Category: Week 3

A crop that has defined Naxos for centuries is disappearing. What happens next?

By Vivien Wong

When Stelios Vathrakokoilis was in his late teens, his father sent him to school to learn English. He hoped his son would pursue college instead of potato farming. This was the 1990s, and as Vathrakokoilis would later explain, “farmer parents didn’t want their children to have to endure the same pain and suffering they had.” But as a teenager, he constantly skipped school; he preferred “flirting with chicks” to sitting in a classroom. “And then,” he said, “I fell madly in love with potatoes.”

On a Tuesday afternoon in late June, Vathrakokoilis, now a sixty-year-old potato farmer, gestured with his cigarette lighter to a well some hundred yards from his brother’s potato fields. “There is water there still,” he said. “In fifteen days, it will be dry.” In 2023, he planted seventeen acres of potatoes. That changed last year, when the wells on his land ran dry. “I didn’t plant a thing,” he said. “Nothing, nothing, nothing.” 

Vathrakokoilis and his brother, loading crates of potatoes from the morning’s harvest into his own nearby pickup, come from a long line of potato farmers on Naxos, the largest and most fertile of the Greek Cycladic islands. Here, no agricultural product is more famous than the buttery Naxian potato. But recent waves of drought have dried up the supply of water to farms across Naxos. Now, as the island’s potato production dwindles, the future of its producers hangs in the balance. 

Dimitris Kapounis, president of the Union of Agricultural Cooperatives of Naxos, considers the potato a kind of “ambassador” for the island. For the past decade, the island has drawn thousands of visitors for the annual Naxos Potato Festival, one of the most popular gastronomic festivals in the Aegean. During the most recent festival in 2019, Naxos broke the Guinness World Record for the largest quantity of fried potatoes served at once: 625 kilograms, or 0.7 tons. At the time, Naxos was producing over seven million kilograms of potatoes per year. This past year, according to Kapounis, the island has produced less than three thousand kilograms—about two to three tons. 

“It’s not my fault, nor God’s, nor nature’s,” Vathrakokoilis said when I visited his brother’s potato fields. “My question is, where is the human intervention?” Last year, there was a shortage of rainfall across the Mediterranean. After the wells dried up, the island’s mayor, Dimitris Lianos, announced that desalination units would treat enough seawater to “cover the shortfall for houses, hotels and pools.” A relief for the tourists who flocked to Naxos—in record numbers—last year. Farmers were less lucky. 

This year, Vathrakokoilis plans to use salty water for irrigation when his well dries up. That’s what he did last year. “It ruins the quality of the agricultural products,” he said. “But in the end, that’s what we’re going to use.”

Without a stable income from farming, Vathrakokoilis’s family relies partly on the wages earned by his children, who work in his brother-in-law’s potato packaging factory. They’re twins—a boy and a girl—and still in high school. They’re the age Vathrakokoilis was when he fell in love with potatoes. 

The boy has demonstrated interest in potato farming. “He can do it if he combines a stable job with free time in the field,” Vathrakokoilis told me. But like his parents before him, Vathrakokoilis doesn’t see a future where his children can rely on farming as a primary job. 

As for the potato fields his children will inherit, Vathrakokoilis hopes they might one day revamp the farmland as a tourist attraction—something like agrotourism, perhaps. The tourism industry, despite its damage to the sustainability of farming on the island, promises his family “a secure income,” he said, “because I believe tourism will never stop as long as there is sun and sea.”

Leaning over the bed of his Ford pickup, he relit his cigarette, took a drag, and let out a nostril of smoke. “Tourism is fine. Hotels and rooms to live in are fine. Tourists are fine. We all profit from that,” he said. “But somehow we have to combine the rooms to live in with a restaurant that doesn’t serve a steak from France, but a steak that comes from this island.” ♦

The story of one farmer’s fight against the Greek island’s ongoing drought

by Isabella Dail

 Stelios Vathrakokoilis awakens at 6:00 AM to spray the fields with pesticides and weed killers. The 60-year-old works a potato farm on the island of  Naxos, Greece, alongside a few other employees. 

His days are long. He often goes to bed after midnight so he can first water the crops in the evening. With such a small workforce, he can spend 10 hours in the fields per day during the harvest season.

In recent years, Vathrakokoilis’s hard labor has only gotten harder as heat and drought threaten Naxos’s agricultural industries. In the late morning of June 24, the sun already blazed down on the tractor that trundled across the field and scooped potatoes into plastic bins. Vathrakokoilis seemed unconcerned that the truck he leaned against was searing to the touch. The prickly pear cacti dotting the field’s perimeter occasionally turned grey and withered.

Vathrakokoilis relies on farming for his livelihood. Last year, he couldn’t harvest any potatoes at all.

Naxos was an island once known for its staple crops. Now, as the agricultural industries are crumbling to heat and drought, a growing tourism industry has brought in new visitors, replaced potato fields with swimming pools, and disrupted local economies and lifestyles.

The island’s largest reservoir is desiccated, and a shortage of rainfall persists. Naxos’s average temperature in the summer has risen by about 4 degrees in the last 50 years. Due to the lack of available fresh water, sea water fills the wells used to irrigate farmland, damaging crop health.

“Water scarcity is a very big problem,” said Giorgios Lialios, an environmental journalist at Greece’s leading newspaper.

The drought isn’t Vathrakokoilis’s only concern. He says that the remaining water on the island isn’t directed primarily to him. Instead, it’s going to the tourism industry.

Naxos has become a prime tourist destination, boasting the ruins of the temple of Apollo, a series of resorts decked with quaint villas, and the freshness of its remaining crops. While farmers complain of little water, swimming pools materialize across the island, and trendy resorts maintain expansive gardens. Employees in the industry argue that tourism is essential for the Naxian economy, even agricultural sectors.

“If the hotels do not work in the summer, the farmers do not work in the winter,” Irene Lianou, the Reservations Manager at the Lianos Village Hotel, said.

In fact, the hotel has married agriculture and tourism, opening a farm that both supports the hotel’s kitchen and appeals to patrons. They offer zucchini, nectarines, and–of course–potatoes from their farm for customers.

“All the jobs here, on this island, are involved in tourism,” Lianou said.

Yet the agricultural industry on a whole seems impossible to sustain in light of the island’s current climate conditions. According to Dimitris Kapounis, President of the Union of Agricultural Cooperatives of Naxos, Naxos once produced over 13,000 tons (12,000,000 kilograms) of potatoes annually. In recent years, that number has plummeted to somewhere between 2 to 3 tons. 

Vathrakokoilis believes that the challenges facing farmers could improve, but it would require local authorities to step in. He hopes that a system which cleans sewage water for irrigation will be implemented. For now, he fears the well he uses will dry up within the next week. If the situation doesn’t improve, he may be unable to continue doing the job he loves.

If a solution to the drought doesn’t occur in the land once known for its potatoes, Vathrakokoilis believes that “in a few years there will be no agricultural production on this island.”

By Mara DuBois 

“This was one of my favorite beaches 20 years ago,” Nicolas Stephanou said as he stepped through a narrow gap in the stone and wood fence enclosing Faragas Beach Bar on the Cycladic island of Paros, Greece. 

It was a scorching June day, and the only way to access this once-secluded public beach was to walk through the bar—a sprawling structure that didn’t exist a decade ago. 

Stephanou, who has lived on Paros for 40 years, passed confidently by the hostesses and through the arrangement of restaurant tables, emerging onto the sunbaked sand. To his left, scattered towels lay haphazardly on the open beach. To his right, five neat rows and 11 columns of square umbrellas shaded matching sets of sunbeds. 

This split view represents a small victory in a much larger battle. In 2023, Stephanou and other members of the Paros Citizens’ Movement successfully pushed for enforcement of a national law requiring businesses to leave at least 50% of every beach unoccupied for public use—a policy now visibly upheld at Faragas. 

While abiding by this law, Faragas Beach Bar represents a growing threat facing the island: overconstruction fueled by booming tourism. 

According to data from Greece’s statistics agency, Paros had 349 new building permits in 2024, more than any other island in the Cyclades for the fifth year in a row. Most of these permits support the construction of hotels, vacation apartments, or other businesses in the tourism industry like Faragas Beach Bar.  

The Cyclades, already vulnerable to the effects of climate change, are negatively impacted by the environmental cost of this development. 

“Water scarcity is a very big problem in the whole of the Cycladic Islands,” said Giorgos Lalios, a reporter who covers overtourism for the Greek daily Kathimerini. 

Paros’s water supply is a concern of Stephanou. While the island is relatively well-off compared to its neighbors like Naxos, Stephanou warns that it’s approaching its limit. 

“There’s an incredible waste of water,” he said, pointing to the proliferation of swimming pools and the use of non-native plants in hotel gardens which require excessive watering.

Paros Mayor Kostas Bizas agreed, identifying the effects of overconstruction as the island’s most pressing issue. However, his office has limited power to meaningfully address the issue. He has sent proposals to the central government to limit construction but is pessimistic about prospects for change. 

“The government doesn’t seem very willing to listen to what we are saying,” Bizas said. 

With local authority constrained, responsibility has fallen to groups like the Paros Citizens’ Movement to suppress the irreversible climate impacts of overdevelopment. Their 2023 beach movement drew over 300 local supporters and gained wide media attention. But their latest focus on limiting new construction has been more difficult. 

“Everyone was with the Citizens’ Movement for the beaches,” Stephanou said. “This is a bit more controversial.” 

Why? Because limiting construction threatens local livelihoods tied to the island’s large tourism industry. The movement now consists of a core group of about 20 activists. 

Still, their efforts have yielded results. 

The Citizens’ Movement has taken to court new building projects in an effort to mitigate the threats to Paros’s water supply. In two cases, the court decided to freeze construction on new developments.

“At least this is working,” Stephanou said.

However, Stephanou remains worried. Having experienced the detrimental effects of the tourism boom on Paros first-hand, he warned, “Eventually, tourism can kill tourism.” 

The clock is ticking. If development continues unchecked, Bizas believes tourists will stop visiting the island due to crowds and traffic. When this happens, investors would likely abandon Paros as its quality-of-life declines under the weight of climate change. 

“Locals will have to stay back with ghost villas,” he said.