As the country prepares to vote on continuing austerity on Sunday, in the streets of Athens some people have already resorted to searching the rubbish bins for food to eat and scrap metal to sell.
Piled high with rubbish congealing in the summer heat, municipal dustbin R21 on Athens’ Sofokleous Street does not look or smell like a treasure trove.
But for Greece’s growing army of dustbin scavengers, its deposits of rubbish from nearby stores and grocery shops make it a regular point of call.
“Sometimes I’ll find scrap metal that I can sell, although if I see something that looks reasonably safe to eat, I’ll take it,” said Nikos Polonos, 55, as he sifted through R21’s contents on Tuesday morning. “Other times you might find paper, cans, and bottles that you can get money for if you take them back to the shops for recycling.”
One reason for R21’s popularity is because it is just down the road from a church soup kitchen, where the drug-addicted, the poor and homeless queue up for meals three times daily.
But many of those who now forage in such dustbins each day are simply ordinary working people – or were, at least, until Greece’s economic meltdown shot unemployment up to 25 per cent.
Mr Polonos, a quietly spoken man of 55, is typical of the new class of respectably destitute. He lost his job as a construction worker three years ago, when Greece’s building boom dried up, and in the current climate, cannot see himself finding paid work in the foreseeable future.
Yet he dresses as smartly as he can in second-hand trousers and shirt, and does not see himself as any kind of vagrant.
“I don’t want to ever look like him,” he said, gesturing to a tousle-haired drug addict slumped in a doorway near the soup kitchen. “I never believed I would end up like this, but as long as Greece is in this terrible situation, my construction skills are not in demand. A lot of my friends are doing what I do now, and some people I know are even worse off. They have turned to drugs and have no hope at all.”