But a job proved impossible to find. He was forced to leave his sunny Athens apartment, sell his BMW convertible, and move in with his elderly mother. Soon, he found himself in a place he never dreamed he would be: standing in line at a soup kitchen. “I used to be sought after,” said Polychronopoulos, 49. “But there is no place for me in society anymore.”

ATHENS, Greece — When Kostas Polychronopoulos lost his high-paying marketing position at a telecommunications company during the height of Europe’s financial crisis in 2010, he exhausted himself for more than a year trying to find work.


Even as signs of an economic recovery emerge in the eurozone, the human cost of the five-year downturn continues to rise. For tens of millions of Europeans, there will be no easy comeback from nearly half a decade of economic privation and Depression-scale joblessness. A growing number of people, not only in Greece but in other battered eurozone economies, are caught in the trap of long-term unemployment, drained of savings and living on the economic and social edge.

Greece, of course, has been hit the hardest: Its unemployment rate is still hovering above 27 percent. But the social challenges are not its alone. In the broader 28-nation European Union, 25.9 million people remain jobless, out of a potential labor force of about 244 million. Data released last week showed no change in the eurozone’s 11.9 percent unemployment rate in February. Spain’s jobless figure was 25.6 percent, and Italy’s was at a new high of 13 percent.

Politicians prefer to point to the positive. When Greece’s finance minister last week lauded news that the country had passed economic muster by international creditors to receive its next allotment of bailout money, he praised his fellow citizens.

“Thanks to the sacrifices of the Greek people,” said Yannis Stournaras, the finance minister, “we have the luxury to be able to discuss economic growth rather than fiscal adjustment.”


Greece even plans to begin selling bonds, possibly this week, for the first time since it became the epicenter of the European debt crisis in 2010 and required the first of its two bailouts. The impending move comes after the government announced last month that Greece had achieved a primary surplus — a surplus not counting debt payments — as a result of bailout-imposed belt-tightening. But many Greeks like Polychronopoulos who are still struggling might call it too soon to declare victory.

The governments of Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain are also forecasting accelerating recoveries, unleashing a wave of optimism among international investors, who have flocked to buy their debt.

But despite such signs of recovery, “growth in and of itself will not solve the human and social problems that have been rising,” said Isabelle Maquet-Engsted, deputy head of social analysis at the European Commission, the administrative arm of the European Union. “We now have to deal with the fact that many people have been affected very seriously, and it will be difficult to put them back on track.”

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the association of free market democracies, puts it more bluntly. It warned that the tentative recovery “risks seducing us into believing that all is now going well and that, over the next few years, a rising economy will lift all boats.” The evidence, the report said, “suggests otherwise.”


People without jobs who have been looking for one for more than a year account for more than half of the unemployed in Greece, Ireland, and Italy.

Among them was Polychronopoulos, an energetic man who said he slumped into depression the longer he went without a job. As a consultant, he had spent a 25-year career building marketing and sales networks for several Greek companies, earning about $8,300 a month at the peak of his career, a salary that afforded him vacations on the Greek islands and a cozy apartment in central Athens.