by Annalisa Jenkins
Diamantis Diamantidis says he works at “a crossroads.”
Lexikopoleio, the bookstore where he serves as events coordinator, sells books in Greek, English and French, and attracts visitors from all over. Our first week in Athens, Vivien, Noah and I walked into Lexikopoleio hoping to buy a notebook and were surprised to hear boisterous English from the corner. It was Wednesday—we had stumbled upon the English book club.
Clocking us as English-speakers, Diamantidis waved us over to join, unrelenting even as we explained that none of us had heard of the book. We listened for 45 minutes as they discussed Perfection, a novella by Italian author Vincenzo Latronico that follows a couple of digital nomads as they make a life in Berlin.
It was a fitting choice. The group—Greek locals and expats from the US, Ireland, Argentina and the Netherlands—discussed what it meant to live and work abroad. We couldn’t help glancing at each other as they criticized the couple for their role in Berlin’s gentrification and for not learning German. Very few had themselves learned Greek (and neither had we).
Since just before the COVID-19 pandemic, Diamantidis—who grew up in Pangrati—has noticed expats flocking to the neighborhood. The Greek government is working to attract wealthy foreigners as the Greek birth rate drops. With Greece’s aging population, “even with zero unemployment, only 45 percent of the population [could] earn money and pay taxes and social security contributions,” Greek journalist John Psaropoulos wrote in a February article for his substack Hellenica.
Greece has implemented a number of programs to bring in foreigners, including tax incentives for retirees who pledge to invest large sums and a “Digital Nomad Visa.” The Digital Nomad Visa allows remote workers to stay in Greece for up to a year, with the possibility of annual renewal. It is “ideal if you’re not ready for a long-term commitment but want to explore Greek culture and lifestyle,” an article on the government “workfromgreece.gr” website says.
The front page of the same government website, reading like an ad, asks blatantly, “How can we tempt you?”
(photo credit: workfromgreece.gr)
These incentives for short-term residents come as Greece faces a housing crisis. According to a 2024 OECD report, from 2017-2024, housing costs rose by 69%. Greeks spend more on housing—an average of 35% of their income—than anywhere else in Europe, the Greek Analyst wrote in a recent substack article.
This increase is due, in part, “to the increasing share of non-resident buyers in the Greek real estate market,” the OECD report said. More than 70% of AirBnB listings in central Athens are owned by hosts with two or more listings—people are making a business of buying up homes and renting them out at high prices to tourists and short-term residents, the Greek Analyst said.
The “Airbnbification of Athens” can become “a socio-economic nightmare for people priced out of their old neighborhoods,” the Greek Analyst wrote.
At the book club, when an American asked the group what would happen when they (the expats) were priced out of Athens with the next round of transplants—as had happened to the characters in Berlin—a Greek member of the group laughed sardonically and responded, “ask the Athenians.”
Exploring this pull for Western implants felt particularly dissonant as we spent class time learning about the ultra-right wing Greek Migration Ministry’s quest to shut Greece’s borders to migrants.
Around Pangrati, graffiti decries this dichotomy.
(photo credit: Vivien Wong)
(photo credit: Noah Labelle)
Like Lexikopoleio, Greece itself is a crossroads situated between the East, whose Ottoman influence it tries to forget and whose migrants it rejects, and the West into which it has integrated.
But Diamantidis is proud of the international community that he has helped to cultivate. Lexikopoleio is a place that “travels you—through the books” and “with the conversations,” he said, sitting in a small nook surrounded by shelves.
