BBC News
June 14, 2012
We drive north from Athens into Thessaly, where once you leave the sea road, the mountains hide a vast alluvial inland plain.
This is green Greece. Fertile with wheat, nuts, olives and cattle. The cow bells and the steep mountain roads make if feel like Switzerland, albeit a Switzerland with 40 degree heat and crazy drivers.
I have come to the village of Anavra because it has got a reputation for economic success. They are doing eco-farming. They have got young people moving there because of the economic crisis in other regions - in fact they are having to fend off incomers.
We sit in the taverna in the main square, the young farmers in their bib-and-brace overalls, already by 12 noon the plastic tables are littered with beer bottles and cigarette ash. These are the good-old-boys of Greece in the making, their battered, hay-plastered SUVs at the roadside.
Their complaint is that governments have done nothing for farmers. That foreign imports are destroying their livelihoods. These are the normal complaints about farming. Then I ask them about politics and they come out with the normal complaints as well:
"The politicians are corrupt," says 30-year-old Stathis Mithroleos. "We're the generation that should be peaking now. I have two children and I am worried about them. If I knew things would be like this I would not have got married."
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