16 September 2026 — Law 5326/2026
A new mediation procedure opens for properties recorded in the cadastre as being of unknown owner. It is new to everyone, including every lawyer in Greece.
The scale
Roughly 3.45 million entries stand recorded as of unknown owner — on the order of seventy‑two per cent of everything the cadastre has mapped. A very large share of them belong, in fact, to families who left: for Australia, for the United States, for Canada, for Germany, for South Africa, and who never registered an acceptance of inheritance because nobody told them one was needed.
What the procedure asks for
The bundle has to be assembled locally, case by case. It cannot be produced by correspondence and it cannot be produced from a database.
- Two or more documentary proofs of possession.
- Sworn statements covering twenty years — which means finding people, in the village, who can actually attest to it.
- Ten years of property tax filings and declarations.
- Technical identification of the parcel, and identification of every adjoining owner.
Each of those is a separate piece of fieldwork. The last one alone defeats most files, because nobody abroad knows who the neighbours are.
What this means for your files
If you act for clients with Greek roots, this will reach your desk — through a client who has read about it, or through one who has been told by a relative that something has changed. The client will not be able to gather any of the evidence, and neither, from where you sit, will you.
The sensible first step is cheap and fast: a screen that says whether a property qualifies at all, what the statute requires, what the family already has, and what is missing — with a cost and a time estimate against closing each gap, and an honest alternative where it does not qualify.
Qualifies or does not qualify, requirement by requirement, with HAVE / MISSING / OBTAINABLE against each. Three hours' work. It is designed to be able to say no, and to say it plainly when it is no.
€270 fixed.
The strongest single exhibit
The Greek state photographed the whole country from the air in 1945, and again in 1960, 2007–09 and 2015–16. Those images are public.
Set the same parcel side by side across seventy years, with the boundary overlaid and the changes annotated, and you have something that is genuinely hard to argue with: the state's own photograph of the olive terraces in 1960, and the same terraces in 2016. It costs four hours at a desk and no travel at all, and it belongs in every possession file.
Briefing note
A written briefing on the procedure — what changes, who it affects, what the evidence bundle requires and what to do first — is available at no charge, to anyone who asks, client or not.