Georgios Christakis Zografos was a typical Thessalian large estate owner of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has been chosen to illustrate the emergence and development of the agricultural question in Greece in this period.

Zografos was a merchant from the Greek paroikia (mercantile community) of Odessa. He also pursued other economic activities in Constantinople.

In the period of the great Balkan crisis between 1875 and 1878, when developments demonstrated that Thessaly would be cut off from the Ottoman Empire, Zografos and some of his colleagues bought land from the Ottoman Turk beneficiaries. This was at a time when the Ottomans were still in power in that area, and when it was believed that the treaty by which the area was ceded to Greece would include an obligation to respect property and property ownership. The purchase was made at a relatively low price: 64,000 stremmata (one stremma = 0.10 hectares) cost 540,000 drachmas (27,000 liras of the time). He himself created the chiftlik, thus uniting land he had purchased and in which approximately 400 families were working and living.

However, the state of the peasants of the area deteriorated after the annexation of Thessaly to Greece. This significant change can be seen in two internal regulations of the Zografos chiftlik, the first one of 1877 and the second one of 1889. With the latter all the favourable provisions included in the 'Ottoman Regulation of Agricultural Relations of Thessaly' of 1861 were abolished, as they were not related to the modern Greek system. Each sharecropper was now to sign an individual contract, renewable each year, and thus he was deprived of the right to life-tenure and inheritance. The owner could send the sharecropper away from the chiftlik whenever he wished, by not reneweing his contract. The contract also obliged farmers to acknowledge the proprietorship of Zografos over their houses and parts of the land that had traditionally belonged to cultivators. Lastly, there were specific and very strict provisions concerning the quantity of production that the sharecropper was obliged to supply. Any peculiarities affecting cultivation such as weather conditions were not included and generally speaking questions of responsibility and negligence the likelihood of a bad harvest were not examined.

All these regulations did away with those laws and provisions under Ottoman rule that had attempted to protect cultivators. However, the western-influenced 'Rule of the Law' that prevailed in Greece did not recognize existing property and the institution of individual contracts between landowners and cultivators.

Cultivators thus encountered new conditions, very different from those they had encountered previously. They became involved in contracts and transactions the meaning of which they ignored and which they were unable to control. The most important change, however, was that the status of their relation to the land they were cultivating was changing. They were being transformed from tenants with specific rights to tenants subject to the will of the owner. This situation led to the insuperable entanglements of the Thessalian agricultural question and the revolts of the early twentieth century, which were only resolved with the agricultural reforms of 1917.