Comment by since7

I live in an southern EU country (Bulgaria). Up until some point in time AC was too expensive and not widely adopted in residential context. This started changing more then 10 years ago and now when almost the whole summer is a constant heatwave nobody rents an apartment without an AC. There is another factor though - in the capital Sofia, using AC for heating in winder is actually cheaper than the central heating which is the alternative.

We travel to Greece a lot, and I've never seen a place without an AC there either.