discretionary spending. Despite the ever-rising numbers of tourists (17 per cent increase in 2023 over the previous year) they are spending less per capita so their contribution to GDP is in fact less significant.
But the mentality matches that of Harvard-educated prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who has welcomed a resort development on a pristine site of ecological importance in Corfu on the grounds that, since it was unproductive it was a “waste of space”. Those who sought to retain its pristine condition as a recreational facility were standing in the way of progress, he said.
What worries me most, as a resident of a small village in Corfu, is the evident erosion of a sense of community identity as people’s actions are directed more to satisfying the demands of tourism than in providing local services. Corfiot identity is called “kerkyraikotita” or “Corfiotitude” and every island and many parts of the mainland have a similar cohesion to local culture and sense of community. The globalisation of tourism puts at risk people’s individual and collective identity as its homogenising effect becomes the hallmark of travel.
Venice and Barcelona are examples of cities which are resisting over-tourism. Athens could well do the same, to the advantage of its residents, who are also complaining of the prevalence of Airbnb, demand for which is exponentially growing.
Serving mass tourism is damaging any sense of identity. To be practical what use is a village without water? Or the local bakery when it is so intent in supplying the major resorts in the area that we don’t get the bread delivery until lunchtime?
- Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Find The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
- Our In The News podcast is now published daily - Find the latest episode here
