The Formation of the Greek Landscape

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The subject of this presentation is the Greek landscape as the result of interaction of natural and/or human factors. The talk will give us the opportunity to “visit” some of the most prominent and culturally rich sites in Greece, most of which are near Patras and have been inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage Sites List. Rather than just looking and describing the monuments, the speaker will explore their special features that introduce us to the characteristics of the Greek landscape, as a cultural manifestation of its inhabitants through the millennia. For this reason the sites are attributed to different types of landscape (e.g. the heroic, the universal, the sensuous, the imagined, the spiritual etc.). The typology is tentative and serves as a starting point for further discussion about the concept of landscape.

Helene Simoni is an archaeologist, and a member of the Laboratory Teaching Staff at the University of Patras with an M.A. in Landscape studies and a PhD in the use of GIS in Urban Cultural Resource Management. She is responsible for implementing theoretical and laboratory courses for undergraduate Geology students, in the fields of GIS/ Remote Sensing and Cultural Resource Management. In addition, she lectures on Greek landscape, Archaeology and Cartography for the international students of the university. She is a founding member of the Landscape Archaeology Group and the Institute of Local History.

Event photo © Vassilis Zogopoulos

Greek Landscapes, Language and Culture is a series of online talks in English, organised by The Hellenic Centre and Εργαστήριο Ελληνικής Γλώσσας και Πολιτισμού (Greek Language & Culture Lab, University of Patras).

See all the other lectures in this series here.