Art News

With shrinking salaries, rising taxes and record unemployment, crisis spurs gold fever in Greece

GREVENA (AP).- Not all Greek myths are ancient. In rural towns and villages, where millennia-old pottery shards and broken classical masonry are sometimes found, shepherds and farmers have similar tales to tell. They cite the buried golden sow with its seven golden piglets (which made a poor farmer rich), the coin hoards guarded by dragons from the times of Alexander the Great or the Byzantine emperors, the gold plunder squirreled away by long-dead Turkish pashas or fleeing Nazi officers. All it takes, they say, is a lucky thrust of a shovel. Legends like that have taken on a new life in debt-crippled Greece. As two years of austerity take a harsh toll — with shrinking salaries, rising taxes and record unemployment for many — more and more Greeks are finding