District Court orders two more months of spousal support pending first wages

The District Court in Greece ordered two further months of temporary financial assistance for Eleni Markou on 9 October 2026. Presiding judge Tsouklas granted support for September and October after Markou sought continued spousal maintenance of €300 per month from Petros Vrettos.

The dispute turned on the gap between finding work and receiving wages. Vrettos had stopped his monthly payments after Markou told him she was sorted for work; she maintained that her first payday was still weeks away. The judgment orders assistance for both months, though it does not separately state the amount payable.

Tsouklas found the request for two more months reasonable in light of the official email Markou supplied from her workplace. The brief formal judgment identifies that email as the basis for continuing assistance.

During the hearing, Markou offered the original job-offer email on her phone for inspection. She said it specified a 16 September start date and a first payment due on 31 October, covering both the partial September period and October wages. The judge subsequently referred to the email as evidence of those dates when questioning Vrettos.

Markou distinguished an expected payday from a completed payment: the email did not establish that wages had already been processed. The decision thus addressed the period before her anticipated first wages, rather than treating acceptance of a job as sufficient reason to end support. The formal reasons do not set out a broader legal test or cite statutory provisions.

Markou argued that one further payment would not cover the whole gap before 31 October. She said she still needed money for basic expenses and acknowledged that she should have explained the payment date when announcing that she had found work.

Vrettos said his agreement had been to help until she found employment, and that her message led him to stop paying. He acknowledged that he had not asked when her wages would arrive. Although he accepted that the email gave an expected first payday of 31 October, he remained unconvinced that two months of assistance were necessary.

He offered one final €300 payment, saying he could afford it. When the judge raised the possibility of documenting repayment, Vrettos rejected treating the assistance as a loan, explaining that repayment had not been part of their arrangement.

According to Markou's account, the couple were civilly married and living separately in Thessaloniki. Vrettos had been contributing €300 a month toward her basic expenses while she looked for work.

The resulting order is a judgment, not an agreement on Vrettos's proposed single payment. It contains no repayment requirement and does not decide support beyond October. Its limited reasons resolve this two-month request without addressing the couple's longer-term financial arrangements.