The door opens with a creak of idle hinges, admitting a shaft of sunlight into the cavernous Papastratos tobacco warehouse. Once bearing the weight of hundreds of workers and hefty bales of tobacco waiting for export, the floorboards seem to sigh under our light tread. They have languished in dust and darkness for years but soon, Agrinio’s most iconic landmark will be reborn as a cultural and administrative center.
Like the warehouse, this town of roughly 100,000 inhabitants in the region of Aetolia-Acarnania at the southwestern end of the Greek mainland – endowed with fertile farmland, beautiful mountains and the country’s largest natural lake, Trichonida – appears trapped in a vacuum between a bygone past and an unwritten future. What happened to bring time to a standstill?
“Tobacco defined the people of Agrinio throughout the 20th century so when we stopped growing the stuff in early 2000, neither the economy, nor society and the agricultural sector were able to recover,” Ilias Dzanis tells Kathimerini. At 76 years old, he still remembers the smell of Tsembeli and Myrodato tobacco, fragrances that have marked his entire life – from his childhood working in the fields alongside his family to his studies in agronomy – a journey that led him to a long career at the local tobacco station in Agrinio, where he worked from 1978 to 2010, meeting thousands of growers.
“In the years before cultivation stopped for good, 25,000 families were in the tobacco business; that’s 90% of the town. In 2004, Aetolia-Acarnania produced just as much tobacco as France did. The town’s middle class emerged from the tobacco trade, but so did the working class and a range of other professions,” says Dzanis.
“Then 2000 came along and production became a victim of the European anti-smoking campaign. We had to choose between a partial and complete break with tobacco production. What prevailed was a climate of fear and poor choices by the unionists who opted for a complete break and big payouts, so farmers who had been accustomed to working from dawn till dusk were paid between 20,000 and 150,000 euros to do nothing. They saw it as a chance for early retirement, abandoning their fields and spending their days in cafes and bars instead. They had no reason to get out of bed in the morning. The temporary wealth did not bring happiness. And then their savings started running out and they hadn’t found some other crop to replace tobacco and bring in a similar yield. There was a spike in suicides around that time. And the state, for its part, didn’t provide any instruction or advice on what would be a suitable replacement for tobacco. While other countries promoted the non-smoking campaign without hurting tobacco cultivation, the approach here was shortsighted and destructive. No one in North Carolina, for example, tried to do away with tobacco even though the United States had the biggest and most successful anti-smoking campaign,” he adds.
The growers
A farmer who still works his land agrees with this sentiment when we go to visit him in a field, taking a dirt path that has been made almost impassable by the rain. “NATO opened up this rural road decades ago and it’s stayed the same ever since,” says Dimitris Farmakis. “Back in 1980, when I was 20 years old, the agricultural economy was booming and I was making more than the average civil servant. Later, though, the union chiefs decided to stop tobacco production altogether. What was the result? We inherited these fields from our parents and grandparents and all we have to offer the next generation is the need to emigrate; to Athens, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany. All four of my children have left Agrinio and live in the capital. Of course, unlike me, they have weekends off, steady work hours and time to rest. Some farmers tried growing broccoli, cauliflower or pomegranates after tobacco, and they failed. The problem wasn’t that the crop was different; you can learn that. The problem was that there were no trade outlets. Agrinio is known for one product and one product only. If I plant 5 hectares of tomatoes, for example, I won’t be able to sell them because no one knows who I am. Everyone buys Cretan tomatoes. I’ve experimented with all sorts of crops and some of them did well, but I wasn’t making any money on them. Every new experiment cost me 10 grand. I still raise sheep and produce chamomile, summer savory and rosemary, and I also grow olives, oranges and a few mandarins. But the fact is that farming has no future. Greeks have a much higher standard of living than in the past; they want to go into lucrative professions. The Albanians were the future a few decades ago but they have gone into business now. The fields are now worked by Pakistanis and soon they’ll move on too – and then what?”
Epameinondas Kamariaris may have found a solution to the problem. He is one of a small number of farmers who moved on, transitioning from tobacco to herbs. He repurposed the special drying chambers once used for tobacco leaves to process rosemary, lemon balm, sage, oregano, thyme and mountain tea, and established the brand Anthir.
“One grandfather was a doctor, the other a farmer. I studied economics in the UK and became a farmer. Nothing fulfilled me if I wasn’t using my hands. I started with herbs in 1996, before the tobacco decoupling. Being a citizen of the world helped me in my work, through study and travel, meeting experts. If the state had supported former tobacco growers in transitioning to herbs, we would have succeeded. There’s still great potential in this field,” he tells Kathimerini.
Anthir sells to big companies in Germany that buy plants from all over the world, process them and then sell them on to other firms that produce anything from beverages to pharmaceuticals.
“I’m optimistic about the future, even though getting here was a struggle. Another thing that keeps me in this business is that you see the result of your efforts and can feel proud. You watch your tomatoes turning a different color every day. When you water, your plants express their gratitude and smell wonderful. All that said, you put your best foot forward every day and then face a state that doesn’t even do the simplest things. You have a truck coming to load an order and you spend the previous night fretting about whether it will make it with the poor state of the roads. A proper road network and transportation is the number one thing for the agricultural sector. We fall short here. The Ionia Odos highway is 20 kilometers away and the railway stopped operating decades ago. Have you ever heard of a place with a population of 100,000 people not having direct access to a highway?”
The traders
When Agrinio’s tobacco plants were pulled up by the roots, so was an entire social class that had endowed the town with important public works.
Helene Sochoritis-Skavaras is one of just a handful of upper-middle-class locals who still lives in the house where she was born. “My godmother insisted that I was called Helene and not Eleni, and made sure it was written down that way on my baptismal cross too. Thanks to tobacco merchants like my family, Agrinio used to have ties with many cities and countries abroad. The Papastratos family, Panagopoulos, Papapetrou – they all received foreign guests here. But they also helped those who were less fortunate. They helped society progress by supporting schools, sports stadiums and associations,” she says, bringing out a plate of cookies she made herself.
“I lost my husband of 63 years last year. Our life had its ups and downs, but as I always say – at this age anyway – you can’t appreciate the joys if you don’t put them beside the sadness and hardships. We’ve been through hard times here in Agrinio and are still waiting for the good times to come around again. The period that is most strongly imprinted in my memory is the 1970s and 80s, when all the ornately decorated neoclassical buildings and simple one- and two-story houses disappeared,” she adds.
Her son Dimitris drops by, as he does every day, to check in. “The solution will come from the tertiary sector, not from tourism,” he says. “What a place like this needs to get ahead is jobs and employment opportunities.”
Private initiatives
Civil engineer Kostas Patronis is one of the more active members of Agrinio’s local community, having co-founded a film club and helped salvage some of the town’s most treasured buildings, like the old train station and the Ellinis open-air cinema.
“I was born in 1950 when Agrinio was still a small and quiet town of just 15,000 residents with dirt roads, small houses and tobacco fields. Agrinio is introverted; access has always been difficult and it’s not near the sea. It also doesn’t have much of a tradition; it was inhabited by Turks during the occupation. The big tobacco warehouses appeared in the 1920s and that contributed to an influx of refugees who mixed in with the local population, most of whom hailed from nearby villages and Souli. What is really missing today is a vision about what comes next. Where are we headed? What could a reboot accomplish?” he says.
As the town struggles to redefine itself, however, there are those, like Patronis, who are carrying out their own mini-revolution.
Panagiotis Theocharis and Vasiliki Pantoula are a pair of 40-something scientists who lived in Belgium before deciding to relocate to the latter’s ancestral town, where they set up a research institute for robotics and technology, MakerLab.
“With a population of 250,000, Ghent helped me appreciate the pace of a small city where you can get everything done easily and get around by bicycle. Vasiliki became pregnant for the second time during the crisis and we really wanted to raise our children in Greece, so we took the risk of coming back, knowing that Agrinio was going to be one of the first cities in Greece in the expansion of fiber-optics, which was essential to our scheme of starting a tech business. So we started our robotics workshop to focus on younger ages, so we could get children excited about learning this way,” says Theocharis, who grew up in Athens.
“We teach 21st-century skills like computational thinking. Technology is not the ultimate goal – problem-solving is. The local community has embraced us, and we now have students who have made it to university: at the National Technical University of Athens, in Patra, at the Democritus University of Thrace, and even at Oxford. Coming here, the children seem to find a purpose,” the couple tells Kathimerini.
“Agrinio has taken some steps toward modernization, following the standards of European cities, in recent years. Pedestrianization projects, new water networks and smart city applications have improved daily life, creating a more modern and functional environment. However, the city’s greatest challenge remains the mass departure of young people, who often seek opportunities elsewhere. The question is: How can there be development without a dynamic youth?” they ask, as they show us the many awards their students have won in international competitions.
The same question nags at Giouli Marousi, an actor and director with the Municipal Regional Theater (DIPETHE) of Agrinio. “We are all indoctrinated by our parents with the notion that we need to leave as soon as we graduate from high school,” she tells Kathimerini. “And, indeed, I left for Athens and got involved in the theater before being hit by the usual disappointment with the big city, which seems to say, ‘There are too many of us here and not enough room.’ I eventually came back for personal reasons a decade later, in 2015, and saw that the city had changed. The DIPETHE had opened its arms and the municipal authority was supporting young creatives so we were able to stand on our feet. Leaving is easy; staying and fighting on is the hard part. And if you’re doing something creative, that has an even bigger hold. Now we have 14 amateur groups – including that of the police and a student acting society – and every September we host a festival for them. We also have a separate student theater festival. We have a music school, a philharmonic orchestra and a choir. After a long hiatus, Agrinio is going through a restructuring phase; it’s like a sleeping city waiting to be kissed to wake up. But we can’t wait for that kiss to come from the state. We need to wake up on our own. It’s a nice place to live. People care for each other and that’s priceless. If you fall down, everyone will come help you up, not just one person. The people are also fun; they love their food and their drink; they’ll come sit with you if you’re alone. And life is more affordable, not to mention more peaceful.”
Students at the University of Patras’ Agrinio-based School of Food Science and Technology, Eleftheria Dimoulitsi from Thessaloniki and Maria Kapranou from Athens, are equally delighted with the town. “It’s a great place for when you’re living away from home for the first time. It’s a quiet town, which is also reassuring to our parents. Rent aside, you can do very nicely with 300 euros a month. It has a winter and summer movie theater, a film club and all sorts of sports activities. The locals have embraced the student community. Having grown up in a part of Athens where it’s a bit dangerous to venture out alone at night, I wanted to know who my neighbors were when I first moved here. When they learned that I was a student and living alone, they all said, ‘I’m here if you need me for anything at all.’ It was unbelievable. They are warm, hospitable and always ready to help. You don’t have that standoffishness here that you see in Athens and Thessaloniki. But young locals feel restricted here and can’t wait to leave. If you look around, everyone is either below 18 years old or 35 and above. Only people who have solved their financial and professional problems come back after studying somewhere else. If I had a magic wand, I’d create something that would bring more jobs for young people,” they say.
One local trying to give Agrinio’s youth a much-needed outlet is Babis Posonidis, who, together with a few other enlightened folk, created the Agrinio Athletic Association in 2020.
Despite having a shoestring budget and a stadium sorely in need of maintenance, the association has distinguished itself on multiple occasions, not least with runner brothers Kostas and Nikos Stamoulis. “I’ve been a coach here for 33 years. My grandparents came to Agrinio as refugees and encountered a very insular community. They were complete outsiders, but they were also very hard-working and were eventually able to buy a plot of farmland. After tobacco died, Agrinio was unable to find a new identity for itself that would determine its future. But for me, the solution lies in our natural surroundings and especially the lake, which is the cleanest and biggest in Greece. And in just 20 minutes you can find yourself at the top of a mountain, surrounded by firs. Yet no one is doing anything to develop these assets. What’s most important, though, is never giving up, and that’s what we teach the kids here: discipline, principles, meaning. These are essential for youngsters growing up in a town that doesn’t look at the future with optimism,” he says.
Local sports fans are proud of the athletics association and follow its achievements with interest, but their true love is Panaitolikos, Agrinio’s soccer team. Sofoklis Gkournelos owns a betting shop and is regarded as the treasurer of the team’s history, having amassed an impressive collection of memorabilia, from tickets and news stories to old photographs. We meet him at the stadium, where he’s come with his granddaughter, who plays on the under-18s girls team.
“Agrinio doesn’t have any tourism, so Sundays are a big highlight for people who don’t miss a game, whether the team is competing at home or away. My heart still beats like crazy every time we play,” he says.
