by JOANNA
KAKISSIS
December
23, 2013 6:17 PM
Thanos
Ntoumanis and his wife, Laura, are crashing at his parents' apartment in Greece 's northern city of Thessaloniki .
The couple
have packed their home and are moving to Germany . Thanos, a 38-year-old
psychiatrist, is joining some 4,000 Greek doctors who have left the
austerity-hit country for jobs abroad in the past three years. It's the largest
brain drain in three decades.
"I
won't say that I'm never coming back," he says. "I do need some
distance, though. I don't want to get to that tipping point. I don't want to
get to that point where I hate it here."
"You'll
come back," says his mother, Pepi Mavrogianni, trying to break the gloom.
She's a retired pediatrician in a "Hippocratic Oath" T-shirt. She
brings out a tray of warm cheese pies.