Excerpt from Despotiko: A Refuge for Boats, Chapter 5: Contemporary Islandscapes, pp. 173-179 | Master Thesis | Politecnico di Milano 2019

An important phase of this research has been the visits to the site and the attempts to become familiar with it. When entering a site such as Despotiko, so pure and uncontaminated by human action, the landscape itself becomes the subject. My aim has been to understand the context, decode the landscape and its impact on humans. As archaeologist Christopher Tilley (1994) puts it, “an unfamiliar landscape remains invisible. You do not know where, or how, to look. This process of observation requires time and a feeling for the place. After being there, after making many visits to the same locales, the intensity of the experience heightens. Monuments that were initially hidden from view on a first visit to a place can now be seen, and patterned relationships between sites and their settings become apparent.” In this sense, understanding a place can be perceived as a non-exhaustive task: the researcher can keep discovering new elements in eternity, since the place itself acts as a living organism. 

Despotiko might be a deserted island, but when one visits it, they can feel an implicit human presence, be it the ancient ruins, the animal pen or the Byzantine church. Nature is demonstrating its dominance over artificial structures and makes the visitor reflect on its importance. This feeling is effectively verbalised by Tilley (1994): “the landscape is an autonomous sculptural form always already fashioned by human agency, never completed and constantly being added to, and the relationship between people and it, is a constant dialectic and process of structuration: the landscape is both medium for and outcome of action and previous histories of action. Landscapes are experienced in practice, in life activities.” 

Experiencing the site through different forms of movement has been vital to this research. Surrounded by water, the landscape becomes a seascape and incites the visitor to explore this particular dimension. Different sets of information were obtained by various forms of movement: sailing around the islands and observing their shores and hills; hiking at the interior of Despotiko, were the sea is always visible but distant. The change of scale and environment implies a shift in the sensory perception and the hierarchy of information. “A monument or place encountered in the course of a walk between places is an altogether different matter. Approaching it slowly, from different directions and anticipatory arriving, it is possible to observe in a much more subtle manner the way in which it is related to its physical surroundings, the lie of the land” (Tilley: 1994). 

This process of ambulation and directionality is undoubtedly correlated with architecture and the insertion of it into the landscape. When it comes to ancient temples, researchers argue that the study of the landscape was primordial for the conception of a building. According to Vincent Scully (1963), who extensively studied ancient Greek temples, a way of adapting to the landscape was by using the slope as an occasion to create the building layout. While the temples do not offer comforting interior space, they created an exterior environment as sculptural forces: “each building in a temenos makes its own statement which is enriched during constructive phases, making a fuller language of the whole”. Upon reaching a sacred site, Tilley argues that “in the process of movement the landscape unfolds or unravels before the observer. Beyond one chain of hills another is revealed; the view from a locale makes sense of its positioning.” Consequently, someone walking towards the Temple of Apollo on Despotiko might think that the subject is reaching the temenos itself; however, once being inside the temenos, one understands that the subject is the surrounding landscape, and that the position of the building was chosen as a medium to observe the context itself. “Places and landscapes are created and experienced through mobility as much as stasis, through the manner and sequence in which they are explored and sensed, approached and left” (Tilley: 2004) 

Since the site is both a landscape and a seascape, it is crucial to understand the parameter of the sea and the way it relates to the land. Islands are usually perceived as enclosed entities, and especially when sailing around their rocky shores, one gets a feeling of isolation and unreachability. Water is thus ascribed the role of an obstacle, a limit or a frontier. Michel de Certeau (1984), analysing the theoretical and practical dimension of this subject, argues that “the river, wall or tree makes a frontier, it does not have the character of a nowhere that cartographical representation ultimately presupposes. It has a mediating role. The limit creates communication as well as separation; it establishes a border by saying what crosses it, having come from the other side. The frontier acts/functions as a third element, an ‘in-between’, a ‘space between’.” The purpose of this research is to highlight the less pronounced dimension of water, the one that acts as a surface of communication. “The water points to something beyond itself; it acts as a bridge, spanning the gap from physical reality to symbolic surreality […] but it is also invested with an intangible presence, made evident by its undulant nature: as it flows, surrounds and swirls, it remains ungraspable and uncontainable” (Moore: 1994). Water can be thus interpreted as a metaphorical bridge, where the medium to cross its surface is the boat; the latter becomes a structural element of the bridge, a cog that renders connection possible. De Certeau argues that “the bridge is ambiguous everywhere: it alternately welds together and opposes insularities, it distinguishes them and threatens them. It liberates from enclosure and destroys autonomy.” If we substitute the word ‘bridge’ by the word ‘boat’, we obtain the theoretical essence of the latter, which in effect characterises the history of the Greek islands through time and their indissoluble link with the seascape. 

Choosing to study the bay of Despotiko for this project has been challenging to some extent, since the purity and integrity of the landscape seem to be willing to remain untouched by the human hand. However, the feeling obtained from visiting and analysing the site could not have been better expressed than in the words of Luigi Ghirri (2016): “Perhaps in the end the places, objects, things or faces encountered are simply waiting for someone to look at them, to recognise them without contempt, without relegating them to the shelves of the endless supermarket of the outside world. Perhaps these places belong to our existence more than to modernity – and not only to the ‘deserts’ or ’desolate’ lands. Perhaps they are awaiting a new vocabulary, new figures, because the ones we know are worn out, and because many of them have not constituted mere changes in the landscape as much as changes in life.” 

Bibliography

DE CERTEAU Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, transl. Steven Rendall, University of California Press, USA, 1984 

GHIRRI Luigi, “For an Idea of Landscape” in The Complete Essays 1973-1991, Mack Books, London, 2016 

MOORE Charles W., Water and Architecture, Harry N. Abrams, London, 1994 

SCULLY Vincent, The Earth, the Temple and the Gods. Greek Sacred Architecture, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1963 

TILLEY Cristopher, A Phenomenology of Landscape. Paths, places and monuments, Berg Publishers, Oxford, 1994 

TILLEY Cristopher, “From Body to Place to Landscape: A Phenomenological Perspective” in The Materiality of Stone, Berg Publishers, 2004 

© Dafni Riga 2020