Falling numbers: Thymaina's plunging population shows Greece's demographic decline

Desertification in rural areas and on the islands is forcing schools to shut. On a small eastern Aegean island, locals speak of soaring costs, isolation and a future without children.

"Let's go to war!" shouted six-year-old Giorgos at his older cousin, Minas, as the two chased each other with claw-like geranium stalks around the schoolyard on the tiny Greek island of Thymaina.

The two boys are the last primary school children on the far-flung eastern Aegean island, 40 kilometres from the Turkish coast.

"When I was a boy, the school had nearly 70 children," 77-year-old Manolis Mitikas, owner of Thymaina's portside cantina, mused over a game of backgammon.

Like the rest of Greece, the former pirate hideout is facing the effects of an ageing population.

The education ministry said it was shuttering 43 nurseries and 32 primary schools this year "due to very low to non-existent" student numbers.

The challenge is even greater in small Aegean islands far from the Greek mainland.

"If we have no more children, the school will close...and unfortunately, we have no more children in Thymaina," Marigo Kottara, deputy mayor of the Fournoi archipelago of which the island is part, told the AFP news agency.

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