Viktoria Kalfaki can still vividly remember the moment she and her wife, Christina Leimoni, realised they would have to fight for their family’s right to exist. The couple, both senior tech company executives who had returned to Greece after years in London, were in hospital with their daughter.
“Niovi was two and sick with bronchitis,” said Kalfaki, who heads the public sector division of Google Cloud in Athens. “Naturally we both wanted to be with her but when the doctors asked ‘Who is the mother?’ and they heard ‘We both are’, their response was ‘That’s legally not possible’ and they refused to let Christina in. There was a terrible scene as she argued and implored but they were adamant. Only I, as Niovi’s birth mother, could be with her.”
It was not the pair’s first brush with the law. Months earlier the Greek embassy in London had refused to recognise their daughter’s birth certificate because it bore the names of both Kalfaki and Leimoni.
“I was reduced to tears,” said Kalfaki, who at 45 has spent more than a third of her life with Leimoni. “It was traumatic, this feeling that as a same-sex couple you are not just lesser but helpless under the law. It’s then that Christina said we’re going to have to fight to protect our rights.”
That fight comes full circle on Thursday when the Greek parliament debates legislation that will, if passed in a subsequent vote, make the country the first in south-east Europe to legalise same-sex marriage.
For the LGBTQ+ community, the milestone bill marks the end of a legal void that has left many distraught, even if the bill is also criticised for not going far enough (to the consternation of gay and transgender people it does not amend rules limiting parenthood through surrogacy to single women and straight couples).
“Yes, it could be better but the truth is it will also delete so much stress and anxiety from our daily lives,” said Kalfaki, explaining that as the recipients of reciprocal IVF in the UK – a process where one partner carries an embryo formed with the fertilised egg of the other – their daughter was a “truly joint creation”.
“Finally we’ll not only be recognised legally as partners in marriage but individually as parents … Previously Christina would have had no access to our daughter if anything had happened to me. Niovi would have been sent to a care home, an institution.”
Few reforms in Greece have stirred as much rancour or debate. In the four weeks since announcing his government’s decision to draft the law, the prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has had to face the ire of the powerful Orthodox church, the concern of many MPs in his centre-right New Democracy party (ND) and the entrenched social conservatism of a populace resistant to change and suspicious of diversity. Populist tabloids have labelled the law “monstrous”.
Indicative of the hostility towards the measure, the far-right Spartans party leader, Vassilis Stigas, told parliament that the bill was tantamount to “opening the window” to paedophiles as he urged ND MPs to vote against it, while the bishop of Piraeus claimed that homosexuality was a “mortal sin” and a cause of cancer. “Google it and you will see,” he told stunned interviewers on Skai TV.
Outrage over the reform was on full display on Sunday when thousands of people attended a rally in Athens organised by Orthodox religious groups to deplore the “sodomisation of Greek society” and pray “in support of the family”.
With his own lawmakers so divided, Mitsotakis knows passage of the bill will only come with support from centrist and leftist parties – at a time when he has faced fierce criticism from the opposition over a spy scandal and curbs on media freedom. But his aides say that is a price the self-avowed liberal is willing to pay if it means changing mindsets on an issue that has remained so taboo.
The leader, whose party includes rightwing nationalists, had made the revamp of family law a key campaign promise before securing a landslide victory and a second four-year term in office last year. Legalising same-sex marriage and allowing adoption rights for same-sex couples was central to the reform.
“For him there are no invisible people with fewer rights than others,” said Akis Skertsos, a minister of state who has overseen the law. “Countries which succeed in sustaining a balance between economic prosperity and personal happiness are those that prioritise civil liberties and rule of law.”
Skertsos has led the charge to persuade MPs about the measure’s merits, although Mitsotakis says the decision ultimately lies with deputies and he will not enforce party discipline.
If, as expected, the bill is passed – with the support of other parties including the main opposition Syriza headed by Stefanos Kasselakis, Greece’s first out gay party leader – the Mediterranean nation will become the 21st in Europe, the 16th in the EU and the 37th country worldwide to legalise same-sex marriage.
But the inflammatory rhetoric in the run-up to the vote has left little doubt that more is needed if Greeks – still prone to dismissing the idea that there were gay people in antiquity – are to embrace 21st-century notions of the modern family accepted elsewhere in Europe. Homophobic attacks have soared in recent weeks and gay support hotlines have been overwhelmed with calls.
Accusations of discrimination are not new to Greece, one of the last EU members to introduce civil unions for same-sex couples in 2015. Before Mitsotakis appointed the first out gay minister, and agay man, Alexis Patelis, as his chief economic adviser in 2019, gay people – at least those who were out – did not hold high office.
In the absence of visibility, the community remained on the margins of society, with the media and church often blatantly homophobic. The first gay pride marches in Athens were deemed so controversial that participants were pelted with eggs – in sharp contrast to today’s celebrations attended by foreign ambassadors and politicians.
Few people know this better than the gallerist Rebecca Camhi. Long regarded as the queen of the Greek capital’s contemporary art scene, the 58-year-old has never hidden her sexuality. In a docuseries about prominent Greek women aired on state TV a few years ago, she raised more than a few eyebrows by talking about family life with her partner, Marina Comninos, and her daughter, Anatolia, now a student at Edinburgh University.
But on a hot summer’s day last year Camhi went further, ensuring the issue got a hearing in polite society when the couple threw a party to celebrate the civil union they had entered into days earlier.
“A lot of those present, open-minded and civilised as they may be, would not naturally find themselves attending a gay event,” Camhi said of scenes that would go down as unprecedented in the Piraeus yacht club. “And at some point in my speech I made a point of making it a point, shouting out to gay friends who were there in sheer joy because people really have no idea what we all went through back in the day.”
She said the bill before the parliament was not only groundbreaking but critical for younger Greeks who might be struggling with their sexual orientation. “It will have a huge ripple effect and give the message especially to young people who may be afraid to come out, to tell their parents for fear of being rejected, that there are others like you out there, you’re not a pariah and you’re not alone. I don’t think members of the Greek parliament are quite aware how important it is.”
Until now, same-sex couples have had to go abroad if they want to marry. While civil unions have provided legal protections, practical difficulties have remained so fundamental that many living abroad simply ruled out ever returning.
“The minute we land in Greece, our two boys lose one of their parents,” said Kostas Androulakis, 46, who is raising his adopted sons in London with his husband, Michael. “Right now, because they aren’t recognised as our kids, they can’t inherit from us, aren’t entitled to free [state] healthcare in Greece or education or becoming Greek citizens.”
Androulakis is among those who have flown to Athens to witness the vote that could change his life and the lives of so many others. “It’s going to be a historic day,” said the management consultant, who left Greece back in the 1990s when it was “all doom and gloom for gay people” and such legislation seemed nigh on impossible.
Kalfaki could not agree more. “Yes there are shortcomings but you can’t go from zero to 100 in one bill,” she said. “It’s a start, a brilliant, brilliant start, and it’s going to be a very good day.”
• This article was amended on 15 February. An earlier version said that, if the vote passed, Greece would be the first country in southern Europe to have legalised same-sex marriage; this should have said south-east Europe.
