Abstract
Cast in the beginning of time, the rock pillars of Meteora make room for an ascetic and monastic life supporting and supported by the monks who have dwelled there for almost a millennium. It is commonly accepted that the landscape of Meteora has a poetry-like quality. In step with the poetics of place, the testimonies of Meteora bring myths and facts harmoniously together. Textual and visual documentation of the place by its visitors and inhabitants, our own visits to Meteora, and UNESCO’s documents, which designate the place as a World Heritage Site, open up horizons where we interpret how the poetic quality of Meteora originates from and sustains itself in the placemaking practices of its monks. Poetics of place comes from praxis. Furthermore, the practice of placemaking at Meteora depends on an aerial imagination initiated by casting nets, which connect inhabitants and guests to the loci of monasteries that are analogous to a bird’s nest perched on top of rocks, isolated and introverted. Net and nest are constitutive figures of aerial placemaking in a landscape imagined as a practice and made possible through poetics.
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Notes
- 1.
In his introduction to Interpreting Environments, Robert Mugerauer summarizes this reading of Hans-Georg Gadamer. (See Mugerauer 1996, xxvi–xxxii.)
- 2.
See ICOMOS’s justification for Criterion V in Meteora’s designation for World Heritage list status. (1988, 16)
- 3.
For Martin Heidegger, “[p]hronesis is nothing other than conscience set in motion, making an action transparent.” (1997, 39).
- 4.
- 5.
On ‘picture’ Gadamer says that “word and image are not mere imitative illustrations, but allow what they present to be for the first time fully what it is.” (1989, 143)
- 6.
Reflecting on Robert Curzon’s texts, della Dora also mentions that “[n]ineteenth-century travel accounts are full of entertaining tales of terrified visitors being ‘reassured’ by an abbot that a new rope was provided every time one broke.” (2013, 224)
- 7.
Heidegger refers to this ‘speaking about’ and ‘speaking to’ as “legein.”
- 8.
See also Mugerauer 1996, xxx.
- 9.
In this project, we are not “reconstructing the way the text came into being” and we acknowledge that our own interpretative thoughts contribute to what this place means. Here, we approach Gadamer’s horizon meld: “In this the interpreter’s own horizon is decisive, yet not as a personal standpoint that he maintains or enforces, but more as an opinion and a possibility that one brings into play and puts at risk, and that helps one truly to make one’s own what the text says. I have described this above as a ‘fusion of horizons.’ We can now see that this is what takes place in conversation, in which something is expressed that is not only mine or my author’s, but common.” (1989, 390) Later, Gadamer continues: “In our analysis of the hermeneutical process we saw that to acquire a horizon of interpretation requires a fusion of horizons.” (1989, 398) Mugerauer notes that this horizon occurs “where the past and present contexts come together to make something new of living value.” (1996, xxxi)
- 10.
Note that in 2004 UNESCO combined the once separate categories of natural and cultural criteria into one list, changing natural criterion III into criterion IX.
- 11.
Donald Nicol further explains this mix of legend and history: “It was commonly held in ancient times that the plain of Thessaly was once an inland sea: and this tradition may find some support in the geological formation of the Meteora rocks.... It was said that Poseidon the earth-shaker had blasted an outlet through the Vale of Tempe. Pindar knew that the honorary title of Poseidon in Thessaly was ‘Petraios,’ the rocky one, or he who split the rocks at Tempe. But for Herodotus it was the work of an earthquake. The tradition is widespread and dies hard.” (1963, 5)
- 12.
Henson notes the following: “According to one of the received modern methods of interpreting Hellenic myth, this story is an allegorical way of describing some great convulsion of nature by which the basin of Thessaly was in fact converted from a wide lake into dry land; and the physical formation of the country lends a certain amount of support to the theory.” (1886, 44)
- 13.
Curzon continues: “A little to the right stands an even more uncommon brotherhood of rocks, projecting to a great height like a cluster of megalithic and inconceivable boars’ tusks from the plain; and on the summit of these cones could be seen outlined against the sky the tiled roofs and towers of Hagias Trias and Hagia Stefanos, two of the nearest monasteries of Meteora.” (1891/1926, 323)
- 14.
Chris Hellier designates this hermitage as the first of Meteora. (1996, 173)
- 15.
A hesycasterion is “a hermitage for solitary confinement and contemplation.”
- 16.
Lear writes: “What a contrast is there between the precipices, from five to six hundred feet high, and these atoms of life playing at their base!” (1851, 395)
- 17.
Lear continues: “To make any real use of the most exquisite landscape abounding throughout this marvelous spot, an artist should stay here for a month: there are both the simplest and most classic poetries of scenery at their foot looking towards the plain and mountain…” (1851, 397–8)
- 18.
Recent studies have claimed that these travelers understood the landscape of Meteora “less of a (sacred) place than a collection of landscapes to be enframed by the artist and ‘taken away’ in pictorial form.” (della Dora and Maddrell 2014, 60) But the differences between Lear and Cockerell’s experiences suggest that there are also differences of degree, if not kind, in these secular artistic productions.
- 19.
Della Dora and Maddrell have suggested that “what mattered to [Curzon] was the container rather than the content.” (2014, 60)
- 20.
Closer approaches to the monasteries (in this time period) yield a similar emphasis on the container. When John Pentland Mahaffy visits Meteora in 1890 and makes a detailed drawing of Holy Trinity from its façade, he focuses on outward appearances rather than the monastery’s inner world: “So also I will here pass by with a mere mention the eyries of Meteora in Thessaly, perched upon strange pinnacles of rock, like S. Simeon upon his pillar. The approach to, and descent from, these monasteries in a swinging net is indeed a strange adventure to undergo, and more painfully unpleasant than most such adventures, but at the top there is little of interest....”
- 21.
In parallel, Heidegger says that “space is not in the subject, nor is the world in space. Space is rather ‘in’ the world in so far as space has been disclosed by that Being-in-the-world which is constitutive for Dasein…. When space is discovered non-circumspectively by just looking at it, the environmental regions get neutralized to pure dimensions…. Space essentially shows itself in a world.” (1962, 146–147)
- 22.
Bachelard describes a similar mode to approach living history: “For there is a map of the universe in the lines that time draws on these old walls…. A poet knows all this. But in order to describe in his own way a universe of this kind, created by chance on the confines of sketch and dream, he goes to live in it.” (1958, 144)
- 23.
In his drawings, Barsky includes celestial bodies as important symbols for the order of universe, while they are absent in the sketches and paintings of 19th century travelers. In Greek, Ilios is masculine but in Barsky’s drawings Sun is feminine. Heidegger connects the circumspection of phronesis with the discovery of the sun’s places: “Regions are not first formed by things which are present-at-hand together; they are always ready-to-hand already in individual places. Places themselves either get allotted to the ready-to-hand in the circumspection of concern, or we come across them.... Thus the sun, whose light and warmth are in everyday use, has its own places—sunrise, midday, sunset, midnight; these are discovered in circumspection and treated distinctively in terms of changes in the usability of what the sun bestows.... These celestial regions, which need not have any geographical meaning as yet, provide the ‘whither’ beforehand for every special way of giving form to the regions which places can occupy.” (Heidegger 1962, 137)
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The authors thank to Maria Papaioannou, Danae Constantinou and Khan Ha for help with translations of the text within Vassily Grigorovich Barsky’s drawings.
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Aktuna, B., Hailey, C. (2017). Suspended in Mid-Air: Casting Nets and Making Places Between Earth and Sky at Meteora. In: Janz, B. (eds) Place, Space and Hermeneutics. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52214-2_6
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