Impersonal and Agentless Passives

Very often you want to report what happened without saying who did it — because you don't know, because it doesn't matter, or because an official notice has no business naming anybody. English does this with the agentless passive: smoking is prohibited, it is said that, my wallet was stolen. Greek has two completely different tools for the job, and they belong to opposite ends of the register scale. One is a small set of third-person mediopassive forms that live on signs, in notices and in the news — fixed as formulas, but still fully conjugating verbs. The other is the bare third-person plural with no subject at all, which is what people actually say. Learn both, and learn which is which — using the wrong one is the single loudest way to sound like a translated English speaker.

The sign-and-notice set

Walk through any Greek town and you are reading mediopassive verbs. These are not really "passive sentences" in the textbook sense; they are labels, and the thing being offered or forbidden is the grammatical subject.

Two of these are doubly formal, and it is worth knowing why. The everyday verbs for selling and renting are πουλάω and νοικιάζω; πωλώ and ενοικιάζω are their learned counterparts, inherited from the formal written language. So Πωλείται is not just a passive — it is a learned verb in a learned form, which is exactly why it reads as an official label rather than as a sentence. Nobody chatting about their flat says ×Το πωλώ; they say Το πουλάω.

Απαγορεύεται: the subject is the forbidden thing

Απαγορεύεται deserves its own look, because English and Greek build the prohibition around different subjects. English bans the person: you are not allowed to smoke, he was banned from entering. Greek bans the activity: the thing forbidden is the grammatical subject of απαγορεύεται, and the person, if mentioned at all, arrives as a genitive clitic or a σε-phrase.

That last one is the pattern to memorise: μου / σου / του απαγορεύεται + the thing. The activity stays the subject and you appear as the affected party in the genitive. The same shape covers Του απαγορεύτηκε η είσοδος στο γήπεδο ("he was banned from the ground").

Λέγεται ότι… — the reportive set

The second family is the one you meet in newspapers and academic prose: a third-person singular mediopassive followed by an ότι-clause, reporting something without vouching for it.

Φέρεται να is the Greek press's standard hedge for an allegation — the equivalent of English allegedly. It has nothing to do with the everyday φέρομαι ("behave"); treat the two as separate entries.

One warning about λέγεται. In the reportive use it is fixed in the third singular with an ότι-clause, and it does not take a person as subject. But the same verb in its other sense — "be called, be named" — takes a personal subject quite happily: Λέγομαι Μαρία, Πώς λέγεται αυτό; Those are two different jobs of one form, and only the first one is the impersonal we are describing here.

Παρακαλείσθε να… — the polite official request

The most formal member of the family is the notice-board request. Παρακαλείσθε is the second-person plural mediopassive of παρακαλώ in its learned shape — literally "you are requested." The demotic mediopassive of that verb is not used here; the archaic -σθε ending survives precisely because the formula is a relic of the older written language. You will also meet Παρακαλείστε in the wild, with the ordinary demotic 2pl ending — it is common on real notices — but -σθε is the spelling the formula is built on and the one careful printing keeps.

In speech, none of this survives. What you actually hear is a plain imperative softened with παρακαλώ or σας παρακαλώ: Καθίστε, παρακαλώ. Reserve Παρακαλείσθε for the register it belongs to — announcements, printed notices, official letters — and it will sound right; drop it into a conversation and it sounds like a public-address system.

What Greek actually says: the bare third plural

Now the everyday tool, and the one most learners never acquire. To say something happened without naming who did it, Greek puts the verb in the third-person plural and gives it no subject at all. The ending alone carries "someone, they, people."

Look closely at Μου έκλεψαν το πορτοφόλι. Greek does not say "my wallet"; it says the wallet, and pins the possession on you with the genitive clitic μου, which simultaneously marks you as the person it happened to. That is a much better fit for the situation than the English possessive, and it is the reason this construction feels so natural to Greek speakers — it puts the victim, not the object, at the front of the sentence. The clitic itself is covered on the weak genitive object.

Λέγεται ότι or Λένε ότι?

Both exist, both are correct, and the choice is pure register.

A third option, Ακούγεται ότι…, sits between them and specifically flags a rumour ("word is that…"). For the whole news-register apparatus these forms belong to, see journalistic style; for the other subjectless constructions of Greek — βρέχει, πρέπει, φαίνεται — see impersonal constructions.

Common Mistakes

1. Supplying a subject pronoun for the impersonal third plural. The bare ending is the "someone." Adding αυτοί, with nobody mentioned earlier, leaves the pronoun pointing at nothing.

2. Making yourself the subject of απαγορεύεται. The forbidden activity is the subject; you are a genitive clitic, or you stay out of it.

3. Treating the sign forms as invariable. Πωλείται and Ενοικιάζεται agree with what is on offer, so a plural noun pulls the verb into the plural.

4. Copying the English "he is said to be" straight over. The reportive λέγεται needs a full ότι-clause; with a bare word after it, the verb flips to its other sense, "is called."

Key Takeaways

• Greek backgrounds the doer two ways: the third-person mediopassive of signs, notices and news — formulaic in wording but never invariable in form — and the subjectless third-person plural of everyday speech.
• The signage set — Πωλείται, Ενοικιάζεται, Ζητείται, Παραδίδονται, Απαγορεύεται, Δεν επιτρέπεται — agrees with the thing on offer or forbidden: Πωλούνται διαμερίσματα, Ζητούνται σερβιτόροι.
• With απαγορεύεται the forbidden activity is the subject; the person, if named, is a genitive clitic (μου απαγορεύεται το αλάτι).
• The reportive set — Λέγεται / Θεωρείται / Πιστεύεται / Υπολογίζεται / Αναμένεται ότι…, plus journalistic φέρεται να — is third singular plus an ότι-clause, and belongs to written and news register. Its spoken equivalent is plain Λένε ότι….
• Παρακαλείσθε να… is the learned notice-board request, kept alive by its archaic -σθε ending; in speech use an imperative with παρακαλώ.
• Default to the bare third plural — Μου έκλεψαν το πορτοφόλι, Μου είπαν να περιμένω, Χτυπάνε την πόρτα — wherever English would use an agentless passive. When you do want to name the doer instead, that is the από-agent.