PROJECTS
toponimio
Exploring and mapping toponyms of the Greek territory
2020 – ongoing
From a young age, I remember going on car trips with my parents, reading signs with the names of the areas we were passing through in an attempt to orient myself, looking at maps, and creating mental images of how the places we hadn’t visited might look. I would wonder about the origins of their names.
Toponimio was born during lockdown. One day, I entered Google Maps and started searching for place names and noting them down. I began by randomly navigating the map of Greece, starting, for example, from the outskirts of Drama (which, yes, means ‘drama’ in Greek too). Within a few days, I had already found around 100 place names through my virtual journeys on Google Maps. From the beginning, the primary criterion for selecting a toponym was that it be funny, either etymologically or grammatically. The purpose of the page is not only to discover place names, and perhaps by extension places we’ve never heard of, but also to laugh. Ultimately, it’s quite surreal to see the toponym Παππούς (‘grandfather’) on the map and realise it’s just a small rocky island. This project can serve as a trigger for its followers to search for more information about something that might interest them. The fact that each post provides a minimum of information about each place and does not focus on travel information – as is already the case on so many other pages – is intentional. Toponimio aims to stimulate a process of search and exploration, encouraging the discovery of the Greek landscape from a different perspective.
Dafni Riga 