You're listening to an upstream sneak peak with Maria Scordialis, a co-initiator of the art of hosting and a Greek activist. In 2006, In 2007 when I arrived we were still in what I call the bubble years. We were still in that period of unsustainable boom. We had come into the euro from 2000 and with the euro what arrived in Greece was a completely different financial system with the Euro bank and the banks

behind it that were giving very, very low interest loans, which created the bubble that we were affluent.

And so I came in at the period right at the end of that.

When people were getting mortgages, getting car loans,

getting holiday loans, and there was this fake euphoria

in the country, hyper-consumerism

in what people were buying and what they were doing.

I actually found the first couple of years that I was here

difficult to relate to people because I felt there was an inauthenticity

to the way they were relating to their lives, very much through money

and very much through the notion of consuming, which is not in the depth of the roots of our culture,

we're actually very, very sustainable people.

So I found it quite difficult when I first came.

And of course, there were banks that were trying to seduce us

to get loans and to develop

Achaditsa and to build hotels and to do it and it's very full of nature at

a haditsa and thankfully the seduction didn't work. And by 2009, 10, it's when the cracks started to happen, which of course

happened with the international monetary organizations that tell a country

whether they're actually credit worthy or whether they're in debt, which is

what happened to Greece.

Overnight Moody, one of those companies,

marked us down from being an A- Credit country

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