With Its Economy Hobbled, Greece's Well-Educated Drain Away
Thanos Ntoumanis and his wife, Laura, are crashing at his parents' apartment in the northern city of Thessaloniki before they leave Greece.
In a couple of days, they'll move to Germany. Thanos, a 38-year-old psychiatrist, is joining some 4,000 Greek doctors who have left the austerity-hit country for jobs abroad in the past three years. It's the largest brain drain in three decades.
"I won't say that I'm never coming back," he says. "I do need some distance, though. I don't want to get to that tipping point. I don't want to get to that point where I hate it here."
"You'll come back," says his mother, Pepi Mavrogianni, trying to break the gloom. She's a retired pediatrician in a "Hippocratic Oath" T-shirt. She brings out a tray of warm cheese pies.
"And we have Skype, so we can talk every day if we want," she says.
Three of her four children became doctors, like her and her husband, a cardiologist. Now, due to a confluence of austerity and an overproduction of physicians, her kids are all working abroad.
"It's good to have your child nearby, but if he's not happy, what's the point?" Mavrogianni says. "You can't block their progress because you want him to stay."
Before the debt crisis hit Greece in 2010, Ntoumanis was an army psychiatrist with a modest salary — less than $2,000 a month — and also had a private practice that brought in a bit of extra money. He and his American wife lived in a cottage nestled in the hills outside Thessaloniki.
“ The recruiter set up appointments with five different clinics. I interviewed at all of them. I was offered all five jobs.