A growing number of Greeks are asking themselves that question, and some are deciding they can. “I think a lot of people will do this,” Ms. Tricha said. “In big cities, there’s no future for them. For young people, the only choice is for them to go to the countryside or to go abroad.”

If the refugees from the cities are expecting an easy or idyllic existence in the countryside, they are quickly disabused of such notions. In 2006, Vassilis Ballas and his wife, Roula Boura, both 36, left their jobs in Athens, where he worked in content management at a Web site and she in marketing, to move to Chios, where his grandparents were from.

That was before the financial crisis, but they wanted a change and decided to try their luck cultivating mastic trees, which grow only in southern Chios and produce an aniselike resin that is harvested and crystallized to produce mastic liquor, foodstuffs, candles and soap.

“It was a personal decision,” Mr. Ballas said. “We were thinking of moving out of Athens, and a friend told us, ‘My grandmother produces 100 kilos of mastic going out on her own with a donkey,’ ” or about 220 pounds, Mr. Ballas recalled, a crop for which a producer can earn around $40 a pound wholesale. But the couple found that mastic cultivation was much more difficult than they supposed. So while they still have 400 mastic trees, they have broadened into mastic-related ecotourism to make ends meet.

Such undertakings — which on Chios includes a fledgling wine cooperative, Ariousios, which is working to resuscitate an ancient grape varietal, Chiotiko krassero — indicate that there is money to be made in agriculture and tourism.

Some young Greeks are returning not to the land but to the sea, joining another venerable Greek industry. Since 2008, the number of applications to maritime schools across Greece has quadrupled to nearly 7,000, according to the Naval Ministry.