Under the Forest with Faidon Moudopoulos-Athanasiou

In this episode Jason König interviews Faidon Moudopoulos-Athanasiou about his work as a landscape archaeologist in the mountainous region of Zagori in northwest Greece.

Faidon is Marie-Curie Postdoctoral Researcher in the Computational Archaeology Research Group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, working on a project entitled ‘Under the Forest’. His 2022 book, The Early Modern Zagori of Northwest Greece offers a very wide-ranging reassessment of the landscape archaeology of the region in the Ottoman period and beyond, from the 15th-20th century. 

 Faidon talks first about his family connections with Zagori and his experience of visiting there in summer holidays as a child. We discuss Faidon’s book on early modern Zagori, work on uncovering local archives in the villages of Zagori, and also his collaborations with the Boulouki Collective on a series of architecture projects in the region.

We then we turn to Faidon’s current project, ‘Under the Forest’, which aims to shed new light on the archaeological heritage that is increasingly concealed by afforestation. Faidon describes the ‘remote sensing’ archaeological techniques that allow him to bring that heritage to life, and talks about the tradition of giving special protection to ‘sacred forests’ in the Ottoman period.

We talk about Faidon’s work on the region’s successful UNESCO world heritage bid, before turning finally to some of the challenges facing local communities in the mountains of northern Greece, including wildfires and depopulation. Faidon offers some closing reflection on ways in which the creation of cultural trails through the landscape can help with tourist development.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:28

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 today Fedon Mudopoulos Athanasiou. Fedon was actually co-organized for our conference in Athens in October last year, and he's going to be joining some of these podcasts as co-interviewer. But for today, we're going to be turning the tables and asking Fedon to tell his story. Fedon is a landscape archaeologist, although, as we'll see, that title doesn't really do justice to the huge range of Fedon's interests. His 2022 book, The Early Modern Zagori of Northwest Greece, offers a really ambitious, wide-ranging reassessment of the landscape archaeology of the mountainous region of Zagori in the Ottoman period and beyond, really, from the 15th to the 20th century. Currently, he is based in Barcelona. He's Marie Curie postdoctoral researcher in the Computational Archaeology Research Group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, although still doing a lot of work in Greece in the Northwest. He's working at the moment on a project entitled Under the Forest, which we are going to be hearing more about later. Welcome, Fedon. It's great to have the chance to talk to you today.

SPEAKER_01 2:11

Thank you, Jason. It's great to be here to see this project growing and talking with you. And also thanks for the very generous introduction.

SPEAKER_00 2:20

Can I start just by asking you to outline what your own connection is with the mountains of northwest Greece? And how did you come to work on Zahori in your academic research?

SPEAKER_01 2:31

I was born and raised in Athens, and until I became 18, I lived there. But my family from my father's side originates from Zahori, which is a mountainous area in northwest Greece. And I recall all my holidays as a kid, going back to the mountain, exploring what we thought with my friends as an unknown landscape, which in fact was very familiar to everyone around. But you know, as kids you develop your own imagination about the past and myths and so on. So I had this experiential connection with the landscape as a holiday place, as a place for rest. And I never thought until I finished my master's that I would go back and work in Zahoria as a researcher. When I did my master's in Aegean archaeology at the University of Sheffield, I did uh study the ethnoarchaeology of the mountainous areas of northwest Greece. And when I finished that master's, I really thought that I want to continue working in mountainous areas but doing research related to the Bronze. So my supervisor, who was a wise man at the University of Sheffield, Paul Halstead, convinced me to go further ahead in time, move to the early modern period. Because, as he said, you cannot do a PhD because we virtually know nothing of these mountains in the Bronze Age. So better start from the more recent periods, use them with the disciplinary methodology, and perhaps you will discover also stuff that is further ancient. Again, it was not my intention, but it developed as such.

SPEAKER_00 4:14

I love the idea that the landscape that you played in as a child and the landscape you explored in a child is part of your academic explorations now. It's a fantastic idea. Okay, I mentioned your 2022 book in the introduction. It's really a huge overview of the whole region, as I said, across a really long time period. Can you just give us a brief summary of what you were trying to do in that project, what you discovered?

SPEAKER_01 4:36

Yeah, it's uh it's great because it connects to the previous answer that I gave you, because actually this book has emerged right after the completion of the PhD. So it's exactly the methodology of trying to understand a cultural landscape from within in a prolonged period of time. So I decided just for the sake of research in the PhD to the earliest framework in the 15th century and adapting the 20th century because through that period, these five centuries, we have the same materials that we can work with. So we have institutional perspectives, Ottoman era imperial documents, and local archives. We can survey abandoned villages that are mentioned in both imperial and regional archives. We can do ethnography with elders who recall a landscape that is no longer visible today, with uh the abandonment and the population of the mountainous areas and the touristication. So it's a quest to understand how these things changed because we tend to think of mountains as static environments, but my research revealed actually that it was quite the opposite. And if I could use only one example to outline what I discovered, is that through this research, which is a combination like we do in landscape archaeology of some basic GIS field survey as archaeologists and written documents, I managed to reconstruct the settlement pattern of the region and suggest that in all this 18th century wealth that someone looks at and admires in the shape of majestic architecture when they walk on the mountains of Bris from Pillion to Zagori, Seatista, and so on, has a deeper past of mobility which was not really understood up to now. So I managed to interpret how these local communities chose to adapt in a sedentary manner in these mountains of Zagori, actually from the 15th century, and that the intensification of cultivation, which came about with gardening and irrigated systems after the arrival of new crops from the new world, came as a response to population rise, but because they chose to adapt sedentarily, not followed the particularly appealing model to us archaeologists and historians of transhuman pastoralism. So Zagori is kind of an exception to that model because we have agropastoral communities that stayed for year-round within the month.

SPEAKER_00 7:15

So you've given us a really vivid glimpse there, just the kind of range of sources we can draw on it if we want to reconstruct, bring to life the history of this region. Obviously, mountain regions are often viewed as backwaters, places that don't really feature in those urban elite histories that we're used that we're used to seeing. But there's so many different sources we can go to, approaches we can use to bring that to life. Yeah, I just wanted to pick up on the on the point about archives in particular, because I know you've done some more recent work on very local archives as well. Could you just tell us a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_01 7:50

As I said, we have a chance of being able to investigate both elite perspectives from the Ottoman administration and also local archives, uh, which are kind of hard to get your hands at. Uh when I started my research, I asked every head of every uh village in Zagori to open up what's left of the community archives, and the results were uh depressing, not because they rejected uh my claim, but because there were no more archives in most villages. And now I want to go back to my relation with the community as a not local, but uh a person descending from uh Zavoy. Back in, I think it was 2016, before I started my PhD, uh, the Aristi Youth Club discovered, or rediscovered rather, uh, the community archive, which was dumped in the basement of the school in very poor conditions by accident, because we were uh trying to remove from that basement the equipment for the local festival, and we saw some piles of documents and sacks at the back. So a couple of friends and I were very curious to see what that is, and it turns out it was the historical archive of the village from the final part of the Ottoman occupation to when the community ceased to exist back in the 2000s. In other words, what was deemed in the early 2000s are unnecessary for the administration. We were the lucky ones because they dumped it in some other villages, they burned or destroyed. Uh, so this uh this discovery actually fueled my own research because I had a safe space. I knew that at least one archive exists to do my research. Uh, but of course, this is a huge endeavor, and you can't you can't do it yourself because you need to start archiving it and so on. So we involved uh the local cultural associations and another non-for-profit organization specializing uh in archiving, archive and taxis, and we organized three summer research expeditions to classify, save the archive, and start understanding what's in there. In these three endeavors, there were researchers who worked with us, but also students from the universities of Crete and West Attica who did their kind of placement with us. So it was an effort to revitalize the archive, but also bring new energy to the village that has only 60 inhabitants year-round, and start caring about this heritage again, not only for specialized knowledge, as was obviously my interest, but also as a relic of the past that is very useful also to the present of the community, but also for researchers more broadly.

SPEAKER_00 10:55

I love the idea that you're using volunteers for that, as you would do actually for an archaeological survey or excavation. That's great. Could you give us one or two examples of what you found? What documents did you find in that in the in those sacks and boxes?

SPEAKER_01 11:10

Yes, uh we have we found many interesting things uh for the for the broader public. It might be interesting to state that we have early maps from the late 19th century of the world or of Epirus. We have a selection of posters and of course less visual material, like uh community leases of uh summer pastures to transhuman pastoral lists, and a lot of documents related to environmental histories of, for example, the effort of the community to hire engineers and dry out lake in order to create more agricultural space and more boring bureaucratic things.

SPEAKER_00 11:46

Great, thank you. Okay, I'm keen to get on in a minute. I'm keen to get onto your under the forest project because that's such an exciting project. I want to spend plenty of time on that. But before we do that, I wonder if you can might be willing to say a little bit very briefly about the work you've done with the Buluki Collective on their various architecture projects in Northwest Greece. We're going to be doing a recording later in this series where Fedon is actually going to join as co-interviewer, and we're going to be talking to some colleagues from Buluki. So I don't want to anticipate that in great detail today, but it'd be great just to have a very quick snapshot of some of the work you've done with them.

SPEAKER_01 12:20

I have been involved in uh some of Buluki's projects in the mountains. And Buluki is a research collective investing resources and research in the traditional crafts like uh dry stone masonry or the production of uh lime and so on. And my relationship with them started right after the thing was formed. And my selfish question, which I tried to answer through collaborating with Buluki, was actually to explore the negative effect of what I was researching. I was researching ruination, so I was discovering piles of rubble that I was thinking they might have been houses at some point, or I was finding ruins of 17th-century houses that were built with dry stone. There were no mortars back then in the mountains. So I was studying this sort of ruination, and I thought that by studying the opposite in a collaborative workshop in Aristi to restore ancient cobalt pathways to fill its gaps, I would understand how is the process of building something, and maybe this would open further insights to the study of ruination. And in fact, it's very funny because from the first day at the site, my question, my academic questions about ruination and whether some of these piles of gravel that I was uh interpreting always as clearance cairns were actually revealed to me as rubbles of collapsed dry stone houses. It was just a revelation, a very easy one to make within the context of such a workshop. So then I kept working with Buluki, and further questions arise about the environmental impact of such constructions, technical and as well as cultural heritage uh aspects, and as well as working with communities. But I think this will be discussed at the podcast of Buluki, so perhaps uh we must reiterate our listeners to that one.

SPEAKER_00 14:21

Great. Thanks. Yeah, we better resist the temptation to say more, but that gives us a really nice little advanced taste of that conversation we will be having with them soon. Let's talk about Under the Forest. Can you start just by telling us what the project is, really? What are you trying to do? What are the challenges?

SPEAKER_01 14:38

This is a Marie Curie project, which I'm implementing in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. This might sound strange to our listeners, so I should clarify that within the Supercomputing Center, there is a faculty of computational social sciences and humanities. And within that, as you mentioned in the introduction, there is the computational archaeology group, which mostly houses landscape archaeologists, because we use some computational methods in our approaches. Within this framework, I'm researching the heritage that lies under the forests of Zagori. We should clarify that these are mostly regrown forests due to the abandonment of the early modern communities which fled after the World War and the Civil War, either abroad as migrants or in the cities, in the big trends of urbanization already from the 50s, but mainly the 60s. And this gap in the population and the local economies led to a retreat of human activity and to a prolonged forestation, which was not managed by the state. So it's naturally regrowing forests. This forestation covered all human activity in the landscape, from man-made structures as abandoned villages or even more agricultural remains and pastoral remains, and also pathways. And these are not visible today, and they cannot be appreciated or understood as a whole by the visitors or the academics. So the main goal of my project was to build up on my PhD and make a cultural mapping of all the heritage that lies under this forest to understand landscape change through time with the aid of new technologies such as LIDAR. So the aim was to fly a LIDAR which has the ability to penetrate forests and produce digital surface models that actually highlight man-made or other structures, use some basic algorithms to highlight these structures, and actually from desk-based uh positions to interpret uh most of it, and then go to the sites and verify what this digital model suggests. So, for example, there might be something that looks like an ancient wall. You then go there and do a basic survey and realize if the algorithm is right, pointing something to you or not. Uh so this was the main goal. As far as the challenges go, I won't uh burden you with many things. I want just to point out that Greece is the only country in the EU that has no LIDAR open access available for researchers, which makes budgeting an insurmountable challenge. So that's the main problem because just to give you an idea about maybe a fifth of the Zagori area, we had to use almost two-thirds of the budget, of the overall budget of the project. So this is the main restriction. For some people that actually are not aware of how much these things cost, imagine that a colleague that does this work in Italy, for example, through a Maricurie ends up with two-thirds more research money. So, yeah, I would uh I would stick to that as the main challenge and as something that can be solved only through top-down initiatives. It's not that we are going to have 10 under the forest projects and then release the data. It's something that has to come from above.

SPEAKER_00 18:27

It's really interesting to hear that. Doing archaeology in the mountains is not easy. That's one of the messages we've been getting from other interviews too, in all sorts of different ways. Even for a project like this, where you may you're not necessarily up in the high mountains, the high peaks. It's still a really painstaking and, as you say, an expensive process. Okay, so you've talked there a little bit about some of the remote sensing technologies you're using, but you're also combining that with more traditional archaeological methods. Is that right? Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_01 18:56

Just to take it step by step after we do the LIDAR flight and we create the digital surface models that are very detailed and hopefully can help us uh see under the forest uh and get an idea about uh material culture remains, uh, either in the forms of pathways or hints about constructions, buildings, or fortresses. We apply an algorithm which is called the multiscale relief model, which actually highlights these potential sites in color coding, so we get a hit map actually of potential sites and percentage of likelihood. So one immediate reaction to that is to go and survey and look with your own eyes whether it's something natural or not. Most of the times it's not. So you get a good idea about different phases of the landscape. Obviously, as you said previously, it's very difficult to survey the mountains. I imagine that in the plains you have bigger teams. Here it's a job of two or three people. So, yes, landscape survey follows uh the desk-based assessment of the lidar. And also sometimes we might even engage with test bits in order to get some datings for the sites in order to establish a relative chronology of the different sites we are discovering, either they are pastoral or agricultural or inhabited spaces. So this is one package of work.

SPEAKER_00 20:31

So you're seeing the big picture and then you're zooming in on particular areas on the ground. And so a lot of that is about structures, about paths and buildings. But I know you've got one strand of work on sacred forests as well, which I'm quite fascinated by that just because of the tradition of sacred forests also stretching right back to antiquity. I don't know whether there's a kind of clear continuity between ancient sacred forests and Ottoman sacred forests, but it's fascinating to see that those were important until really relatively recently and maybe still are important in some places. Can you tell us just a little bit about that strand of the project too?

SPEAKER_01 21:05

Well, sacred forests are a very interesting uh case from northwest Greece in the regions of uh Zahori and Konica, but this is a transborder phenomenon, so we have sacred forests, similar structures in Albania, as far as we know, in some areas. And it's a tradition coming from the Ottoman era. I think the research of colleagues such as Kalyopi Stara has shown that the most ancient trees are 400 years old within these forests. It's a sharp contrast between these ancient forests and the regenerated woodlands that I talked about briefly earlier. And these were very interesting communal adaptations through which we can see religion as a player, as an actor in the managing of the commons. Because unlike what we might think if we Look at the map of Zahori today, or an aerial image of Zahori today, which is all green, we have to imagine that up to the 1950s the green patches would have been limited and the cultivated areas would have been occupying most of the Midlands, let's say, and then you could have the pastures in the uplands. So a totally different image than what we see today. And these forests are protected by the communities up to the present, although today it's kind of metaphysical because for someone who doesn't know the limits of these forests and is ignorant of the internal processes of the landscape, he wouldn't be able to say, okay, here we have an ancient forest and a hundred meters later a young regenerated forest. So, yes, it's very interesting that even the younger generations of kids that grew in the cities, like myself, in some villages have this attachment to these forests, although they never lived in the previous landscape where the forest was a separate entity.

SPEAKER_00 23:07

We're so used to thinking about deforestation as a problem in mountain areas. It's really interesting to think about the growth of new forests actually as a problem for preservation of cultural heritage.

SPEAKER_01 23:17

Yes, indeed. And I think it's a matter of perspective. In Zahori, if you look at the advertisements of most hotels, you would see a narrative that is come and join the beautiful, enjoy the beautiful villages within a sea of nature, which was never the case in the past. So if we try to put another hat on and look at that landscape through a more local perspective, we would start discerning all these patterns that I was talking before. But of course, as an archaeologist, as an or as a historian, you cannot say 100% that one natural development is a problem and another one is not. So what I've learned from working with colleagues, because these questions and landscape archaeology as a method is interdisciplinary, is that not all forests are the same. And if we dig a bit deeper in the local language, in the Greek language, forests is dasos. But dasos as a Greek word never existed in the dialect of the locals. They had other words that are reminiscent to hoodlan, which is very different. Forest is somehow state-managed and so protected and so on. But this notion never existed in the historical periods, as far as we know. And in order to help me understand what is this thread, apart from literature from other Mediterranean mountains that are alerting us of potential wildfires due to this afforestation because of the composition of these forests, what I tried to do was to create, as a byproduct of my PhD, another discussion. I invited 18 scholars from different disciplines who worked in Zagori through a grant from the AHRC while I was a PhD student to offer a piece of reflection targeting locals. So all papers were not written in scientific language, but they were explaining a problem. So I invited foresters, cultural biologists, archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists, as well as local stakeholders, to reflect on some issues about the landscape from their own academic perspective. And there, the forester of the group described the change from the 1980s onwards, which was his experience, all these years working with the landscape. And he was actually the one arguing that we will, at some point, touchwood, have a fire that will evolve into a megafire because of the way we haven't managed this afforestation. And this, according to his perspective as well, is the product of the diminishing primary sector of the economy, namely the absence of any sheep or goats by law in these villages, because this landscape was then framed as a national park and all herders had to migrate to the plains, to the lowlands, and also the absence of agriculture. So nothing productive replaced those activities, not even logging. So, in this sense, this is an unmanaged uh area, as I interpret this uh argument, that uh will cause us problems if we don't do anything else. So we cannot say that because Zagore is green, it's comparable to the Schwarzwald in Germany or the forests of Patagonia, which we have seen devastating images uh in the past days. But if we don't act again, uh we might face similar problems.

SPEAKER_00 26:59

So, yeah, actually, it's then reforestation as a problem not just in cultural terms but also in conservation terms.

SPEAKER_01 27:06

If I may add also that uh my project started as identifying this heritage that is lost under this young forest, but actually, through the same remote sensing techniques, we can identify different values in the forest. And these different values in the forest are also identified by biologists who argue that, for example, the sacred forests that you mentioned earlier are huge biodiversity reserves. They create different habitats for different flora and fauna, while newer forest actually is a problem. Because, for example, the vultures used to hunt for prey in the open spaces of the fields. Now they don't have any habitat to prey on and they live. So it's a complex issue that, as a landscape archaeologist, I can't see on the map, but only if we collaborate with different scholars from the natural sciences, we can get a bigger narrative out that would be sound scientifically and not only empirically driven, let's say. And in this way, I have been trying to collaborate with many other people from different disciplines.

SPEAKER_00 28:16

Great. Yeah, we're starting to talk there about the way in which Zagoria as a region is tied up with the way it presents itself to the world, the way it's which is tied up with bigger challenges. So just a couple of very quick questions to finish on the in that area. First is just about the recent bid for UNESCO recognition of Zagoria as a World Heritage Site. I think you were you've been involved in, Fevon. Any chance you could tell us just a little bit about that, what that process involved, please?

SPEAKER_01 28:42

My involvement started when I was halfway through my PhD. I got an invitation to be part of a scientific committee that would draft uh the bid, and I contributed the historical background and the archaeological background, as one might expect. So my contribution relied on my expertise as a researcher, but I think I also helped a bit uh through my community-driven workshops, as the ones who briefly mentioned above with the archive or with the with Puluti to offer some counterexamples from bottom-up perspectives that I think helped the nomination, which was successful, and since 2023, Zahori is listed as the first cultural landscape of Greece, the UNESCO World Care, at least.

SPEAKER_00 29:30

Great, and that's clearly a very valuable thing for the whole region. And then finally, just a really a question about future challenges. It's something we've been talking about in all of these interviews, really. What do you feel are the biggest challenges facing mountain communities in Greece? What can we do to help? And particularly what difference does heritage make? How can giving attention to mountain heritage make a difference to that, both within your own work and more broadly?

SPEAKER_01 29:56

I think that the two main problems that the Greek mountain communities are facing are not directly related with heritage. The one is the risk of fires, since climate change or climate crisis is here. And you know, this image I portrayed is not only in Zagori, but it's very indicative when you ask a local what do you see in this landscape around? He would say this is a jungle, not a jungle in terms of the qualities of the forest in the jungle, which is a mature forest, but in the jungle, in the way we in the pejorative way we describe a situation that is unmanaged as jungle. So I think this is the primary problem, that challenge that the mountains of Greece are facing, wildfires that are not natural in a sense that it is because we have abandoned mountainous communities as a policy. Then the second problem is that mountainous communities are fading and we need to seek a way as a solution, again from the bottom up, but from also from the top down, to send people uh out of the big towns, out of Athens to try and live in the countryside because they become the best stewards of the literally abandoned landscape. So, in terms of heritage, one example from Zahori would be to try and increase cultural paths. I know we have been talking with Fibon Savaropoulos in other interviews. Our idea, also as cultural associations, is to open up old paths that would allow visitors to stay more in the village, create cyclical routes that start from one point and then to another village or to the same, in order to get past the mass tourism with cars that go only to sightseeing in the high in the highlights, the Instagrammable places, and spend more quality time engaging with the landscape because this way we tour guides have uh an incentive to stay in the mountains for prolonged periods. And my impression is that tourists will be interested in that as an activity that could create a sustainable niche segment within the tourist model that can actually work in favor uh of the whole uh area and the management.

SPEAKER_00 32:20

Great. Yeah, so it's thinking about making sure that we have a model of tourism that really engages with communities and local needs rather than simply being imposed from the outside. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 32:33

And maybe just one final empirical observation. Back in 2023, there was a fire in the East of Zavori near the village of Vovusa. Vovusa is a village with active loggers, so they keep forest roads maintained. The fire department had to walk for three hours from the end of the forest roads in order to put the fire down. Imagine if that road was closed due to the abandonment, how much would these firefighters have to walk and whether it would have been feasible to operate. So, I mean, it's not that this image that I portray goes against modern prevention. It's just that people with local knowledge in those local landscapes can assist and perhaps also help creating new models for state intervention. The big deal is to make to convince the state to listen to them. And I think that's part of what we are trying to do through articles, symposia, conferences, and so on. There is a big road ahead, but we have to remain optimistic.

SPEAKER_00 33:45

Thank you, Felon. Thanks to Sophia Gertin for editing. We've got more episodes coming up exploring mountain heritage in Greece from a whole 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. You might like also to have a look at the separate website for the broader mountain stories, mountain futures 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.