Τhe company responsible for drawing up the Greek land register, the National Cadastre & Mapping Agency (EKHA), has launched a tender for the final phase of the project, budgeted at 465 million euros and set to be completed by 2020.
The project is expected to cost the state 399 million euros over the next four years, the bulk of which – 148.6 million euros – will be tacked onto the 2019 budget. The Environment Ministry, meanwhile, is awaiting a response after applying for funding of 83.5 million euros from the European Union.
Greece is the only country in the EU without a cadastre. The registration of all land and properties in the country was meant to be completed by 2008 but has been repeatedly delayed by mix-ups, red tape and disputes.
Experts from European Union and International Monetary Fund identified the lack of legal certainty about property rights and land usage as a major barrier to investment, proper taxation and economic development.
Albania the only other country in Europe that until recently did not have a land register and a far poorer Balkan neighbour has leapfrogged Greece and implemented a digitized land registry and zoning map, even if some holes remain.
the never-ending epic of the cadastre, started in 1995 with EU funds that had to be returned to Brussels in 2003 because of misuse.
Creating a land register in Greece has to tackle everything that remains to be fixed in the country – bureaucracy, political patronage, competing layers of government, legal complexity, fiscal uncertainty, vested interests, cheating, tax evasion and opaque relations between the two biggest landowners – the state and the church.
The country even boasts a union of ‘illegal’ house owners that campaigns to legalize their homes.
Michael Vlahakis a 60-year-old pensioner from Heraklion is president of the “Residents Outside Town Planning” club, which he says represents some 45,000 illegal home owners in Crete.
“Our club is unique in Greece, in Europe and probably in the whole planet because Greece is the only country in Europe that doesn’t have a cadastre,” he told Reuters in an interview.
“We still don’t know what is mountain, what is forest and what is a building or a house.”
About two-thirds of Greeks lived in the countryside until the 1960s, when a massive rural exodus began. Now more than half live in the cities of Athens, Thessaloniki and Heraklion.
Vlahakis, who says he has built two illegal houses, one for himself and his wife, the other for his daughter, was invited to Athens four years ago to address lawmakers and ministers in parliament on the need to adapt town planning to reality.
“They haven’t done it since the mid-1980s despite the fact that Heraklion city has more than tripled in terms of houses and land since then,” he said, describing an upside-down urban development process.
“In Greece we build the houses first, then the roads, after that the infrastructure – waste system, electricity and water network – and at the end the sidewalks.”
Politicians, real estate developers and construction firms had all sabotaged the cadastre project to protect their interests, Vlahakis said.
According to Dimitris Rokos, director of planning and investment at the National Cadastre and Mapping Agency, just 25.3 percent of the country has been completely mapped, another 22 percent is in the works and contracts have yet to be awarded for just over 50 percent.
The agency has lost key staff such as the IT director and top legal experts to the private sector due to steep pay cuts under austerity measures imposed by Greece’s lenders. It also endured long months without a budget in the last five years.
‘Make it simple’
European officials who have been involved in trying to help speed up the job say it is impossible to tell when it will be finished and have urged a radical simplification.
“It is so complex that no one dares to say ‘let’s make it simple’,” said Rik Wouters, a veteran Dutch cadastre official who led the European team that tried to help Greece between 2011 and late 2014, when an EU Task Force was withdrawn.
Wouters, managing director of the European Land Information Service, said in a telephone interview he had recommended the project be streamlined using tax records and old land registers to identify property holders and produce an index map locating land parcels rather than the more cumbersome delineation of boundaries to the centimeter.
Some of the problems are the legacy of history. Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries until 1830 and has since been scarred by wars, occupation and mass migration.
Most land transaction records in this nation of 11 million people, sprawling over 132,000 square km, are still handwritten in ledgers held by local registrars.
There are no title deeds for land in some parts of the country, and any area for which documents proving private ownership are not available from 1883 onward is deemed to be state land, causing endless legal disputes.
The Greek Orthodox Church has no central land registry, forcing the state cadastre agency to deal with individual monasteries or diocese to try to establish land ownership and delineate boundaries.
Documents may be two centuries old and define the limits of properties with reference to landmarks that no longer exist, or using fuzzy phrases such as “500 paces from the olive tree” or “five stone throws in this direction.”
What’s a forest?
Roughly 60 percent of the country is officially designated as forest, protected by the Greek constitution from economic exploitation. The perimeters of forests are largely delineated by aerial photographs taken shortly after World War Two.
Areas that have since been deforested, including several of the Cyclades islands, remain registered as forest even though they may not have a single tree. Much of suburban Athens is still officially forest, since the city expanded massively in the 20th century with no equivalent changes in land zoning.
Attempts to change the status quo, whether for economic development or practical purposes such as creating a cemetery to bury the dead, encounter often fierce resistance that can lead to years of litigation.
eKathimerini, Reuters
