The Island Where People Forget to Die

This is probably true and helps a lot. But who created the statistics? The pension system there is widely misused. People keep their death parents "alive" on paper to receive their pension for many years. It was so widespread and the loss so great in Creek (and some other EU countries) that the European Union intervened.

In fact, the pension system in Greece has been following the European standards since at least 10 years.

I am so sick and tired of outsiders spewing nonsense all of the internet about Greece without knowing any real fact.

'What Wolf slowly realized was that the secret of Roseto wasn't diet or exercise or genes or the region where Roseto was situated. It had to be the Roseto itself. As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they began to realize why. They looked at how the Rosetans visited each other, stopping to chat with each other in Italian on the street, or cooking for each other in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town's social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to Mass at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under 2000 people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the town, that discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.

In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills.

"I remember going to Roseto for the first time, and you'd see three generational family meals, all the bakeries, the people walking up and down the street, sitting on their porches talking to each other, the blouse mills where the women worked during the day, while the men worked in the slate quarries," Bruhn said. "It was magical."'

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/books/chapters/chapter-out...

Search for "greek pension abuse" on Google:

* Greece pulls the plug on pensions for the dead (Apr 25, 2012): http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/25/greece-benefits-id...

* 2% of Greek population abuse pension system (26 Apr, 2012): https://www.devere-group.com/news/Greek-population-abuse-pen...

* Greece Still Paying Dead Pensioners (Aug 17, 2013): http://greece.greekreporter.com/2013/08/17/greece-still-payi...

* New Greek finance sham: 120,000 families claiming 'ghost pensions' for relatives who died years ago (12 October 2011): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2048385/Greek-financ...