A new law in Greece allows same-sex couples to marry but excludes them from future parenthood through surrogate mothers, which could lead to it being challenged in court, according to legal experts.
“A blanket measure that excludes same-sex couples from surrogacy when opposite-sex couples enjoy this right in Greece is, in principle, discriminatory,” says Vassilis Tzevelekos, reader in law (associate professor) at the University of Liverpool School of Law and Social Justice, asserting that the legislation might eventually face challenges before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg.
The bill passed with 176 votes in favor and 76 against in the 300-seat Parliament on Thursday. It was not supported by the more traditionalist faction of New Democracy, with 51 MPs from the ruling party voting against or abstaining, so support from four opposition parties on the left of the political spectrum (SYRIZA, PASOK, New Left and Course for Freedom) was needed to raise a majority. Opinion polls had indicated that the public of this socially conservative nation was narrowly in favor of the reform, which faced strong opposition from the reactionary but influential Orthodox Church.
In addition to recognizing same-sex civil marriage, the legislation clears the way for adoption and grants equal rights to both same-sex parents as legal guardians of a child. Prior to this, such rights had only been extended to the biological parent. But parenthood through surrogate mothers remains restricted to women – single or married – who are unable to bear children on health grounds.
While the 46 signatory states to the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), including Greece, have some discretion to regulate certain aspects of parenthood, such as whether to allow surrogacy and who can resort to it, these decisions must comply with Article 14 of the convention, which prohibits discrimination.
Experts say that an exclusion can only be considered acceptable or legally justifiable if the discrimination in question serves weighty and legitimate goals, such as protecting the rights of the child, thus making the discrimination necessary.
“In my view, no such reasons exist,” says Tzevelekos, who is also a member of the Council of Europe’s anti-torture committee (CPT) and the UN’s Human Rights Council Advisory Committee. “But it will be interesting to see what grounds Greece may invoke and how convincing these can be,” he adds.
To date, says Alina Tryfonidou, assistant professor in the Department of Law at the University of Cyprus, there has not been a case at the Strasbourg court that distinguishes between married opposite-sex couples and married same-sex couples concerning parenthood, including parenthood through surrogacy.
“But I am almost certain that the ECtHR would find that reserving a right only to married opposite-sex couples and excluding married same-sex couples would amount to direct discrimination on the ground of sexual orientation,” she says, also underlining Article 8 of the convention protecting the right to respect for private and family life.
Greek courts will be invited to remedy this discrimination and, should they fail to do so, the issue is very likely to be raised before the Strasbourg court.
“This can be done after all domestic remedies are exhausted, which obviously is something that will take many years,” Tryfonidou says.
Unlikely avenue
Those anticipating a swifter vindication by seeking redress with the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) may be disappointed. Experts suggest that the likelihood of similar action before the top European Union court is slim.
The EU rulebook stipulates that medically assisted reproduction falls primarily within the jurisdiction of member-states; meanwhile, family law is under their exclusive jurisdiction.
“The exclusion of same-sex couples from surrogacy in the Greek territory does not violate EU law,” Tryfonidou says.
Konstantinos Rokas, assistant professor of private international law at the Law School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, explains that “EU law can only influence such provisions indirectly,” as national legislation would have to infringe upon one of the fundamental freedoms of the European Union – such as the freedom of movement or residence.
EU law, in fact, imposes an obligation of cross-border recognition of an already existing parent-child relationship between a child and both of their same-sex parents, but only for the purpose of enabling the family to exercise free movement and residency within the European Union.
Greece’s new law affords such cross-border recognition, guaranteeing compliance with EU regulations.
“I find it very unlikely that the case will be adjudicated in the EU court,” says Rokas, concluding that the Strasbourg court is the most appropriate platform for challenging the Greek law on grounds of discrimination.
The opinions expressed by Vassilis Tzevelekos in this article are his own and do not necessarily reflect the official positions of the organizations with which he is associated.
The lack of a political culture that values environmental issues, the presence of antagonistic political trends, and persistent internal skirmishes are the primary obstacles that prevent the green parties in Greece from establishing themselves as a meaningful political force, according to experts. This failure becomes even more glaring as environmentally focused politicians across Europe make gains, driven by the escalating impact of climate change and the increasing prominence of sustainability issues on the political and public agendas.
In May’s election in Greece, held under a system of simple proportional representation seen as advantageous for smaller parties, the Ecologist Greens-Green Unity alliance received only 0.6 percent of the total, or 35,201 votes. The Green Movement secured 0.25 percent of the vote, or 14,627 votes. The Greek Ecologists, a fringe party led by the seasoned election maverick Dimosthenis Vergis, failed to garner any votes. Furthermore, Green and Purple, a newly formed alliance of seven parties (including the pan-EU federalist party Volt, the Pirate Party of Greece, eco-feminists, animal rights advocates and other activists), was unable to participate in the polls as it did not receive clearance from the Supreme Court. Given that the threshold for entering Parliament is 3 percent, none of the green parties succeeded in electing an MP.
During the repeat election in June, which operated under a system of reinforced representation, the green parties experienced a decline in voter support. The Ecologist Greens-Green Unity only managed to secure 21,188 votes, reducing their share to 0.41 percent. Meanwhile, the Green and Purple alliance obtained 0.30 percent of the vote, equivalent to 15,725 votes. The Green Movement chose to withdraw, while Vergis’ party once again failed to collect a single vote. Conservative New Democracy, which had frequently faced criticism during its first term for compromising the country’s environmental protection legislation, was re-elected with a commanding 40.56 percent of the vote.
Political culture
As a non-industrialized country, Greece has managed to mostly steer clear of irreversible environmental damage that could directly impact health, such as industrial pollution or nuclear waste. As a result, the public has not been forced to develop an inbuilt resistance over such issues.
However, experts agree that the structure of the Greek political system and the country’s political culture have played a more critical role in obstructing environmental parties from establishing a distinct and electorally significant voter base.
“The truth is that Greek society has never demonstrated the same ecological sensitivity as societies in Central and mainly Northern Europe,” says Lefteris Ioannidis, the president of the Hellenic Green Cities Network who ran as a candidate with Green and Purple in June, pinpointing other long-standing political priorities and different needs.
“In Greece, we frequently confine the political landscape within the binary framework of right and left, which objectively hinders the emergence of a political space that could be defined beyond this dichotomy,” says Ioannidis, who in 2014 became the first Green mayor ever elected in Greece, representing the northern town of Kozani, a longtime center for lignite extraction.
Following the end of the 1967-74 military dictatorship, Greek politics has largely been dominated by a two-party system under socialist PASOK and conservative New Democracy.
Iosif Botetzagias, a professor of environmental politics and policy at the University of the Aegean, concurs that “this left very little room for any other party to gain a substantial share of the electoral pie.”
Additionally, Botetzagias says, Greek environmentalists have been unable to adopt or politicize two crucial themes that were instrumental in the success of eco-parties in Europe during the 1970s and 80s: the so-called libertarian issues, encompassing minority rights, civil/political liberties, and anti-militarism, and the matter of environmental protection. These themes had already been embraced by Greece’s New Left parties, particularly the Synaspismos Left Coalition, the forerunner to SYRIZA, leaving their green counterparts without anything new or distinct to contribute.
Simultaneously, the issue of environmental protection has been under the control of and synonymous with major nongovernmental environmental organizations operating in the country since the early 1990s. Organizations such as Greenpeace or WWF have been mostly technocratic and apolitical in their approach.
“As a result, environmental protection was perceived as an issue lying beyond parties and ideologies, to be solved through technical and technological interventions,” explains Botetzagias. “The fate of the environment was seen as being beyond political or party competition.”
Occasional spikes in support for the green parties have primarily come in the form of protest votes – a trend most evident at the peak of the financial crisis Greece went through roughly between 2009 and 2019. In their strongest showing, the May 2012 elections, the Ecologist Greens gathered 185,366 votes, which accounted for 2.93 percent of the total vote, falling just below the parliamentary threshold.
Botetzagias notes that such voting behavior “obviously lacks both continuity and stability over time.”
Economy
While protest voting triggered by austerity may have temporarily boosted electoral support for green parties, the financial crisis did not ultimately benefit the green agenda overall.
“Under the burden of economic hardship, citizens often seek ‘easy’ solutions without giving due consideration to the long-term consequences,” says Michael Bakas, a member of the Ecologist Greens and former North Aegean regional councilor.
For Ioannidis, the fluidity that arose in the social and economic environment during the bailout period not only impeded progress on environmental issues but also led the greens to adopt a political agenda that deviated from their core ecological principles. “This led to a substantial loss of electoral support,” he says.
During some of the most turbulent years of the debt crisis, the Ecologist Greens aligned with the SYRIZA ticket in both the 2015 elections, both of which were won by the leftist party. During the tenure of the leftist-led coalition with the nationalist populist Independent Greeks (ANEL) party, the greens were criticized for not stepping up against the government’s hydrocarbon exploration agreements in the Ionian Sea. Nevertheless, they cooperated again with SYRIZA in the 2019 polls, this time unsuccessfully.
Elias Papatheodorou, who ran as a candidate with Green and Purple in the latest vote, agrees that the decision to join forces with SYRIZA caused significant political damage for the greens.
“The greens relinquished their political autonomy and overly embraced a discourse of protest. But voters did not respond favorably. This has undoubtedly been the greens’ most significant failure,” says Papatheodorou, who has previously served as international secretary for the Ecologist Greens.
In the 2009 European Parliament elections, the Ecologist Greens secured 3.49 percent of the vote, allowing them to elect one MEP. By the time of the 2019 European polls, their share had plummeted to 0.87 percent.
The strain of disappointing electoral outcomes further fueled what Ioannidis identifies as “factionalism, personal conflicts devoid of political substance, and, ultimately, the discrediting of the greens.”
In December 2022, the Ecologist Greens initially agreed to join the Green and Purple alliance, but soon after, they withdrew due to internal conflicts over leadership.
Mainstream hijack
Adding insult to injury, the greens face the challenge that mainstream parties have over the years moved to adopt a pro-environmental discourse. “In the eyes of the voters,” says Botetzagias, “everyone seems to care about the environment.”
Most experts agree the shift is mostly pretextual. “Mainstream parties have indeed shown a clear political shift toward ecology, which of course validates the legitimacy of our proposals. However, they frequently compromise due to political or vested interests,” Ioannidis says, pointing out the case of hydrocarbon development, where “even today, most parties hesitate to firmly reject such practices.”
“Regrettably, mainstream parties fail to fully grasp that the ecological dimension should be ingrained in all policies at every level, rather than treated as a separate and isolated policy,” he says.
Papatheodorou concurs that non-green parties are doing a poor job of promoting genuine environmental policy.
“The most significant risk of the eco-parties’ absence from the Greek Parliament is greenwashing,” Papatheodorou says, slamming the “misguided” policy on climate change, renewable energy transition, and sustainable agriculture.
Environmental groups have strongly criticized the environmental policies of Greece’s center-right government, citing its failure to adequately address the severity of climate change and, in some cases, to uphold EU environmental law commitments. Greece ranks second in the total number of open infringement cases and holds first place in continuous violations of decisions by the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU).
Studies show that the inclusion of green parties in Parliament is more likely to result in the implementation of environmentally friendly and socially beneficial policies.
While Greece’s green politicians find it hard to even win a seat in the House, green parties are coalition partners in six EU countries: Austria, Belgium, Finland, Germany, Ireland and Luxembourg.
Renewal
While acknowledging the significant impact of the devastating wildfires on the islands of Rhodes and Corfu, as well as other parts of Greece, on voters, most experts interviewed for this article concur that Greece’s green parties need to prioritize the restoration of their political independence to gain traction.
“The green movement in Greece finds itself entangled in a ‘watermelon’ logic,” says Papatheodorou, signifying a situation where it appears green on the outside but holds red ideologies on the inside.
He argues that the green movement has achieved success where it has maintained its autonomy and convinced citizens, especially the youth, that it presents innovative solutions to pressing social issues such as unemployment, sustainable economy, transparency, social cohesion, and the well-being of many.
Such a transformation, Ioannidis acknowledges, “cannot happen overnight.” But initiating personnel renewal appears to be a promising starting point.
“It is imperative that new individuals with fresh ideas step forward to restore the credibility of the movement,” he says.
“I think it is essential for veteran figures within the green political movement, who have become closely associated with the failed management of past years, to relinquish the possessive mindset that often defines them.”
The fragility of the Aoos/Vjosa River, which crosses the border between Greece and Albania and represents one of Europe’s few remaining free-flowing waterways, has inspired a multimedia exhibition that seeks to explore the confluence of history, culture, economy, and environmental sustainability.
Photographer Penelope Thomaidi and documentary filmmaker Natasha Blatsiou have been invited by the Vovousa Festival to create a series of works integrating visual and audio elements. Through landscape and portrait photographs, cyanotype prints of plants, oral narratives, and soundscapes, the exhibition, which is curated by Vangelis Ioakimidis, aims to immerse viewers in the ecological diversity and multicultural identity of the area, encompassing the Aoos and its tributaries, the Sarantaporos and Voidomatis.
The show, which is supported by the Athens-based Mediterranean Institute for Nature and Anthropos (MedINA), is being hosted at the Vovousa Water Power Museum in Epirus, northwestern Greece, from July 15 to August 30. Lying at the heart of the Northern Pindos National Park, the village of Vovousa, with its population of 35 inhabitants, is located on the banks of the Aoos. The village has hosted the namesake festival for nine consecutive years.
Thomaidi is returning to the festival for a second year, following her presentation of a photographic investigation into the development of hydrocarbons in Albania and Greece since the beginning of the 20th century, which took place last year.
“This exhibition provided me with the opportunity to further explore the location and the stories that unfold alongside the river, as well as to experiment with various techniques aimed at capturing the diverse layers that constitute a river ecosystem,” the photographer says.
“Through the lens of photography, visitors are able to discover the Aoos River by engaging with scientific data, landscapes, cultural elements, and evidence of the struggles faced by its inhabitants in preserving it as a freely flowing river. We traverse the sources, delve into historical memory, and witness the imminent changes to the landscape,” she says.
Blatsiou’s audio documentary short, “Listen to the River,” captures the sounds, everyday life events, and voices of the people residing in the villages along the Aoos and the Sarantaporos.
“While we usually associate rivers with photographs, maps, discussions about water volume, or fish, the historical aspect often remains ‘muted.’ The river’s rumble, the soundscape, is omitted from the conversation, despite serving as evidence of both history and cultural understanding,” says the documentary maker.
“The river even influences the songs and music of the communities residing alongside it, as well as our own perception. We listen to their surroundings,” she says.
The Aoos/Vjosa River stretches over 270 kilometers (170 miles), beginning from the forest-clad slopes of Greece’s Pindos Mountains and flowing into the Adriatic Sea from the Albanian coast.
In March, the Albanian government officially declared the river and its tributaries a national park, in a bid to preserve what they described as one of Europe’s last wild rivers. As part of this endeavor, plans for eight hydropower stations along the Vjosa and its tributaries were scrapped.
Environmentalists, including MedINA, are urging Greece to expand protection measures for the river on its side of the border. About a third of the river within Greek territory remains unprotected, facing increasing pressure for hydroelectric power plant construction.
Holding Greek flags, opponents of the Prespes Agreement participate in a rally in the northern port city of Thessaloniki, in January 2019. Analysts say the deal, which settled the decades-long ‘Macedonia’ name dispute, was key to boosting Greece’s far-right parties. [AP]
By Harry van Versendaal
New Democracy’s strategy of capitalizing on sensitive political issues that appeal to far-right audiences during Greece’s general election, where the conservatives achieved a landslide victory over their leftist rivals, also fueled the rise of fringe parties, according to political analysts. However, the reasons for the increase in support for these smaller groupings are more extensive and structural, implying deeper underlying causes for their popularity.
The June 25 election witnessed the entrance of three far-right parties into Parliament, including the Spartiates (Spartans), a reincarnation of the Golden Dawn group previously under the political radar until its endorsement from the imprisoned frontman of the now-defunct neo-Nazi organization, Ilias Kasidiaris. Along with the pro-Russian Greek Solution and the ultra-Orthodox Niki (Victory) parties, the far-right secured more than 12 percent of the vote, obtaining 34 seats in the 300-member House. Additionally, populist Course of Freedom, led by former SYRIZA MP and ex-House speaker Zoe Konstantopoulou, garnered 3.17 percent of the vote, a share that gives the party eight seats in Parliament. Despite the party’s roots in the radical left, some analysts now tend to classify it within the LePenist tradition of anti-liberal, populist nationalist parties.
During its first term, the New Democracy government implemented a strict migration policy that Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis claimed resulted in a 90 percent reduction in arrivals. Human rights groups have reacted to what has been a combination of deterrents and counterincentives, including the construction of a fence along the Greek-Turkish frontier in the Evros region, the establishment of closed-structure reception centers, and alleged summary deportations commonly known as pushbacks. Conservative officials have refuted claims that Greece engages in pushbacks. At the same time, they have repeatedly accused SYRIZA of favoring an open-border policy on migration.
Furthermore, after the inconclusive May 21 election, New Democracy accused leftist SYRIZA of playing into the hands of Turkey for failing to react to supposed voter manipulation by the Turkish consulate in the Rodopi constituency of Thrace in northern Greece. Rodopi was the only constituency where ND did not secure a majority.
“When a government boasts about having ‘zeroed out’ refugee flows by demonizing refugees and immigrants, or when it denounces its political opponent as a ‘national exception’ and essentially a puppet of Turkey, it has embraced elements of the far-right agenda, and the far-right feels at home,” says historian and author Stratis Bournazos, drawing parallels with former French president Nicolas Sarkozy who strategically positioned himself between the “old” right and the far-right.
Kostis Kornetis, an expert on 20th century comparative European history, also takes note of the conservatives’ politically expedient discourse, but says it is difficult to determine the extent to which the rhetoric actually influenced the rise of far-right parties.
“During the pre-election period, New Democracy did indeed capitalize on these sensitive political issues in a somewhat risky manner, partly aiming to address the concerns of a broader right-leaning voter base. As is common in such situations, a segment of the electorate ultimately prefers a hardcore nationalist party over a lukewarm, mainstream alternative that merely aims to hold on to voters,” he says.
Turning to the controversy surrounding the Muslim minority vote, Kornetis says: “I believe that New Democracy laid a trap for SYRIZA, and the latter fell into it quite easily. Taking more progressive positions in the minefield of national issues requires caution, especially during a pre-election period. The left-wing party slipped on every banana peel it found along the way, resulting in it being labeled as a ‘national exception.’”
Deeper roots
Vassiliki Georgiadou, a political scientist who has produced extensive literature on the Greek far-right, agrees that there is no evidence to assess whether New Democracy’s narrative about Rodopi affected voter behavior. She, like all other experts interviewed for this piece, believes that the reasons behind the rise of the far-right delve deeper and trace further back into the past.
Georgiadou highlights the pivotal role of the Prespes Agreement signed by the SYRIZA administration in 2018, which settled a 28-year dispute between Athens and Skopje over the use of the term “Macedonia.” Nationalists in both countries still oppose the deal, claiming that it erodes their identity.
“The strongholds of the far-right parties, particularly Greek Solution and Niki, are predominantly concentrated in Central Macedonia and have been significantly empowered by the signing of the Prespes Agreement and the subsequent reactions that persist in these specific regions. Greek Solution emerged as a direct response to the accord, and shortly after, Niki was also established in reaction to the same agreement. Therefore, the settlement of the Macedonia name issue stands as a significant factor in bolstering these parties,” she says, adding that these also gained from New Democracy’s failure to challenge the agreement, as it had promised before the 2019 elections.
“Coupled with the European sanctions imposed on Russia, which the government supported, the far-right parties, particularly Greek Solution and Niki, capitalized on the opportunity to attract voters from the pro-Russian and pro-Putin segments,” Georgiadou says.
In her view, the primary factor driving the Spartiates’ unexpected surge in the elections was the call from Kasidiaris, urging the voters of both Golden Dawn and the Greek National Party (Ellines) to support the GD splinter group. Unlike the other two fringe parties, Spartiates’ influence is not confined to specific geographical areas but has a broad presence across almost the entire mainland and the islands.
New norm
Most experts agree that conservative ideas have become more mainstream; and they are here to stay. After enduring 10 years of economic crisis, immigration crisis, health crisis, and energy crisis, alongside the war in Ukraine, a prevailing sense of insecurity has driven a substantial number of voters to seek more conservative and “secure” solutions – not only in Greece but also across Europe, Kornetis believes.
“The unequivocal doctrine of ‘security’ has, in essence, triumphed over a nebulous, left-leaning humanism. In this regard, we witness a normalization and outright dominance of New Democracy’s right-wing policies,” he says.
Based on data from last year’s annual survey YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project, the Greeks, at 58 percent, were the most likely among western nations to say reducing immigration should be a “high priory” target for their nation. Meanwhile, a poll last month found that seven out of 10 Greeks approve of the Evros border fence.
Will the composition of the new parliament push Greece’s political pendulum even further to the right?
Bournazos has no doubts it will.
“I believe that the presence of ‘three and a half’ far-right parties in the Parliament – and I use ‘three and a half’ because I think Course of Freedom will also ultimately align itself with the far-right – will shift the agenda toward the right,” he says.
Kornetis, on the other hand, believes it is highly unlikely that the center-right government, having all but conquered the middle ground, will be tempted to adopt more extreme positions soon.
“With 40 percent of the vote and a comfortable majority, alongside an almost vanished opposition, they have no incentive to do so. On the contrary, I consider it highly risky, given their clear hegemony in the political center, which could easily lead to disillusionment,” he says.
“Mitsotakis’ choice to appoint several members from PASOK to key ministries, such as Migration and Justice, is a shrewd move reminiscent, to some extent, of President Emmanuel Macron’s strategy in France, leading to the actual co-optation of the center-left,” he says.
Although it does not offer much consolation, analysts draw attention to the fact that it is not the first time Greece has witnessed such high percentages for the far-right. In the May 2012 elections, the populist nationalist Independent Greeks (ANEL) party, which later joined a SYRIZA-led coalition, secured 10.62 percent of the vote, while Golden Dawn won just under 7 percent. Even the crackdown promoted by the murder of anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas in 2013 did very little to curb the momentum of the neo-Nazi party.
Kornetis acknowledges that despite Greece moving into a new historical cycle, departing from the era of international bailouts, fiscal surveillance, and popular anger, there remains an audience that denounces the political system and seeks anti-establishment remedies for its problems.
“The new element, in my opinion, is a more alt-right version of what we saw in the 2010s, with the tie replacing the boot, but also a theocratic, para-ecclesiastical type of far-right entering the Parliament for the first time,” he says.
For Bournazos, Mitsotakis actually holds the key to fighting the trend. He explains that even though his party has managed to firmly position itself in the center ground and the prime minister himself promotes a reformist, liberal profile, the ideology of “country-religion-family” has remained a pivotal force in Greek political history, providing sustenance to both the right and the far-right.
“The great political wager would be if Mitsotakis, with the political dominance he has attained, were to saw off this core, in the way that Konstantinos Karamanlis did in 1974,” he says of the late conservative statesman and New Democracy founder, who is credited with successfully restoring democracy and constitutional government in the country following the end of the military dictatorship.
“Regrettably, the track record of his government during the first term makes me highly skeptical of such a possibility.”
Founded in 2019 by a team of local and international experts based in Athens and the island of Syros, the Archipelago Network has unveiled two new projects dedicated to protecting and revitalizing the rich heritage of the Cyclades. The nonprofit organization’s latest initiatives, made public this week, focus on pottery making on Sifnos and traditional maritime trades and crafts in Greece’s most famous island region.
Sifnos boasts a remarkable legacy in pottery, with over 14 pottery workshops that have been crafting one-of-a-kind ceramic objects for generations. Supported by the Ministry of Culture, the “Pottery of Sifnos” program aims to preserve and promote this tradition, which dates back to the Early Cycladic period.
“Our engagement with Sifnos began when we were approached by local community members involved in the effort to start a museum for pottery on the island,” Archipelago Network founder and lead researcher Jacob Moe says of the Ceramic Museum of Sifnos, which is currently in the offing.
Working in cooperation with the Sifnos Pottery Association and the working group for the Ceramic Museum of Sifnos, the organization is carrying out interdisciplinary research in the field, led by curator Lydia Matthews from the Parsons School of Design and Ioanna Theocharopoulou from Cornell University.
One aspect of the program involves digitizing the photographic archives of eight traditional pottery workshops on the island, as well as valuable diagrams, notes and photographs from the Ceramic Crafts Collection of postwar artist and architect Cosmas Xenakis (1925-1984). Additionally, the initiative aims to create 13 ethnographic documentaries exploring the cultural significance of Sifnian pottery, which will be screened on Sifnos in late June.
“Pottery is closely linked with the island’s culture and economy, and is a successful example of the coexistence of traditional culture and tourism,” Moe says.
“In order for it to survive and evolve, we must support it with institutions and targeted actions,” he says, stressing the need for a museum and a school of fine arts, similar to the School of Fine Arts in Pyrgos on Tinos which specializes in marble craftsmanship.
The Archipelago Network plans to make the fruits of their labors widely available through an open-access archive on their website. The material will also contribute to the Ceramic Museum of Sifnos, cementing the preservation of Sifnian pottery for generations to come.
Sea trades
In parallel, the Archipelago Network’s project on “Maritime Trades of the Cyclades” is designed to preserve the endangered traditional activities associated with the marine environment in the area.
Their motivation was concern that invaluable practices such as wooden-boat building or ship carpentry, small-scale fishing and seafaring are at risk of dying out. Hundreds of Greek fishermen have in recent years voluntarily turned in their fishing licenses and taken their boats to the scrapyard, also in response to financial incentives provided by the European Union as part of a scheme aimed at safeguarding dwindling fish stocks.
“Boatbuilding, small-scale fishing, and the seafaring knowledge related to these professions are all at critical risk, significantly altering the relationship of Aegean island populations with the sea,” Moe says.
With the support of the Costas M. Lemos Foundation, this project employs a multilayered research approach to safeguard the oral traditions, social practices, rituals, festive events and know-how intertwined with the maritime trades of the Cyclades. Focusing on Syros, Paros, Santorini, Amorgos and Koufonisi, the researchers are digitizing audiovisual archives and producing visual ethnographic material in order to document historical evidence as well as contemporary practices.
This data will also become freely accessible on the Archipelago Network’s online platform. In addition to documentation and research, the organization has plans for an in situ program that will include a traveling exhibition and educational workshops. Once again, the ambition is to share their discoveries, as well as their vision, with a wider audience.
“At a time when questions of sustainable development and climate change are at the forefront of EU and national agendas, we can learn from these local forms of knowledge that have operated for centuries with a keen awareness and respect for the marine environment,” Moe says.
Beyond the Aegean
Expanding its reach beyond the Aegean, the Archipelago Network has embarked on two interregional projects: “Communities Between Islands” and “Mirrors: Trans-Mediterranean Archive Dialogue.”
These initiatives will take the team to Mediterranean coastlines and islands that lie farther afield, enabling them to forge alliances with local communities in Beirut, Cairo, Corsica and Sardinia.
Through these interconnected activities, the Archipelago Network strives to nurture diverse forms of material knowledge and cultural practices that address pressing social and environmental challenges.
The number of national flags hung from the balconies of private homes in the streets of the Greek capital grew sharply in the wake of the contentious name deal between Athens and Skopje, according to a new study which explores the impact of symbolic conflict resolution on nationalist sentiment.
According to the study, which was printed in the Journal of Conflict Resolution under the title “Symbolic Conflict Resolution and Ingroup Favoritism,” the effect was more pronounced in Greece’s northern port city of Thessaloniki, which is also the capital of the country’s Central Macedonia region.
The experts, Elias Dinas of the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Sergi Martinez of Princeton University, and Vicente Valentim of the University of Oxford, conducted extensive on-site survey with a team of research assistants, counting the number of flags (the Greek national flag and that featuring the Vergina Sun) hanging from the windows and balconies of private residences in more than 300 randomly selected streets in Athens, three days after Parliament ratified the treaty. The figure was then compared against pre-treaty data on the sampled streets that was collected with the help of Google Maps’ Street View feature. The experts applied a similar methodology in the case of Thessaloniki, this time around eight months after the ratification of the agreement. Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, was used as a control group.
According to the study, flags in Athens almost tripled after the Prespes deal compared to Lisbon, an estimated 197 percent increase. Meanwhile, in Thessaloniki, where the accord was seen as posing a greater symbolic threat, the number of flags multiplied by a factor of six, or by 450 percent.
‘More contagious’
Dinas is keen to draw attention to the public manifestation of nationalist sentiment.
“The public expression of nationalism can be more contagious because it can alter perceptions about how popular one’s own preferences and views are,” he says.
“A sentiment that may feel marginal or even stigmatized, like chauvinism for example, may be perceived as more socially acceptable or even desirable. Finding oneself in a more friendly setting for one’s ideas, one is more likely to express these ideas more clearly – which may sometimes lead to more extreme behavior,” he says.
Signed in June 2018 by the two foreign ministers, Nikola Dimitrov of the ex-Yugoslav republic now known as North Macedonia and Nikos Kotzias of Greece, in the presence of Alexis Tsipras, Greece’s leftist prime minister at the time, and his North Macedonia counterpart, Zoran Zaev, the deal was according to opinion polls opposed by the majority of the Greek public, who rejected it as an appropriation of Greece’s ancient cultural heritage. New Democracy, now in government, voted against the agreement in January 2019, with party leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis calling it “a national defeat… a national blunder that is an affront to the truth and history of our country.” His conservative party went on to win the July 2019 elections with near 40 percent of the vote.
Dinas says that the Prespes accord accentuated nationalist sentiment because individuals understood it as a threat to their group’s distinctive self-understanding.
“The deal shook our group status as it questioned a rigid assumption of exclusiveness that shapes our group identity,” Dinas says.
“This challenge to the monopoly on the Macedonia title produced an almost spontaneous reaction, namely that of doubling down on protecting and strengthening the group identity through an emphasis on the community’s distinguished cultural traits, such as songs, language and history,” he says, adding that the backlash was reinforced by the lack of elite consensus on the issue.
Left-right division
The fieldwork in the study was backed by an analysis of voting patterns which confirmed increased party polarization over the issue, especially in the Greek region of Macedonia. While falling short of significantly influencing the 2019 election outcome, the deal was found to have intensified the left-right dichotomy of the political system.
“It seems to have brought about, or at least contributed to, a very subtle but crucial change in Greek public opinion and party competition, namely formulating an all-encompassing and rather heterogeneous anti-SYRIZA front,” Dinas says.
“In a way, the Prespes deal brought back the good old left-right regularities the country’s political system had been built upon, thereby breaking with the crisis-laden context where attitudes toward the EU, for example, served as a more appropriate shortcut than the standard left-right division to understand Greek politics.”
Spikes in tension between Athens and Berlin during Greece’s 10-year financial crisis caused a dip in German car sales in areas that suffered from Nazi atrocities during the Second World War, according to a study published in the American Political Science Review.
According to the report, titled “Collective Remembrance and Private Choice: German-Greek Conflict and Behavior in Times of Crisis,” the drop in sales was steeper in communities bearing official “martyr” status, a designation associated with state-sanctioned commemoration of the disaster.
“Our findings show that historical memory matters for people’s behavior. When present events remind us of the past, collective memory resurfaces and affects our decisions,” said Vasiliki Fouka, political scientist at Stanford University, who co-authored the study with Hans-Joachim Voth, economics professor at University of Zurich.
Researchers analyzed data on new car registrations across 51 regional units, comparing those with a big share of reprisal towns against their unaffected counterparts (36 suffered reprisals, while 25 include martyred towns), during peaks in tension between Germany and Greece which were calculated based on the frequency of relevant media reports (in fact, the authors applied a machine-learning algorithm on the online archive of Kathimerini newspaper). They found an up-to-17 percent drop in areas most exposed to wartime violence.
The difference between regional units with a heavy concentration of officially recognized martyred towns and the rest was 5.7 percent on average. The discrepancy suggests that official commemoration involving symbolic actions such as memorial services and timed remembrances, parades, monuments, museums and so on reinforces memory preservation among those affected and their descendants. Such institutionalized practices furthermore transmit memory to members of the community with no personal or family experience of past violence. New arrivals also appear to be affected.
“Public commemoration preserves a latent collective memory that is ready to become activated when triggered by salient events,” said Fouka.
“Among Greek towns and villages that experienced German reprisals, those that commemorated the atrocities in some way were more likely to draw an association between the behavior of Germany during the debt crisis and that of the German army during the war. As a result, they were more likely to buy fewer German cars,” said Fouka, adding that evidence on buying intentions shows that it was distaste, not financial strain, which stopped consumers in reprisal towns from purchasing what is an “iconic German product.”
The authors admit they could not establish whether their findings on consumer behavior are mainly a reflection of personal preference – i.e. greater dislike of Germany – or of concern about the social acceptability of purchasing a German product.
The paper did not discuss whether collective memory can be manipulated to produce behavioral effects.
Dormant animosities
Berlin’s hardline economic positions during Greece’s debt crisis, which brought the nation to the brink of a euro exit while shrinking gross domestic product by 25 percent, fueled resentment against Germany and revived long-dormant animosities. Anti-German sentiment was accentuated by populist politicking and tabloid reports employing derogatory or stereotypical language and imagery. When Angela Merkel visited Athens in October 2012, protesters burned effigies of the then German chancellor in Nazi gear.
Hitler’s forces invaded Greece in April 1941. Around 300,000 Greeks died in the occupation, mostly of starvation. An estimated 130,000 were executed in brutal reprisals for acts of resistance or sabotage.
In one of the most abhorrent crimes of WWII, near the town of Kalavryta in the Peloponnese, at least 670 men and boys were massacred on December 13, 1943, in retaliation for the killing of German soldiers.
On June 10 the following year, a Waffen-SS unit burnt the village of Distomo, near Delphi, to the ground and killed 218 civilians in an act of revenge for a partisan ambush on German troops near the village.
Greece up to this day claims Germany owes it more than 300 billion euros in damages for the Nazi occupation of the country.
“It’s time for it to come out,” Pavlos Kozalidis says on a Skype video call from his home in the seaside village of Oropos, northeast of Athens. An astoundingly prolific photographer and a pointedly media-shy figure, Kozalidis, now 60, has spent nearly 40 years traveling around the world with his camera. Over that time, he has very rarely paused to show his images to the public – most notably, in a 2008 solo exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Athens with photographs from the lives of ethnic Greeks in the Black Sea region which confirmed him as an authentic lensman gifted with candid, raw sensitivity. More recently, a period of painful personal loss saw him sink into his China archive. “I got down to business, scanning some 10,000 images,” he says. “It was a lifesaver.”
About 70 of them, all shot on black-and-white film, will go on display next month, once again at the Benaki. Making such a narrow selection was certainly not an easy task. Built over roughly a quarter of a century, the collection has grown to a gasping 120,000 images. Kozalidis first visited the Asian country in 1989, around the time of the Tiananmen Square protests. The Communist government’s bloody crackdown on student-led pro-democracy protests was not what drove him there. “I was looking for the Cultural Revolution,” he says of the decade-long upheaval unleashed by China’s “Great Helmsman,” Chairman Mao Zedong. “Basically, I saw the very, very tail end of that,” he adds, recalling his fascination with the archetypal images he had first encountered in Vancouver Magazine of rice-hatted Chinese farmers plowing their fields with cows. “Always with a smile on their face. It was all very, very patriotic.”
As many as 2 million people died in Mao’s campaign to reinvigorate the Communist revolution by strengthening ideology and purging rivals between 1966-76. “It was one of the most turbulent times in China. It was horrific. People really, really suffered,” Kozalidis says. However, he takes care to emphasize, it was not politics that drove him there, but an insatiable curiosity about the world. “When I started to photograph, I didn’t want to change the world. I wanted to see the world. I wanted to experience the world,” he says. “I was just madly interested in this country. I fell in love with China and its people.” He never depicted the poverty. “I don’t like photographing poverty. It’s like somebody coming to your house with a camera and trying to root out the ugliest things. And where he encountered poverty, he would try to capture it in a way that cherished the dignity of the people. “I was basically invisible. My photography was about people; people without bothering them,” he says. His Greek passport made navigating and interacting with locals a little less difficult, he says. “The Chinese love the Greeks; they really respect this country. We are deeply embedded in their history. We are in their psyche.”
And, indeed, he traveled all around China. Sometimes he would come in through Pakistan, others he would follow the route through India, Nepal and Tibet. He has also crossed into China though Vietnam, Hong Kong and Japan, and once traveled on the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Beijing. He never really planned a route. “I just arrived at places. I did not really follow some great plan. I just wandered around China. I would just get on a train or a bus. I often arrived at some place just because I liked the station and I would get out. And it turned out to be a wellspring of photographs.” Kozalidis was a stranger to comfort, taking long-distance, occasionally perilous journeys on third-class buses and trains, and sleeping at very basic dormitories for foreigners. “You have to have almost a mad curiosity to put yourself through traveling this way,” he says. “Now I am paying for it. My body is wrecked.”
Butterfly effect
Kozalidis was born in the Attica port city of Piraeus. Growing up as a boy in the working-class suburb of Drapetsona, he was familiar with the sight of Egyptian seamen, but had never encountered a Chinese person. His fascination with China would be sparked a few years later in another port city across the Atlantic, in Vancouver, Canada, where his family moved when he was 5. “I was just totally awestruck by them.”
He liked to hang around Vancouver’s Chinatown, started by immigrant laborers in the 1880s, but the pivotal moment came when he visited the house of a Chinese classmate and fellow bully target Peter Wong. The Wongs’ apartment featured all the typical Chinese decoration, and a portrait of Mao hung on the wall just above the refrigerator. “Outside it was a totally different world that I was still learning. And then there was this world of China and this house that overwhelmed me. I just fell in love with these people,” Kozalidis says. He was mostly captivated by the decorative antique boxes with butterflies from around the world – animal symbols of happiness and longevity. “It was the whole house. There were just zillions of butterflies. They were everywhere. It was that house that gave genesis to my curiosity,” he says. Nevertheless, the butterfly effect would kick in around 20 years later, when Kozalidis took his first actual trip to the vast Asian country.
Deeply humanistic
Kozalidis, who has shot in black-and-white as well as color (Kodachrome) in 35mm, 6×6 and panoramic format, would always come back with some stunning shots, drawing on his favorite themes: community life, social traditions, religious rituals. A particularly atmospheric image included in the Benaki exhibition depicts a headless statue of Mao at 798 Art Zone in Beijing’s Dashanzi district. In another, worn-out workers sleep on a train to Urumqi, the capital of China’s far western region of Xinjiang. A stunning shot in a field near the Afghan border shows horsemen playing buzkashi, a rugged equestrian game played for centuries across Central Asia. There are snippets of humor also, like a picture of an elderly storeowner putting on a playful show to demonstrate the use of a dragon mask to the curious photographer.
Aesthetically powerful and deeply humanistic, his images extend on the classical photographic tradition – or “visual language,” as Kozalidis prefers to call it – of Marc Riboud or Henri Cartier-Bresson. Kozalidis nevertheless prefers to keep modest about his artistic aptitude. “I don’t know if I did anything new in photography. I’m sure I didn’t. I would have liked to,” he muses. “The work is so personal that it becomes universal. Because it is not trying to be anything,” he asserts a bit later, in a statement that emits confidence in the value of his work. The body of work no doubt is precious, if only as a historical record. “Visually, I have 35 years of the past world; some 800,000 photographs,” he explains. Kozalidis estimates that by the end of his career, a word that would most likely raise his eyebrow, he will have shot nearly 1 million images. “There is value in that, and I know this,” he says.
As the sheer volume of his output suggests, photography is an obsession for Kozalidis. Besides China, he has photographed in nearly 80 countries, including in South and Central America, Africa, India and Greece. In one of his most ambitious and still not quite complete projects, he has followed the trail of Alexander the Great through the Eastern Mediterranean, Egypt, the Middle East and parts of Asia, “looking for ghosts.” Very little of that work has seen the public light. “I really didn’t care to show. It may sound very arrogant, but it was all for me. I was not doing it for anybody else. I was trying to keep my sanity. Photography gives me purpose, it gives me passion, it gives me all the best things I need to carry on.”
How much longer will his roll of film last? “I have a passion for it and a love for it. I know that if I don’t do it, I get a bit squirrely. And I still have the curiosity. I just hope my body also carries on,” he says.
Unsurprisingly, Kozalidis takes absolutely no interest in social media. “Photography has become so saturated with zillions of photographs and they’re all being shared – and I’ve kept this dinosaur kind of ideology. I made these photographs for myself,” he says. Nor does he see the excess and the narcissism of our image-propelled era as a threat to the craft. “Photography is not art, it is magic,” he says. “It is there to stop time. It is to freeze the beauty of a person to see it in the future. How can that ever go out of style?”
Pavlos Kozalidis’ photo exhibition “House of Butterflies” will go on display at the Benaki Museum’s (benaki.org) Pireos Annex from October 6 to November 20. The exhibition has been curated by Thomas Asimakopoulos and Senka Trivunac.
Stabbed 15 times by her boyfriend, partner violence survivor Italian Laura Roveri is the lead character in director Nina-Maria Paschalidou’s documentary ‘Femicidio.’
By Harry van Versendaal
Laura Roveri will never forget the night she went out to celebrate a friend’s birthday at a Verona discotheque eight years ago. The 25-year-old ended up half dead in hospital with 15 stab wounds – inflicted by her boyfriend.
Roveri, now a women’s rights activist and yoga instructor, is the main character in “Femicidio,” the latest documentary by Athens-based filmmaker Nina-Maria Paschalidou, which will be screened at the upcoming 24th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival in northern Greece. Made over the course of four years, the 70-minute coproduction by Al Jazeera and Sky Italia seeks to explore the notion of femicide, generally defined as the murder of a woman because of her gender.
According to official European Union figures, there are approximately 3,500 intimate partner violence related deaths in Europe every year. That is more than nine victims a day, seven of whom are women. Meanwhile, about 86% of domestic violence cases are never reported to a law enforcement agency.
“What struck me about femicide in Italy was that this is not India, or the Middle East or Latin America, meaning societies which are regrettably used to such attitudes to some extent. This is the heart of Europe. Women here have fought for equal rights in employment and salaries and so on. And yet, things are not what they seem,” Paschalidou tells Kathimerini English Edition.
The director recounts Raveri’s struggle to overcome the physical and mental trauma of the attack and to rebuild her life while seeking justice against her ex-partner. Traveling from the northern cities of Vicenza and Verona to the southern shores of Cava de’ Tirreni and the island of Sicily, Paschalidou also interviews experts, lawyers, activists and, most heartbreakingly, family members of femicide victims, exposing the cultural and social dynamics behind domestic violence.
“We live in a patriarchal society that determines people’s roles and status. Gender division is the most fundamental social cleavage: there are men and there are women. Our entire society is built on this premise,” she says, also drawing attention to the Catholic values that run so deep in Italy, which suggest that a woman’s role is in the home, taking care of her children.
According to a recent survey by AstraRicerche, one in four Italians believe that violence against women is not actually a form of violence. Moreover, 30% of men think that physical abuse against women is less serious when the latter have been accused of showing promiscuous or suggestive behavior – 20% percent of women share the same view.
Shooting a documentary on gender equality and female empowerment was not fresh territory for the Veria-born director, who has in the past worked with international networks such as Al Jazeera, ARTE, RAI and PBS’ World Channel. Her 2013 documentary “Kismet” explores the social impact of Turkish soap operas on women across the Arab world and beyond, while “The Snake Charmer,” released four years later, follows the campaign of a famous Bollywood star to stop violence against women in India.
Paschalidou also takes mainstream media to task for perpetuating traditional gender roles and sexist stereotypes. Scantily clad women parading on stage as the camera zooms in on their busts and other physical features has been a casual – and regular – spectacle on former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s private Mediaset channels and even national broadcaster RAI.
“The model for a period has been either you are a ‘valletta’ (the female television assistants on game shows) or a mother,” Emma Bonino, a veteran Italian politician and civil rights activist, says on the film.
The issue of physical and psychological violence against women has also gained prominence in Greece recently, in the wake of several brutal femicides. Paschalidou says she believes her country “simply followed the trend,” as Covid lockdowns spurred a spike in domestic abuse.
A Eurobarometer poll commissioned by European Parliament ahead of Women’s Day on March 8, found that 77% of women in the EU believe the pandemic caused a rise in gender violence in their countries. In Greece, nine in 10 women agreed.
While acknowledging the long-term merits of education in driving cultural change and improving the status of women, Paschalidou says prevention is a key, immediate step in stemming abuse. “When a woman petitions for a restraining order the fifth time she’s been abused, or when a woman is admitted to hospital with broken ribs for the eighth time, you must intervene,” she says.
But at the end of the day, she adds, much of the responsibility lies with women themselves. “Looking at Italian society, I realized that women themselves espoused the sexism code. The mother of Laura’s boyfriend would scream out of the window, calling her a ‘hoor.’ It’s the kind of attitude you see in old Italian and Greek movies,” she says.
“The change needs to come from us women changing the way we bring up our sons. I often catch myself telling my boy things that underscore gender distinctions, like: ‘don’t do that, it’s for girls.’ This is something we need to work on. This is why I dedicated this film to my son. I, too, am responsible.”
Boatbuilder Mastro-Yannis Zorzos and his barber. Fouskis Boatyard, Syros, 1980. [Archipelago Network]
By Harry van Versendaal
Sometimes it takes an outsider to appreciate the value and fragility of a local culture. An ambitious new initiative by local and international experts aims to collect, preserve and disseminate the largely untapped and endangered audiovisual heritage of Greece’s Cyclades islands by creating an online archive and a residency program.
Archipelago Network is the brainchild of Jacob Moe, a New York City-born documentarian and translator who shares his time between Athens and Syros, the administrative capital of the country’s most-visited island group. Speaking in a video call from his home in a village on the island’s largely undeveloped northern side, the 31-year-old says the idea dawned on him around five years ago while he was running a film festival at different locations in collaboration with various communities around the island.
“We came into contact with people who possessed audiovisual collections of their own, primarily 16mm and Super 8 film shot in Syros in the 1960s and 70s,” Moe says.
As he quickly found out, the vulnerability and the precarity of the aging analog content required more attention and better organization than the ephemeral festival format provided.
“The idea was born out of this need to begin preserving these materials in a systematic way. We felt they were neglected and very unique to the culture and the landscape of the Cyclades,” he says.
In the process, he realized more was at stake.
“Audiovisual archives have a unique ability to embody subjectivity, emotion and affect,” Moe says.
“By preserving endangered collections of material, we can effectively safeguard vanishing aspects of our not-too-distant past, gaining a better understanding of ourselves, of others, and our shared future,” he says.
The Archipelago Network archive consists of films, photographs, videotapes, audio cassettes and sound recordings, including interviews, field recordings and oral histories from the late 1800s until the appearance of born-digital content on the islands today. It expands as more material is digitized.
‘Living archive’
The goal is to move beyond the traditional notion of the archive as a static repository of data and information toward a more renewable, open-access platform – “a living archive,” as Moe calls it.
“Forget the idea of a hushed library where you approach a material with the consent of a librarian and white gloves before carefully browsing through the available information. We hope it will be something much more contemporary,” he says.
The team will also establish a research-based residency on Syros so individuals from a wide scope of disciplines can engage with the collected archival material and communicate it to a broader audience at home and abroad.
“This will allow it to depart from this purely archival realm of classification and information to become stories and narratives,” Moe says.
The organization relies on an array of specialized advisers both in Greece and abroad providing ad hoc know-how on issues like copyright law, content management and organizational development.
“The scope is inherently both local and international, so it’s something that needs input from experts and researchers who are also outside of Greece but have some kind of a stake in the islands,” Moe says.
Moe, whose mother is a professor of modern Greek literature at Columbia University, was himself raised speaking Greek, although he has no Greek ancestry. Many of his formative years were spent in Greece, on visits to Athens and the islands for summer vacations and his mother’s research sabbaticals. Upon graduating from Pomona College in California, he came to Greece, where he co-founded the Syros International Film Festival (SIFF) in 2013. After pursuing further studies and work in Sao Paulo, Brazil and Santa Cruz, California, in 2019 he returned to his festival duties on Syros while working to materialize the whole concept of Archipelago Network.
Ships and herbs
The network itself has been developed in collaboration with the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), which has also thrown its weight behind the first two pilot projects that formally launched on February 15.
One is an archival module on traditional shipbuilding on Syros. It involves the digitization of audiovisual materials from private and public local collections such as the Industrial Museum of Ermoupoli in the island’s elegant 19th century capital, and the production of five video portraits of surviving representatives of the dwindling craft. In parallel, architecture and ethnography experts have been conducting on-site fieldwork on the social, cultural and economic dimensions of traditional boatbuilding.
Syros emerged as the main industrial, commercial and shipbuilding center of the modern Greek state founded after the War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire, until it was eclipsed by Piraeus.
For the second project, named Anthemis after a flower that is native to the area, organizers invited Tinos-based multidisciplinary artist duo Hypercomf (Paola Palavidi and Ioannis Koliopoulos) to Syros for the development of an online herbarium that will host photo quadrats of plant biodiversity, linking them with community archives. It will include photographs, sketches and audio recordings made by botanists, artists, and plant enthusiasts on the island. A portable toolkit for collection of botanical data, fitted inside a custom-made hiking backpack, will soon be available for use by community groups and schools.
“We are basically using the original archives as a jumping-off point for a community-driven plant archive,” Moe says.
Open access
True to the spirit of initiatives like the EU’s Europeana web portal, Archipelago Network aspires to be an example of open and reusable digital cultural heritage.
“If we’re going through all of this effort to preserve and document these archives, then they really should be available for public viewing and reuse,” Moe says.
“Prioritizing ethical open access is at the core of our mission,” he says.
With the fervent social media-driven celebrity culture already taking its toll on the Cyclades, some are naturally wary of initiatives that aim to create additional interest in its once-pristine islands. Moe is however confident about the sustainable nature of the project, believing it can foster that substantive kind of engagement with a specific place, its history and culture in a manner that is neither passive nor damaging.
“One thing that is definitely on our minds very much is the pace at which the elements that are the focus of this archive are vanishing, which make it all the more urgent,” he says.
“The notion of endangerment is viscerally present for us. There is no next generation.”
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