This chapter of Digging-Up. Atlas of the Blank Histories remains a work in progress.
It is grounded in an exploration of the Greek mainland and its lesser-visited islands, in search of unknown, overlooked or forgotten histories that run alongside the historical record and have remained buried beneath the surface.
This, after all, is where the project began. Plato’s cave, where people mistake shadows for reality, and the myth of Atlantis, the civilisation swallowed by the sea, are among the stories that first gave shape to Digging-Up, along with the idea of memory as something to be wrested from oblivion. Returning to Greece means going back to the source of these narratives and asking what might still lie buried beneath them.
What follows is not an account of Greek history, but a series of evocations that informed the choice of this territory: stories, myths, images and readings which, layered upon one another, made Greece an essential setting for the project. Each represents a stratum, and together they form a kind of imaginary core sample, extending from the surface of the sea to the heart of the earth.
Greece appears as a fragmented territory. Its islands emerge from the sea like shards gathered by an archaeologist from the surface, fragments of a whole whose original form is no longer known. The word archipelago itself has its origins in the Aegean, whose name it once bore before coming to denote island groups throughout the world. For millennia, this sea has been a passage rather than a boundary. Merchants and pirates, heroes and shipwreck survivors have crossed its waters. Sponge divers have inhabited its depths, descending for generations into the darkness of the seabed. Today, it is crossed by people fleeing war, seeking refuge on the islands closest to the Turkish coast. Every crossing has left something behind. From the Antikythera shipwreck, discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, emerged a device of bronze gears capable of calculating the movements of the sun and moon, submerged for some two thousand years: a time machine preserved by time itself.
On each of these islands, time has accumulated in layers. Successive powers and languages have left traces that sometimes appear side by side: an ancient sanctuary, a castle built by the Knights Hospitaller, a mosque, the rationalist architecture of the Italians. Yet the surface reveals only what someone has chosen to pass down. The rest has slipped further beneath it: the exoduses, the exiles, the villages perched on high ground to escape the gaze of those arriving from the sea. There, memory ceases to be narrative and becomes matter.
Deeper still lies myth, which in Greece is never entirely detached from place. On Serifos, according to legend, Perseus turned a king to stone by showing him Medusa’s head. Nisyros is said to have been formed from a fragment of rock hurled by Poseidon at a giant who still lies beneath the island. On Leros, the birds known as Meleagrides were associated with a sanctuary of the Maiden: according to myth, they were the sisters of Meleager, whom Artemis transformed into birds because they could not stop mourning their dead brother. On Lefkada, people would leap into the sea from the white cliff that gives the island its name, hoping to be cured of love; later tradition held that Sappho had been the first to make that leap. On Patmos, tradition locates the vision of the Apocalypse, the end of time from which, as in La Jetée, every journey into the past seems to begin.
For the ancient Greeks, the underworld was the realm of the dead, the place to which Persephone descended each year before returning to the light. It was there, beneath the earth, that the fate of memory was decided. The gold tablets placed in Orphic tombs gave the dead instructions for their journey: on reaching the underworld, they would find two springs. They were not to drink from the first, Lethe, whose waters erased memory, but to seek the second, the spring of Mnemosyne, the personification of Memory. The same choice lies at the origin of Digging-Up: to descend beneath the surface and rescue from oblivion what the earth holds.
Beneath myth, finally, lies the earth itself, and here the earth is never still. The islands rest on one of the most unstable geological regions of the Mediterranean, where the African Plate slips beneath the Eurasian Plate. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis have reshaped these coastlines for millennia. Around the seventeenth century BCE, the eruption of Thera buried the city of Akrotiri beneath volcanic ash. Many believe that this disappearance gave rise to the legend of Atlantis: a buried civilisation and a story that preserves its memory. The Greeks themselves imagined Delos as a wandering island, carried by the waves until it was anchored to the seabed. Beneath the earth, too, they imagined a hidden geography.
In the Phaedo, Plato describes a world riddled with immense cavities, traversed by subterranean rivers of water, fire and mud flowing into the abyss of Tartarus. At the southern tip of the Peloponnese, at Cape Taenarum, a cave was believed to be one of the entrances to Hades, the passage through which Heracles descended to bring Cerberus into the world above. It is an ancient vision of the earth as a world within a world, inhabited beneath its surface, an idea that would endure through the centuries and reach the scientists and visionaries of the modern age.
In a sense, Digging-Up shares this dream: that another world exists beneath the surface, made up of everything that has been buried, and that digging might be enough to reach it. As in Marker’s vision, the past here is never settled, but remains in the process of being redefined.
These associations, accumulated over the years and woven into the very fabric of the project, have made Greece an inevitable destination. Yet the richness of this historical and mythological landscape can also obscure its lesser-known histories. Great narratives and enduring myths overshadow the smaller stories, precisely those the project seeks to uncover.
Research, after all, has no clearly defined beginning or end. It unfolds through studies, readings, encounters and explorations that overlap, continually shifting one’s perspective on what has already been observed. The Greek chapter, too, emerged from this gradual layering of knowledge.
In preparation for the journey in 2021, I extended my reading beyond the studies I had already undertaken, turning to further essays across a range of fields, from history and anthropology to philosophy and the earth sciences. I continued reading throughout the journey, allowing the books to become entangled with the places I visited, the encounters I had and the stories I heard from those who lived there. The intention was not to impose a theoretical framework on the territory, but to pursue the questions that had drawn me to Greece in the first place, allowing what I learned through reading and what I experienced firsthand to reshape one another.
The underground, above all, called for an understanding that went beyond its physical dimensions. In Underland: A Deep Time Journey, Robert Macfarlane explores places where geological time meets human history, and where burial can mean preservation, concealment or the entrusting of something to an unimaginably distant future. I wanted to explore this ambiguity, which runs through the project as a whole: extracting a testimony of the past from the earth while, through the Time Capsule, making the reverse gesture of entrusting something of the present to the ground. Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures offered another perspective on the life unfolding beneath the surface, on invisible networks of relationships and on the processes of transformation that move through matter. Different in both method and subject, the two books challenged the notion of the underground as a passive repository.
Another line of reading concerned the nature of testimony and the conditions under which an event enters history. In On the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin challenges the idea of the past as a succession of definitively established facts, while in The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov, he considers how experience is passed on through voice and narrative. What interested me most was the distance between a history lived, a history passed down and a history recognised as such. Marc Bloch’s The Historian’s Craft allowed me to think more closely about the relationship between trace, testimony and interpretation, a distinction that becomes essential when asking what a material finding can actually prove. Annette Wieviorka’s The Era of the Witness shifted the focus to the historical conditions under which a witness’s voice acquires public authority, while Georges Didi-Huberman’s Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz raised the question of what a fragmentary image can testify to, even when it seems incapable of representing an event. In On the Natural History of Destruction, W. G. Sebald confronts the silence that can surround a collective experience even when its material consequences remain visible. These are different concerns, yet they converge on a question central to Digging-Up: the existence of a trace does not guarantee that it will be recognised, just as the absence of written testimony does not mean that an event never took place.
To these readings I added Frances A. Yates’s The Art of Memory, seeking a deeper understanding of the relationship between images, places and the construction of remembrance. Memory can be organised spatially, entrusted to an imaginary architecture, to a sequence of places through which thought finds its way. This relationship between space and memory seemed particularly relevant to the making of an atlas in which every geographical point leads to a story, and where the visible map must continually be read alongside another, less accessible one, formed by the narratives that inhabit the territory.
Greece also brought the research into contact with the idea of endings, and with the question of what may survive the disappearance of a world. Ernesto De Martino’s The End of the World: Cultural Apocalypse and Transcendence allowed me to explore the relationship between the collapse of a cultural horizon and the very possibility of continuing to recognise oneself within the world. In Western Eschatology, Jacob Taubes examines the relationship between historical time and the anticipation of the end, while Edgar Morin’s La Voie. Pour l’avenir de l’humanité turns towards the possibility of imagining transformation from within the crises of the present. Alongside these reflections, I read Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, to consider a conception of time that exceeds human existence and memory, and Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near, which offered a radically different perspective, one in which technological acceleration transforms the relationship between present and future. Bringing such distant visions together was not an attempt to reconcile them, but a way of extending the enquiry into the different timescales running through the project, from the remote past preserved in matter to the century during which the Time Capsule will remain buried.
The relationship between places and the communities that inhabit them also called for a more nuanced understanding. Jean-Luc Nancy’s Being Singular Plural and Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation accompanied my reflections on forms of existence and memory that cannot be understood in isolation, but take shape through relationships, crossings and exchanges. This perspective was especially meaningful in an island territory, where the sea both separates and connects, and where the histories of those who live there are often shaped by migration, encounters, successive dominations and overlapping forms of belonging. Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience also became part of this reading, bringing questions of individual responsibility in the face of authority and the possibility of resisting what is imposed as legitimate order. A concern that also touches, indirectly, on the right of a minor history not to disappear within a dominant narrative.
These books were never intended to form a theoretical system to be applied to the territory. I read them to sharpen my attention to whatever the research might reveal, without deciding in advance how it should be interpreted. Each book brought another perspective, but also further uncertainty. The gradual accumulation of knowledge does not necessarily make what lies beneath the surface more transparent. Rather, it makes it possible to recognise how differently things may be preserved, forgotten, transformed or passed on.
Study was essential to finding my bearings in such a layered territory, but it also carried a limitation that the project could not ignore: what has been written has already been told. A story committed to the page, however marginal, has already entered some form of transmission. The histories sought by Digging-Up also lie elsewhere, in the voices of those who inhabit these places, passed down from one generation to another like an inheritance no one ever thought to transcribe. Reading alone could not reach them. I had to go.
And so, in mid-September 2021, the research moved into the field, away from the most celebrated sites, on a journey lasting almost two months and ending on Leros on 7 November. The journey was made by boat. Many of the islands I was looking for have no regular transport connections and can only be reached by sea. This is also how, for millennia, navigators, merchants and travellers approached these lands, one landing after another. The boat was captained by someone with extensive experience of Greek waters, who accompanied the entire journey, navigating the routes, winds and anchorages.
This way of travelling has an ancient precedent in Greece. In the second century CE, Pausanias passed through these lands, documenting the local traditions and stories he encountered along the way, preserving accounts that might otherwise have been lost. In a different way, this journey also unfolded through sailing, walking and listening. The slow passage from island to island, the landscapes encountered, the people met, and the stories heard directly from inhabitants opened up reflections and avenues of exploration that no amount of reading could have offered. Study had shown where to look. Only the journey made it possible to see.
The route crossed Greece from one sea to another. In the Dodecanese, it took in Patmos, Arki, Agathonisi, Leros, including Blefouti Bay and the islet of Archangelos, Levitha, Kalymnos, with the village of Palionisos, Pserimos, Nisyros and Gyali. In the Cyclades, it passed through Paros, including the village of Naoussa, Ano Koufonisi, Kythnos and Serifos; in the Saronic Gulf, it reached Hydra. In the Peloponnese, the journey continued to the fortified town of Monemvasia, the island of Elafonisos, Porto Heli Bay and Pylos, before turning inland to Olympia. Finally, in the Ionian Sea, the route included Zakynthos, Antipaxos and Lefkada, as well as the bays of Sarakiniko and Syvota. The journey ended on Leros.
Every landing left its mark. On certain islands, however, the landscape and the stories heard became more closely entwined, revealing something like a sensitive zone: a place where something seems to be waiting beneath the surface. These are the islands on which the research has chosen to concentrate: Gyali, Nisyros, Leros, Levitha, Arki, Agathonisi, Kalymnos, Serifos, Kythnos, Monemvasia, Elafonisos and Lefkada.
Each is marked by a point on the map. Following it opens onto the island’s history: stories passed down orally by inhabitants, documents traced and photographs gathered during the journey. Together, these materials form, island by island, the first map of this new chapter, a map of histories to be superimposed on the geographical one. The list remains open and may grow to include further islands as the research continues.
This initial phase, undertaken independently and without institutional support, laid the foundations for the Greek chapter. The next step will be to return to the selected islands, this time accompanied by those who know how to read the earth: geologists and sedimentologists, volcanologists, speleologists, geophysicists capable of investigating the subsurface without disturbing it, archaeologists, geochemists and dating specialists, together with drilling technicians. This follows the same process already followed in the three previous stages, in Kabul, Cappadocia and Pompeii, where each intervention was prepared and carried out with the involvement of specialists from different scientific fields.
There is not necessarily a correspondence between a story passed down through generations and the matter that has accumulated over time. A story may survive for centuries without leaving a recognisable geological trace, while the earth may preserve evidence of events that no one remembers. Narrative and the underground hold the past in different ways, and neither can restore it in its entirety. Bringing these two forms of testimony into relation through scientific investigation will make it possible to establish whether the ground beneath the places identified through oral accounts holds material traces that correspond to what memory has passed down, and to determine precisely where to dig.
Only then, with institutional support and the necessary permits, will the operational phase begin: the extraction and analysis of core samples, the exhibition, the plaques marking each borehole and, finally, the Time Capsule entrusted to the earth for a century. This is a process whose outcome cannot be known in advance. A history emerging from one of these islands, previously untold, buried, overlooked, yet deserving to be brought to the surface, will determine where the earth is to be questioned. And the journey, which began as an act of listening, may finally become an excavation.