Greece is reborn: reversing the fate of a ghostly mountain village

At first glance, Vamvakou looks like many other mountain villages in the Peloponnese, with pretty stone houses and cobbled streets stretching up to a big place. But Vamvakou is no ordinary village. In fact, it is at the center of an ambitious plan to revive the fortunes of Greek mountain villages, many of which are on the verge of extinction.

In 2016 , Eleni Mami and her husband Anargyros Verdilos (who is from Sparta, but has roots in the village) were vacationing in Vamvakou when they decided they wanted to do something to stop the seemingly inevitable death of the village. In the summer, the village was a hive of activity when the Vamvakite diaspora descended on their ancestral homes. But through the winter, only nine older residents remained, guardians of a village that, like so many others in Greece, was slowly but surely disappearing.

"We didn't want this to happen, we wanted to resist,” says Eleni, when I meet her in Vamvakou after a three-hour drive from Athens.

The village may have been in decline, but good luck has been in aiding Eleni in her quest. Vamvakou was the birthplace of the parents of Stavros Niarchos, a billionaire Greek shipping tycoon, who bequeathed his fortune to his namesake foundation upon his death in 1996. Eleni approached the foundation in 2017 with her proposal to transform Vamvakou from a dying summer retreat into a sustainable working village that would attract new residents, as well as visitors.

The application was a success - and browsing Vamvakou today you start to ...