Life.Culture.Discovery.

The Greeks who've taken a one-way ticket to Hong Kong

The economic crisis in Greece has sparked a brain drain to many parts of the world, including Hong Kong, whose Greek arrivals have no plans to return home. Stuart Heaver reports on the human side of a financial disaster.

9-MIN READ9-MIN

Published: 11:00pm, 25 Jul 2015Updated: 5:50pm, 13 Jun 2016

Members of Hong Kong’s Greek community, at Santorini restaurant on Elgin Street, Central, include (from left): Kyriakos Plagianakos, Tilemahos Stamatis, Vasilis Stamatis, Ilektra Stamatis, Christo Stamatis, Vasilis Vasileiadis, Yorgos Tountas and Ioannis Roussis. Photos: Jonathan Wong

It's a contemporary Greek tragedy being told with restrained emotion in a popular Hong Kong restaurant. Its narrator and chief protagonist is Yorgos Tountas, an astute businessman from an affluent family that ran a successful luxury car dealership near Athens for many years.

The family business sold about 100 new 4X4 vehicles every year but then, after the financial crash of 2008, sold just one more car - and Tountas' life imploded almost overnight.

His tale has all the ingredients of classic Greek mythology - an unexpected disaster imposed by the gods (in fallible, human form), an ill-fated love affair, a bitter family feud and the death of a patriarch. Except this tragedy is not fiction and similar tales - in countless painful variations - are unfolding in real time across Greece, a nation that has lurched from financial crisis to financial crisis in the past few years.

For Tountas, the family business failed, his father died after a severe stroke and the government death duties for his father's estate massively exceeded any realistic market value in a country where the only people with cash to spend are foreign criminals and drug dealers. His brother's marriage failed under the strain and the family now lives on his 73-year-old mother's old-age pension of €300 (HK$2,500) per month. The telephone was disconnected long ago and they are unable to make a fresh start. Tountas left Greece desperately seeking any opportunity and - having followed a lover who has since left him - ended up in Hong Kong. Unable to afford a ticket home, he now works 12-hour days as an unpaid volunteer on an organic farm near Sai Kung.

"I am 40 years old. It is not dignified to beg my own mother for €5 just so I can have a cup of coffee with my friends. Dignity is very important to Greeks," says Tountas, who is, according to consul figures and the Facebook page Greeks in Hong Kong, one of about 300 Greek nationals currently living in the city, all of whom have been affected by the economic meltdown in their homeland one way or another. Many, like Tountas, are in Hong Kong as a direct result of it.

"No one wants to leave Greece … to leave those things you love but, for some, it is the only way to escape the political system, the corruption and the economic crisis," says Tountas.