The Greek parents ‘too poor’ to care for their children

Greece’s financial crisis has made some families so desperate they are giving up the most precious thing of all — their children.

One morning a few weeks before Christmas a kindergarten teacher in Athens found a note about one of her four-year-old pupils.

I will not be coming to pick up Anna today because I cannot afford to look after her, it read. Please take good care of her. Sorry. Her mother.

In the last two months Father Antonios, a young Orthodox priest who runs a youth centre for the city’s poor, has found four children on his doorstep — including a baby just days old.

Another charity was approached by a couple whose twin babies were in hospital being treated for malnutrition, because the mother herself was malnourished and unable to breastfeed.

Cases like this are shocking a country where family ties are strong, and failure to look after children is socially unacceptable — and it’s not happening in a country ravaged by war or famine, but in their own capital city