Across the border, but stuck inside: learning Greek from the TV

Elona was forty years old when this interview was conducted in 2012. She had already been living in Thessaloniki for about 17 years and was working in the historic centre of the city. Her narrative describes the circumstances of her arrival in Greece/Thessaloniki and the first years of her resettlement.

Elona came to Greece at the beginning of the 1990s. It is noteworthy that the first wave of Albanian migration mainly concerned men. Initially, few women crossed the border to Greece, not only because the act was illegal for the majority of the migrants who were not eligible for a Special Expatriate ID Card (see EKT008), but also because the conditions for the people crossing on foot were harsh and dangerous. Another contributing factor to this gender disparity might have been the cultural practice of ‘kurbet’ in Albanian society which, according to Papailias,  dictates that mainly the men should migrate, as it is their heroic duty to physically protect their family members.

Until 1998, when a new migration law (GG 240/A/28-11-1997) granted work and residence permits to undocumented migrants living in Greece, it was common for women migrants from Albania and other former socialist countries to spend long periods of time stuck in a house. Some worked as live-in domestic workers in the houses of local families, while others worked informally in the contract manufacturing business, biding their time until they could claim legal status. Gazmend Kapllani writes that the first generation of migrants is the ‘kitchen dogsbody generation’. Due to the difficulties faced by migrants in acquiring legal status, migration from Albania became associated with all sorts of manual labour, backbreaking work, and low wages.

Eventually, Presidential Decree 359/97 (GG 240/Α/28-11-1997) granted work and residence permits to people who had been living in Greece without documents for a certain number of years, thus allowing many women to finally leave the house. When talking about the time she worked from home in contract manufacturing, the interviewee states, ‘That was the time when I was sitting around the house learning Greek. What else could I do? I did embroidery.’ Since the beginning of the 1990s, many women from Albania and the former USSR had been working informally as contract manufacturers, sewing or embroidering garments. Nowadays, as one of the interviewees notes, ‘The Chinese came and all the embroideries, all the fabric decorations are made of plastic. This type of labour is gone and it’s possible some women won’t want to talk about it. Those first years of our life in Greece are in the past.’