Excavating Mount Lykaion with David Gilman Romano

In this episode Jason König interviews David Gilman Romano, from the University of Arizona, about his many years of archaeological research on Mount Lykaion in Arkadia.

We start by discussing David’s first visit to Mount Lykaion, in 1978. David sketches out the mythological importance of the site, which was claimed as one of the birthplaces of Zeus, its importance for Arcadian identity in antiquity, and its athletic significance, as the venue for the festival of the Lykaia which was held high up on the mountainside.

David then describes the development of the Mount Lykaion Excavation and Survey project, which has been underway since 2004, and summarises some of the most important finds from the site, including evidence for continuous use of the space of the summit altar back to the Neolithic period.

In the second half we turn to the creation of the Parrhasian Heritage Park in the area around Mount Lykaion, which has involved decades of collaboration between archaeologists and local communities, and the creation of a series of hiking trails. David describes his favourite trail, the Trail of Pan.

Finally we talk about some of the ways in which archaeology can make a difference to mountain regions struggling with depopulation.

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

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to the Mountains of Greece podcast series, part of the broader Mountain Stories, Mountain Futures podcast project. These interviews follow up on a 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 David Gilman Romano. David is a professor of Greek archaeology at the University of Arizona. He's got a huge range of research interests, most of which we won't have time to touch on today. He's worked on the ancient Olympic Games, Greek and Roman cities and sanctuaries, including work on Roman Corinth, and he has many decades of experience of archaeological field work in Greece. But most relevant today is his amazing work on Mount Lacion in Arcadia and the Peloponnese. David is co-director of the Mount Lacayon Excavation and Survey Project, which is by far the most extensive archaeological investigation of any mountaintop sanctuary site in Greece. So it's a really major landmark in mountain archaeology in Greece. There are huge numbers of publications coming out of that project. Most recently, actually, David's jointly authored 2024 publication in the journal His Mary. I was just having a look at that this afternoon on thunder, lightning, and earthquakes at the Sanctuary of Zeus. Really fantastic to read. So welcome, David. It's great to have the chance to talk to you today.

SPEAKER_01 1:44

Well, thank you. Thank you, Jason. I'm happy to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:47

And I should say that David is talking also today on behalf of his colleagues Nota Pantzu and Dimitris Papaconstantino, who also presented at our conference back in October. So I wonder if we could start just by going back to the beginning. Maybe I could ask you just to say a little bit, first of all, about how you came to work on Arcadia and on Mount Lacowan in particular.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

Sure, I'm happy to talk about that. When I arrived in Athens at the American School of Classical Studies in 1976, I was interested in ancient Greek athletics. And as a regular member, we toured around Greece and went to many different ancient athletic sanctuaries, among other things. One of our professors at the American School at that time, the emeritus professor, was Eugene Vanderpool, a professor of archaeology. And knowing of my interest in ancient athletics, he urged me to go to Mount Lacan and to see the Hippodrome and the stadium at Mount Lacan at 4,000 feet or 1182 meters to see the sanctuary, this beautiful mountain sanctuary. He said, You'll love it. So it took me a year and a half to get up there because our regular membership year, we weren't able to get to Mount Lacan because of a rainstorm. But when I went, I approached the sanctuary from the village at the base of the mountain, Isioma, a four-hour hike. My wife Irene and my friend Robin Rhodes and I hiked up to the hippodrome area through the village of Anucarias. We we saw the hippodrome in the stadium, and then we hiked further up to the southern peak where the altar of Zeus is situated. And when I got up there, I just had a conversation with myself about this is it. This is the place. Uh, you know, what could be better than this? You've got a stadium, you've got a hippodrome, you've got the birthplace of Zeus, and you've got this fantastic mountain view in all directions. And I knew that you know immediately I wanted to come back and I wanted to work there in the future, and I couldn't imagine what that would look like, but I pledged to myself that I would come back. So that that's really how it all started back in 1978.

SPEAKER_00 3:53

Amazing. Yeah, and it is an extraordinary site as you I mean you described it beautifully there for those who haven't been before. I wonder if you could sketch out for us a little bit more about the importance of this site in antiquity. Why did this matter so much? What happened there?

SPEAKER_01 4:09

Yeah, so it's a very important site. It was important to the ancients. It was sometimes called the Arcadian Olympus. It was known as the Koraphi, the sacred peak. And it was one of the, according to ancient authors, one of the considered birthplaces of Zeus. So the Arcadian birthplace of Zeus, certainly, but there is this dispute in antiquity about the real birthplace of Zeus. Was it on Crete at Mount Ida or Mount Dicty, or was it on Mount Lacaan at the sanctuary of Zeus at Mount Lacan? Was it the Arcadian peak? And it's Callimachus who writes the ode to Zeus and asks Zeus directly, where were you born? Were you born in the mountains of Crete, or were you born in the mountains of Arcadia? And then he adds, the Cretans are always lying. So at that point, I thought the idea of the birthplace of Zeus with early athletics was something that I was extremely interested in. And this was something that I think was of great importance to the ancient Greeks as well. That is, if there was an association of early Zeus or the origin of Zeus with this mountaintop site and early athletics, certainly for me this would be important. And I thought for the ancients this would be important. So this is one of the reasons why it stands out.

SPEAKER_00 5:29

Yeah, yeah. I mean, actually quite unusual for mountain sites in having the stadium and the hippodrome so high up on the mountain. I guess we've got, presumably, we've got people then trekking out from cities all around and actually traveling from all across the Mediterranean in in later periods to come to that festival. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 5:44

That's right. It became the Arcadian sanctuary par excellence, and before that it was the Parasian sanctuary. And it was like a Panhellenic sanctuary, certainly in the fourth century BC, because they did have athletes coming from around the Greek world, and they had victors that were from different uh parts of the Greek world from Macedonia and from Sicily, and it was on the circuit. So it was a very important Panhellenic-like sanctuary, and certainly in the fourth century it was of that status.

SPEAKER_00 6:17

Fantastic. Thanks. Yeah, it's a very rustic place in some ways. It feels very much out of the city, away from city life, but it's for that period. It's really the center of the Mediterranean world with people coming in from everywhere around.

SPEAKER_01 6:28

Right. And actually, we we consider it remote today because it's difficult to get there and it's difficult to get from Mount Lacan one ridge over to the Temple of Apollo Epicurios. But in antiquity, it may not have been quite so remote because of the rivers, the Alpheus River and the Rotus River that formed a kind of a highway through the Peloponnese. So it was it was right off the main highway. And there was also the Nether River, there was also the Lucius River, there were a whole series of rivers that came together close to Mount Lacan. And so it may have been a crossroads more than we can imagine today, when it takes ingenuity to find your way up to Mount Lacan.

SPEAKER_00 7:07

Fantastic. It's really interesting to hear about the rivers. So what were the first steps for the project? What were the early stages of that work like in the survey project and then the excavation?

SPEAKER_01 7:19

Right. So back again to 1978. So when I pledged to myself I would come back and work at Mount Lacan, I was also thinking to myself that this was a landscape, this was a mountainous region that needed to be preserved. I remember thinking that in 1978, I just thought, wow, look at this. This is fantastic. We have to preserve this. You know, I had no idea how this would happen or if it would happen, but those were my thoughts. I put that in the back of my mind. I finished my PhD and then I ended up working at Corinth for many years on Roman centuriation and Roman city planning, uh, but always with the idea in the back of my head that I would come back to Mount Lacan. This was going to be my second project, my final project. I needed to come back to the pledge I made to return. So when I was thinking about this seriously in the early 2000s, 2001 and 2002, I was looking around for a colleague to work with me on this project because I knew that this project was huge. It was a huge mountain site, it was remote, it was going to need infrastructure, it was going to need logistics, it was going to need all kinds of things. And I certainly didn't think I could do this all myself. So I was looking around for a colleague to help me, someone with an interest in this part of the world. And I found that colleague in the form of Dr. Mary Voyatis, who uh has been my colleague ever since 2002 and is an emeritus professor of archaeology and classics here at the University of Arizona. We got together at the Arcadian Conference in 2002 and talked about the idea of a new excavation at Mount Lacan, at the Sanctuary of Zeus in Mount Lacan. She had been working at Tegea for many years. She had an interest in pottery and in small finds, which was not my strength. And so I thought this might be a good combination of forces. So from 2002, we got together and started talking about this new excavation at the Sanctuary of Zeus. But a part of the proposal that we made to the then Ephor of Antiquities, the fifth Ephoria in Sparta and Arcadia at that time, what I was then calling an archaeological park. And so from the very beginning, this was one of the ideas that we presented to Anastasia Panayotopulu, who was the then Ephor, to include the idea of an archaeological park in the proposal for the excavation from the very first moment. And she gave us the go-ahead for this. She said, This is a wonderful idea. Please go ahead. That's how it literally started from a meeting in 2003 with Anastasia Panayotopulu in Athens.

SPEAKER_00 9:56

Amazing. Thank you. Yeah, we'll talk a little bit more about the Parisian Heritage Park in a moment, but maybe I could just quiz you a bit more on the archaeology before we get to that point. I mean, for those who haven't done much archaeology or maybe had much chance to be involved in archaeological projects, obviously archaeology is a slow-moving business, isn't it? It's painstaking. And I guess one of the pleasures of getting further on in a project like this after several decades is to be able to look back and see just how much you have uncovered and made sense of. Could you give us a summary of some of the highlights? So what have you uncovered? What have you discovered about Mount Lacan that we did not know before all of this started? And there are any highlights there, exciting discoveries, for example, for you.

SPEAKER_01 10:36

Well, thank you. This is one of my favorite subjects. Well, you know, when the Greek excavator Kurniotis worked at Mount Lacan in the early 20th century, and he worked both at the altar and in the lower sanctuary. And the earliest evidence he found was 7th century BC. And so we were hoping that perhaps there could be earlier material at the site. We know that George Milenos in 1943 had written a paper in which he predicted that the Sanctuary of Zeus at Mount Lacan would be found to be a very early and important Bronze Age sanctuary. And we knew that. And we just wondered if there wasn't some earlier material because of all the mythology and all the uh literary history about the site. So one of the first things we found in the earliest years of our excavation of the altar was pottery that went back to the Neolithic period. We had Neolithic, we had final Neolithic, we had early Halladic, Middle Haladic, and Late Halladic pottery, and then straight into the Iron Age and so on. So we have a continuous sequence from the Neolithic all the way through. So that's one of the new discoveries. This is the new information that we did not have previously. Another very important discovery was the fact that the dedication of burned femurs, which we discovered along with the Mycenaean pottery, could be carbon-dated to the at least the 16th century BC. And because there was a continuous sequence of these burn femurs down into late Helladic, down through the Iron Age into the Archaic and Classical periods, we could see that there was continuity in this sequence. And we could then propose continuity of cult of these burn femurs going back to the 16th century BC, which of course was also new information and information that was of great importance. So that was the that was another discovery that we made fairly early on, which we are still working on. We also have been able to document many different interesting findings from the altar. I'm still speaking only about the altar. So the tripod cauldrons, the whole series of miniature tripod cauldrons that we found at the sanctuary, similar at the altar, similar to the ones they have at Olympia. We have hundreds and hundreds of keelakis that we've found, drinking cups from the altar, and other dedicatory items. We have, you know, a range of other dedications, which in the 10 years of excavation at the altar, we found a considerable amount of material that can document the altar site. So it will be a full discussion of this important altar.

SPEAKER_00 13:06

Yeah, amazing to be able to stretch out that chronology and just to see the way in which that site was in use over centuries, if not millennia, continuously.

SPEAKER_01 13:15

I should add that we aren't at this moment claiming continuity of cult all the way back to the Neolithic period, but we have continuous use of the space of the altar going back to the Neolithic period. And it's hard to believe that people would be up on top of this mountain doing anything else besides something cult related. So this is a part of our publication, which we're working on currently, our volume two, which would be dedicated to the altar excavations.

SPEAKER_00 13:43

Fantastic. Yeah. So for those of you who haven't been to the site, you've got the altar right up on the very summit of the mountain. Then the stadium and the hippodrome down below, I think maybe about 200 meters below the summit. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 13:54

That's correct. Another one of our remarkable discoveries from the altar area and the Temenos area is that we have an early stadium at the level of the altar, just 48 meters below the altar, but it's a plateau and it's uh there's ample space for an early dromos, the dromos of Zeus that Pinder refers to. And we have a level surface and we have a man-made surface there, which would be suitable for certainly running races and probably other kinds of events as well. So we have an early stadium up with the altar and with the Temenos as the sanctuary of Zeus in the beginning when there was nothing else on the mountainside.

SPEAKER_00 14:32

Amazing. And what have you discovered right further down at the main stadium site?

SPEAKER_01 14:36

So with the lower sanctuary, which again was the area that Corignotis partially excavated in the early 20th century, we have the stadium, the dromos of the stadium, we have the hippodrome, we have a bath facility, there is a stoa, there is an administrative building, Corinnotis' former Xenon. We have seats or steps, we have a stone-lined corridor that's 31 meters long with an additional 10 meters extension, which is the corridor that will have been used by the athletes walking from the Sanctuary of Pan, which we have also recently discovered, out toward the stadium and the hippodrome. And we may be coming upon an athletic area closer to this lower sanctuary in front of the stadium and hippodrome. So we have all this down below. Most of it is dated to the second quarter of the fourth century BC after the establishment of Megalopolis in 371 or 370 BC. So this is an Arcadian sanctuary. This was the preeminent Arcadian sanctuary.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

Great. Thank you. Yeah, so it's a very rich picture, and we could talk for a lot longer about that, I think. But let's at this stage maybe then look more broadly at the surrounding area, and maybe we could come back to the Parisian Heritage Park that you mentioned right at the beginning. Can you tell us a little bit about how that came into being once you'd have the initial idea? What were the steps you took?

SPEAKER_01 15:56

So after we had had our meeting with Anastasia Panayotopulu, the effort of antiquities of the region, I started talking to the locals about this idea of the excavation, but also the idea of the park. The idea of we're not coming here just to dig a trench and then go away. We're not here to dig, you know, a stadium in the hippodrome and then go away. But we're here to work with the community. And one of the ideas that we have is to create a heritage park or an archaeological park around this sanctuary and your village. This is this was the village of Anocaries where I started talking. And together with my colleague Dr. Voyatzis and with others on the team, we started talking about what would a park mean. And they immediately liked this idea and they immediately said, we are very much interested in our heritage. We have a cultural society here of Lachae and Zeus that has been in place for many years. We are very proud of the games, we're proud of the culture, we're proud of the history. We want to help you. How can we help you? And so it was their initiative, those in Anocaries, to set up a lecture uh in Athens at the War Museum, in which they invited the Arcadian communities to come to the lecture, and I would discuss the idea of this archaeological park, that is, creating an archaeological park. And so this happened in 2005, and there was a large crowd there, and it was very interesting to the communities. And so this is how it all got started from an initiative of the village of Anocaries. They created the need for a talk in Athens to the larger Arcadian community, many of whom live in Athens. And from this one meeting at the War Museum, everything else ensued.

SPEAKER_00 17:39

Yeah, it's great to hear that that was partly on the on the initiative of the local community there. Yeah, I know it's a slow process bringing this kind of thing into being. Say a little bit more about the planning and accreditation processes you've had to go through for that. What's it been like to navigate through all of that?

SPEAKER_01 17:56

Well, it's it's been 20 years, and there were various steps that we took. We were very fortunate to have the advice of Dr. Kostas Casios, who was formerly the professor of rural surveying and informatics engineering at the National Technical University of Athens and the former directory of the forestry service. I met him by serendipity, but he became a very close colleague and friend, and he advised us from the very beginning, from 2005 on. So he was the one who knew how to create parks in Greece. He had created all the national forests in Greece. And so because the idea of the park would encompass parts of Arcadia, Mycenae, and Elis, three prefectures, two different regions of Greece, and five mayoral districts, he said, this is going to be complicated. Believe me, I know, because he had created the forest. But he said, I will help you. And so he did. And so he got the wheels in motion. And in 2010, there was a new law that was passed in the Greek legislature that meant that it was possible to create a heritage park in Greece. That was fairly early on. The trouble is that the law changed slightly from 2011 until 2016 and 2017. So we had to move between agencies. So even though Kostas Casis helped us to create an environmental impact assessment by 2016, two volumes, which we first submitted to the governor of the Peloponnese for various reasons. We later had to submit this all to the decentralized administration of the Peloponnese, which includes Western Greece and the Ionian Islands and the Peloponnese because of the hierarchy at that time. And then later the law changed again, and we had to submit the proposal to the Deputy Minister of the Environment. So through the Ministry of the Environment. And in this case, Dr. Dimitri Papakonstantinu, who was a part of the BSA conference, he, as Costas's finest student, took on the reins when Costas died and has been leading the legislative efforts ever since. And so he has been navigating the politics of all of this. And he has brought the environmental impact and the idea of the Parasian Heritage Park through these different agencies. Now we're dealing directly with the Ministry of the Environment. So that's in very short order where we've been in 15 years or so.

SPEAKER_00 20:24

Yeah, it's fascinating to get a glimpse of what it takes to bring through to completion, really a marathon effort, but possibly a kind of example that would make it easier for others to do the same in the future.

SPEAKER_01 20:33

Exactly, because there are no, as you know, no large-scale heritage parks in Greece. And so, as an example of a cultural heritage park, this would be an example that could be copied all over Greece because all of Greece could be a heritage park. Of all countries not to have heritage parks, Greece needs heritage parks.

SPEAKER_00 20:52

And if we could just zoom in a little bit on the detail of this, I mean one of the things you've got there is a whole series of trails radiating out from Mount Lacan, which Mount Lacan is at the center of the heritage park, but it covers a huge area, the whole thing, doesn't it? Could you tell us a little bit about the trails and about the wider area?

SPEAKER_01 21:08

Sure. So the park encompasses 675 square kilometers of land, so it's a large area. As paradigms for the local communities, we initiated our own trails. So beginning in 2011, 2011, 2012, 2013, created the Trail of Zeus, the Trail of Pan, and the Trail of Rea with mythological theme. And so the Trail of Zeus encircles the southern peak of the mountain, and it's about 10 kilometers in length. The trail of Rea is the shortest of the three trails, and this runs from Anocarias up to a ridge where you can see a very large cave in the side of the mountain, which many locals believe to be the cave of Rea, the so called cave of Rea. And then the Trail of Pan, which is my favorite trail, it links the uh on the sanctuary of Zeus in Pan on the eastern side. Of the mountain to the sanctuary of Pan at Barakla on the western side of the mountain near Neva. So there actually are two sanctuaries of Pan that people can visit. And so it ranges from Arcadia into Messenia. And it's a very attractive trail, and it's one that I think the hikers enjoy the most because it's the right length and it's mostly an agricultural trail that we have utilized for the purpose of a hiking trail. So it's well maintained, it's clear, it's always clear, it's very difficult to get lost. So it's a point-to-point trail.

SPEAKER_00 22:36

Fantastic. Thanks. You're making me want to go back to Arcadia, David. Where I should say we're doing this interview in January, and I'm in the middle of this dark Scottish winter here. So it's uh fantastic to have a glimpse of the Arcadian trails uh ahead of me. Yeah, that's it's that's really inspiring to hear about all of that. And yeah, interesting to hear about the way the trails are linking different areas. It always strikes me in Arcadia that one of the really fascinating things is the way in which the do these different sites are interlinked with each other, both on the ground, but also visually, because of the way in which different mountains are intervisible and different sites are intervisible. For example, looking down to Basai from Mount Decaon and so on.

SPEAKER_01 23:13

That's right. Yes, yeah, they're wonderful views, and and one of the things we're doing is uh trying to incorporate viewpoints into the trail so that people know what they're looking at from where they are.

SPEAKER_00 23:24

Yeah, great, great.

SPEAKER_01 23:26

In the modern day, the um the state has now taken the initiative to fund locals creating trails. So there is now state money for trails to be created by the local communities. And this is this is wonderful. So the idea of the paradigm trails has worked, and now uh there are many agencies that are interested in creating trails. We're very happy about that.

SPEAKER_00 23:47

Yeah, no, that's fantastic, isn't it? So you talked a little bit earlier about the work you did with the local community and the village just below the sanctuary. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about the field school that you've been running as part of this project.

SPEAKER_01 24:01

Yes. So uh since 2011, we formalized what we were doing for the previous five years from 2006 on, which was a field school in which we were training some of the students that were at the excavation. We couldn't train all of them, but maybe six or seven of them, would stay on for a week or so after the excavation, and we would spend time working on creating a heritage park. Our initiative had to do with what we needed to do to create a heritage park. What does that mean? Who do we have to talk to? What do we have to do? Do we need trails? So we created some paradigm trails. Do we need to talk to the locals? Yes, of course. Do we need to talk to the politicians? Do we need to go and see the mayor? We need permission for these trails. We need permission to set up the signs. And so instrumental in all of this was Mark Davison, who was our park planner now from Boulder, Colorado. He is a professional park planner who was working with Costa Escasios in the beginning, but also with the field schools, Notapanzu from the University of Patras was instrumental in organizing the field schools and bringing Greek students together with our American students from our excavation so that we would have Greek and U.S. students working on the creation of the trail. Because as I would tell all the local communities, this is not, this isn't our park, this is your part. And this is we are only here as catalysts. If you don't like the idea, we will go away. But if you like the idea, we will help you create the park. And so we wanted to be sure and have Greek students involved in this, especially Greek students from the communities. So we uh sought out students from the area of the Parassian Heritage Park.

SPEAKER_00 25:42

Great, yeah, I know. Really inspiring to hear about that. Finally, just a couple of questions that look to the future. First is really just about what the next steps might be, future prospects, both for the Parisian Heritage Park and for the Mount La Cion excavations. What would you say the priorities for the coming years?

SPEAKER_01 25:58

Right. Well, I can say that we're at a very advanced stage for the Parisian Heritage Park. The Ministry of the Environment has written with our help the designation act of the park, and they have also written the presidential decree for the park. All that remains is for the Minister of the Environment and the Ministry of the Environment to forward these documents to the president and the prime minister for their approval. We're at that stage for the Porossian Heritage Park. So it's all completely political. It's out of our hands. We had most recently 26 local societies write letters to support the idea of the park through the mayoral districts because the Ministry of the Environment wanted to be sure that everybody was on board with this idea. So we've done that. That's where the Porossian Heritage Park stands at the moment. It's at the very highest levels of government. For the excavation, we have two more years of excavation in 2026 and 2027. We're going to be focusing on the lower sanctuary where we still have a good deal of work to do. We've embarked on our publications, uh, other than the preliminary reports and the individual articles which are underway. We have four volumes in the works through the American School of Classical Studies, the Mount Lucayan Studies series. The fourth of those volumes will be a guidebook to the park. So this has been set up some years ago. Of course, we haven't embarked on this volume four yet until the park is actually established, but we're hopeful that this is going to happen soon.

SPEAKER_00 27:26

Great. Really exciting to hear about all those plans. And then the last question I have is about challenges. It's a more, I suppose, a more nebulous question. I'm interested in broadly in the challenges of doing mountain archaeology in Greece. But also, are there ways in which you see the archaeological work that you and your colleagues do as intertwined with the challenges facing mountain communities, mountain landscapes in Greece more broadly?

SPEAKER_01 27:50

Yes. So this is a very interesting question. I like this question because it's so important. These mountain communities around Mount Lacan, but also elsewhere in Greece, as you know, are facing lower populations. They're facing the question of who is going to carry on, the villages at the high elevations, especially in the mountains. One of the initiatives that we have embraced was the idea of bringing some of the young people back into the village, either to run Airbnbs or to somehow become involved in the new park in various categories of employment, or to serve as rangers or guides or engage the local community, the teachers from the high schools and the grade schools and the in the towns and cities around to bring the students up to the villages. And some of this is happening so that we're encouraged by this. That is using the mountain as a resource and not, you know, stay away from the mountain, but bring people up to the mountain and engage in the mountain and hike the trails and talk about the history and uh have events up in the village. And so we're seeing this happening now in Anocaries, especially, but in some of the other villages as well, in all three of the provinces. So in Elis and Andritzina, we've been involved, in Arcadian Anocaries in Licchio, of course, but also in Messenia in uh Ambeliona, we've been involved. And so we can see there is some new energy coming up to these elevations. And so this is something that is new in the last 20 years. I can see it for myself. This is new.

SPEAKER_00 29:20

Yeah, it's very inspiring to hear about the way which giving attention to mountain heritage can help with all of those other challenges as well. And people talk a lot at the moment about mountain tourism expanding in Greece, more and more people interested in that. But I it's very clear that there are good and less good ways of imagining that future.

SPEAKER_01 29:36

Um Yeah, so as you know, there are a whole series of trails around Ambeleona and the Ambeliona retreat. And uh this was the idea of the owner of the hotel, Spiros Angelopovos, who engaged a commercial firm to create the trails. And so this is good. This brings people out into the community. They've also intersected with some of our trails, and we're happy about that. But getting people out into the mountains, through the trails, through the hotels, through the Airbnbs, through the antiquities, of course, and through all the cultural sites, ancient and later, this is all happening now. I mean, we can actually see it happening.

SPEAKER_00 30:11

Fantastic. Thanks, David. It's great to hear about all of this. Okay, thanks to David. Thanks to Zophia Gertin for editing. We've got more episodes coming up exploring mountain heritage in Greece from a whole range of other perspectives. If you enjoy this episode, please do share our podcast with others. Have a look at our other episodes. You can follow us on social media or get in touch directly via the Mountains of Greece project website. You might also like to have a look at the separate website for our broader mountain stories, mountain futures projects that this series is a part of. You can follow the links to both of those in the episode notes. Thank you for listening.