Lynne's residency saga 2022
As many of you will know Mike now has an Irish passport and is therefore an EU citizen. Although, in theory, I can stay in Greece with him for six months, in practice the Greek government assume you are moving permanently if you spend more than ninety days in the country. We decided that it would make life a lot simpler if I were to apply for temporary residency. Little did we know!
Before I could begin my application Mike had to apply for a Greek Registration Card, which costs nothing and never expires. The only stipulation is that he has sufficient income and has Greek annual medical insurance. This was another stumbling block, as the only way to get full cover is to have a Greek Tax No which we do not require. After two weeks of emails and phone calls to the insurance broker we finally managed to get a policy with lower cover, which doesn't require the tax no, but also doesn't give us much cover, but at least fulfils the requirements. An appointment at the Police Station in Vonitsa was arranged and his card issued.
Mike has been in email contact with the relevant Government office since the end of last year, with all emails sent and received in Greek. He received a list of the required documents which were needed for my application, all of which have been completed in Greek. We had to get a new copy of our marriage certificate, as they won't accept one older than six months, which then had to be translated into Greek. We took the new copy of the marriage certificate (which is a scanned copy of the original hand written entry in the register - 49 years old and illegible to our Greek translator). She was surprised that we hadn't been asked for an apostilled (legalised) copy, so Mike contacted the office in Messolonghi who confirmed that it was indeed required.
A further copy was ordered from Mike's niece, who is a registrar, and she very kindly sent it to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, where it arrived safely and was signed for at 9:00 the next morning. It sat there for over two weeks before I got a text to say they had received it and were working on the application. Two hours later I received another text advising that the application had been completed and the apostilled certificate dispatched by courier. Over a week later I received a text from the courier advising they had received the package. This was the FCO at its finest. The certificate was delivered to the translator the next day and I collected it the following day. I was then able to make an appointment with the Department of Aliens in Messolonghi.
Armed with what we hoped was all that would be required, we made our way up the Gulf of Patras to Messolonghi. Thankfully we anchored in the early afternoon and went ashore to make sure we could find the office as the appointment was 9:00 the following morning. Nothing in this process has been easy and this part was to be no exception. When we got to the address we'd been given we discovered that the office was no longer there and we spent the next 2½ hours looking for it, being given not very great directions by the police and the port police. Finally after a second visit to the port police we found it, much to our relief. It's not a lot of fun walking around in the sun with the temperature over 30°C!
We arrived for my appointment thinking it would be in a separate office, but no, it was conducted at the main desk with people shouting over the Covid screens, all wearing masks so to hear anything was very difficult. The final event was a slight anti-climax. Everything seemed to be a bit of a box ticking exercise; however I now have a certificate confirming I have an application in process, which is valid for 1 year. My fingerprints were taken by someone who spoke no English whatsoever (as this is the Department of Aliens you'd think it would be requirement of the job that they could speak in other languages) and provided my security checks are all OK , hopefully I should receive my biometric residence card in the next couple of months. I will be extremely relieved when the process is completed.
