A modern society can function without known comforts and conveniences

By TIME

ON SEPTEMBER 20th, Greeks will once again vote in an election, having last chosen a new government in January and also voted in a referendum in July. The year has been marked by economic turmoil even worse than in previous ones, culminating in the imposition of limits on cash withdrawals from banks. Circumstances are unlikely to improve, whatever the outcome of the poll. But somehow Greeks carry on, cashless but ingenious.

Many households have hidden large sums in beds. The practice hails from the time of tight foreign exchange controls in the 1970s. “Mattress money makes me feel safer,” says Dina Efthymiou, a pensioner. The number of burglaries has gone up as a result but the police refuse to give out figures. Estimates put the increase at about 15%. That the number is not higher suggests Greeks are getting better at concealing their cash. Some seal it in with cement.The continuing cash shortage has also prompted more than a million people, including Mrs Efthymiou, to buy on credit. “I never got any bank cards because I worried about falling into debt,” she says. “Now I can pay at the supermarket with a card and save my cash.”

For owners of small businesses, many of which have already been hit hard by several years of declining sales, the capital controls could prove the final blow. Manufacturers struggle with approvals for raw material imports, and suppliers outside Greece now insist on being paid in advance. Bank loans are only available to big companies, says Adamantios Pappas, owner of a plastics plant that has extended its four-week summer shutdown by another six weeks. “I’m thinking of shutting up shop altogether,” he says.

Lack of work is a pervasive problem. The unemployment rate is 25%; about three-quarters have been jobless for more than a year. Soula Romanou has worked as a part-time cleaner since losing her job in a shoe shop three years ago. The single mother is buying clothes for her seven-year-old daughter, Maria, at an open-air market in Panormou, a middle-class district of Athens that is becoming grimier with every year of the crisis. She picks out a cheap pair of jeans and then scours stalls piled high with smuggled Chinese goods. “I have only €30 to spend on everything Maria needs to start school,” she says. “If I can’t manage, I’ll have to try the church secondhand bazaar on Sunday.”

Close family ties and high levels of home ownership have made it easier for Greeks to cope with economic hardship. Still people once comfortably off now describe themselves as “the new poor” following deep cuts in wages and pensions. In terms of economic output Greece has gone back to where it was 15 years ago. Manolis Panagiotakis, a civil servant in Athens who retired early on in the crisis, says, “We were prepared in 2009 for a period of belt-tightening after the boom years. But the recession just went on and on.” His pension has been cut by more than 40%.

Mr Panagiotakis and his wife recently decided to shutter their Athens apartment and move to a village house in Crete, their native island. Mr Panagiotakis will take over cultivating a sizeable family-owned olive grove. He says the move is prompted by worries about higher property taxes and the prospect of further pension cuts. “This way we will continue to have an income even if the politics goes badly wrong,” he says. “Olive oil is a cash crop that is always going to be in demand.”

Clinging to hope

His wife, Anthoula, admits it will be a wrench to leave their grandchildren and friends in the capital. “When the economy turns around, we’ll come back,” she says, sounding hopeful rather than certain.

With unemployment at levels not seen in half a century, many younger Greeks are accepting low-paid jobs abroad. More than 100,000 educated youngsters have left over the past four years, mainly for Britain and Germany.

Compared with the experience of Greeks who went to work in German factories as guest workers in the 1950s and 1960s, the new wave of labour migration is less of an upheaval, thanks to EU rules that guarantee the right to live and work. Yet it follows a familiar pattern, with early movers in cities like Hamburg and London setting up networks for their compatriots that then benefit all later arrivals.

Engineers and IT specialists often opt for multi-year contracts in Gulf states. Dimitris Agouridis, a 33-year-old software specialist, took a job in Dubai two years ago but still feels unsettled. “My girlfriend moved with me and found an OK job in marketing but didn’t like the lifestyle. She’s back in Athens, unemployed,” he says. “I want to stay a bit longer and save to start my own company when Greece starts to recover—it will happen, eventually.”

For stay-at-home Greeks life is hard even when they have work. A 31-year-old maths teacher who took a second job as a security guard (after the school where he worked cut his pay by one-third) has moved in with his parents. “It’s pretty odd being back in my childhood room but I don’t think I can take off and leave my elderly parents on their own,” he says.

Greece’s latest international bail-out, agreed in July, will further test national resilience. An unpopular property tax is to be reintroduced in October, followed by another round of pension cuts. More spending reductions are due as well. Many doctors fear shortages of medicines.

Yet the popular mood is not one of unremitting gloom. A good tourist season has helped. Money earned on the islands is making its way back to mainland cities to see families through the winter. European Union funds for start-ups keep scores of young entrepreneurs, especially computer-science graduates, occupied, even if only a handful of projects are likely to become profitable. A hardworking volunteer community staffs hundreds of soup kitchens in Athens and other cities. Charities provide packed meals for thousands of schoolchildren who would otherwise go hungry. Tough survivors of past periods of deprivation such as Mrs Efthymiou say they take an almost perverse pleasure in weathering a milder version in modern times. “It’s not going to last forever,” she says. “Greeks were always resourceful.”