ORALS

The broader area of the Aegean, i.e. the southern Balkans, mainland Greece, the Aegean sea with more than three thousand islands and islets and the Western Asia Minor (Anatolia), is particularly geodynamically active today. It has a long geological history of more than 250 million years. It raised from Pangaea and the deep sediments of the Tethys sea, to today's mountain ranges, with the seas and the many bays, the peninsulas and the impressive underwater relief. This place, where Western Civilization has its deep roots, in the Cycladic culture and classical antiquity, the concept of Europe was shaped by mythology and philosophy. Ancient Greek mythology created gods and deities as manifestations of natural phenomena associated with geological processes and as geomythology they are presented and interpreted today. This long-suffering, hard and beautiful place, crossroads of gods and people, myths and history, culture and wars, scientific geological laboratory, place of art and grandeur, prosperity and decline, “amaranth sea”, where “life harmonizes ceaselessly and the pulse of the earth beats calmly”, it was praised by poets, from Homer to the modern Nobel laureate Odysseus Elytis in his great poem "AXION ESTI” (Worthy Being), in which all its geological history is transcendentally described up to the struggles of its inhabitants.