For more than 20 years, Stavros Gavriliadis and Dimitrios Elefsiniotis have been building a life together. They bought a house and started a family. But under Greek law, they couldn’t marry or both be recognized as the parents of their three children—until this week.
Greece’s parliament voted on Thursday to extend equal marriage and automatic parental rights to all of the country’s 10.5 million citizens, and to allow same-sex couples to adopt. It is the first majority Christian Orthodox country to take the step, and now stands out in a region largely opposed to change.
“Our suits and wedding rings are already ready,” Gavriliadis said. “Maybe we’ll be the first to get married.”
The new law means the 52-year-old allergist will no longer go to bed worrying that his son will become a ward of the state if he dies before his partner, or if he’ll be allowed to pick up his (non-biological) twins from school. The five of them will finally be considered a single family in the eyes of the law—not “strangers” as Gavriliadis put it.
“The reform makes the lives of lots of our fellow citizens much better, without taking away anything from the lives of the many,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said. “Marriage is nothing more than the culmination of the love of two people who choose to be together by making a commitment to themselves, the state and society as a whole.”
Legalizing same-sex marriage, a key part of Mitsotakis’s effort to modernize Greece, marks a major step for a prime minister coming from a conservative party. Even after winning a landslide election in June, he had to rely on support from the center-left and leftist opposition parties to pass the measure amid resistance from parts of his own party as well as the influential Greek Orthodox church.
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