OF TIME AND TIME-DEPTH

Methanites recognised that their landscape is covered with traces of past human activity. Some are archaeological sites, like Methana's ancient city, named Paleokastro – the Old Castle – for its well-preserved encircling walls and acropolis-like position. Methanites believed that a much smaller ancient acropolis-like site was the seat of a particularly brutal Agha (Turkish landowner). However, the latest archaeological material on this multiperiod site is medieval and thus pre-Turkish (Mee et al. 1997, 146–8). At the other end of the temporal scale, reminders of the past included abandoned kalivia and numerous water-storage structures – cisterns and loutses (open cisterns) – many still in regular use, scattered across the landscape. In addition, there are approximately three dozen churches of varying ages, many at substantial distances from settlements. Several retain vestiges of wall paintings in a primitive style (see fig. 9.2) and some also have ancient tiles of a type unknown over the last two centuries or so (fig. 7.1) (Koukoulis 1997b). Finally, there were the older houses in villages which also acted as monuments to past people and times.

Methanites could not date most of these reminders of past human activity: for them, the past was largely an undifferentiated blur, a homogenised block of time, comparable to the homogenisation of the sequence of ancestors prior to grandparents discussed later in this chapter.