Upswing in Greece: These are the reasons for the boom

The place where the future is to begin shows its scars undisturbed. Here, in the heart of the old town of Ioannina, life once vibrated. But when people lost their jobs, there was no longer enough money, when young people left the country in droves, the bars in front of the shops were lowered, the doors were locked, the facades were sprayed with graffiti. “The street simply died,” says Irene Maragos about the crisis a good ten years ago.

But today, a new beginning is blowing through the “Kaniggos” – the cobbled alley in the center of Ioannina, a student city in northwestern Greece: An antique shop has opened, a hair salon, a nail salon. And Maragos, a petite, dark-haired woman, is standing in the former rooms of a jeans shop, where the smell of fresh paint hangs in the air. In a few weeks, a co-working space for the start-up and tech scene that has sprung up in Ioannina in recent years is set to open here. “We have all the ingredients to become a relevant tech hub,” she says.

It is a story that hardly anyone would have thought possible until recently. Not in Ioannina – and not in Greece either. But of all places, the former bankrupt state is being celebrated as Europe’s new economic miracle country. At the end of 2023, the British “Economist” named Greece’s economy the best of the year – for the second time in a row. Growth of around two percent is expected for 2024, well above the eurozone average of 0.8 percent. Rating agencies had already upgraded Greece’s creditworthiness from the first junk level in the autumn. And it is no longer debt and rescue packages that have been making headlines for a long time, but rather the IPO of Athens airport or the billion-dollar real estate project “The Ellinikon”, a luxury district being built on the site of the old airport on the coast off Athens.