“There is only one big, important, national industry for Greece. An industry that has been advertised for 2,000 years – and free of charge – for which we have everything needed right here and which can … make our country rich: It is the industry known by the highly foreign term, tourism. This tourism has never been treated in a serious way by any government.”
This editorial from the first page of Kathimerini’s May 24, 1949, edition, sums up the narrative of an entire era: on the one hand, the high expectations Greeks had of tourism and, on the other, their frustration with the state’s failure to capitalize on it. It was a state of affairs that would feature in the Greek media for many decades to come, illustrating the country’s ambivalent relationship with its so-called “national industry.”
“Tourism is a spotlight, an area through which we negotiate our identity,” Eirini Karamouzi, a professor of contemporary European history at The American College of Greece and an associate professor of contemporary history at the University of Sheffield in the UK, tells Kathimerini.
Seeking to investigate how Greeks have viewed tourism through the decades, the historian studied 2,500 articles published in the Greek press (in Kathimerini, To Vima, Ta Nea and Oikonomikos Tachydromos) and more than 1,400 articles in the foreign press between 1945 and 1990, focusing chiefly on opinion pieces. She was somewhat surprised to find that many of the pieces described problems that are very similar to the ones Greece faces today. Criticism of excessive tourism is not a new phenomenon. The discussion about the “saturation,” “degradation” and “destruction” caused by tourism goes back decades.
