Ground Zero in Athens provides refuge for Londoner fleeing costs

By Maria Petrakis

Londoner Eleni Kyriacou is building her fashion brand on the ruins of Greece's textile industry.

The 34-year-old designer moved to Athens in the midst of the debt crisis that shrank the country's economy by a quarter and put more than a million Greeks out of work. The downturn that decimated the garment industry as banks froze credit is now providing Kyriacou with highly-skilled, low-cost pattern cutters and knit-makers that her hometown of London can't match.

"I can afford to survive as a brand by being in Athens," Kyriacou said in her suburban studio, converted from an old apartment bought by her parents when they lived in the capital three decades earlier. "In London you have to make money from day one to survive because there are so many overheads."

In Athens, which provides about half of Greece's gross domestic product, some entrepreneurs are finding opportunities amid the crisis even as the government and European officials bicker for a fifth year over the terms for releasing bailout funds. Some of the capital's precincts are pulsing with renewed activity as property taxes and lower incomes squeeze out old tenants and a fall in rents draw new businesses.

"The huge internal devaluation that has taken place in Greece may well have made the economy more competitive," said Nicholas Spiro, managing director of Spiro Sovereign Strategy in London. "These gains are now being undermined by the fallout from the bitter standoff between Greece and its creditors."

A total of 166,455 new businesses were registered between April 2011 and April this year, according to the Greek General Electronic Commercial Registry, compared with the closure of 144,809 companies in that time.

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