For many years a fiefdom of the Pasok party, the south-western city exemplifies all that is wrong with Greece, says one resident
The south-western port of Patras, population 300,000, is Greece's third city. It's an attractive place between mountain and sea, with an elegant lower town laid out on a grid pattern devised in the 1850s by a Greek engineer in the French army and an older, more random upper town.
It's got a technical institute and two universities, which means maybe a quarter of its population are students. One of them is Spyros Theodoritsis, 27, who hopes to graduate next year with a degree in computer engineering (a field in which Patras has an international reputation).
Spyros grew up here but has travelled widely, for six years on and off, living, studying and working in France, Britain, Holland, Austria, Turkey and Germany. He thinks there's quite a lot wrong with Patras; in fact, he thinks it's pretty much a case study for Greece's problems.
"This was the first city in Greece to have public lighting and electric trams," he says. "It's been downhill pretty much ever since." The city has long been a fiefdom of the once-mighty Socialist Pasok party (the Papandreou dynasty, which has supplied three prime ministers, are from nearby) but Spyros says that's done Patras precious little good.
"We don't have a tram any more," he says. "The train from Athens is slower than the bus. We don't have a motorway. Pasok ran this place for years, and still we kept voting for them!" (Not lately, of course; in the past few years the city council has changed hands at least three times).
With sensible civic management, Patras's three major problems could have been sorted decades ago, Spyros says - but nothing ever seems to get done.
Greece's "gateway to the west", has for years drawn large numbers of illegal immigrants hoping to jump a ferry to Italy and onwards to the rest of western Europe. Tensions have mounted. Last month locals and members of the far-right Golden Dawn clashed violently with police outside a disused factory serving as home to several hundred immigrants after the murder of a local man. The completion of a new port – due 20 years ago – out of the city centre has succeeded only in moving the problem elsewhere, and creating a new group of bitter residents.
There is also a severe and permanent parking problem (there's a chronic shortage of car parks) and an overflowing landfill site outside the city that should have been closed years ago but never has been, leading to piles of stinking rubbish in the streets every August.
City hall inefficiency and corruption hamper every project, Spyros says: "Corruption in Greece is like an octopus, and most people only see one or two of the tentacles. It spreads everywhere, and it's 3D." So he wasn't optimistic about Greece – whose endemic shortcomings might be seen as Patras's writ large – before the crisis, and he certainly isn't now.
"I will start being optimistic about Greece when people stop smoking in cafes, where it's illegal, and start stopping at zebra crossings, which is obligatory," he says. "This country has an attitude problem."
For himself, he's much more sanguine. Spyros lives in a shed up on the mountain on a patch of land owned by his parents (it has running water and electricity, but no fridge or telly). He cycles everywhere, and eats vegetarian. He studies, gets a bit of help from his parents, works as and when he needs to – he's currently helping the university science museum develop applications for children – and gets by, he reckons, on maybe €150 a month.
"Everyone else takes the bus to uni; that's €2.50 a day," he says. "To show off, they'll drink in the expensive cafes downtown, not two blocks away where it's half price. They buy top-up cards for their mobiles instead of finding a cheap contract." He points proudly to his shoes, Fred Perry trainers: "€15 on eBay, rather than €50 for a pair of Converse. If you're sensible, realistic, you can get by. I want to spend my money on what I want, like travelling."
So he'll probably work abroad, he reckons, once he's graduated. But he recognises it could be hard for people less self-reliant, and with more commitments, than him. "I know friends my age or a bit older with babies," he says. "They've started hoarding baby milk. People are worried about what could happen, that's for sure."