Explaining Greece

The “sirens of war” again erupted in the Middle East on the last day of February, last month, with the coordinated and large-scale US and Israeli strikes against Iran, followed by the latter’s retaliation across the wider region. The repercussions of the latest Mideast war, beyond the actual death and destruction in the immediate area, were immediately felt around the world, i.e. financial markets and energy prices.

In this week’s episode of “Explaining Greece”, we again speak with Maria Gavouneli, a professor of International Law at the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens and a board member of the Athens-based Hellenic Foundation for European & Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP), in an attempt to understand how Greek leadership is dealing with the crisis and how the war affects the country.

Standing on the western edge of the now expanded conflict, given its proximity via the eastern Mediterranean with Israel, along with Lebanon and the large island republic of Cyprus, NATO and EU member Greece is closely scrutinizing developments and taking initiatives within its framework of its interests, agreements and alliances. For instance, two Greek  warships and four fighter planes were dispatched to Cyprus, namely, to the internationally recognized part of the island, as one-third of the island remains under Turkish occupation – another variable in the “calculus” of geopolitical realities in the region.

Greece and the Greek Cypriot majority on the island share close fraternal ties.

The deployment followed foiled attacks by drones or missiles, ostensibly by forces backing Iran, against a British airbase on the divided island.

Shipping is also a high priority for Athens, as Greek-owned vessels and companies comprise one of the biggest blocs in the world’s ocean-going fleet, especially the now vulnerable tankers trying to navigate the Strait of Hormuz and other “chokepoints” in the region.

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It figures as the most pressing problem facing Greek society today, literally a “double whammy” of a shrinking population intertwined with an increasingly aging one.

The demographic crisis – according to others more of a looming catastrophe - threatening 21st Greece isn’t unique, however. Similar ominous population trends plague other western and advanced societies.

In this edition of “Explaining Greece”, demography expert Alexandra Tragaki breaks down the numbers of births and deaths in the country; trends since the end of WWII; emigration and migration, and some of the reasons behind this development are discussed. Solutions are requested, yet difficult to define.

Tragaki, a noted professor of economic demography at the Harokopio University in Athens, also warns that any implemented policies to overturn demographic decline won’t be immediately felt, even if successful, given the complexities involved with women and couples in the West having less and less babies.

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One of the most prominent strategic realignments in the east Mediterranean over recent years has been the burgeoning cooperation between Greece and Israel, which both Jerusalem and Athens now call “strategic” in nature.

In this edition of “Explaining Greece”, veteran Corinth-based journalist, correspondent and communications specialist Jean Cohen, details how once chilly official relations have evolved into a solid partnership in various areas, including defense cooperation.

People-to-people exchanges, mainly through tourism and very heightened interest by Israelis in purchasing homes in Greece, and even residing in the southeast European country, are broached.

On the wider political front, Cohen offers his candid views over the backlash faced by the IDF and Israeli leadership after Oct. 7 in their quest to eradicate Hamas from Gaza, referring reactions in Greece, which echoed, to a smaller extent, protests other western countries.

Cohen also disuses the state of the venerable Jewish communities of Greece, including the ancient legacy of the Romaniote Jews and the once unrivaled Sephardic Jewish community of Thessaloniki – which was decimated during the Holocaust.

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The second edition in 2026 of the podcast “Explaining Greece” shies away from current affairs and the geopolitical situation affecting the east Mediterranean country and, instead, focuses on a health-related issue that’s attracted a notable amount of media attention around the world of late, namely, “testosterone therapy”.

This podcast edition’s guest is Dr. Giorgos Stavroulakis, a cardiologist and Ph.D. holder who is has increasingly specialized in sports cardiology over the past several years in the country. Among others, he's screened literally thousands of athletes, juveniles and adults, women and men, who compete in amateur and professional sports in Greece.

Explaining his perspective and the situation with testosterone therapy in Greece, Dr. Stavroulakis weighs in on the pros and cons involved, and how the country figures in international rankings.

As a specialist with years of experience in cardiology vis-à-vis athletes and sports competitions, he also touches on the highly sensitive issue of transgenderism in sports, and as a dominant factor in hormone treatment. He also discusses the prospect of perceived advantages that testosterone therapy has in athletic competition.

Finally, Dr. Stavroulakis broaches the subject of whether and to what extent testosterone is linked to cancer risk, and what role it plays when, unfortunately, some forms of the disease are diagnosed.

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Noted former US diplomat Brady Kiesling, an archaeologist by training and a historian with a specialty in ancient history and Mediterranean archaeology, and just as importantly, a long-time resident of Athens, is the guest today on the first 2026 edition of “Explaining Greece”.

Kiesling gained international recognition back now in now far-off February 2003 when he very publicly resigned from the US State Department to protest America’s impending war with Iraq.

However, diplomacy and geopolitical analysis is far from his daily routine these days, as he’ll explain, with academic pursuits revolving on his beloved disciplines taking up much of his time “in front of a PC screen”, as he half-jokingly laments.

Kiesling has been instrumental in developing an application and website called ToposText, a free mobile app and website that connects the ancient Greek world's literary culture, monuments and history with its physical landscape, billed as a digital library and map for travelers, researchers, and aficionados of ancient history. He’s also on the team behind the site Digital Periegesis, which traces the places and legends of ancient Greece through the footsteps of Pausanias, a second century AD Asia Minor geographer and traveler.

Along with his insight as an American expatriate living in Greece for years, Kiesling expertly touches on politics and the global situation – up until the last days of 2025 - when asked. He also candidly reflects on his high-profile resignation from the State Department in 2003 and even refers the subject of one of his books, “Greek Urban Warriors”, a detailed history of the emergence and eventual defeat of the far-leftist terrorist group “17 November”.

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Farmers’ and stockbreeders’ mobilizations across Greece have been dominating the political agenda and media attention in the country over the first half of December, with standing demands for lower production costs and better prices for their goods now even more animated amid a farm subsidies furor – the OPEKEPE scandal - valued at hundreds of millions of euros.

A now defunct state agency, known in Greek as OPEKEPE, remains at the center of parliamentary review and criminal investigations in the country and by the EU prosecutor’s office. The fraudulent payments of ag-related subsidies have generated heaps of criticism against the ruling center-right government, although the political opposition also struggles to propose solutions that don’t involve throwing “more state money” at the problem.

Mobilizations that often lead to the blocking of highway intersections with heavy farm machinery as well as the blockading of ports, airports and border posts are scenes that have been played out in the country practically every “off season” for producers, late January and February, yet this year the anger from the farm subsidy scandal has energized the protests.

Just as ominously, there’s an ongoing sheep and goat pox epidemic in Greece that has decimated stockbreeders’ herds, another headache for the sector and the state.  

In this edition of “Explaining Greece” Celia Bakostergiou, a 20-year-old agronomy student at the Athens Agricultural University who is actively involved in her family’s farm near the south-central Greek town of Domokos, sheds light on some of the challenges facing the vital sector and what it’s like to be a young female farmer in a rural province.

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November witnessed two major energy-related agreements finalized and signed in Athens, with the first foreseeing the import of American LNG to at least a couple of terminals in Greece for subsequent regasification and transport – by pipelines – to other countries in southeast and eastern Europe, including for the all-important Ukraine market. 

Just as importantly for the Greek side, two major multinationals, ExxonMobil and Chevron entered into binding agreements with Athens to begin exploratory drilling in a handful of maritime blocks south of the large island of Crete and in the Ionian Sea – marking the first time that drilling will occur in Greek waters in decades. The country’s largest refinery group, the partially state-owned Helleniq Energy, will also participate in a consortium with ExxonMobil.

A more-or-less unofficial regional energy summit in the Greek capital also apparently revitalized interest for the ambitious (and challenging) Great Sea Interconnector project, which entails the connection of the power grids of Israel, Cyprus (the government-controlled areas and not the illegally Turkish-occupied northern third) and Greece via an undersea cable laid across the breadth of the east Mediterranean’s seabed. 

Ankara’s opposition to the project is standing and has been manifested with saber-rattling and attempts at “gunboat diplomacy”, yet an embryonic proposal floated by Athens to convene a meeting of five east Mediterranean coastal states (Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, Libya and Turkey) to at least agree on a framework for resolving differences made headlines. 

Additionally, ever closer Greece-Israel relations, both on a bilateral level and in multilateral settings, and which include defense cooperation and energy, now comprise a component of the wider region’s geopolitical “calculus”.

On this segment of “Explaining Greece”, Triantafyllos Karatrantos, an expert in international relations, European security and new threats, is asked about these very recent developments and what they entail for the country and the wider region. He also touches on the Gaza conflict and how this possibly affects Athens.

Dr. Karatrantos is a research associate specializing on the issues of radicalization, terrorism, law enforcement models, security and foreign policy at the Athens-based Hellenic Institute for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP), and conducts post-doctoral research on at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

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One of post-war Greece’s best known and beloved music makers, Dionysis Savvopoulos, passed away last month (October 2025) at the age of 81, leaving behind a musical and cultural legacy that can’t easily fit into neatly defined genres or generational monikers. Savvopoulos was hugely consequential in Greece and with Greek-speaking fans yet remains more-or-less unknown beyond the “Hellenosphere”, i.e. the Greek-language world. Endearingly known as “Nionios” to his fans, Savvopoulos wrote his music, lyrics and enthusiastically performed his works. Some point to his often-eclectic mix of different musical styles – ranging from 1960s American folk to southern Balkan rhythms to rebetika (Greek blues) to the 1960s domestic New Wave – varying influences and even a limited use of the iconic bouzouki, the plucked string instrument (part of the lute family) that is famously associated with 20th century popular Greek music. Look up “syrtaki” and you can hear bouzouki-dominated scores. Dylan and Frank Zappa were his early and clearly visible influences. Savvopoulos’ lyrics are also playfully complex at times, using wordplay, metaphors and mischievous rhymes that were, possibly, difficult to convey in other languages and lacking the context entailed with the “Greece reality” in the 1960s and 1970s, his most productive periods. He was both a modernist and traditionalist, a non-conformist in his art and life, but not a nihilist nor a pessimist. The Thessaloniki native was on record (no pun intended) – in interviews and, more importantly, with his albums – as being an unabashed optimist and afficionado of the finer things that life has to offer. Savvopoulos also eschewed ideological and political confinement, repeatedly and calmly speaking his mind on politics and current affairs, earning the 20-something troubadour two arrests and rough treatment at the hands of authorities during the advent of the military dictatorship in Greece (1967-1974) – a “badge of honor” in the minds of democratically minded citizens. Years later, however, with the restoration of democracy in the country he slipped into near pariah status for the left and far left, given that many on this end of the divisive political spectrum considered that he prematurely and definitively “abandoned the cause” in favor of mainstream success and its amenities. The vast majority of Greek society, fans or not, disagreed and considered his death as the passing of a musical genius. This podcast merely “scratches the surface”, the real Savvopoulos will emerge through listening to his music.

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A political “tempest in a teapot”, a mere diversion from other, more pressing issues, a necessary move to better protect a revered site for Hellenism, or, a “discount” on freedom of assembly and free speech?

An amendment tabled by the center-right government in the latter half of October transferring jurisdiction of the Tomb of the Uknown Soldier monument and the commons in front of the memorial – which lie directly in front of the Greek Parliament – to the defense ministry sparked a passionate debate and sudden political tug-of-war.  

Moreover, the first article of the now ratified law prohibits the occupation, alteration and holding of public gatherings in the area in front of the memorial monument, located between Parliament and Vasilissis Amalias Avenue – the thoroughfare that separates the commons from Syntagma (constitution) Square. Penalties for offenders are up to a year of jail time or fines.

The amendment came immediately after a hunger strike and protest “encampment” was set up in the commons area by the father of one of the 57 victims of the Tempi two-train collision in February 2023. The latter demanded that judicial authorities allow the exhumation of his son’s body for DNA and toxicology testing. While ostensibly aimed at pressuring relevant judicial authorities to allow the exhumation, the nonstop protest – which attracted supporters and activists of other causes as well – vigorously targeted the center-right government over what critics say is its culpability in the deadly train accident and claims of a “cover-up” in its wake.

In this edition of “Explaining Greece”, Alkmini Fotiadou, a constitutional law expert and practicing Athens-based attorney specializing in human rights, administrative law, privacy and protection of personal data, broaches the question of where protection of a venerated monument begins and ends – at least in Greece - and where the, at times, blurry boundaries of freedom of assembly and free speech exist - or should exist in relation to the latter.

The amendment was ratified on Wednesday, Oct. 22, by 159 deputies in the 300-MP Parliament.

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Greece will need to at least triple its power production capacity - today at roughly 50 TWh - by 2050 and produce cheaper electricity, according to Purdue professor of nuclear engineering Lefteri Tsoukalas.

Noted professor Tsoukalas stresses that the future use of nuclear reactors, possibly along the design of small modular ones (SMRs), is “imperative” for the east Mediterranean country. At the same, he emphasized that before any consideration is given to the possibility of generating power from nuclear means, infrastructure, such as “smart grids”, and a massive investment in human resources is necessary.

Nuclear projects are akin to building dams, tunnels, bridges and offshore facilities, he emphasizes.

The native of Elis (Ilia) prefecture in southwest Greece also first touches on the concept of “green transition” that now is now an almost ubiquitous topic in addresses by policy-makers and company executives.

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