Desolation Road

Desolation Road

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Our vision at Desolation Road is to shed light, through first-class texts and visuals, to the roadside relics, the hidden stories, the lesser-known places and the abandoned remnants of Greece's contemporary times, which lay scattered all over the country.
From the old tuberculosis clinics at the mountains, to the islets of exile or the WW2 resistance battlegrounds, the hidden stories of each place provide a deeper understanding for the culture of the modern civilization of Greece and Europe.
With 49 others
Desolation Road
Lumberjacks and tuberculosis ghosts in Campochiaro

Lumberjacks and tuberculosis ghosts in Campochiaro

The two contradictory lives of the Campochiaro / Agia Eleousa ghost village of mountainous Rhodes.

October 22nd, 2020
Born in the mist of Benito Mussolini’s fascist delirium 85 years ago, the village of Campochiaro in the mountains of northern Rhodes has been a tranquil forest settlement for lumberjacks from Italy’s Fiemme valley, a place of pain and suffering for tuberculosis patients of pos...
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Nikos Kazantzakis’ Aegina hermitage

Nikos Kazantzakis’ Aegina hermitage

Isolated in this house, facing Athens during the years of WW2 and the German occupation of Greece...

October 9th, 2020
At the crack of dawn every morning, Nikos Kazantzakis climbed the stone staircase that led to his office, in the attic of the house where he lived for a decade (1936-’46) on the island of Aegina opposite of Athens. His daily ascent was nothing short of a profound symbolism: th...
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The soldiers' ghost Sanatorium

The soldiers' ghost Sanatorium

A four-storey abandoned stone giant in the forest of mount Mainalo, haunted by the old soldiers f...

July 1st, 2020
Inside its frayed walls and under its falling roof, the ‘Mana’ sanatorium seems haunted by the old soldiers that were sent there from the battlefields of Asia Minor and Anatolia, a century ago. So much, that you can almost hear a distant voice, singing vaguely, through an imag...
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The Sleeping Girl

The Sleeping Girl

The life after death of young Sofia Afentaki and the death in life of the sculptor of her burial ...

December 21st, 2020
Created in 1878, the tombstone sculpture of young Sophia Afentaki, in Athens’ First Cemetery, is a manifest of life in death: leaning gently on her couch, she seems to be asleep, rather than dead. She looks as though she’s resting, calmly, from a life that pulsates, breathing ...
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Winters in Paradise

Winters in Paradise

Life at the rural reality of a Greek island, far away from the azure waters of its cosmopolitan b...

November 14th, 2019
Far away from cosmopolitan Nydri and the azure waters of Egremni and Porto Katsiki beaches, at the “Kyra’s cob”, the southest spot of the island of Lefkada in Western Greece, where the rocky cape is covered like a carpet by the green cloth of the vegetation, the Doukato lighth...
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The night of the Giants: A glorious WW2 bridge sabotage

The night of the Giants: A glorious WW2 bridge sabotage

On the night of November 25, 1942, a group of Greek partisans and British saboteurs blew up the G...

March 3rd, 2021
Inside a hut of the village of Viniani in the mountainous Evrytania of central Greece, and while the whole country was experiencing the terrorism of the occupying forces of the Axis, on November 12, 1942, the leaders of the two largest resistance organizations in Greece, Aris ...
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Milos’ abandoned Sulfur Mine

Milos’ abandoned Sulfur Mine

Thiorichia Beach, Paliorema, Milos island, Western Cyclades / Southern Aegean Sea

October 16th, 2020
Although this hollow of barren rocky land in the east coast of the island of Milos is dominated by an abandoned stone sulfur mining plant that rises to a height of 63 meters, its beach looks peaceful as it is smoothly bathed by the azure waters of the Aegean Sea. However, this...
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Dylan, Morrison and the Muses

Dylan, Morrison and the Muses

On the occasion of Bob Dylan’s new song, ‘Mother of Muses’, we look back at the biblical moment w...

June 22nd, 2020
When a BBC documentary crew working in Greece invited Bob Dylan to jam with Van Morrison, on a hot summer morning of June 1989, the chosen setting was the hill facing the Acropolis monument. This place -called the Hill of the Muses- was full of symbolism, and although Dylan an...
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Our vision at Desolation Road is to shed light, through first-class texts and visuals, to the roadside relics, the hidden stories, the lesser-known places and the abandoned remnants of Greece's contemporary times, which lay scattered all over the country.
From the old tuberculosis clinics at the mountains, to the islets of exile or the WW2 resistance battlegrounds, the hidden stories of each place provide a deeper understanding for the culture of the modern civilization of Greece and Europe.
With 49 others