The Cultural Landscape Past of the Eastern Mediterranean: The Border Lord’s Gardens and the Common Landscape Tradition of the Arabic and Byzantine Culture

Konstantinos Moraitis

doi:10.3390/land7010028

Abstract

An evaluation of landscape tradition, in Near and Middle East area, could emphasize a profound past of agricultural experience, as well as of landscape and garden art. In reference to this common past, Byzantine and Arabic landscape and garden art paradigms appear to be geographically and culturally correlated, as proved by a Byzantine 12th century folksong, presenting the construction of a villa, with its surrounding gardens and landscape formations, in the territory of Euphrates River. This song refers to Vasilios Digenes Akritas or ‘Border Lord’, a legendary hero of mixed Byzantine-Greek and Arab blood; ‘Digenes’ meaning a person of dual genes, both of Byzantine and Arabic origin, and ‘Akritas’ an inhabitant of the borderline. At the end of the narration of the song, contemporary reader feels skeptical. Was modern landscape and garden art born in the European continent or was it transferred to Western world through an eastern originated lineage of Byzantine and Arabic provenance?

Highlights

An evaluation of landscape tradition, in Near and Middle East area, could emphasize a profound past of agricultural experience, as well as of landscape and garden art
We ought to remark in advance that the present article is written by a professional design practitioner who believes, that space formative practices are not of mere technological importance. They may present, central cultural assumptions, in many cases correlated to the political identity of the societies in reference, as they depict and support and enforce their political ethics. It is under the conscious or the unconscious feeling of the political importance, which potentially inhere within landscape and garden art, that Western centralized ‘civilization’ and afterwards Western extended ‘cultural’ appreciation1 recognized them as emblematic practices
Its principal aim has to do with the recognition of their age-long liaisons, of their cross-border bounds mutually correlating their knowledge as well as their tradition and cultural experience. It is under this ultimate political scope that indigenous cultures of Eastern Mediterranean, of Near and Middle East, have to reconsider their correlation to their landscape substratum; not on the ‘shallow’ prospect of touristic activity only, but on the deepest need for self-conscience and self-esteem

Summary

Introductory References

We ought to remark in advance that the present article is written by a professional design practitioner who believes, that space formative practices are not of mere technological importance They may present, central cultural assumptions, in many cases correlated to the political identity of the societies in reference, as they depict and support and enforce their political ethics. It is under the conscious or the unconscious feeling of the political importance, which potentially inhere within landscape and garden art, that Western centralized ‘civilization’ and afterwards Western extended ‘cultural’ appreciation recognized them as emblematic practices. We refer to a privileged geo-cultural territory, where the first development of agricultural prosperity coexisted with the first need for geometrical abstraction

The Eastern Genealogy of the Western Landscape and Garden Art

A ‘Border Lord’ of Dual Origin and His Landscape Formative Activity

Land Reclamation Activities and Landscape Architecture Interventions

The Transition from Tradition Cultural Practices to Organized Knowledge

Art Imitating Nature and the Mechanical Replicas

10. Conclusive ‘Rhetorical’ Questions and Conclusive Statements