The recent bloodshed in Vorizia, Crete—human lives lost in yet another episode of vendetta—is not merely a local tragedy. It is a symptom of a long-standing wound in Greek society: the cultural and social lag across much of the periphery, which never evolved at the pace of the urban centers.
Vorizia shook Greece back in 1955 with another deadly vendetta. Nearly seventy years later, the same scene is replayed with the same brutality, as if half a century of social progress and education had never intervened. This is stark evidence of how profoundly unequal the development of Greece’s social fabric has been.
Despite financial support, public works, and European programs, Greece’s periphery remains to a great extent socially and culturally isolated. In the cities, Greece looks modern, engages with the world, and speaks the language of technology and ideas. In the provinces, however, mindsets and behaviors that belong to a pre-modern era still persist, where the law of honor and revenge supplants the law of the state and of reason.
Vendetta—with its pseudo-romantic aura of valor and vindication—is nothing more than the most extreme expression of a cultural deficit that runs through much of provincial Greece. Beneath the rhetoric of tradition and local honor, raw instincts, anger, and fear often lie unworked and untransformed into civic education. The clash is not only familial; it is a conflict between two worlds—the world of progress and the world of stagnation.
This gap is the product of a long period of uneven development. For decades Greece invested in its cities, leaving the periphery to self-regulate through local ties, family dependencies, and informal rules. As a result, the principles of justice, equality, and respect for life never took deep root. A culture survived in which power, kinship, and revenge function as mechanisms of social control.
The European model—democratic education, tolerance, participation—seems to stop at the suburbs of the three major cities. Beyond that, the logic of a closed society prevails: suspicion of difference, aversion to change, and attachment to old power structures. So long as this inequality endures, episodes of violence will not be mere unfortunate incidents, but eruptions of a deeper social disease.
This is not, then, a matter of local tradition but of national failure. The state has never managed to invest meaningfully in the cultural renewal of the countryside—neither through education, nor through the effective operation of cultural institutions, nor through the example set by public administration. Neglect has bred marginalization, and marginalization, when not integrated, expresses itself in anger and violence.
The urban drift that marked the twentieth century was not only an economic trend; it was a cultural escape. Thousands of young people left the provinces not because they didn’t love their home, but because they could not endure an environment of social suffocation, pettiness, and a primitivism that persists. Those who stayed often found themselves trapped in a vicious circle, where progress seems alien and education is viewed as a threat.
If the new slaughter in Vorizia shows anything, it is that the country no longer has the luxury of ignoring the root of the problem. Condemnations and emotion are not enough. What is needed is a national plan for the social and cultural rebirth of the Greek periphery: modern education, citizen participation, and cultural policies that open horizons. A new relationship between center and periphery must be built—not on charity, but on cohesion and justice.
The responsibility is above all political. Progress cannot be allowed to stop where the National Highway ends. If Greece truly wants to become European, it must first become whole—and shine light into those places where the darkness of primitivism and fear still prevails.