'No home, no bathroom, no life': grim future for Athens homeless

Athens

On a bench beneath a fluttering Greek flag in front of an Orthodox church, two homeless men are philosophising about the financial crisis that has devastated their country and helped push them onto the streets.

"What can I say about the situation?" asks 45-year-old Andreas, who was a builder before the construction work dried up and who has been sleeping rough in Athens for six months. 

"Greece never dies," he shrugs. "The Greeks, however, will die. That's how it is. That's the situation."

"No home, no bathroom, no life," adds Michalis in a mixture of English and Greek, smiling kindly.

The bearded 43-year-old leather worker, who has been homeless for three years, opens his rucksack to show his life's possessions.

What little he has includes a book by 20th century humanist poet Giorgos Seferis, a Nobel Prize winner who wrote about alienation, death and Greek heritage, and his own thoughts scrawled in red ink on a crumpled piece of paper, titled 'Loneliness'.

Five years of austerity in Greece has seen pensions and wages slashed, while unemployment has risen to 26 percent, with youth unemployment soaring to nearly 50 percent.