Sustainable Landscape and Community on the Greek Island of Tinos

Abstract

“At the area of Polemou Kampos, land was mainly public and belonged mostly to Isternia and Kalloni communities. There, a man has been constantly buying land; he may be actually a businessman who wants to sell this land to a corporation, presenting himself as an ‘ecologist’. This man is in fact searching for very old contracts when things were not very clear. But, problems of access have started to arise in the area; villagers usually took shortcuts, jumping over the low boundary stone walls of each property to reach their own properties when there was no direct path. Where pathways existed in the past, representing a communal gesture of goodwill on the part of the villagers that had no objection to this kind of communal use, there this man is now putting fences. Purchasing a large part of the land, fencing it and creating enclosures, this man has been blocking villagers’ access and has broken the continuity of the network connecting village land with other villages’ property. A very new, uncommon situation has started to arise for the villagers of the area, something that alters what existed there before.â€

 

Keywords: Socio-Cultural Sustainability, Farming landscape, Village life, Village communities, Sustainable communities