History of the Pindus with Molly Greene

In this episode Jason König interviews Molly Greene about her research on the history of the Pindus mountains in Ottoman Greece, from 1400-1821.

Molly is Professor of History and Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. Her research has focused on many different aspects of the history of the Mediterranean Basin, the Ottoman Empire, and the Greek world. Her interests include the social and economic history of the Ottoman Empire, the experience of Greeks under Ottoman rule and the early modern Mediterranean. Her publications include her award-winning 2010 book, Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Mediterranean 1450-1700.

Molly starts by talking about how she first came to be interested in the mountain regions of Greece as a possible research topic, first of all during the four years she spent living in Greece after her undergraduate degree, and then again in the early 2010s, on a wintry detour through the mountains during a drive from Athens to Thessaloniki.

She discusses some of the models she has found helpful for thinking about mountains, in the work of historians like Fernand Braudel and James Scott, before going on to outline some of the challenges of telling the story of a region that has traditionally been viewed as being ‘without history’.

We talk about the importance of monasteries and monastic history for understanding the region’s connectedness with the rest of Greece, but also some of the difficulties of accessing sources.

Molly then zooms in on a case study of the monastery and bridge at Tatarna before offering some final reflections on why it matters to make mountain history more visible.

This episode was edited by Zofia Guertin.

To learn more about the Mountains of Greece project you can visit our website https://mountainsofgreece.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/ and subscribe for regular updates, or follow us on Bluesky @mountainsofgreece.bsky.social. 

For the broader Mountain Stories, Mountain Futures project please visit our website https://msmf.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk and subscribe for regular updates, or follow us on Bluesky @futuremountain.bsky.social.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Welcome to the Mountains of Greece podcast series, which is part of the broader Mountain Stories Mountain Futures podcast project. These interviews follow up on our recent Mountains of Greece conference held at the British School at Athens in October 2025. The goal of the project is to explore a wide range of stories from people working on different aspects of mountain heritage in Greece. That involves thinking about the past, but also thinking about the future. How can we find new ways of engaging with history, heritage, and conservation in the mountain landscapes of Greece? How can we ensure a sustainable approach to environmental and cultural preservation? I'm Jason Koenig from the University of St. Andrews. It's a great pleasure to welcome Professor Molly Green from Princeton University. Molly's research has focused on many different aspects of the history of the Mediterranean basin, the Ottoman Empire, and the Greek world generally. Her interests include the social and economic history of the Ottoman Empire, the experience of Greeks under Ottoman rule, and the early modern Mediterranean. Her publications include an award-winning 2010 book, Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants, A Maritime History of the Mediterranean 1450 to 1700. More recently, she's turned her attention from the sea to the mountains. She's currently working on a history of the Pindus Mountains under the Ottomans, and we're going to be hearing more about that today. Welcome, Molly. It's great to have the chance to talk to you today.

SPEAKER_00 1:20

Thank you. I'm very glad to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

Can I start just by asking you to outline how you came to be interested in the mountain regions of Greece, both personally and in your academic research?

SPEAKER_00 1:31

Yes, this comes from when I lived in Greece for four years after my undergraduate. I went and did a semester in Greece and then wanted to go back and live there forever. I thought that changed. And I was very much a 20th century person then. I would never have believed you at that time that I'm I'm writing a book now that starts in the 14th century. Anyway, my interests were very modern and I was uh just in love with the Greek Civil War. That's something I think I share that is common to my interest in Ottoman history as well. I seem to be interested in hidden histories. So the the Greek Civil War, 1944 to 1949, was fought up in the mountains. The communist-led insurgency was quickly driven out of the cities, and I traveled all around the mountains asking people about this. And this was a time of real changes in how Greece saw its past. It was, I think, in 1981 when the socialists came to power for the first time in the post-war period that the Greek resistance was uh recognized and so on and so forth. So there was a lot about this, and I read a lot and uh traveled a lot. And then that kind of went into abeyance until 2011, 2012. I wasn't even really thinking about the fact that mountains were in my mind. But I was driving from Athens to uh Thessaloniki in the winter to give a talk, and I was driving through the plains of Thessaly, and the Pindus Mountains, this is quite a sharp contrast, rise up very abruptly out of the plain of Thessaly. And I thought, what do we really know about these mountains? And I actually took a turn that day, this was a mistake because it was winter, and speaking about movement in the mountain worlds, which interests me a lot, uh, and drove for a while uh up into the mountains, and uh then the car in front of me stopped, so I got out to see what was going on, and he said, It's all ice ahead. So we had to do very careful three-point turns and drive back down. Uh, but that's what started me thinking about the mountains, and then as we get into it, I can talk about sort of more academic questions that that have come up with with studying these mountains.

SPEAKER_01 3:23

Fantastic. Thanks. Yeah, I often think the plains in Greece are almost as spectacular as the mountains, especially when you see them side by side just so incredibly flat, and then you have these huge walls rising up from them. So when you were traveling around when you lived in Athens, where did you go to? Did you go up into the northwest or down to the Peloponnese or just all around?

SPEAKER_00 3:41

Interestingly, you know what? That's right. I was not in the Peloponnese. I think because I read this book by a French journalist about Adis Veluchiotis, who was one of the more flamboyant leaders of the I think he might have been the head of the Great Communist Party, and he was actually caught and executed in the main square of Trikola. People still talk about that. That was in the area that I study now. Now that I think about it, the capital of Ayam Elas, the uh the organization that fought the Nazis and then was in charge of the resistance, was in Rendina, which is precisely in the area where I'm studying. I mean, the very southern Pindus. You know, the Pindus started at the Greek Albanian border and go all the way down to the to the Gulf of Corinth. And I I kind of do the southern part for reasons that we can talk about. But Rendina actually, you know, comes up in my work today. There's a monastery that was founded there in the 16th century. We have a a Greek cleric, a monk priest, who was from the area and went and studied in Padua and then decided he wanted to go back and live in his mountain village, and he wrote hundreds of letters of which have been published. And he takes a nice trip through Rendina during the grape harvest and kind of hangs out at the monastery. The final days in 1949, when the when the resistance was defeated, yes, went all the way up to northwestern Greece. I'm not quite sure of the military history now, but I think they progressively pushed them north.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

Great, fantastic. So we'll get on to the kind of the nitty-gritty of your project in a minute, but I just wanted to ask you first of all about models. So obviously, mountain history is not a big field, I think, but it's growing. More and more people working in this area. And clearly there have been some important landmark studies over the last few decades. I just wonder what kind of models, what kind of what are the publications that you turn to when you're looking for models for your own work? What have you found helpful?

SPEAKER_00 5:24

Yes, I'll talk about the big models that have influenced me, which is I think the well-known ones of Fernand Broadell and James Scott. And they've been very formative for me, but principally in terms of what the Pindus are not. And this will help me sort of then formulate the meaning of my questions. So, first of all, I've been interested in both in movement within the mountain world and between the mountain and the plain. And Broadell has very strong views on both of those, which are related to French colonial policies in North Africa. We won't get into that. But one of them is he talks about isolated hamlets in the mountain world. And people will tell you today in Greece, oh, we didn't know people five miles down the road. And anthropologists talk a lot about this, the isolation in discussions of the Greek War of Independence in 1821. Historians like, well, we all know that the uprising was then followed by at least two or three civil wars, part of which is explained by extreme localism. Another concept that anthropologists have talked a lot about. And I had all of that in my mind when I began driving through the mountains that day and then and then going back. And I saw all of these bridges, bridges, bridges, bridges, all of them built during the Ottoman period. And I thought, well, if anybody's so isolated, what are all these bridges doing? So that's an area where I disagree with Broadell, and I'm trying to figure out there's a lot of mobility in the mountain world, and I'm trying to both discover it and come up with concepts to explain it. The other thing that Bradell says, and I'll quote here, he says, civilizations may spread over great distances in the horizontal plane, but are powerless to move vertically when faced with an obstacle of a few hundred meters. End quote. This is manifestly not true with the Hindus. For instance, all of the institutions of the Orthodox Church, monasteries, churches, clergy, are there, as well as all the issues of church administration during the Ottoman period. When I talk about sort of things that I've encountered with people who know the Orthodox tradition very well, they say, oh yes, for instance, there's the ideological preference for genobitic monasticism living collectively, but the reality in the Ottoman period of idiarhythmic monasteries, you know, monks kind of living on their own and not paying attention to what the abbot wants. Exact same thing in the mount. The keeping of books of donations called protheses, right? So parishioners or people who donate then get their names read in church. And then there's the tendant problem of people writing their names in the book without paying. So this whole idea of kind of lawlessness, not that there isn't some of that, really fades when you see that people once again are trying to sneak their name into the book and abbots of monasteries. So this is one way that the mountains, at least the Pindus Mountains in the period that I study, are culturally very, very recognizable to what we see of the Orthodox Christian world throughout the Ottoman period. Now, Scott talks more about mountains as a place of refuge, a place where refugees from the burdens, the extortions, the oppressions of state-directed societies in the plains flee. Now, this fits in perfectly with the nationalist view of Greece, right, which is a nationalist version of Greek history and not just Greek history, but across the Balkans. The Ottomans come in to the plains, they take over everything, they kill or kick out the Christians, and they all flee to the mountains and stay there for 400 years and and live in opposition to the Ottoman state. Now there is some flight, and I'll talk about that in a minute, but this really doesn't get at what's going on in the Pindus Scots model. First, there are already people uh living in the mountains long before the Ottomans arrived. And we know that as early as the 16th century, Ottoman rule really settles in in Thessaly in the 15th century. As early as the 16th century, um people are moving down to the plains from the mountains, and then sometimes they uh go back up. So there's a constant movement up and down. Now, there does seem to be some movement into the mountains in the 17th century, and I can, if we have time, I can talk about why I think that. But that is not with the Ottoman conquest, but two centuries later. Now, the 17th century is known as the Ottoman times of trouble, a rise in banditry and insecurity, a major reason for moving into the more isolated areas, also the Little Ice Age. I'm still trying to uncover a lot of information on Thessaly in terms of either of these crises in the 17th century, but I'm looking for it.

SPEAKER_01 9:29

Yeah, that's really interesting to hear. So we've got Brodell, we've got Skockbook, particularly, is the art of not being governed.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

I mean, one of the things that uh actually Claudia Rapp published was an 18th-century missive from the Patriarch in Istanbuls. Clearly, someone had written to him from the Pindus Mountains saying so-and-so is being a bad person, and I need you to excommunicate him. So this is, you know, the patriarch sends us all the way back to to Carpanice, and clearly this person thought this would be effective. Not to say that you know that there isn't banditry, but we have to figure out how banditry fits in with this other stuff.

SPEAKER_01 9:59

Got it. So with those kind of models, those frameworks in mind, could you just give us a bit of an overview then of what your project is, what it has in it, what questions are you asking, what's the scope of it?

SPEAKER_00 10:08

My scope is the entire Ottoman period up until 1821. So basically 1400 to 1821. It won't be a continuous history. The sources simply don't exist for it, but I can dive in at certain moments and we can talk about sources later. And as I said, it's this southernmost area, and I'll talk more about that in a minute. I started off just very close to the Gulf of Corinth, an area that's called Eurytania, but for various reasons I've I've extended it a bit further. Anyway, my goal is first and foremost to write a history of the Pindus Mountains. This is an area that I think has been presented as and presents itself as a place without history, right? There are places that are considered history makers and then people who just respond. That's certainly uh anthropology has tended to present these places as unchanging. I mean, we all know this as academics. When your questions change, you see things you hadn't seen before. So I read all of the Greek anthropology about Greek mountain villages, and one of them was about, I forget the author, but she wrote about the village of Ambalaki.

SPEAKER_01 11:03

Is that Juliet Giboulet? Is that the one? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:06

I think that's right. And she said, I chose this village precisely because it's remote in its ancestral place and so on and so forth. So this is presented as a place uh without history. I'd like to know what are the consequences for the Pindhuse Mountains of the Ottoman period. Do the mountains follow the general rhythms of the more sort of mainstream areas? There was one other thing I wanted to say, oh yes. And the people themselves there think of themselves as not having history. Every single museum that you see in the Pindus, at least from my experience, is all they have is folklore. So I, you know, I find that intellectually a good challenge. I had mentioned this earlier when I saw all the uh bridges. I want to understand mobility uh within the mountain world and how mobility uh coexists with localism. I had mentioned the bridges. It's also clear to me now that there are clergy collecting contributions, zetiya, um, relics are moving all of the time. Um villages move, villages die out, and and and villagers move somewhere else. So that's one of my questions. How does mobility work in an area that we think of as extremely local? In terms of this oppositional model that Scott and uh Bradell have, yes, of course, we have the Ottomans, you know, chasing bandits all the way up to the highest points. I can almost make the title Pindhus the Friendly Mountain. I had mentioned this cleric, Gordhios is his name, who's living uh way high up in the Pindhus Mountains in the late 17th, early 18th centuries. He, you know, wrote hundreds of letters, they're published. Of course, he doesn't, you know, speak exactly about the things I want, you know, you have to read between the lines, right? He's interested in castigating Islam and things like that. I'm not interested in that. But for instance, in 1676, he's writing to his mentor, another monk, and he describes a trip to Athens. Uh he's writing to him back home in Independus, where he stopped at the the mo the monastery in Rendina, the place where Yamalas had their headquarters, and he stayed for 10 to 15 days. It was the grape harvest and he had a very nice time there. And the abbot asked Gordios, who's going to Athens, to have a book sent to him, and it says should be easy to get it to you because uh merchants are always coming up from Domagos, which is a town right at the edge of the plains. So it's impressive that this kind of uh, you know, easy movement through the mountains, which is usually not what's emphasized. It's either this extreme localism or Ali Pasha with his guards, and here's this guy, you know, kind of having a nice tour. And so that's one of the things I want to understand. Another question, and I found it hard to find literature that discusses this conceptually, what does a remote mean? And this gets to the you know, the question, less so within the mountain, but the question between the uh the relationship between the mountains, the plains, and the imperial capital. So going back to Scott, he says shatter zones are found wherever the expansion of the state, uh of empires, of slave trading and wars, as well as natural disasters, have driven large numbers of people to seek refuge in out-of-the-way places. And I asked myself, what is an out-of-the-way place? The monasteries, uh, and there are many, many monasteries, I haven't mentioned that, but that's one of the ways I got interested in this. As I started to explore, I saw that this province of Everytania, which is about a quarter of the size of Crete, has 24 monasteries in the 18th century. I've never heard this monastic landscape discussed at all. With the sources that we have for these monasteries, which are fragmentary but they exist, of course the monasteries present themselves as a refuge within the refuge. Right? Christians have fled to the mountains, and in kind of local historians routinely refer to these monasteries as hidden. Luckily, because of the work of local historians, we know the location of all 24 of these monasteries. They've lost their lands, but either the monastic church is still there or we know where it was. And many of them are on major roads, and they build funds for receiving visitors and so on and so forth. I'm very interested in this concept of remoteness and connection. I'm interested in the relationship between the plain and the mountains, between the mountain and the imperial capital, and also the mountain is not a monolith. I started off with a very southern focus because of this book written about Everything with all of these monasteries. Then I came to realize that just further north, in the area that's heavily blocked, we have much more documentation precisely because of the monasteries of Meteora. So that's also a difference. So we, you know, we have the records of the village of Haliki, which is still there. We know it's been there since the 10th century because Meteora had a relationship with it. So I've added that precisely because there's more documentation, but also it helps to show the point that the mountain is not a monolith because between the northern and southern halves of the Pindus that I'm studying, there is a marked difference, which I still can't account for in the first Ottoman cadastral survey. The villages in the north are many more and they're bigger. And the south is much more sparsely populated, and the villages are much smaller. This area is very well populated by the 18th century, which is one of the reasons that I think people fled there in the 17th century. And it's also distinctly from travelers' accounts, Greek as opposed to Vlach.

SPEAKER_01 16:05

Fantastic, right. So that's I mean, a lot of this then is about actually resisting some of those standard stereotypes of mountain landscape, mountains as zones of refuge, mountains as cultural and economic backwaters. I mean, that has a lot of resonance with the material I work on from classical antiquity in the Mediterranean. It's uh Nicholas Passell and Perrin Horton have a fantastic metaphor in their book The Corrupting Sea, where they talk about the villages, cities, towns that are at the foothill of the mountains. They talk about them as equivalent to harbors actually, and think about goods and people actually flowing down from the mountains or back up into the mountains through these places. I love it.

SPEAKER_00 16:40

That's like Lonikosen bringing him the book.

SPEAKER_01 16:42

Right, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, it's great to see those some of those little snapshots that bring those new perspectives to life. I wonder if you could just sketch for us in in a bit more detail the the region you've been working on. What is this place like to visit today? Can you give us maybe a few more examples of some of the places you have been working on, the specific places, how they can help us to write a broader history of the region?

SPEAKER_00 17:03

Well, first of all, the Pindus Mountains are beautiful and they're heavily wooded. They are places of deep valleys, deep river valleys, and this is something that is distinctive about the area that I'm studying. The northern border is what has traditionally been called the Zagos Pass, and that is still the major highway. And this starts in Kalambaka in the plain and goes up to Metsovo, a big tourist center, a sort of visibly blocked village, which is unusual, and then down to the Ionian Sea. That is the national highway because there's a slight incline and then a slight decline. Further south, it's different. It's up and down and up and down. At every basin, at every river crossing, there is today a bridge, as there was in the past. And often the restaurants that are there, because of course there's a restaurant, they call themselves Han after the Ottoman name. And so clearly there were always places there. This was kind of a gathering point to cross the river. It's a deeply wooded mountains, despite all of the logging that's going on in the forests, they are very dense in these days of, although I'm gonna contradict myself because I'm writing against the idea of mountains as a refuge, but environmentally they feel kind of like a refuge these days with all of these stresses associated with the Mediterranean, the increasing heat, lack of water, the people dying as they try and get across the sea, tons of water springs everywhere, and that whole sort of tradition of devoting a fountain as a civic contribution very much continues. So they are beautiful, they are differentiated. The northwest corner, not what I'm studying, but what's called the Zagaro Horia. It's interesting, had a privileged position in the Ottoman period, and today is the center of the rapidly growing mountain tourism area in a way that's completely absent in my area. Rafting is very big, hikes through gorgeous, things like that. I would say what's most distinctive of it, the area that I'm studying is deserted. Everybody has left. When I went into Rendina and I knew that there was a little museum there of Ayamalaz's, you know, history there. I went and it was a summer day. There are people sitting in the square, and I asked about the museum. So they had to send someone to go get the key, which of course they did, right? Um, and inside the museum, you see commanders from the Russian army were in Rendina, but today it is deserted. A few years ago, I read an interesting anthropological account where this woman said that the mountains have been emptied out to turn the mountains into the source for hydroelectric energy for Greece. And you do see these beautiful but strange three or four artificial lakes that were created in the post-war period to provide water for the plains of Greece. And it doesn't look like the Mediterranean. It's kind of this deep greenish blue, and it almost looks like Switzerland. So she said this landscape has been emptied out to serve as a hydroelectric station for Greece. That's not exactly true because people voluntarily left as well. But it is true that this is a profoundly disrupted landscape. This monastery that I'm particularly interested in, Katarna, which was found in the middle of the 16th century and is still there, is still an active monastery. I know because it's its charter, Stippicon has survived, that it used to be next to the Asperopotamos River, but you can't tell that now because that section of the river has been turned into a lake. These artificial lakes have created um earthquakes, they've created landslides. Many people were forcibly moved out of these villages in the late 1940s so that they couldn't provide support to the communists. So it is it looks peaceful, but it is a profoundly disrupted landscape.

SPEAKER_01 20:31

Yeah, thank you. Okay, yeah, we might come back to this question of what the future holds for these landscapes to towards the end. Um before we do that though, could can I ask you about sources, which you've touched on every so often in the in the last few minutes. What sources are you using here and what kind of challenges do you face in getting hold of the material that you need?

SPEAKER_00 20:50

Yes, a number of years ago, a friend of mine um said to me, He's like, You can't you can't write a history of the mountains, there aren't any sources. And it is a challenge. I would say that the the biggest challenge is my first two books were based on a rather discrete set of sources. I mean, other things were supplementary, but there was source A, Ottoman court records, and then the second book, Maltese Court Records. Here I've had to draw on a bunch of different things. Uh there are Ottoman cadastral surveys, very, very important. Um, because even the basic question of who is up there in the mountains, you know, hasn't been asked. So Ottoman records, particularly for the early period. When there are wars, that's great. You know, so late 17th century, when Gordodios is writing, there are Ottoman, there's Ottoman Venetian um fighting up in the mountains. That produces documents. This is my um, you know, jumping in at various times. I'm working with and trying to get a grip on um digital sources. So I have someone I'm working with because I'm very interested in why monasteries are where they are. That's great for digital humanities. And what we're doing is constructing things from the plains through the mountains and constructing what's called the least cost pattern. path like what is the easiest way to walk from Arta in the West over the and are monasteries on those paths? Sort of trying to figure out this so that's an important part. One of the most important sources, I could say even the most important source is monastic records. And that has been the biggest challenge, right? I mean the Greek state archives, it's an archive. You go, they understand what you're doing. Monasteries are private. They don't have to share. And I've had some success. It took me a couple of years, but there's a monastery called Lusiko, which is right in the foothills. It's a harbor. And for reasons that are not clear to me, but I know I can show that this was the case, this was the monastery most involved in kind of settling the mountains during the Ottoman period. I mean in terms of building bridges like the Bridge of Tatarna, in terms of founding monasteries. They have an Ottoman archive which I haven't been able to access and I don't think I will be able to access. I mean I've met with the abbot he's very nice and we'll see what we can do and let's have coffee and all that. But then I found out just from reading an article in a footnote about a 400 year fight between the monastery and a village in the mountains over a field the author whom I've met but had never mentioned this, this is from the 2000 page codex which is a gold mine for local history. So that began like a year of trying to get you know access to this I won't go into all the details I have managed to get they would give me part of it if I could identify what I wanted. Luckily I did have kind of a set um so I have 150 pages uh which is pretty but but even then I was only able to ask for those 150 pages because I know the area well now so when it talks about these villages I know which villages are mountain villages and which are not. If you didn't know that you would have no idea. So quite a bit of the stuff from Mete Oda for you know further north has been uh published. So that is helpful. But monasteries are um just an incredible um source for the kind but they're very very um difficult a complete microfilm copy of the codex has been given to the Academy of Athens but for the use of one scholar.

SPEAKER_01 24:00

Wow okay this is amazing to hear so it's not just like getting your library ticket and turning up with you or actually building relationships over a long period and yeah I mean clearly there are and it's almost hard to do and to because because we don't actually know exactly what's in some of these places it's hard to know what you you're looking for even.

SPEAKER_00 24:17

Yeah when I finally managed to speak to the Abbot and I and I had someone from the ethnicoethima I mean the big research institute in Athens I mean I had him contact people at the Academy of Athens and it was like no way. But when I spoke to the when I finally managed to get on the phone with the Abbot which is a whole story said so what interests you in this codex I said you know well the whole thing and he said oh that that's too much. Okay. You can have a look.

SPEAKER_01 24:41

I see the challenge but I'm really there there is a really rich treasure house of amazing material in there which actually kind of shows that your friend was wrong that you can write this history if you can get your hands on the stuff. Yeah. Yeah yeah amazing I wonder if we could just talk finally about the one example that you mentioned briefly earlier which is Tatana the monastery also the bridge at Tatana which I know you've been working on that's one of the case studies you used for your um conference presentation back in in October at our conference. So how does how does Tatana fit in with the bigger story you're telling?

SPEAKER_00 25:13

Right one of the things I'm fascinated by bridges they're so beautiful particularly in the mountains one of the first things that I started thinking about when I drove through these mountains was all of these bridges being built and how does this fit in with this trope of isolation. The bridge at Tatarna uh we don't know when it was built I mean no later than the 17th century. Unfortunately during these hydroelectric projects it was submerged and no dating was done because it's Ottoman period it's in the mountains but the bridge was clearly connected to the monastery we know that the the monastery had the bridge built and the monastery at Tatarna was right next to the Aspro Potomos River. So what we have is a monastery situating itself at the river and then building a bridge exactly at the point where it's easiest to build a bridge because the river is narrow and it turns I won't go into all of this. So I think the existence of the bridge at the monastery first gives the lie to making oneself hidden and inaccessible and also shows that the people who came up from the plains to build the monastery knew the geography of the area very well. And this was probably already an area where people pass because people forward the river where it's narrowest and where it turns this puts the monastery in a whole new light. The other bridge that has been fascinating to me is called the Bridge of the Raven which was built slightly north of this area again over the Aspro Potomos River was the largest stone bridge in the Balkans until 1949 when it was blown up during the Greek Civil War, which shows that it was still strategic. So now only a small section of it survives. This bridge or was commissioned to be built by the abbot of the monastery of Lusico which is why I talked about Lusico we haven't paid a lot of attention to bridges in in Ottoman historiography. Our whole image of bridge building comes from Ivo Andrich's novel The Bridge on the Drina right where the harsh and scary Grand Vizier comes in and you know through force has a bridge built over the river Drina in Bosnia-Herzegovina and that's our model and here we have two cases with the monastery of Tatarna and with this bridge built by the Christians engaging in infrastructure building which in itself is is interesting. And it was happening at a time when infrastructure is being built across Bosnia-Herzegovina. This is the time when dervish convents when caravans arise when bridges are being built so I think Christians are engaged in the same imperial project which itself is interesting. But then also the question of why are these clerics interested in building these bridges? Clearly the monastery wanted to be the place where people crossed the river. With the bridge further up it's known as the bridge of the raven it's a wonderful case where we have actually written evidence of local views of remoteness because the man who had the bridge built subsequently became a saint his Saint Vizarion and the Vita of his life was written and amongst his many accomplishments in his Vita they say and he built a bridge in a place that was so remote that not even the ravens fly there. So that's you know quite wonderful. So why was he doing this? I mean the bridge was not built there during the entire Byzantine period and there are many reasons but I think one of the reasons is we know that with the Ottoman conquest and the loss of imperial patronage the church had to turn elsewhere for support and a lot of attention has been paid particularly to what is today Romania which then was Moldavia and Wallachia and the Christian princes there pouring money into Christian institutions in the Ottoman Empire which is true it doesn't say this about the bridge but I think that the abbot in building the Bridge of the Raven also wanted to open up the mountains for collection of contributions from Christians and we have lots and lots of evidence for this. So yes he went as far afield as Moldavia Malekia but he also turned to his own backyard and that was one of the reasons for building this bridge.

SPEAKER_01 28:58

Great thanks for that you've given us an amazing overview of the project in the region but also these wonderful little snapshots really bringing to life particular places and particular moments in this bigger history. So just a quick final question before we finish is a question we've been asking everybody actually in these conversations is and we've touched on it already it's about future challenges. What do you feel are the big challenges facing mountain communities in Greece in the present in the region you work in and beyond and what can we do to help with that? And particularly I suppose the question is how can history help?

SPEAKER_00 29:29

How can giving attention to mountain history make a difference to these communities that you're engaging with because of the kinds of things I'm interested in but also because of the the search resources is I have done a lot of oral history of asked people lots of questions. And people are very very excited that I'm interested in the mountains they definitely feel forgotten. They think it's strange that I'm interested in the mountains and I am struck by how much the image of Greece internationally and then I think people in Greece have absorbed it is of the islands and and people outside of academia when I tell them I'm working on mountains in Greece they always seem surprised that there are mountains in Greece whereas Greece is mostly mountains. And I'm also struck by how much despite obviously there's something called a very strong Greek identity and yet the limited ability of the nation state at least so far to remake people's mental geographies most of my friends in Greece are you know intellectuals, academics and many of them come from Asia Minor. For them, Smyrna which was never part of Greece is still more vivid in their minds than the mountains. Many of them haven't been to the mountains and they kind of laugh when I go there. And I think people in the historiography there is still this sharp divide between mountains and the sea and the sea is the place of Greek glory in part because of the inheritance from antiquity but I think also associated with the modern world where you know going out to sea is associated with being forward thinking with being progressive with being adventurous you know so on and so forth and the hinterland is the place of stagnation and superstition and so on and so forth. So there's a lot of pride associated with the sea. But in fact again there are these connections so one of the prides of Greek national history is the development of the shipping in Misolongi which is to the west of the Pindos Mountains on the coast of the Ionian Sea and a friend of mine has been working on the development of the shipping of Misolongi and of course was the site of one of the most heroic scenes in the Greek revolution and Lord Byron was there and so on and so forth. A sort of a 10 hour walk you know up in the mountains is a very very famous monastery of Rousseau with a famous icon which is still very much venerated and it's called the Pania Prous so the the Virgin of Pousse. Well it turns out that a lot of these ships in Missolongi named their ship after that icon. So they clearly knew about it. They probably went there so that's another connection between the sea and the mountains that I think is insufficiently appreciated. I hope I can make this rich history which is an integral part and very much connected to Greece today but which is still kind of invisible even in the minds of people who themselves are Greek.

SPEAKER_01 32:06

Great thanks to Molly we've got more episodes coming up exploring mountain heritage in Greece from a whole range of other perspectives. If you enjoyed this episode please do share our podcast with others have a look at our other episodes you can follow us on social media or get in touch directly via the Mountains of Greece project website. You might also like to have a look at the separate website for the broader mounted stories mounted futures project that this series is a part of there are links to both of those uh in the episode notes. Thanks to Zopia Girton for editing thank you for listening