Thira: teacher without a home because of her pets

A teacher with a permanent post at a primary school on Santorini is unable to find a home on the island, because the available properties do not accept pets. The Panhellenic Animal Welfare and Environmental Federation (PFPO) sent a letter to the Municipality of Thira and to the Directorate of Primary Education of the Cyclades asking for intervention, according to an announcement by the federation published by Cyclades24 on Wednesday 19 August 2026. The teacher, who remains anonymous in the source, is looking for accommodation for herself, her five-year-old son and two pets. The kind of animals is not specified. The federation says she is a teacher with many years of service in primary education and with a record of social and animal welfare work.

The letter makes two distinct requests. The first concerns the family itself: the PFPO asks the two recipients for immediate assistance in finding suitable accommodation. The second is institutional and concerns everyone: the federation asks that the criterion “accepts pets” be built into the mechanisms for finding and allocating housing for teachers, so that an individual intervention is not needed each time. As it points out, the issue is not a simple private difficulty but a broader social problem, particularly in island and tourist areas, where finding housing for teachers and other workers is already extremely difficult. The federation’s position is that responsible cohabitation with pets cannot be allowed to turn into a social disadvantage, nor to force people to choose between their home and their animals.

Santorini is one of the hardest places in the country for a long-term rental. Most of the available housing stock has shifted to short-term tourist letting, with the result that workers who come to the island for twelve months a year — teachers, health staff, civil servants — compete for very few properties. In that environment, one additional restrictive condition such as a ban on pets can wipe out the available options altogether. The problem is neither new nor specific to Thira, but it carries particular weight on an island that at the same time has significant funds for its tourism promotion, while the housing of the staff who keep the schools and the public services open remains without an institutional safety net.

Neither the Municipality of Thira nor the Directorate of Primary Education of the Cyclades had replied publicly to the letter by the time the announcement was published, while the text sets no deadline for a reply and names no elected or administrative official. The timing, however, is not neutral: the new school year begins in September and the housing question has to be resolved before lessons start. TodayGrid preserves the anonymity of the teacher and her child and will return to the story if there is a reply from either of the two recipients of the letter, or if a specific measure is announced for housing teachers on the islands of the Cyclades.