St Paul to Lead Greek Tourist Drive

Greece's stuttering economy appears to have found an ally in St Paul, with tourism officials poised to promote the apostle's wanderings in an effort to buttress the country's top-earning industry.

The move, nearly 2,000 years after the saint traversed the Mediterranean, caps a campaign to rebrand Greece as a destination for modern-day pilgrims.

"Religious tourism is the way forward," said Themistokles Balaskas, director of tourist facilities at the national tourism organisation, EOT.

"We can no longer rely exclusively on our sun, sea and sand. We have to diversify and come up with alternative forms of tourism that will extend the season."

Thirty years after the arrival of mass tourism - thanks to tour operators triggering fantasies of escape from post-industrial societies - Greece's tourist sector is eager to abandon the low-budget, "anything goes" image and upgrade its leading industry.

In St Paul, policymakers believe they have hit on the perfect formula to keep bawdiness at bay, not least from the hordes of young, alcohol-fuelled Britons who regularly descend on Greek shores.

At nearly 19%, tourism is the biggest single contributor to Greece's gross national product, employing some 800,000 people, or 18 % of the workforce. Agriculture, the country's second-biggest employer, accounts for just 7% of GDP.

Next week, officials will begin preparing sites along the route where the apostle preached, from the island of Samothrace in the north to ancient Corinth in the south.

Stavros Makarios, a senior adviser at the tourism ministry, said: "There is a growing, popular demand for this kind of tourism. Americans and older Britons have both expressed an interest in retracing St Paul's steps. Many of the places he visited are in little known corners of the country that are spectacularly beautiful."

The drive is part of a wider, EU-funded campaign, which Italy, Malta, Cyprus and the Palestinian authorities have also signed up to. Mr Makarios said he believed religious tourism, which may include "holy site" cruises around the Mediterranean, would be drawing crowds by the summer.

Monasteries were also being renovated to cater for visitors, he said.

"There is a very big market in the Orthodox Christian countries of the former Soviet Union that we are keen to tap," he told the Guardian. "EU funds have been earmarked to train young people for the industry, and international tour operators and travel agents will soon be meeting to discuss the creation of a Mediterranean network of religious tourism."

Greece, which bankrupted itself hosting the most expensive Olympic games in history in 2004, is struggling to trim its budget deficit, which at 4.3% of GDP is well above official EU limits.

Since assuming power two years ago, the conservative government has placed unprecedented emphasis on tourism as the driving force of the Greek economy, establishing a tourism ministry for the first time since the 1990s. Greece's target is to attract 20 million visitors by 2014 - 9 million more than its population. Last year, about 12 million visited the country, with Britain the leading source of tourists.