The Digital World of Psiloritis Through the Mosaic of Shepherding and the Shepherds’ Way of Life

By Giorgis Kalomoiris

If the first human to set foot on Psiloritis — the ancient Mount Ida — was a hunter-gatherer, the second was most likely a shepherd who, through his choice of livelihood, shaped life on a mountain that continues to be nourished by its myths, its history, and its traditions.

In the lush and sacred landscape of Mount Ida, which received its name in distant prehistory due to its forested slopes and abundant springs, stands the shepherd of Psiloritis — the most enduring human presence on the mountain — engaged in a continuous dialogue with its environment.

This ongoing dialogue between the mountain’s people and the highland landscape laid the foundations for the culture of the pastoral communities of Psiloritis, while also inspiring the thematic direction of the present research program entitled IDAology – The Pastoral Experience in the Communities of Ida (Psiloritis Geopark) as an Augmented Reality Experience and a Digital Repository of the Mountain’s Intangible Cultural Heritage.

The shepherd of Psiloritis is the bearer of a living continuity. Through his uninterrupted presence he carries forward, like a relay of experience, a mixture of traditions and customs, unwritten institutions and laws, techniques and crafts that together form the interconnected elements of a distinctive cultural microcosm.

The first step toward interpreting the world of shepherding began in 2017 through an initiative of the Municipality of Anogeia and a cultural study conducted by Androidus Project Tank on the shepherd’s world and its customary practices, with the aim of documenting it as an element of Psiloritis’ intangible cultural heritage. This process remains ongoing, yet it has already provided the necessary foundations for the development of a new research proposal focusing on dissemination and digital documentation through the collaboration of scientific methodology, cutting-edge technologies, cultural mediation, and local participation.

The momentum created by the research and the collection of evidence that reveal the essence of shepherding — understood as the combination of pastoral economy and cultural practice that shaped the development, networking, and interaction of the communities surrounding Psiloritis — led to the creation of the interdisciplinary research program IDAology.

The program brings together, in direct collaboration, the shepherds of Psiloritis and researchers from both technological fields and the social sciences and humanities.

The consortium formed by the Institute of Computer Science of the Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH), the Department of Visual Anthropology at the Research Center of the University of Crete, and the cultural management organization Androidus Project Tank combines scientific rigor, technological innovation, cultural mediation, and interaction with the local population.

Over the course of thirty months, the collaboration among these three institutions aims — through research and digital documentation — to develop:

A dynamic knowledge repository that will function as a data collection system for the shepherds’ world and for shepherding as both cultural practice and pastoral activity, addressing digital users, future researchers, and intercultural scholarship.

An immersive digital experience using innovative virtual and augmented reality technologies, introducing users — individually or in small groups — to the “natural” space and time of the shepherd’s life. Through this experience, users will digitally traverse the rocky northern ridge of Psiloritis to the forested landscapes of its southern slopes.

An augmented reality book presenting elements of intangible cultural heritage, folk tradition, and myth-history that shape the social world of the shepherds of Psiloritis, approached through the perspective of public history and designed especially for students.

In the transitional era we are currently experiencing, modern digital cultural technologies offer the possibility of interactively documenting elements that are gradually moving from lived reality into the sphere of collective memory.

After travelers, local folklorists, archaeologists, and regional historians, the world of the shepherds of Psiloritis now enters the field of research more dynamically than ever, in collaboration with the shepherd himself — who continues to live and work on the mountain’s grazing lands — thereby sustaining the communities of Ida.

At a constant crossroads of change and transformation, a new era emerges, confronted with contemporary challenges in which the global community, through scientific inquiry, turns again toward the local scale in an effort to preserve the universal implications of glocalism — a perspective that highlights diversity as uniqueness, synthesis as authenticity, and cultural visibility as nourishment for cultural heritage.

Within this new reality, the cultural elements that shape the identity of a place — when retrieved from collective memory and examined through scientific study and contemporary technologies — unravel the thread of intercultural exploration, inviting us at the same time to navigate digitally through the labyrinth of space and time.

*Giorgis A. Kalomoiris is the Scientific Coordinator of the IDAology Project, President of Androidus Project Tank, and a PhD candidate in Cultural Planning focusing on issues of Cultural Democracy.