Greek Farmers’ Intermarriages with Albanian Women: : Towards ‘Trans-Border Social Homogamy’?

Marriage markets and succession systems in the European countryside have, during the last decades, been transformed as a result of contemporary processes of rural restructuring. In Greece such processes have been characterised by, among others, young women’s outmigration thus jeopardising rural families’ reproduction and endogenous development prospects. On the other hand, owing to the political change in the Balkan countries there has been a sizeable inflow of immigrants in the Greek countryside who have contributed to the revitalization of the Greek rural economy. The present work aims at exploring intermarriages between farmers and immigrant women, especially Albanians. Such intermarriages are due to certain socioeconomic and cultural characteristics of the Albanian women; hence, we put forward the hypothesis of ‘trans-border social homogamy’.