DIORAMAS: Kythera, Australia, and the landscapes that connect them

DIORAMAS begins from a simple but urgent observation: the relationships between the Mediterranean countries and Australia are not only historical or emotional. They are also environmental, cultural, educational, and practical.

Across the Mediterranean, islands are facing growing pressure from tourism development, climate change, water scarcity, and land abandonment. Greece is no exception. The rapid expansion of tourist infrastructure has increased demands on already limited water resources, while hotter and drier conditions have raised wildfire risk across the country. These pressures are especially acute on the Greek islands, where freshwater is scarce, agricultural land is fragile, and cultural landscapes are often both beautiful and vulnerable.

In this context, DIORAMAS starts from the island of Kythera. As an island marked by emigration, return, seasonal movement of migrants between Australia and Greece, and changing land use, it is a case study through which broader Australian-Mediterranean relationships can be reimagined for the future. Australia’s experience with water management, drought-resilient agriculture, and landscape-scale environmental planning can enter into dialogue with Mediterranean traditions of terracing, cisterns, dry farming, pastoral mobility, and small-scale land stewardship. These are not only technical issues, but also cultural ones, embedded in memory, material culture, settlement patterns, family archives, and inherited practices.

Kythera offers a particularly powerful case study of these challenges. For much of the 20th century, large-scale emigration reshaped the island’s demography and economy. As people left for Athens, Australia, and elsewhere, many of the island’s older systems of cultivation, terracing, water retention, and land management gradually fell out of use. Today, these abandoned terraces remain visible across the landscape: not simply as ruins, but as evidence of past strategies for surviving in a dry, demanding island environment.

At the same time, Kythera is facing new pressures. Climate change has intensified the risk of fire, seen dramatically in July 2025 when wildfires destroyed around 10% of the island. New construction linked to the island’s expanding tourist economy adds further demand on water, land, and infrastructure. The result is a landscape where past knowledge and present challenges meet in urgent ways.

The large bushfire that burnt the 10% of the island's area was one of largest wildfires that increasingly threaten the Island's landscapes, cultural and natural heritage, economy, and biodiversity (image by Adelin FM Kythera) 

Yet Kythera has sustained human communities for millennia. Archaeological evidence, historical records, oral histories, and surviving landscape features all show that its past communities developed ways of managing water, soil, cultivation, movement, and settlement over long periods of time. What we still do not fully understand is how these practices worked together: how water was captured, stored, distributed, and protected; how agricultural terraces shaped the movement of water and soil; how communities adapted to political, environmental, and demographic change; and how migration affected both land use and local memory.

This is where the first DIORAMAS sub-project begins: in the landscape of Vythoulas, in northeast Kythera, through EVOKE: Exploring Vythoulas Origins in Kytherian Environs

Vythoulas is an ideal starting point because it brings together the main themes of DIORAMAS in one place. It is one of the most significant long-lived landscapes on the island, with evidence for occupation from the Neolithic period through to the present day. This gives the area an exceptional time depth of more than 5,000 years. Through targeted archaeological, archival, landscape, geomorphological, and environmental research, Vythoulas allows us to explore how people lived with the island’s resources across changing historical conditions.

Our exploration of Vythoulas examines the relationship between settlement, water, cultivation, mobility, and memory. It asks how past communities managed scarcity, how they shaped the land to retain soil and water, and how these practices changed as people moved, returned, inherited, abandoned, or reoccupied the landscape. By combining excavation, landscape survey, archival research, diaspora histories, material culture studies, and environmental analysis, this particular projectis building a richer understanding of how Kytherian landscapes were made, used, remembered, and transformed.

This research matters deeply for Australia. More than 80,000 Australians claim Kytherian descent, and the Kytherian diaspora continues to support the island culturally, economically, and emotionally. Many diaspora families maintain strong connections through return visits, property, philanthropy, language, food, memory, and education. Their relationship with Kythera is not simply nostalgic; it continues to shape the island’s present and future.

Kytherian Association of Australia, celebrated its centenary in 2022, exploring the connections between Australia and Kythera and the impact of Kytherian diaspora in Australia

By beginning at Vythoulas, EVOKE demonstrates how a single Kytherian landscape can open wider conversations between the Mediterranean and Australia: about migration and return, water and land, memory and sustainability, heritage and future resilience.

Professor Tamar Hodos and Dr Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory explore an ancient stone-built road at Vythoulas, Kytherara (photo by K. P. Trimmis).

EVOKE is funded through a combination of competitive research grants and philanthropic donations from the Kytherian diaspora. It is supported by the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens, through which Australian researchers apply to the Hellenic Ministry of Culture for the permits required to undertake archaeological fieldwork in Greece.