Our Land

Our Land

Our Land

 

This article focuses on a small community in the village of Kampos, on the Greek island of Tinos in Greece. In studying the history of the island of Tinos and its villages, it becomes evident that the relationship of the villagers to the land and the landscape is vital for an understanding of the architecture and of daily life. Hierarchy and the allocation of land plays an important role.

 

What is life like for the inhabitants of a farming landscape? This cannot be answered only through architectural drawings, or by studying descriptions of the village’s architecture nor by analyzing anthropological references. Through narratives that bring out the reality of the village, one becomes aware of the value of metaphor as the natural language of a communal life that is inextricably connected to the natural, built environment, which in turn is connected to ownership and a different perception of the value of land.

 

Different and more grounded versions of reality emerge through metaphor, narrative and fiction. They equip architects with a way of interpreting local tradition as a contemporary way of living and innovating, instead of responding to architecture and dwelling through form and fashion. In other words, they force architects to tap more into the social and ethical function of architecture, to engage in “meaningful regionalism” in Perez Gomez’s terms, related to humans and the environment. The methodology of narrative, metaphor and fiction developed in this paper focuses on an aspect of the crisis facing architecture today: In the search for a highly technological, sustainable function of architecture, what is built remains disconnected from humanity and environmental reality. In the methodology proposed, place can be perceived and understood through various versions of reality. This allows the role of the architecture behind a built work to be interpreted as incorporating the wider complexity of life. By adopting fiction and narrative through the use of phenomenology and hermeneutics, the intention was to introduce another architectural dialogue, based on language, words and narrative, as what Perez-Gomez calls a “space of experience”. Fictional narratives were created out of the villagers’ stories, their spaces, their life with animals, their common life. However, the various plots of these narratives and the story excerpt which follows are imaginary. Through these, one becomes fully aware of Ricoeur’s claim that words in a sentence can reveal a discourse in the world, endowing language with the function of creating images.

 

This methodology is introduced through an excerpt from a fictional narrative, one of the eight fictional narratives from the PhD thesis “Liminality, metaphor and place in the farming landscape of Tinos: the village of Kampos”.

 

Fictional Narrative (excerpt): Our Land

It was 8 o’clock in the evening at the end of October and already dark . Usually, the village streets are empty at that time. Often, one might hear the sounds of animals or the wind when it picks up, but nothing else. However, that day, there were people coming and going. Men from different parts of the village were gathering at Nikiforos’ caffenio (coffee shop). Nikiforos had already placed an old wood burning stove in the middle of the room. On that particular day, there was an extra table in the middle of the space of the caffenio, right next to the stove. The priest, Father Giorgis, sat there, with his black leather folder directly in front of him. He also had all his papers spread out on the table and was taking notes with an old pencil, stopping only to cough. He wanted to be certain not to miss any rent or comment that had to be included in the church’s notebook. Most of the villagers were sitting by the timber surface, which rose to one meter along the walls of the caffenio. Although this would happen rarely, that evening all the seats at the tables against the walls were taken, so villagers began sitting at the few tables between the wall and the centre of the room. Nikiforos was standing behind the wooden counter, next to the entrance and he seemed busy preparing small carafes with raki and small dishes of dry nuts. The space had a heavy smell of burnt wood, mixed with the strong odour of raki (a local alcoholic drink). Everybody was speaking loudly as if what they were saying was very important and they were sipping their raki with slow and deliberate movements. Rita, accompanied by her mother Roza, sat at one corner.

“Is there anyone else interested in Levadakia?” Father Giorgis’ voice was heard.

“Where would we find someone interested in this area, Father Giorgis?” Manolis wondered.

“For Levadakia, write down the name of my father-in-law,” Manthos said.

“Livada? Was it four hundred euros?” Giannis’ voice piped up from the back of the room.

“For a year, yes,” Father Giorgis said.

 “Eeeeh, I should take it,” Giannis went on.

“Does Iosif know about this?” Michalis intervened.

“Is the priest talking about a fee for two years or for one year?” I asked.

“For a two-year lease mpaktonete (method for renting the fields) but the fee is for one year,” Giannis answered.

“Lakka, didn’t Vidalis want it?” Father Giorgis went on.

“He is not here.” Manolis objected.

“He said that he wanted Katsarado. I don’t know. If it is cheap, I can take it, too.” Michalis went on. I nodded in agreement with my head, and continued staring at the floor.

“If no one wants Lakka, I’ll take it!” Antonis, Mathios' son, spoke up.

“Thomas knew about this. He should have been here,” Father Giorgis explained.

Giannis nodded in agreement. As tension rose in the atmosphere of the caffenio, he added:

“Logically, everyone should have been here otherwise we cannot complete the process. What is left for the church stays with the church.”

“At a moment I understand that he wanted to “play around” and not to pay the church. He said that he would take it only for one hundred and fifty euros and then I said that I was willing to pay two hundred and fifty euros, so I took it.”Antonis said.

“Well, can I say something?” said Giannis’ in his heavy voice . “I’ll make a deal for two hundred euros for the field up there, in my area, because I want to plant crops there. Otherwise, it is not worth anything, go ask Iosif. You know who I am talking about: the previous tenant. Let me know, because I will take it and I will make it zevgari (plowed). Otherwise, it has no value.”

“First of all, a good arrangement in my mind is being able to leave this room with

no hard feelings between us all. Michalis said conscientiously.

“No, we shouldn’t break our hearts, I am just letting you know my intentions,” Giannis explained.

“Can I ask you something, Giannis? If someone plows the field next year, do you intend to take it again?” Manthos asked.

“No Manthos, I don’t.” 

At that point, Father Giorgis intervened.

“When I was a priest in Kampos in 1994, all the villagers agreed that if someone ekane zevgari (plows), he could then have it for four years.” But Giannis interrupted him.

“Let me tell you something, Manthos. If your nephew wants to kanei zevgari he has to do it four times. That would cost one hundred and sixty euros and an equal amount for the seeds. The total cost would soon reach five hundred to six hundred euros.”

“Ok, I understand.” Manthos confessed.

 

The conversation went on for at least an hour and a half. That year, the Kantos was not as efficient and well organized as last time, two years ago, when all the farmers and breeders were there. They would probably have to meet again the following Sunday. This turned out to be the same as the previous Sunday. Some of the farmers were not there, so the ones that did turn up had to remember which ones from the previous tenants would be still interested in the church’s fields. If they did that, they might be able to avoid conflicts and misunderstandings. I kept on staring at the floor thinking: If I could lease my plots of land for the next two years to plow them and sow seeds, I could provide food for my animals. Over the past two years, things have changed. Fodder price has been increasing and I have to be far-sighted. 

 

The nights were already very cold in the village. Most of us had turned on our electric blankets on our freezing beds before going to bed. I left the coffeehouse after a few shots of raki and headed home. I passed by the choreftra, our old communal open space. The full moon cast shadows upon the belfry of the church of Saint Ekaterini. It was a humid, cold night and there was no wind at all. I passed underneath the vaulted arch below Marioga’s house. The scent of night flowers in her courtyard tinkled my nose in the coolness of the night. I climbed up the steps and passed underneath the area where we hang our laundry early in the morning. Next to the kitchen doorstep, I stood gazing at the silver reflection of Exombourgo Rock far away in the moonlight. No matter how many years, or how many nights I had looked at it, Exombourgo, in its ice-silver color under the moonlight, still filled me with awe. 

I walked into the kitchen. My sister had left an okra stew with tomato sauce for me for my evening meal and she had switched on the electric blanket. As I never got married, she liked to look after me this way, even though she already has a large enough family. This is why I bequeathed a piece of land in Messaria to both her older sons Marcos and Antonis and another in Tsekina to the younger one Nikolas, even though I know that they would not carry on the family’s name and only one bore my name.

(continued)

I woke up at around 7 in the morning. The sun hadn’t risen yet behind the hills of Komi. Our village is the last to be reached by the sun rays every morning. I took the path at the periphery of the village to the other side. I wanted to avoid meeting my older sister, Tassia, who was upset with me because of a conflict over a piece of land that was adjacent to hers, the one with the olive trees. On this side of the village, the gardens were busy as usual at that hour, as some of the housewives were already there to feed their rabbits and pick the vegetables for that day’s meals. I crossed the main roadway, where Manolis, the topographer, was waiting for me.

“Eeeeeeh, Good morning,” I shouted to him and as he turned his head surprised, he shouted back:

“Good morning. It’s very humid up here.” His car windows were starting to get wet in the morning mist.

I got into his car and started giving him directions so that we would reach the farm road and then drive along the path for as long as it was wide enough. We stopped over Flegomeni. There was no farmed land there. It was hard to discern the boundaries. 

“Look at that,” I said with despair, before getting out of the car, “I think that soon you and the other topographers may not be able to tell where these fields end and where they begin.” We got out of the car: “Tomorrow, they will not be able to tell the boundaries of the fields. They gradually disappear too.”[…] They are falling, who will build them? Εeh, this slope is finished; tomorrow they will not be able to tell their property apart, there are no people available to see to that. If I were to leave now, go to Kionia and take care of my animals, there would be no one there, everybody else has retired.” I was so worried about this situation that I had asked Manolis to come with me today. I had also asked the warden to join us, but he was not able to come.

“We have to install a wire mesh, Marcos. The stone walls have crumbled. Who is going to rebuild them?” Manolis was pensive. 

We stood at the edge of my field and looked west toward the area of Ktikados. The morning sun hadn’t reached this area yet and the land looked inhospitable and cold.

“I have a field that was bequeathed to me by my late mother. When I measure it on paper, it was supposed to be three stremmata (acres), when actually, it was thirty. In other words, it was part of a simblie (traditional word used to refer to good neighbours), next to Tasos’ land, next to Antonis, putting their names up was a way of making it theirs. Now, writing down land on paper, we have to pay money, if your wallet is full and you are willing to pay, everything can be settled.”

Marcos, there are contracts,” Manolis tried to reassure him, “even if the measurements are not accurate and we have to guess the zevgaries for some of them, there are still reference points, such as the stone storage huts. Then, there are also the siblios (neighbours).”

“They do not know where the boundaries are; they may exist on paper, but take me, I know where everything is, where the water is, the pathway, you know I know so, because I’ve also told the priest. I told him, Father, I had twenty sheep, I gave back thirty, this was good. The following year, I didn’t keep ten females, there were only five, ten died, others got mixed up, they were lost. That’s what the village is like, there are no children left and villages vanish. That’s life in the village, there used to be more of us, but not anymore. Everybody who owns something, knows so from their father, their grandfather. There used to be no papers, or there would be papers, but they would refer to an entire piece of land as a whole” “This coming Friday, let’s go to Rochi together. I want to show you something else.”

Manolis remained silent gazing down the hill towards the sea. He had to take measurements on Marcos’ fields for a new topographical drawing for him.

“I understand what you mean.” he confessed. “When I was looking for a piece of land, sometimes the only way to find it was to go to the caffenio in the village and talk with the expert witness of the village and find the siblios, who then came with me to identify all the points of the land, so that we were able to define its boundaries. I think that nowadays, with aerial photographs, things like that are much easier than before. But where do the boundaries of Kampos end? How come you have land in Rochi? I thought that only people from Smardakito had their properties over there.”

Manolis, the topographer, seemed unsure about how things were on the island. Anyway, he wasn’t dhikos mas (one of us), not even from the island. 

 

The excerpt about life and land in Kampos is accompanied by a extensive interpretation of the meaning of property, water, community, conflict, the need for order and coexistence with nature. It is also infused by the kind of awareness defined by Emmons, Fenerstein, Dayer and Phinney that “drawing, like storytelling, exists across the ambiguous dimension of reality and fiction”. “Architects actively construe stories while drawing; and the ways these stories are constructed are inseparable from the way a project is designed”. The book Confabulations: storytelling in architecture illustrates Frascari’s exploration of architecture as an art that seeks an “expansion of architectural potential, integrating poetry and technique so as to engender, it may be hoped, fabulous buildings”. This volume emphasizes the role of narrative as an essential tool of design. The authors wish this to convey a more substantive understanding of what storytelling may offer to architecture.

 

Interpretation of places and spaces in the narrative

In the village of Kampos and the surrounding villages, every two years, usually in October or later and depending on the local priest’s availability, the villagers take part in Kantos as in this fictional narrative. The farmers bid for the best fields according to their needs and the location of the land. This takes place at the caffenio of the village, turning the space into a contemporary arena of social interaction and competition.

According to Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition, property is not necessarily connected in this case to wealth: “originally, property meant no more or less than to have one’s location in a particular part of the world and therefore to belong to the body politic, that is, to be the head of one of the families which together constituted the public realm. This piece of privately owned world constituted the public realm.” They participate as members of a social group representing their families and the village itself. This is why according to Arendt property is not connected necessarily in our case with wealth, but with a form of “citizenship” in the public realm of the village.

 

Kantos at the caffenio of the village

The term Kantos derives from the Italian word cantos, which means open auction (usually by bidding). It takes place in all the villages of Tinos and is held both by official communities and sometimes by private citizens. Though the process is verbal there is, with few exceptions, a recorded declaration (announcement). When this was organized by the Community, proceedings were drawn up after the process, as Danousis claims in his research.

The Kantos takes place in the village every two years. The lease of the land can expand to areas around the village. The actual expression that was used by the villagers for this specific event was “call the Kantos.” This term originates many years ago, when a crier would announce the Kantos in the village, and the fields that would be either leased by the church or sold as private property. The crier also informed that the Kantos would end in 15 days. At the end of these 15 days, fields with a starting price of ten thousand drachmas, may have reached the value of thirty thousand drachmas. Nowadays, things have been simplified, considering that the Kantos takes place only for church property leasing, and specifically on Sunday, and there are fewer farmers. Thus, there may be five people who bid and compete for one field, while in past there might have been ten farmers bidding for one field. This gave the event greater weight and the outcome had a more serious and grave impact on the farmers. The farmers would evaluate the different locations, the value of the land depending on its characteristics, whether it could be used for grazing or cultivation and what kind of crops would be appropriate.

Kantos has a special meaning in the farmers’ lives, involving a bodily and social interaction through language. Johnson claims that “meaning is thus both (1) grounded in our bodily interactions - in the qualities and the structures of objective situations; and (2) always social because it would not exist in its fullness without communicative interactions and shared language, which give us the means of exploring the meaning of things.” 

The whole event of Kantos involves a form of competition among the farmers of Kampos. Ιn our case, a competition is initiated by the institution of the church and the villagers compete for the church’s land, which is leased, rather than bought. Thus, the villagers participate in a land auction in which the authority remains with the Catholic Church. On those nights, the space of the caffenio becomes a space of constant negotiation, of biding and competing for land, with the priest sitting in the middle of the room representing this authority of the church over the land. This dates back to medieval times when bishop Giustiniani tried to create a cadastre that would give the church control over the land on the island of Tinos. For their part, the villagers compete for a resource available to all of them.

The meaning and value of land in the village

Marcos often speaks about contracts related to his land, property and siblios (neighbours). In the recent past, the value of land was not measured in surface area, but in terms of how much could be farmed and the size of its yield. In the contracts, what counted were the days it took a pair of cows to plow the land. The acres did not matter as a measure of wealth.

The landscape is conceived and understood differently through farming. This is also because the property of each family is divided into small pieces spread over the surrounding area of the village. The farmer has to follow a specific route everyday to reach them. “Every farmer had between 4 to 12 plots, which means anything from 15 minutes to 2 hours to get from one to the other.”

Working with nature, which–for the island and village setting–means dry land and lack of rain, the farmer seems to nurture day by day a bond with what he or she can actually never own, nature. Farmers work constantly on the earth: They follow an annual schedule of sowing for every plant, they wait for the rain, they fallow their land, they share machinery, water, land, they enter in agreements with those who have wells in exchange for farm produce. All this activity is based on the need to cultivate. Boundaries become permeable for the farmers so that they may own the products of nature: wine, olive oil, vegetables and fruit.

“From the earth and the sea comes everything. Τhe bread, the vinegar, the olive oil, everything needs work so as to be made. Only God spoke and created, man needs to make,” as Barba Marcos says. Although they live in an era when everything is available at the supermarket, the work for their own vegetables, vinegar, wine and olive oil produce according to a plan. In an effort to own the products of nature, village boundaries disappear from the peasants’ everyday routine, their house and family name extend far into the fields through family members' wills. The property boundaries of water and land merge, in order to allow for a good production.

On the other hand, the walls separating properties represent border agreements. In daily practice, one can cross them and even tear them down, as animals often do. But more importantly, each wall represents an agreement and a negotiation.The low stone walls define the properties in the village landscape and affirm their limits, but at the same time define perhaps a competitive relationship and kind of communication as a result of either an agreement or disagreement.

The fact that in some cases, as narrated in the present article, the stone walls of a property do not necessarily represent to a fixed boundary, allows the creation of a contact zone, an intermediate space of communication, and a space of conflict and agreement. The owners need to conclude an agreement. The un-objectifiable and, in some cases, flexible boundaries create a threshold of communication, and a different need for a claim of ownership, which extends to the villagers’ everyday life. This also creates a situation of coexistence and cohabitation.

However, the conflicts and agreements on disputed and indefinable boundaries or the village’s common land create a different type of bonding/ownership for the villagers, not only with their land, but also with the broader area of their village. There is a communal perception based on a communal awareness, too, which also affects the farming landscape and the way people in the village inhabit it.

 

 

Taking care of the family land

Marcos is indicating another connection of the villagers to their land and their family. This action reveals “interconnections between the pattern of naming children, their rights to family property, and their obligations.” “Houses and fields are passed on from parents to children with particular items of property going to certain individuals because of the particular Christian names they were given,” as Margaret E. Kenna reports for a similar situation on Anafi, an island southwest of Tinos. Continuity is achieved for the family name in the land and landscape of the village, as well as a bond of the family members, with the family, the land and the village as well. “A consideration of this salient feature of the physical landscape leads to an examination of key principles and values of the social landscape,” as Kenna claims. “These principles and values are used to interpret, justify and evaluate behaviour in different ways at various points in the domestic cycle.” 

A different situation arose when a piece of land was inherited by the daughters of the family, they would not actually carry the family name, since, once married, they would take their prospective husband’s name. This is why, specifically in the past, the daughters inherited the land by the sea which usually could not be farmed and thus there was no interest in preserving the family name in this area. “The meaning of something is its connection to past, present and future experiences, actual or possible,” as Jonson claims in The Meaning of the Body, Aesthetics of Human Understanding. This explains why the villagers were very much concerned with the idea of the land bearing the family name over the years, from one generation to the other.

The villagers were aware that there is a connection among them through land. For example, the properties in Tinos were small and, as reported in 1829 by J. Fuller in his description of lands within the Ottoman Empire, there was a law decreeing that no property would be allowed to be sold unless a proposal was made to the adjacent land owner to buy it first. If the adjacent land owner was not rich enough, he would borrow money to buy it, and then go straight back to work to pay the debt. Apart from the family, the meaning of siblios has been very important for the villagers. This is still the case today. In this fictional narrative, it is obvious that Marcos, a breeder and a farmer in the village, inherited a field of three stremmas from his mother as stated in her will. In reality, it was thirty stremmas. As he says with relief, “fortunately we had the siblios.” The boundaries of each property were and still are defined by the neighbors’ land. Even today, in the minds of the residents of Kampos, given the absence of clearly defined borders in earlier contracts, the existence and importance of a good siblios seems to be sometimes as important as water.

The dialogue between Marcos and Manolis brings to mind de Coulanges: “the family did not build for the life of a single man, but for generations that were to succeed each other in the same dwelling.” The connection of the family to their land, and also the singling out and inheritance of the best parts of the land to the sons of the family, is characteristic of the village of Kampos and of Greek culture in general, thus confirming the need for the continuity of the family name in the island’s land. “If you can, do not sell anything. Just pass it over to the next one.” This is also a different way to connect with nature and the passage of time, but at the same time the boundaries of the properties are confirmed in an analogous way to the continuity of the family names in the landscape. De Coulanges also claims that: There are three things which from the most ancient times, we find founded and solidly established in these Greeks and Italian societies: the domestic religion; the family and the right of property - three things which had in the beginning a manifest relation, and which appear to have been inseparable.”

 

Boundaries and property at the village of Kampos - concluding thoughts

Contracts and covenants redacted until 1981 presented the value of land in terms of the time it took oxen to plow it (zevgaries), as already mentioned, or as the time it took men to work on or dig the land. Water, even today, is presented as water that is part of someone's property only in the context of time’s passage, because contracts mention only periods of ownership as opposed to quantity, except in the cases of private wells and drillings. In both cases, boundaries in ownership are permeable and porous and allow arguments and conflicts to arise. On land, stone walls and partitions accurately define the boundaries of each property. However, misunderstandings can arise. All the above descriptions of property were vague and on occasion led to disagreements and conflicts. Land becomes a landscape of agreements, personal and cultural history, of social ordering and symbolism, according to Casey.

This methodology and the study of Kampos led to a different understanding of space, of place and of deeply embedded ways of life. This approach may be of particular importance at a time when architects, planners and design professionals are preoccupied with ecological and sustainability issues, struggling to find novel and ever more efficient solutions. Despite the changes dictated by external imperatives, these ways of life in the village continue to contribute to a psychologically and physically healthy and fulfilling lifestyle today, one that extends from the private sphere to the public realm. 

I approach the subject matter of the present article from the perspective of an architect, researcher and author of a fictional narratives followed by scholarly interpretations guided by phenomenological and hermeneutical methods, anthropological principles and ethnographical observations. The goal was to arrive at a deeper understanding of the role of the architect, as other researchers and authors have already done through their own research, away from drawings and modeling tables into the world of text, given that narrative and imagination have been tools for both both architects and authors.

As argued by Paul Emmons, Marcia Fenerstein, Carolina Dayer and Luc Phinney in the book Confabulations: Storytelling in architecture “drawing, like storytelling, exists across the ambiguous dimension of reality and fiction.” “Architects actively construe stories while drawing; and the ways these stories are constructed are inseparable from the way a project is designed.” “Architects build stories while buildings edify inhabitants. Storytelling and architecture are fundamental forms of what philosopher Nelson Goodman calls ‘world making.” 

According to the editors of Confabulations, mentioned above, Perez-Gomez , “touching upon a broad swath of the history of architecture to argue for the significance of the literary imagination, noting that the literary image is not so much a still image as a reenactment of the scene it depicts. Mimesis, in this context, is the imitation of the mime rather than the mirror: it takes place, in architecture, as embodiment.” Gadamer reinforces this point, according to which “in language and only in it, can we meet what we never “encounter” in the world, because we are ourselves and merely what we mean and what we know from ourselves.” 

This methodology also helped me teach a contemporary urbanism course and a theory course "Understanding and Imagination before Designing" during the last three years in CYA and the University of Thessaly. Reality took shape through a fictional/imaginary plot that helped the students anchor their experience. The courses seek answers on what a young architect should know beyond the structural aspects of building, how they could understand the complexity of life in order to analyse and understand an existing spatial and social situation in depth before beginning the design process. Interpretative tools were given through different approaches as well. Either in practice or in architectural education the methodology proposed above suggests that architecture could be understood as a practice that is traditionally used to connect people with their community, place, religion, and environment.

 

 

 

 

Endnotes

 1. Pérez-Gómez, A. (2016). Attunement, Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science. Cambridge, MA, London, England: The MIT Press, p.160.

2. Pérez-Gómez, A. (2016). Attunement, Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science. Cambridge, 

MA, London, England: The MIT Press, par. 5. 

3. Ricoeur, P. (2003).The Rule of Metaphor, The creation of meaning in language. transl. by Robert Czerny, Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello SJ. London and New York: Routledge Classics, p. 213.

4. Vidali, M. (2017). Liminality, metaphor and place in the farming landscape of Tinos: The village of Kampos, thesis submitted to University of Thessaly in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. University of Thessaly, School of Architecture. 

5. Interview 1, Boundaries, Kampos, January 6th, 2013, trans. from Greek by Maria Vidali, Appendix, Liminality, metaphor and place in the farming landscape of Tinos: The village of Kampos, thesis submitted to University of Thessaly in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, (University of Thessaly, School of Architecture, 2017), pp. 74-75.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

 8. Emmons, P., Feuerstein, M. and Dayer, C eds., Phinney, L. assist. ed., (2016). Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture. London and New York: Routledge, Taylor Francis Group, p. 9.

9.Frascari, M. (2011). Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing. New York: Routledge, p.68.

10. Arendt, H. (1998). The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 61.

 11. Ibid.

12. Interview by Kostas Danousis, May 23rd, 2017, trans. from Greek by Maria Vidali.

 13. Abstract from Manthos Lagathas’ interview, Kampos, September 4th, 2014, trans. from Greek by Maria Vidali.

 14. Ibid.

15. Johnson, M. (2007). The Meaning of the Body, Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, p.226.

16. Foskolos, M. (1998).Τηνιακά Ανάλεκτα, Τόμος 3, Ανάτυπο, Το κτηματολόγιο των εκκλησιών της Τήνου και η καταγραφή των λεγάτων τους. ΑΚΤ, Κώδικας 4, Αθήνα: Εκδόσεις Φιλιππότη, pp. 15-16.

 17. Presentation of the agronomist Ioannis Aspromoungos, Tinos, September 2011, trans. from Greek by Maria Vidali.

18. Interview by Marcos Filipoussis, Kampos, January 3rd, 2013. Trans. from Greek by Maria Vidali.

19. Kenna, M.E. (1976).’Houses, fields, and graves: prosperity and ritual obligation on a Greek island’. Ethnology 15.1: 21,(Jan 1, 1976): 21.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. Johnson, M. (2007). The Meaning of the Body, Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, p.273.

23. Sarafi, E.N. (2008).Τήνος,Χάρτες - Ενδυμασίες, Εκδόσεις Καστανιώτη - Διάττων, Αθήνα, pp. 223-229.

 24. Interview by Iosef Kaloumenos, Kampos, January 6th, 2013, trans. from Greek by Maria Vidali.

 23.De Coulanges, F. (1902). The Origin of Property in Land, edited and translated by Margaret Ashley. London: Messrs. George Allen & Company, Ltd., p.81.

24. Interview by Antonis Pontis, Komi, September 14th, of, 2014, trans. from Greek by Maria Vidali.

25. De Coulanges, F. (1877). The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome. 3rd ed., translated from the latest French edition by Willard, S. .Boston, New York: Lee and Shepard, Charles T. Dillingham, p.80.

26. Interview by Antonis Pontis, Komi, September 14th, of, 2014, trans. from Greek by Maria Vidali.

27. De Coulanges, F. (1877). The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome. 3rd ed., translated from the latest French edition by Willard, S. .Boston, New York: Lee and Shepard, Charles T. Dillingham, p.80. 

28. Casey, E.S. (1999). “J. E. Malpas's Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography”. Cambridge University Press, p. 225.

29. Emmons, P., Feuerstein, M. and Dayer, C eds., Phinney, L. assist. ed., (2016). Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture. London and New York: Routledge, Taylor Francis Group, p.9.

 30. Ibid., quoting Nelson Goodman, Ways of World-Making, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978).

31. Ibid., p.8.

 32. Gadamer, H.G. (1976). Philosophical Hermeneutics. trans. and ed. Linge, D.E., Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, p.20.