Tilema­chos Karachalios works as a jan­i­tor in Stock­holm, forced from his home by Greece's eco­nom­ic cri­sis. As a phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal sales­man in Greece for 17 years, Tilema­chos Karachalios wore a suit, drove a com­pa­ny car and had an ex­pense ac­count. He now mops schools in Swe­den, forced from his home by Greece's eco­nom­ic cri­sis. "It was a very good job," said Karachalios, 40, of his for­mer life. "Now I clean Swedish s---."

Karachalios, who left be­hind his six-year-old daugh­ter to be raised by his par­ents, is one of thou­sands flee­ing Greece's record 24 per cent un­em­ploy­ment and aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures that threat­en to un­der­mine growth. The num­ber of Greeks seek­ing per­mis­sion to set­tle in Swe­den, where there are more jobs and a sta­ble econ­o­my, al­most dou­bled to 1,093 last year from 2010, and is on pace to in­crease again this year.

"I'm try­ing to sur­vive," Karachalios said in an in­ter­view in Stock­holm. Greece is in its fifth year of re­ces­sion, with the econ­o­my ex­pect­ed to con­tract 6.9 per cent this year, the same as in 2011, ac­cord­ing to the Athens-based Foun­da­tion for Eco­nom­ic and In­dus­tri­al Re­search. Since 2008, the num­ber of job­less has more than tripled to a record 1.22 mil­lion as of June, out of a to­tal pop­u­la­tion of 10.8 mil­lion.

"In Greece, there was no fu­ture," said Oura­nia Mich­topoulou, who moved with her hus­band to Swe­den in 2010 af­ter both lost tex­tile in­dus­try jobs in Thes­sa­loni­ki, where they had a com­fort­able life with a house and car. "Here, I can hope for some­thing good to hap­pen. Maybe not for me-I'm 48-but maybe for my chil­dren." Their fam­i­ly now crams in­to a small apart­ment, while her hus­band, Nikos, works for a land­scap­er and her teenage chil­dren strug­gle with Swedish lessons.

"It was not easy for them," she said. "My daugh­ter said lots of times, 'I hate Swe­den, I want to go home.'" Karachalios be­gan his ca­reer in phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal sales af­ter his manda­to­ry mil­i­tary ser­vice, work­ing at three dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies in the south­ern city of Pa­tras. "You can plan, you can or­gan­ise, you can make plans for ten years, 20 years, but you don't know what life brings," he said.