Routes for talent

None of the doors above would matter if nobody wanted what stands behind them, so argue the case once in daylight rather than euros. The working year in Athens carries around 2,800 hours of sun. Add the sea at the end of the metro line, healthcare that travels on an EU card, and the cost inversion this chapter has already priced, and the desk stops being a sacrifice that patriotism must subsidise. It becomes the desk a rational person chooses.

The proof is that people already choose it uninvited. Applications for the digital-nomad route have multiplied every year since it opened: around ten in its first year, nearly six hundred in its second, and climbing since. The nomads found the desk without a campaign. The campaign's job is to build an industry around it.

People do not relocate as categories, but routes can be mapped as them, and a serious programme publishes a practical map for each: housing, schools, healthcare, banking and language, city by city, so the decision to come is made on information rather than optimism.

Give the six a single face, composite and hypothetical: a Greek live-ops engineer in London, eight years in, fluent in the discipline of running a game as a service, whose calculation about coming home has never been about desire. It has been about the arithmetic at the top of this chapter, and the arithmetic has changed. The doors above are that person's paperwork; the next chapter is their first year.

And not everyone needs to move. The diaspora Greeks running teams in London, New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, Berlin, Stockholm and Sydney can mentor, review, invest and open doors from where they are. Brain circulation, not just brain return: the skills come home even when the person cannot yet.

Routes, though, are only lines on a map until someone walks them in numbers, and nobody boards a boat for a slogan. What turns a route into a homecoming is a first place worth arriving at. The next chapter opens that place, one room in Athens, and keeps it honest for a year.