HERO Heritage Restoration Workshop Organization Video

This Anthology is a part of the ‘Adelos’ project, developed by the interdisciplinary team of Boulouki in collaboration with the Ephorate of Antiquities of Cyclades and the French School at Athens, with primary funding from The J.M. Kaplan Fund. The project focuses on the restoration of a vernacular farmhouse on Delos – the “Farmhouse of Markos” or “Madoupas’ place” – and the study of the agricultural heritage of the complex of Delos, Rheneia, and Mykonos. The following pages emerged from the project’s ethnographic research, which was supported by the Cycladic Identity Initiative of the Museum of Cycladic Art.

As a word, “anthology” points back to the gathering of flowers. But it is a word of books rather than of fields, and the people who speak in these pages would perhaps not have chosen it. Theirs, though, is the gathering: the wild greens and the mushrooms, the water from the old wells, all that the place and its seasons offer. Alongside that gathering, our own takes place: the testimonies and images that follow were gathered little by little, through successive journeys – and are being gathered still. The voices multiply, the material grows, our understanding deepens and is often revised; along with it, the texts themselves will be reworked. Even so, we wanted to give the first findings a narrative form now: to return to the people and to the place what they entrusted to us, while the conversation with them remains open. This is why we do not think of the Anthology as a final object but as a first gathering – a living one, which in the months and years to come will grow richer and ripen together with the project.