Stones of all color and shape, skillfully placed the one next to the other, make up the endless dry stone walls of the Aegean islands. Spreading across plains, slopes and mountain peaks, they suavely interrupt the scenery’s monotony, giving the islands their unique “striped” feature. Adorning the naked slopes of the Cyclades, dry stone walls tell their stories, which are written in hard work, patience and a lot of love for the earth.
I wonder how many pairs of tireless hands, how many countless hours and how much sweat dripped on the slopes of the Aegean islands until the dry stone walls were built. Breaking the ground from one end to another, climbing on the steepest peaks and reaching all the way to the waterside, the walls are infused with man’s labor, depicting his effort to tame the land. These thousands of miles of dry stone walls that cut through the anaglyph of insular Greece, constitute the main feature of the environmental physiognomy of the Cyclades. As the word suggests, a dry stone wall is a wall without any mortar to bind the stones together. Each rock, depending on its properties, makes a wall of distinct character. Granite makes walls of large blocks, with great solidity and resilience to corrosion. Gravel makes walls of small pieces which are more fragile and susceptible to animal crossings.
Equipped just with stones and abundant patience, man started building dry stone walls since god knows when… He built them in order to determine the boundaries of his land, to confine the animals’ grazing, or to level the mountain slopes. The terraces broke the land into horizontal strips, allowing for cultivation in sloped territories, as terraces retained water and soil. Dry stone terraces thrive in other places of the world where cultivable land is scarce as well, such as Peru or Ethiopia. Dry stone walls are abundant throughout the Mediterranean basin, but also in Britain, France and Switzerland, where there’s much effort made in recent years for their protection and maintenance.
In total harmony with the environment, dry stone walls follow the landscape’s morphology, enriching and embellishing the rural scenery. They protect the land from erosion and they suggest the number one flood-preventing mechanism in the islands. Within the rocky hollows, small animals and plants find refuge, thus taking part in the micro-biotope of dry stone walls. Geckos, lizards, spiders, snails, snakes, birds and hedgehogs find there protection when the weather conditions are against them, whereas many animals hibernate inside the protective walls in the winter. The stones to be used for the walls are picked during the cleaning up of the fields, thus making up a very good example of recycling useless materials. By-products of the land itself, dry stone walls demonstrate a beautiful aesthetic intervention which is 100% in accordance with the natural surroundings. The colors, the shapes and the curves, are all in line with the anaglyph of the land, blending in beautifully and harmoniously. Utilizing just the properties of the rock and the craftsman ability to bind them together in a three-dimensional jigsaw, the ancient art of dry stone walling has survived intact through the ages. Look out for them in the islands of the Aegean; they constitute a major part of their cultural and environmental heritage.
