This ongoing project is a collaboration with Dr Alexandra Stara of Kingston University London. It focuses on the small stone shrines bearing a saint’s icon of the Zagori region, a remote cluster of 46 mountainous villages in NW Greece. These ‘iconstands’ survive mostly from the past three centuries, while being part of a vernacular architectural tradition that goes back to antiquity. Their role combines personal commemoration with a mode of ‘place-making’ through cult practices and accompanying symbolic structures. Although their more obvious role is to sanctify (or ‘deify’) the inhabited landscape through building, the extent to which individual and communal identities of the inhabitants are woven with these structures and the demarcation of ‘their’ place on earth, also reveals the distinctly human face of architecture.

Despite Zagori’s inscription as UNESCO Cultural Landscape in 2023, its iconstands have never been studied, with even their number and locations remaining uncertain, often forgotten along overgrown paths that in the past connected the villages. This research project aims to shed light on this vulnerable and neglected part of architectural heritage. The project aims to identify and interpret the Zagori iconstands not as autonomous objects, but as manifestations of a tradition where building and environment are intrinsically linked, pointing to architecture’s enduring role as primary mediator between human community and nature.