Abstract
What remains unexamined and undervalued in the Greek landscape, are the extreme and abandoned limits of the small non-metropolitan regional areas. At the limits of Greek cities, we can identify a great dispersion, a marginal instability, states of transition and deposition. The architectural and planning policies of the Greek state, through the modernistic period, have set a significant number of traces on the rural part of the country. These traces on the countryside, can only be recorded and historically analysed through systematic approach and subjective mapping, such as the methodology of oral history promotes. The landscape of the lowlands of Thessaly is selected as a paradigm of a changing reality, where one can see and recognize a number of exemplary transformations and specificities. The resettlement phenomenon of the mountain populations in Karditsa region, which was affected by the reclamation infrastructure of the 1960s (construction of Megdova dam), is the springboard for a dispersion of new residential settlements in the lowlands. This relocation process had a significant impact on the transformation of the rural landscape of Thessaly, as well as on the social life of the countryside. The architectural and historical research is motivated from the current ruin condition of these promising residential settlements on the countryside of Thessaly and systematically examines the policies that lead from the construction of Megdova dam to these abandoned traces on the landscape. The methodology of this research is based on an ongoing microhistorical archive which aims to raise microhistory as the main interpretation tool. Composed by oral testimonies, historical sources, state documents, blueprints and other official recordings, this microhistorical archive will be able to map andinterpret the architectural, topological and social history of these modernistic interventions on the countryside of Thessaly.
Highlights
In order to understand the profile of the Greek nation’s topological and architectural history after World War II and the civil war that followed, we should emphasize at the national reconstruction attempt that had its beginning in 1947
As an evolution of the phenomenon of the “moving rural family”, an important and multidimensional project that contributed to the organization of rural habitation system was the displacement and relocation of entire settlements. Key factors of these rapid, ongoing and somewhat violent transformations of the rural landscape were all the development projects that the acceleration of modernisation of the 1960s brought, such as the extension of basic infrastructure, electrification and the national road network. All these development projects had a direct impact on the unequal development of the of rural landscape regions and were the cause of the displacement and resettlement of populations in general
The process of oral history is an integral part of the archival record, which, among other things, is used to confirm or deny the narrative that produced from the other sources
Summary
In order to understand the profile of the Greek nation’s topological and architectural history after World War II and the civil war that followed, we should emphasize at the national reconstruction attempt that had its beginning in 1947. We can recognize in this national reconstruction team the personality of Konstantinos Doxiadis, who seemed to have a much more insightful view for this context. The aspects of this reconstruction process were to reconstruct the war damage in the country and to implement new productive large scale development projects. The evolution of the rural habitation system, deeply affected by these national development projects, can provide us with significant information on the social impact of the modernization processes. The landscape of the lowlands of Thessaly, which is located in the north-central part of Greece, summarizes the identities, specificities and changes of the rural habitation process of the country. Evolution of the rural habitation system in the internal part of the countryside of Thessaly
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