“I Couldn’t Wait to Get away from My Village” : Re-examining Childtowns in Postwar Greece

Dozens of thousands Greek children lived in the childtowns in the 1940 and 1950s. Although this experience had profound consequences to their lives, there is to this day no serious study of what exactly was the impact of the childtowns on the children’s values and way of life. I interviewed four children and asked them about the differences between the childtowns and their villages. The key finding is that most children first came in touch with – and chose to accept – a modern and urban way of life in the childtowns. This suggests that despite the objections about the ideological motivations and use of the childtowns, these insitutions had a profound impact on Modern Greek cultural identity.