Kasos, a Palimpsest

On a remote island in the southeast Aegean I wonder about what it means for a place to be known, and whether in documenting things formally they become more forgotten.

Kasos is a place littered with memories. Climb the hills and dry terraces of the island’s sloping profile and you’ll find many palimpsests – structures, corners and loose earth where history collides with itself. Pebble-floored churches embedded with the marble spolia of older structures, a Roman sarcophagus with a new name, an Italian bell, an abandoned well, sherds of ceramic from across historical time and maybe even before form the ground, the coastlines, the sea bed. 

What’s extraordinary about the island to me isn’t so much the number or quality of these relics but the character they add to the terrain through their constant presence. They are everywhere, not because they are unknown by locals but because for the most part, they are left in their place. From the plastic shot glasses stashed inside a hundred-year-old oven and the glowing embers of church candles only just blown out, it’s clear that these places are known to the people of the island young and old, and left where they are or embedded into the stuff of today on purpose. 

I suppose Kasos is known in mental maps and memories, tales passed from grandfathers to grandchildren, the discoveries made on haphazard explorations, an embedded knowledge of the timelines that collapse here and the remnants of that collision, even if it is fragmentary. Yet the island is remarkably undocumented; unsurprising considering its location in the southeastern corner of Aegean, but what some might consider a lost opportunity in light of this wealth of material. 

It makes me question the notion that excavating and dissecting the past is the way to make it ‘known’. I wonder if ironically in documenting things and places formally they become more forgotten, or if perhaps there is more meaning to be found in the places where stories are allowed to overlap, memories are created and passed down, and the past has an opportunity to decay, be overgrow, resurface again, and evolve.