How I work

Standing terms

• Fixed fees, agreed in writing before anything starts. No hourly surprises, no scope that quietly grows.
• Disbursements at cost, with receipts, no margin. State charges are shown as what they are. Where a state fee is nil, you are told it is nil.
• A documented negative is a result. The office, the date, the person, the reason for refusal, and what else was tried. It closes the question, and it is billed like any other finding — stated before instruction, never afterwards.
• Every finding carries its source. Where something rests on oral testimony rather than a record, it says so, and the person is identified in the file.
• No legal advice, no appearance before authorities, no notarial acts. Your Greek lawyer or notary does their part and is paid directly by your client.
• Never third‑party money. Funds are never held, received or handled.
• No contact with your client unless you ask for it.
• No research into a living person without their knowledge. Tracing is undertaken for notification of entitlement only, and confirmation of that purpose is asked for in writing.
• Nothing is published. No client names, no villages, no cadastral references, no photographs. Specimen material is format only.
• A written update every Friday — including the one that says nothing moved this week. Three to five months of silence is what destroys trust at distance.
• A conflict register is kept of every estate put to me. Where a second firm approaches on the same estate, it is declined and nothing is disclosed — including that the matter is already held.
• No unofficial payment to any official, ever. Beyond the obvious, an instructing firm can be criminally liable at home for a bribe paid by someone acting on its behalf abroad. A refusal, properly documented, is a billable result. There is no need for a side door.

What is declined

• Active litigation, where a person is asserting a competing claim.
• An estate where debts are suspected and the renunciation period may still be open. That is routed to a lawyer the same day — the window is four months, or a year where the deceased was last resident abroad, and if it passes, acceptance is presumed together with the debts.
• Any instruction that depends on a guaranteed outcome.
• Any request to suggest to a witness what they should say. Ever.
• Anything requiring entry by breaking a lock or crossing a barrier. Photographs are taken from where one is lawfully entitled to stand.
• Forest disputes, shoreline and complex unauthorised construction — not before the experience to do them properly exists.

Access to Greek records — the part nobody explains

Greek records fall into three tiers, and knowing which tier a document sits in is most of the work.

Open, no authority needed

Cadastral sheets, diagram extracts, registration certificates, forest maps, and the state orthophotography series from 1945 onwards. Ordered electronically, delivered in about six days. The first move on any file is checking whether the area has passed into the national cadastre at all — if it has, nobody needs to travel.

Legal interest required

Birth, marriage and death entries, next‑of‑kin certificates, family status, municipal and male registers, and the court certificates. These are released only to a relative, to someone holding a relative's written authority, to an appearing Greek lawyer, or on a court order. An instructing firm's own authority does not open them. This is the single most common reason a Greek estate file stalls abroad, and it is why a Greek lawyer sits in the arrangement rather than beside it.

Consent only — no route without it

Tax filings, bank relationships, insurance, safe‑deposit boxes. The heirs sign and file; the requests are built, tracked and chased. Ecclesiastical archives are opened by the priest's permission and by nothing else.

Who you are dealing with

Miltiades Georgiades — Athens. I do the on‑the‑ground part for firms working Greek property and inheritance from abroad: registries, civil records, archives and site attendance. I am not a lawyer and I do not sit in place of one. I sit underneath, and the file I hand over is what your Greek counsel and your own advisers work from.

I work in Greek, English and German. The German matters more than it sounds: a large part of the Greek diaspora went to Stuttgart, Munich, Düsseldorf and Frankfurt, and those families' files come back to the same village registries as everyone else's.

I am studying programming at the Hellenic Open University, and it shows in how the work is run rather than in anything you will see. Every file is built to the same structure. Every request is logged with what was asked, when, of whom, and what came back. Fees are worked out from measured hours rather than from what the last client happened to pay. The file you receive in March looks like the file you received in January.

The first property I worked through properly was my own family's — a field with an old house on Salamina. Cadastre, the state aerial survey back to 1945, the forest map, the lot. It is a useful thing to do to your own land before doing it to anyone else's.

What I like is the problem. Most of what stalls a Greek file is not law, it is sequence: the wrong document requested first, the consular power of attorney begun in week three instead of on day one, the certificate that expired while something else was being waited on. Getting the order right is most of the job, and it is the part I am good at.

Correspondence is in English. Files are delivered in English, with the Greek original of every document reproduced alongside.