{"id":230,"date":"2025-07-05T23:59:16","date_gmt":"2025-07-05T20:59:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/?p=230"},"modified":"2025-11-01T22:22:05","modified_gmt":"2025-11-01T20:22:05","slug":"saving-potato-island","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/2025\/07\/05\/saving-potato-island\/","title":{"rendered":"Saving Potato Island"},"content":{"rendered":"

A crop that has defined Naxos for centuries is disappearing. What happens next?<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\"\"
Stelios Vathrakokoilis\u2019s well, located a few hundred yards from his truck, is nearly dry. <\/span>Photo courtesy the author<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By Vivien Wong<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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,\u00a0<\/span>\u201cfarmer parents didn’t want their children to have to endure the same pain and suffering they had.\u201d <\/span>But as a teenager, he constantly skipped school; he preferred “flirting with chicks” to sitting in a classroom. “And then,” he said, “<\/span>I fell madly in love with potatoes.”<\/span><\/p>\n

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. \u201cThere is water there still,\u201d he said. \u201cIn fifteen days, it will be dry.\u201d In 2023, he planted seventeen acres of potatoes. That changed last year, when the wells on his land ran dry. \u201cI didn\u2019t plant a thing,\u201d he said. \u201cNothing, nothing, nothing.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Vathrakokoilis and his brother, loading crates of potatoes from the morning\u2019s harvest into his own nearby pickup, come from a <\/span>long line<\/span><\/a> 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\u2019s potato production dwindles, the future of its producers hangs in the balance.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Dimitris Kapounis, president of the Union of Agricultural Cooperatives of Naxos, <\/span>considers<\/span><\/a> the potato a kind of \u201cambassador\u201d 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 <\/span>broke<\/span><\/a> the Guinness World Record for the largest quantity of fried potatoes served at once: 625 kilograms, or 0.7 tons. At the time, Naxos <\/span>was producing<\/span><\/a> over seven million kilograms of potatoes per year. This past year, according to Kapounis, the island has produced less than three thousand kilograms\u2014about two to three tons.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s not my fault, nor God’s, nor nature\u2019s,\u201d Vathrakokoilis said when I visited his brother\u2019s potato fields. \u201cMy question is, where is the human intervention?\u201d Last year, there was a <\/span>shortage<\/span><\/a> of rainfall across the Mediterranean. After the wells dried up, the island\u2019s mayor, Dimitris Lianos, announced that desalination units would <\/span>treat enough<\/span><\/a> seawater to \u201ccover the shortfall for houses, hotels and pools.\u201d A relief for the tourists, who flocked to Naxos in <\/span>record<\/span><\/a> numbers last year. Farmers were less lucky.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This year, Vathrakokoilis plans to use salty water for irrigation when his well dries up. That\u2019s what he did last year. \u201cIt ruins the quality of the agricultural products,\u201d he said. \u201cBut in the end, that’s what we\u2019re going to use.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s potato packaging factory. They\u2019re twins\u2014a boy and a girl\u2014and still in high school. They\u2019re the age Vathrakokoilis was when he fell in love with potatoes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The boy has demonstrated interest in potato farming. \u201cHe can do it if he combines a stable job with free time in the field,\u201d Vathrakokoilis told me. But like his parents before him, Vathrakokoilis doesn\u2019t see a future where his children can rely on farming as a primary job.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As for the potato fields his children will inherit, Vathrakokoilis hopes they might one day revamp the farmland as a tourist attraction\u2014something 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, “b<\/span>ecause I believe <\/span>tourism will never stop as long as there is sun and sea.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Leaning over the bed of his Ford pickup, he relit his cigarette, took a drag, and let out a nostril of smoke. \u201cTourism is fine. Hotels and rooms to live in are fine. Tourists are fine. We all profit from that,\u201d he said. \u201cBut 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.\u201d \u2666<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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,\u00a0\u201cfarmer parents … <\/p>\n

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