Boulouki with Ionas Sklavounos and Marilena Mela

In this episode Jason König and Faidon Moudopoulos-Athanasiou interview Ionas Sklavounos and Marilena Mela about the work of Boulouki. Boulouki is a collective that studies and transmits traditional building crafts as an active and sustainable body of knowledge, through educational and participatory projects, many of them in mountain areas in Greece. It brings together architects, engineers, craftspeople, researchers, heritage professionals, creators, and local communities who co-shape its work.

We talk about the beginnings of Boulouki, which was co-founded by Ionas in 2018, and the ideals that lie behind it, focused on co-production with mountain and island communities, and on the combination of environmental preservation with cultural heritage restoration.

 We then talk about some of Bouolouki’s recent projects, which have included the Kalderimi x2 project that involved the rebuilding of the old pathway that leads to the historical Bridge of Plaka, the Frasta School project, which restored the primary school at the village of Frasta in Tzoumerka, the Shelters project, which involved building a wood-fired oven and a treehouse at a pair of mountain refuges, at Melissourgoi and Pramanta, and the Reappearances project, which combined a practical workshop and a participatory restoration of an old cobbled pathway in Aristi in the Zagori region.

Finally we discuss some of the challenges facing the mountain communities of Greece, but also some of the ways in which Boulouki’s work is making a difference, for example by forging new alliances, and creating opportunities for empowering dialogue between external experts and local communities.

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/, 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, or follow us on Bluesky @futuremountain.bsky.social.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome to the Mountains of Greece podcast series, 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 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. And I'm Fedon Buroculos Panasu from the Barcelona Super Computing Center. Fedon was one of the co-organizers for our conference back in Athens, but he's on the other side of the microphone today and is going to be joining his co-interview, which is great. It's a great pleasure also to welcome Jonas Stavunos and Marilena Mela from Buluki. Buluki is a collective that studies and transmits traditional building crafts as an active and sustainable knowledge form through educational and participatory projects in a range of venues across Greece. Buluki involves architects, engineers, craftspeople, researchers, heritage professionals, creators, and local communities who help to co-shape its work. Their work has been very widely recognized with a series of prizes, including, among others, the prestigious Europa Nostra Prize for 2024. I'll tell you a little bit very briefly about Marilena and Jonas individually. Both of them actually have a background also in academic study of architecture. So Marilena is assistant professor of heritage studies in Amsterdam, and Jonas has a PhD from the University of Antwerp. So welcome Marilena and Jonas. It's great to have the chance to talk to you today.

SPEAKER_00 1:48

Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

And I'm going to pass straight over to Fedon to get us underway. Thank you, Jason.

SPEAKER_03 1:53

Can we start by just asking Marilena and Bionas to outline what Buluki does and how they work with and where actually in Greece? For listeners who might not have come across their work before.

SPEAKER_02 2:05

Yes, Fedon. Thank you so much, Marilena. Maybe I start and then uh join. So, yes, it's useful to say that uh Buluki is indeed a collective uh study so-called uh traditional uh ways of building, but it's also, let's say, a civil non-profit company. This is the formal way in which we operate since 2018 in Greece. We mainly work in uh remote locations in mountains and island communities in Greece. And what we do is we try in a way to reconstruct forms of knowledge that have been forgotten, relating, of course, to traditional building crafts, so ways of building with stone, with wood, with lime mortars and so on. And we do this in collaboration with local communities in different places that we visit. Maybe it's also important to note that Buluki is an itinerant workshop on traditional building crafts, and this means that we travel, that we move from place to place trying to really understand the specificity of each place and the building knowledge that is embedded in it. The first answer is that we go with we meet with local communities, we study a local architecture, we try to find local craftspeople that know how to build in each place, and then we organize hands-on workshops and professional apprenticeships so that people can actually practice in these forms of building. And the object of these workshops and these apprenticeships is usually a project that has community needs, let's say, at the center. It might be a footpath, it might be a small building or something like that, and this is something that we co-produce or co-design in a way with local communities.

SPEAKER_00 3:32

Perhaps what I can add is to repeat the geographical focus of Buluki's work, which as Ion has mentioned, has started from the mountains in the Ipirus region of northwestern Greece. We talk more about the Ipirus later on, also engages with insular and island communities in the Silas Islands. And I think it's important to mention because we will talk about climate challenges and environmental adaptation later on, and these two realms that represent different landscapes of Greece also face different challenges. But I think it is interesting to already gear the conversation to sustainability by saying that this transferable methodology that Buluki has established actually can work and be adapted in these different environments and to offer different results as well.

SPEAKER_01 4:20

Could you tell us the story then of how this is maybe a question for you and us as co-founders, how did Buluki come about? How did it start?

SPEAKER_02 4:27

Sure. So, I mean, as I said, we go back to 2018 when the group and the company in a way was formally founded. It was five people, co-founders, four architects and one civil engineer, who all shared, I think, this kind of uh interest or passion about vernacular architecture, traditional building crafts, mountains specifically. From different, let's say, side. We had different backgrounds, different ways through which we approached this, but we all shared this need in a way to be out there, to work with our hands and to work with local communities. And so the key idea, the key premise of this project from its inception was that we will be working hands-on and that we will be conducting workshops in places that we want to be, in places that we want to work, in landscapes in which we want to actually be part of in a way. And we started indeed in Ipirus. Maybe we should say, we should clarify, uh, it's in northwestern Greece, uh, it's a mountainous area, and it it has historically been one of the birthplaces of traditional uh stonemasonry. So it's one of the places in Greece where the traveling companies of builders and craftspeople, the Buluja, so this is also the reference to the name of the group, so these journeying companies would begin their journeys from throughout Greece, the Balkans, uh, and the world. So, yes, this is how we started a project in Ipirus and the reconstruction of a specific pathway. Maybe we can talk about it uh more. But then gradually, this is a project that became a little bit more than just a hands-on work, the exchange with local communities, but also with the academic world, but also with many other spheres of culture in a way that are related to this kind of heritage, were soon a very important part of what we look at as. So what we do in our projects is we really try to involve different actors, different forms of knowledge, and see how we can jointly approach this question of landscapes, of vernacular architecture, but also its relevance, as Marilena just said, for today, in terms of climate, in terms of social equity, and many other questions that we think uh come up through this kind of projects.

SPEAKER_01 6:24

Great. And you've mentioned the name, the buluki, that word which is, I think, almost untranslatable in into English, really. I did could you tell us a little bit more about that word in Greek and what it means and what range of connotations it has?

SPEAKER_02 6:35

Of course. I mean, we should say that this is a a word with cross-cultural roots. It comes from the Albanian and the Turkish languages, where it literally uh refers to uh an unruly group of people, in a way. It's a bunch of people. And I think that initially, uh historically, let's say, it also referred to disorderly troops in the years of the Ottoman Empire, and it later on came to signify actors, theater players, and musicians, so groups of people that travel around the countryside to perform, but indeed also groups of craftspeople, indeed. So journeying companies that travel throughout the countryside to build. Uh and we like this. I mean, in a way, we also chose this word because of this kind of broader connotations that you know extend beyond the technical questions of traditional building to its larger cultural contexts, but also because it evokes this kind of Balkan heritage, this kind of Balkan cultures that Greece is part of, and that maybe Greeks often tend to forget why they look westwards very often.

SPEAKER_01 7:35

Fantastic, yeah, such a wonderful name. I love the way in which the name itself has it has this complex heritage as well as the work that you do within it. So just a question maybe for both of you, just about your individual involvement as well. So how, Yonos, maybe you first did you grow up in the mountains? How did you come to be interested in these areas? What's your connection there?

SPEAKER_02 7:54

Well, to be honest, no, my background is mainly from an island. I mean, part of my background I mean is uh from Corfu, which is an island in the Ionian Sea, related to Ipirus in many ways, but maybe what I should mostly say is that uh some of our members do come from Ipirus and do come from mountainous regions. So there was a connection right from the start from the founding members that say a biographical connection, if you like, with the mountains. But it was also a question of the content of our work itself. As I said, Epirus has been a birthplace for traditional stonemasonry, and especially the area of Jumerica where we started, is a place where you can still find in a way the material remains of this form of knowledge. So when we started, yes, what we actually did was really work with this kind of material, be there, fall in love with it in many ways, and then yes, just continue from there. Maybe Marilena, you can also say, I think one of the wonderful things with Beluke with this kind of work was really uh working with people like Fedon and like Marilena. Some come from the mountains, some don't. But we all feel this kind of attraction towards these landscapes and the things that they can teach us.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

Thanks. How about you, Marilena? You joined a bit later, I think. Is that right? How we how did you come to be involved?

SPEAKER_00 9:08

Yes, um description brings to mind what also drew me into the work. I don't have uh origins from the mountains, but I do have origins from the countryside, from uh the island of uh Avia that faces all kinds of problems, demographic, uh depopulation, uh, abandonment, and very similar ways, uh like the mountains. So I think there is also this personal interest that has to do with this lead interest. Uh but uh practically what happened is that uh almost 10 years ago now Jonas and I met during our postgraduate studies in architectural theory. And uh it is around that time that uh the seeds for Buluti, I think, were also shown with uh the other uh founding members. So I was always uh keen on joining these discussions and uh kept in touch with Jonas, who became a treasure friend and collaborator for years during also our PhD journeys in the Netherlands and Belgium. And then I think it was with the first very large academic symposium that we organized in 2022 in Santorini as part of the project Under the Landscape that Jonas and I, together with another close collaborator, Nikos Maguliotis, came together to form a scientific committee behind this uh symposium that combined this hands-on participatory series of workshops with scientific uh thinking about the landscape. So there we invited people from cultural geography, from art history, from uh anthropology who were very established thinkers. And it was also, I think, an important moment when we understood uh what we do has a lot of scientific relevance because these people uh were very eager to form part of this kind of workshop, to be there on the island together with meeting the craftspeople, meeting members of the local community. And we were also joined there by the early stage researchers on landscape. So it was a very important moment when we started cross-fertilizing between these kinds of knowledge, we could say landscape knowledge and more academic knowledge. And uh this became an approach, I think, that remains since uh we've had projects and our ongoing discussions. So I am now assistant professor in heritage studies, I don't work with architectural design anymore, but this cross-fertilization with state-of-the-art thinking about heritage, landscape, sustainability uh remains, I think, a land that runs parallel to Buluki's hands-on work.

SPEAKER_03 11:41

Given things that we have discussed so far, it's very interesting to draw a parallel going back to the mountains. The mountains from the Ottoman period where all these traditional landscapes we are talking about emerged were always diasporic in the sense that communities were moving back and forth from the towns and the plains to the mountains, either as specialized pastoralists, craftsmen or merchants. So it's very interesting to see the analogy with the profiles of our interviewees today. And also that all this description that Ionas and Marilena gave us so far draws in mind that the postcolonial academic reasoning that researchers do not just extract knowledge from local communities and they move to the mountain or the islands or other insular areas and they co-create in a way new forms of knowledge. So before uh looking at some concrete examples, I wanted to delve a bit more and ask uh based on the principles that you have outlined so far, what is especially the importance of lived and local knowledge and working with communities and whether you reflect on that in your practice?

SPEAKER_02 12:56

Sure. For us indeed, it both in in terms of academic interest but also in terms of of lived experience in a way, it has been very exciting to observe this difference, let's say, between what we can describe as local forms of knowledge or lived forms of knowledge in comparison with the, let's say, more formal scientific forms of knowledge that we are all taught in schools and universities. I think there are several levels in which one can discuss this, but perhaps the most important has to do indeed with the social and cultural aspects that relate to it. So working with communities in real life, in real places, and seeing how staring this knowledge actually is an empowering thing to do, and which in a way empowers, of course, first of all the local communities, but also us in a way as as people, as researchers, because it brings us in more close contact with things that actually don't matter in a way, if I may say that. This has been a very revealing experience in a way. At the same time, I mean, of course it is a challenge, especially when one also operates at least partly, let's say, from within the academia, to to do this in a kind of rigorous way. So what kind of methodologies, what kind of tools are fit to do that, or to be able to claim that one is doing that. So in a way, and I mean I I I should also say, because I mean I feel we are amongst friends now that again working with with Ferdon and with Marilena, it's been a really exciting thing to be discovering what it means to work with anthropological tools, with ethnographic tools and so on, to really start engaging with this kind of knowledge. I mean, one could say that of course we're speaking about embodied knowledge when we speak about skills and about craftsmanship. Uh this is a kind of knowledge that really is embodied in the people that carry it and is very difficult to transfer in more latent ways or to be documented. It's a knowledge that is enacted, and so to really understand the context and the occasions in which it is enacted is uh is a very important thing and a very elusive thing to do. But it's also a knowledge that is embedded again in buildings, in artifact and so on that needs to be decoded, reconstructed, etc. I I think the the social, cultural, and sometimes even political implications of working with local communities and local knowledge are what I think is really at the heart of this project and we're more most interested in further developing. But maybe Marilena, you want to to continue.

SPEAKER_00 15:19

I couldn't agree more with uh yours and Ferrand's interpretations. I want to take it a step back for our listeners, perhaps, to explain how actually Buluki centers this local knowledge. You mentioned it in the start, but perhaps we can paint a bit of a more precise image of what Buluki does, actually identifying, and we will talk about uh specific projects later on and how communities themselves sometimes are the ones who invite uh Buluki to deal with very precise projects, works that embody this traditional knowledge. So a very concrete example is stone masonry in the Aperos Mountains that you already mentioned, and the people who become really central are of course the craftspeople, because these are the people who have this knowledge. This is a knowledge that um Buluki identified as an early objective that needs to be uh somehow transmitted because it meant something important for belonging, for culture, and later on also for sustainability. And so what happens is that in co-designing, these projects that would then stay, of course, in these landscapes and enhance uh hopefully life of the local community, this is carried out in participatory and hands-on ways. And there are two main methods, let's say, in this, and there, you know, you can of course add, but the first is apprenticeship, and this means that uh more experienced craftspeople would have, as apprentices, younger, less experienced craftspeople for a period of three months or so, so that they can really learn by uh working together. And then there are shorter workshops for people who are interested in in the construction process but will not gain uh this deep knowledge, but will connect it with their own practice. And there we are always joined by architects, engineers, artists, uh, but also yeah, a lot of other different kinds of professions, people who are just becoming interested in local knowledge itself. So just to again paint this image of this bulucha of people who stay with these uh communities for for a while and uh uh for these bursts of busyness, let's say in these places where during autumn or during spring perhaps are not uh so busy, and a lot of uh people then are are there carrying out this uh hands-on work and then occupying other spaces in uh in the village or in the landscapes, it's very magical.

SPEAKER_03 17:42

Thank you, Marilena and Yona. Since you started painting the closer picture, could you paint us the picture of Puluki's connection with the Greek mountains in particular?

SPEAKER_02 17:54

Of course. I mean, uh as I as I mentioned before, our first project was in the mountainous region of Epirus, uh in in northwestern Greece, in the region of Lacka, in the region in the broader region of Zumerka, and uh near the river Arachthos, uh, where there was actually a very significant landmark, so the bridge of Plaka, uh a one-arched uh stone bridge that collapsed back in 2015, and then there was, let's say, a very big effort on behalf of the state and its institutions to rebuild that. We found that this presented an interesting occasion, an interesting context to formulate a project around this area, and what we did was we looked at the old path, the historic pathway that used to lead to the bridge. Because back then what you had was indeed a kind of contemporary footpath along the river, but the old footpath moving through uh the agricultural fields and reaching the bridge in this way was more or less forgotten and in a very bad condition. The word that was used and is still used in many places in Greece and in the Balkans for this kind of uh pathways is Calderini. It means literally, you know, the cobalt pathway. So what we did was try to reconstruct parts of this pathway. Uh we did this, it was a successful project, and then a year later we returned for a second time to really uh reconstruct the entire footpath, and this was the Calderini Times 2 project. This describes the beginning of our connection with the mountains of Greece in Zumerica and Ipirus, but there were also other projects that we can talk about that took place also in the mountain uh shelters and refugees of Ipirus, but also in the area of Aristi, where Feathern comes from as well. So, you know, when you work in an area and you explore it and you're looking for craftspeople, then the area opens up to you and it's different projects come up. And for many years, I mean I think for quite a few years, we were really just working in this very rich area in terms of knowledge and in terms of heritage. Maybe this describes the connection initially, which of course has developed further throughout the years.

SPEAKER_00 19:49

I think since Ian started to describe the projects, I can jump in and mention a very important uh project for the presence of Buluki in the mountains, and this is the restoration of the former primary school in Frasta, which is literally located very close to the bridge of Plaka and the Calderimi that uh Ion has mentioned it's it's visible even from each other. Uh, and this I think is what signifies not temporary but more permanent presence of Bulluki in the mountains, because the school that was not functioning as a school anymore is now uh granted to Buluki from the municipality and uh is becoming a center for traditional and sustainable building. But the school itself, the building itself is also gradually being restored with traditional and sustainable methodologies through the same methodology that we discussed before. So every year, if I'm not wrong, there is this large meeting uh that each time investigates and restores an aspect of a building, starting from stonemasonry, then I think it was timber in the latest uh iteration, traditional mortars. So I think I don't want to get into the technical aspects of it, but uh this also signifies this presence of Luki that is not a theme that only comes and then goes, but that stays. And that uh these uh efforts every year are also combined with what we call community engagement, but it's yeah, something I think also more essential than that is people coming to open roundtables, but also to celebrate together, to dance together with uh traditional music, to eat together. And uh I think uh people from the village and the area are embracing this now because it has become a part of the religious reality as well. So for me, this is really the most significant among the projects for the sustained engagement, let's say, with the mountain communities.

SPEAKER_02 21:42

Yes, and and maybe we can briefly add because this is really uh uh also an important aspect that there are indeed members of our team, such as Panos Costulas and Diuana Ducci. Panos is also a co-founder of Buluki, who are increasingly, let's say, more committed into staying in this area. Uh, that they are really running a school project and they're uh uh trying to actually live in Jumerca be part of this effort to revitalize this area. So this also shows up a really personal commitment on behalf of parts of the group and members of the group in this idea, which indeed combines this itinerant approach, but also with a more you know sustained presence in places.

SPEAKER_01 22:16

Yeah it's really interesting to hear about how how that has evolved into away from simply being an itinerant group into having that kind of permanent presence. So it's really good to hear about that Kalderimi project. I wonder if you could tell us just a little bit more about the detail of that and I was curious about the name as well. It's Kalderimi times two. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_02 22:35

Yes of course as I said Kalderimi refers to the Cobalt pathway. It's again a word that appears throughout Balkan countries and languages and indeed this project was about really completing the reconstruction of the cobalt pathway that led to the Bridge of Plaka. I think the importance of this project of Kalderimi times two also let's say uh for the development of Bunuki is that it was the first time that we established uh let's say a professional apprenticeship. So what we did is we launched an open call uh especially addressed uh not only to people from Greece but also from other uh Balkan countries to come and to learn alongside experienced craftspeople for two months so to be paid to stay and work for two months there to help reconstruct this pathway. And this we combined with a more let's say focused intense 12-day workshop addressing a larger audience. So for us this was also a moment where we formulated this kind of approach that combines a professional apprenticeship with the workshop format.

SPEAKER_03 23:28

And I think this we have kept it we have continued with this throughout the years and in this sense I think it's a project that is worth mentioning together with all the other aspects lectures side visits and so on that were part of his approach since the beginning I think although I'm not a founding member just a collaborator I think Ionas will agree with me that during Calderini times too they st the group started realizing how big can this endeavor become I remember when we were designing for example the APR project how overwhelmed we felt from exactly how we saw the management growing with all the things necessary changing from one day to the other. So if I might just dump in for a for a second when we launched the applications through Google Forms for the reappearances project in our ISTA we received over a hundred applications from abroad Greece as well so from the Balkans France and so on and we have to bear in mind that this was during the COVID era and before the vaccine was launched so you know it shows some really serious commitment if you're willing to move to another country during that period to take part in such a workshop. And if I can just paint this dynamic with two images if you were putting those demographics of the applicants on a map and you would see their places of residence you would see like the heat map was pointing to the big capitals so Athens, Thessaloniki, London for diasporic Greeks, Paris and so on. But if you were moving to the places of origin you would see that all these dots were spread in various niche areas of Greece in the Balkans from Kosovo to North Macedonia and Greek Macedonia and Italy which means that you know it's not always the place that this workshop is being held but it's also the relationships and the sentiments that people have towards their places of origin that can be reflected to a similar place elsewhere. Having said all this as a parenthesis I wanted to open the spectrum to various Guluki projects so we Marilena mentioned the Bitletraster school Jonas described the Calderini Times too which is kind of a roadmap you had also prepared the shelters to workshops in parallel in Jumaica but also the recent connectivity conservation initiative.

SPEAKER_00 26:04

Through all these projects we see different approaches to mountain landscapes and I was wondering whether you could outline what changes and what remains the same in your approaches to these different various projects this project I mentioned is actually one of the most recent projects of Buluki that is also a very interdisciplinary project in collaboration with Hellenic Survey of Geology and Mineral Exploration and Callisto who is a Society for wildlife and nature conservation and it is funded by the Prespa of Nature Trust. So you see a lot of stakeholders or collaborators involved with nature preservation are actually involved here. This is a project that is run uh mainly by also part of Buluki and here what I think is uh fascinating is we have a combination of nature preservation with cultural heritage restoration if you will in a more holistic landscape approach a researched backed restoration project where in another region of the Ipirus in close to Konica where group of villages named the Mastorohoria also where many of these traditional Bulucheo builders originate are facing the population abandonment of the productive land and this has brought the fringe between the settlement and natural areas very close which means a lot also of unwanted sometimes encounters between people and wildlife including bears and wolves and so Buluki is interested in traditional building and Calisto and the other organizations in preserving wildlife. So what happened there was a mapping of the routes that these animals these non-humans actually take and combined with a mapping of traditional landscape infrastructure such as traditional fountains for example that were used before as part of village life but were since abandoned and identified these meeting points of the two let's say maps and this guided the approach on what actually we transfer these fountains to restore again in a similar process of bringing in participatory approaches engaging local people learning from local craftspeople but here we see actually an emphasis on giving uh not only to human communities but also to broader let's say ecosystems and for me this is a fascinating project.

SPEAKER_02 28:28

I also think that this is one of the key uh developments in a way the this connection to the more than human life and to ecosystems and to this more environmental kind of let's say value in traditional forms of knowledge. I think this was in a way present since the beginning in the way we engage with landscapes and and with pathways and with the infrastructure that pathways are part of but it was not so pronounced in the beginning. Our focus was mainly let's say in the building craft it itself. But yes maybe the shelters project uh is worth mentioning because indeed we're talking about mountains here and in the region of Merica there are still two main mountain refugees to two places where one can actually stay and then go hiking and so on. So while we were preparing our projects and searching for craftspeople and builders and I'd we used to stay there as a group and so slowly we became friends with the people who managed these mountain refugees and the idea of a project you know wouldn't take too long to emerge and what we did is we planned two workships in tandem focusing on different materials and different techniques to accommodate what each mountain refuge wanted. So in the first case in the mountain refuge of Melisuri we built a good fired oven so the project was more about building with stone uh clay uh and lime and bricks of course and in the other in the mountain refuge of uh Pramada we built a treehouse because this is what the managers wanted it was of course a very intense project you know the group had to split into application forms two groups of participants but in a way it was really uh amazing to move between these two places and really uh understand the reality of the mountains through this lens and maybe just as a comment to how all these you know through the shelters project the Calderimi times too and the reappearances I think that one thing that really becomes central now in Buluki's approach is how focusing on this kind of cultural health that really opens up to these larger environmental and more than human questions in a way and that in a way the discourse should not be polarized between the human and the non-human but rather understand that it is through these interconnections that we can actually achieve some some impact and understand how different generations or past generations have understood such questions of how to engage with with forms of life, forms of intelligence or resilience that go beyond our own uh understanding uh in ways that are still meaningful in in in cultural terms thanks really inspiring to hear that you've mentioned the the reappearances project a couple of times but I wonder if you could just say maybe this is a question for Fedon just as much I don't know because I know you were involved Fedon in that what was what is the reappearances project and how does that fit into the bigger picture of what you do so the first time I met someone from what was about to become Bulluki was in the festival of Vovusa which is another mountain village in Zahori.

SPEAKER_03 31:11

It was a festival that developed out of the need of the locals to resist to a huge mega dump in Aos or Vyos which is the last free flowing river of Europe and back then we just realized that we shared some common interests with Christophoros Dojaris another founding member of Buluki but nothing more. Next time we met with Christophoros again it was in the Balkan border crossing summer school of the University of Joanina which was happening in Konica Christophoros and I were participants and back then Buluki was already four and I was let's say complaining to Christophoros about the way we treat vernacular and traditional architecture in the mountains and he explained to me the idea behind the Buluki's creation. So as a local member of the youth association in the village of Aristia I extended an invitation to Buluki to come and survey the village through a knowledge exchange fund from the University of Sheffield where I was based at the time doing my PhD. So in a sense again the idea for the project started from uh an academic interest and fascination uh but it led to an on-ground uh survey of the needs of a local settlement that later on came to be part of uh UNESCO World Heritage Calvary is part of uh UNESCO World Heritage since 2023 so what we did was we surveyed the whole village and we identified a key pathway that needed restoration and recreation actually and we focused on uh designing a project based on the experience of uh Calderin times to I guess Jonas might correct me on that to actually tackle the problem and we wanted it to be visible so we decided to choose one that was next to the village and that would serve the need of the locals but also draw the attention of the visitors as a counterexample to contemporary development in those regions.

SPEAKER_02 33:24

But maybe we can say a few words about the the title of the project because I mean it really reflects a kind of ambition that we had for this project. So I I think uh the idea was that there used to be a Calderimi there there used to be a cobalt pathway which cannot be seen anymore and which we will either reveal or rebuild so that the cobalt pathway would reappear. But also what we wanted to explore was this kind of latent potential if you like of people originating from this village originating from Aristi and now being residents of big urban centers in Greece or abroad that come as tourists or as visitors during the summer or during the holidays but maybe they could come also to work to do that because we we felt that this kind of interest this kind of emotional links let's say between people in their places of origin that Fedon also talked about before could also be translated into something more tangible or something other than just vacations. So the call had this specific let's say intention it was inviting people that originate from Aristi or have some ties to Aristi to reappear and to work for let's say a few weeks to do that. Course reality also tends to complicate things in a way because it was not only that in the end it was just people or mainly people who were interested in mountains, who were interested in traditional building that show up to do the work. But I think in a way this was also revealing this was also interesting to observe that you know the very notion of community or the very notion of origin uh needs to be enriched with contemporary understandings if we want to make it operative and meaningful today. And not just you know keep it perhaps as it it might have been uh conceived of decades or centuries ago.

SPEAKER_01 34:58

Fantastic so it's about reappearances of places and paths but also about people. Okay so just to finish I wanted to end with a question about future challenges really we've been asking this to all of our interviewees we've mentioned challenges of various kinds in passing in in this conversation but maybe you could say a little bit more about what are the challenges that you feel the maps and communities of Greece are facing and how do you feel your work is trying to address those challenges and make them better?

SPEAKER_00 35:26

The Mountains conference in October was very educational inspiring, plus concerning in this regard because I was became aware of all the different challenges actually existing there. My interpretation is that since we mentioned communities and indeed the continued depopulation of the countryside but also aging population is very much expressed in also the abandonment of the settlements of productive land. So these are all very proclaimed there and anyone can see but also joined by other pressures that I think already mentioned like tourism is now starting to grow a lot in the mountains as well. And you know in Greece we have a lot of negative examples from the coastal areas it is at least concerning to see at the very least concerning to see that lessons are not learned perhaps about the negative effects and what can be lost that can never be recovered. But also joined by large energy projects and including wind farms and so-called sustainability projects that have quite a negative impact in terms of natural degradation. And I yeah we could not not mention the effects of climate change right so we have uh less rain less snow drought I think it's also uh starting to become very evident and worrisome for local communities. So this is a my mental list of challenges and I think it's quite interesting we mentioned most of them in passing to show that this the engagement with these challenges is actually very active.

SPEAKER_02 37:01

I think Marilena has really covered this I think these are indeed the challenges faced by mountains uh areas uh and the challenges we also see in our work but maybe we can also note that there is a growing interest also from people and groups to engage with these problems and tackle these problems so one thing we've learned uh through Muluki is that if the framework uh can be created, if the the opportunity can be given a lot of people can actually coordinate and and and work around the common cause in these areas these areas still exert a great influence to people and in a way the big question is how this can become more meaningful and more impactful. How long can this project be sustained beyond the 12 days of a workshop or the few months of an apprenticeship and how this dialogue between local communities and people coming from other areas, urban areas or abroad can indeed become more empowering for these places themselves. We don't have any easy answers, of course, but I think through the years and just perhaps as we described through the first projects to more complicated projects that also place environmental challenges more centrally answers begin to emerge. It is really a question of forging alliances in a way sustaining them and to start picking up you know parts of these greater problems and see how we can start addressing them.

SPEAKER_00 38:16

And I wanted to add a bridge to what Ionis is saying that indeed these challenges cannot be tackled by one group alone obviously but Ipirus I think is quite of an interesting region in this context of Greece because there is a lot of vested interest from such groups and uh Bullock is becoming part of what now is called I think a social or environmental ecosystem of such initiatives including collaborative approaches to energy to making uh you can add to that DNA as you're more familiar with this. And so all these approaches are combined in a network of alliances of people who actually live in the same region so they share these material problems and it's quite inspiring to see and hopeful.

SPEAKER_01 39:01

Great thanks I mean maybe I could just finish with a question about what the future holds really because it's one of the really interesting things I've learned in this conversation is just how you've grown as an organization and through your practice how you've developed new strands in your work as time has gone on. So could you say a little bit more about that and about what the future holds?

SPEAKER_00 39:20

To continue my line of thought about alliances because I have been feeling this is what uh has allowed to grow it's uh this network of people that is not only uh located in Ipirus as I mentioned before but through this continued practice across the islands other areas of Greece where collaborators also become in a way part of the group so we have this let's say networked growth but I could also mention the fact that we operate also across different contexts if I for example I am located in an academic environment in Amsterdam but still can form part of this sustained effort and the same goes for all these different people located across realms of practice and thinking so for me this can bring a lot of unexpected alliances and projects and remain open but still meaningful for the local scale and I think that's quite significant. But perhaps Jonas can say something more concrete than that.

SPEAKER_02 40:19

No but it's absolutely concrete and it's it's it's part of of really what the future brings it comes through that I think through this kind of synergies. I mean I think for us as Buluki it's certainly important to continue consolidating developing our base in Ipirus. So really this project has only just begun and then to have really this as as a center for uh let's say research and education around traditional and sustainable building indeed connected to all this kind of larger questions. Then at the same time I mean we do have an ongoing project on the island of Dilos so moving from the mountains to the islands which will be continuing for several years and there also together with Feather we are exploring all these interconnections between different non-modern or other than modern forms of knowledge since Dilos is also a very important archaeological site, a UNESCO World Heritage site but also with let's say a more recent rural heritage so there we're trying to trace connections of this kind so to see what the other than modern can offer us for today's combined let's together with with our own contemporary approaches. At the same time and maybe this is enough to foreground or to describe what the future might bring or what we hope it might bring, we are exploring how all this effort and these journeys around the countryside around the mountains and the islands how can all this be translated into contemporary urban contexts that also face important challenges and that are part of the question, an important part of the equation. So what we are trying to do is really develop projects in areas such as Athens or the larger area of Attica in Athens and there to really translate these kinds of traditional knowledge into let's say contemporary approaches to sustainability to urban systems to and so on. So it describes of course an ambition on behalf of the group it's easier said than done but yes this is what we hope to do this is what we are trying to achieve while along the way really continuing to weave these uh these networks uh between craftspeople and academia local communities and and researchers craftsmen engineers artists and so on so this is what we hope for the future and then next month or so we have an important publication where Ionasu Fedon uh Nicolas Moguliotis and I are editing uh as a result of the symbol of Under the Landscape which where much of this thinking uh that we discussed today I think is represented about the approaches to landscapes grounded approaches if you will so stay tuned fantastic great to hear that that is on the way let's leave it there thanks to Jonas and Marilena thanks to Zofia Gettin for editing we've got more episodes coming up exploring mountain heritage in Greece from a wide range of other perspectives if you've 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.

SPEAKER_01 43:06

You might like also to have a look at the separate website for our broader mountain stories, mountain futures podcast project that this series is a part of you can follow the links to both of those in the episode notes. Thank you for listening