Museum and archaeological site guards continue to strike indefinitely on weekends protesting against the new pay scales. As a result, museums, monuments and archaeological sites will remain closed on weekends.
According to a Kathimerini report, a hand-written, misspelled sign on the entrance of Acropolis reads “The archaeological site will ramain closed on Sunday 27/12/2015.” The report says that hundreds of tourists who wanted to visit that Sunday turned away and left.
Museum guards complain that the new pay scale sees the extra pay on weekends reduced by 35 percent. They also want more personnel to be hired claiming they are understaffed.
Due to the economic crisis, archaeological sites in Nemea and Delos are indeed understaffed, while the same applies to the Athens Archaeological Museum and the Heraklion Archaeological Museum.
“We came to see Vergina. We checked on the internet the previous day and we saw that IT [the site] was open. We came and found it closed. There are lines of people outside and tourist buses, people from several places in northern Greece who have come here based on the information that it would be open,” one of the unlucky visitors reported to Kathimerini.
Again, there was a blue-marker, hand-written sign saying that the place would be closed on Sunday. The visitor also noted that most of the tourists were senior citizens.
The guards union calls all members not to work voluntarily on any tourist event like cruise ship tours and sightseeing tours on weekends, until there is a government decision to bring the weekend pay back to previous figures. They are expected to meet for the second time this week with Deputy Interior Minister Christofors Vernardakis to discuss the issue.
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