Hundreds of thousands of sheep and goats are being culled in Greece, due to the outbreak of an infectious disease. It may affect production and exports of the country’s famous feta cheese.

Anastasia Siourtou walks through her deserted farm on the outskirts of Karditsa, a city in the Thessaly region of central Greece.

An eerie silence hangs over the place where 650 sheep were being raised.

On 12 November veterinary officials culled all the livestock after a case of sheep and goat pox was detected.

“There is another farm two kilometres away. They had pox cases, but hid it,” she says, alluding to how she believes her herd contracted the disease.

Ms Siourtou is a veterinarian herself and has expanded the farm that her father built.

Losing the animals means financial ruin – besides the livestock the farm lost, the sheep’s milk, which is sold for the production of feta cheese, is often referred to as Greece’s “white gold”.

More than the financial blow, however, Ms Siourtou speaks of the emotional toll. “I was here the day the sheep were culled. It is very cruel, I felt that I failed to protect them.”

Sheep and goat pox is a viral infection. The first cases were detected in northern Greece in August 2024, and the disease has since spread across many regions of the country.

A total of 1,702 incidents had been recorded by mid-November, according to the latest data from the Ministry of Rural Development and Food.

Detecting a single case on a farm means the entire herd must be culled for preventive reasons. Some 417,000 sheep and goats have been disposed of so far, which is roughly 4-5% of the previous total.

Approximately 80% of Greek sheep and goat’s milk goes towards making feta cheese, which is a protected designation of origin within the European Union.

This means that while similar cheese can be produced elsewhere in the EU it cannot be called feta. The UK continues to respect this 2002 ruling following Brexit.

Last year, Greece exported €785m ($909m; £690m) of feta, figures from the Greek Exports Association show. Of this, €520m went to fellow EU nations, and €90m to the UK.

Feta has to be made of at least 70% sheep’s milk, with the remainder being goat’s.

Small dairies say they are already having problems sourcing sheep’s milk, which could mean possible shortages of feta going forward. While prices have not yet increased in turn, this will likely be the result if the outbreak is not eradicated.

“The limited amount of available milk increases production costs and makes it more difficult to maintain current quantities [of feta] on the market,” says Prof Dimitris Gougoulis from the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Thessaly.

Another sheep farmer near Karditsa, Tassos Manakas, saw his 873-strong herd culled on 9 October.

He now spends his days sitting in a small room in his barn. “The shop is closed,” he says bitterly.

Mr Manakas walks past the empty metal feeders and the milking room now gathering cobwebs. “I used to come in in the morning, hear the animals bleating, stroke them.

“The day they were culled, I was here. If you cut me that day, I wouldn’t bleed.”

He is flipping thoughtfully through a government document packed with numerical tables.

Affected farmers are being offered compensation of between €132 and €220 per sheep depending on its age. Farmers respond that the payments fall far short of covering their losses.

The government has also been criticised for its wider response to the outbreak. A National Scientific Committee for the Management and Control of Sheep and Goat Pox was only established only in late October – a full 14 months after the first case was detected.

Meanwhile, no lockdown zones were established in the areas where the first cases were recorded in late summer of 2024, and critics say that the state veterinary service is significantly understaffed.

At the same time, farmers have been arrested for the illegal transport of animals in trucks into areas considered disease-free. And local reports say infected animals have been buried in fields without notifying the authorities.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Rural Development and Food tells the BBC: “We implemented the plan to eradicate sheep pox from the very beginning, as provided for in the European protocols.

“The result was to reach almost zero cases in the spring of 2025. The decision to establish the scientific committee in October 2025 was taken under the pressure of one factor – many farmers did not comply with biosecurity measures, resulting in an explosion in cases.”

Greece’s Supreme Court has now ruled that prosecutors must investigate possible violations of biosecurity measures, which many critics say is overdue.

Across the country, there are still farms operating under 1960s standards – tin shacks, walls made of baked soil or cement bricks, and no fencing.

The BBC visited one such farm on the outskirts of the city of Larissa, in Thessaly. Two dead lambs were lying on the ground.

The owner insisted that there were no cases of pox on his farm. He refused to allow photographs. “Some animals have lumps on their chest. It’s not pox, but no one will believe me,” he says.

Sheep and goat farmers in Thessaly are calling for approval of mass vaccination of their herds, which they say is how the problem is tackled in Bulgaria and Turkey.

Such vaccination is allowed in an emergency under EU rules, and farmers are putting a lot of pressure on the government to request vaccines from the Commission’s available stock.

However, the Greek government responds that mass vaccination could lead to Greece being classified as an endemic country for the diseases, which would bring restrictions on the export of sheep and goat’s milk – and especially of feta cheese. Greek authorities also stress that there is currently no certified vaccine against sheep pox.

Prof Gougoulis points out that the existing older vaccines are effective in countries where pox is endemic, but “are not a tool for eradication [of the disease]”. “They do not completely prevent infection, and the virus can continue to circulate within vaccinated populations.”

Yet the situation now seems to be getting out of control.

Members of the National Committee for the Management and Control of Sheep and Goat Pox recently told journalists that livestock farmers in different parts of the country may have carried out as many as one million illegal vaccinations. This distorts the epidemiological picture and makes disease control even more difficult.

But many livestock farmers are angry with the officials’ assumption. They say it is an arbitrary calculation and accuse the scientific committee of endangering the export of feta.

Farmer Haris Seskliotis, in the village of Rizomylos near Volos, listens to all this with deep concern. One infection was detected on his farm, leading to the preventive culling of 700 sheep.

It was the second time his farm was ruined, following the devastating floods in Thessaly in 2023.

“It’s extremely harsh,” he tells the BBC, walking through his sheep empty pens.

There are stacks of hay bales around meant for sheep to eat, now left unused in the yard of the farm and soon to rot.

Mr Seskliotis is not the kind of farmer who sits and counts his wounds. “I am thinking of setting up a new unit with my son for fattening calves,” he says. “We have not learned anything other than raising herds.”