Editor's Note: August

On homecoming, hospitality and hubris, and the final four contributors of the season.

As a Greek, it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the Odyssey, which is in the cultural spotlight off the back of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation. I wanted to mention three central concepts from the epic, and how they manifest themselves today, as this month’s contributors will also be touching on these concepts in some form.

While the below thoughts are brief, this video by a Greek archaeologist and mythology scholar offers a deeper dive on these Homeric concepts, and discusses how they show up in Nolan’s film.

Nostos

Which means “homecoming” (and is the whole premise of the Odyssey), but also means the journey back to yourself. The idea of longing and belonging to a country you carry inside of you plays a huge part for many of us today. Some Mediterraneans quite literally return to the place they once inhabited, like Odysseus or my mother. For diaspora children, homecoming is more complicated than that — you must re-assimilate while knowing you’ll always have one foot out. It’s a strange yet profound feeling to return to a country you weren’t brought up in, and yet feel like you still belong there.

Xenia

In the Odyssey, this is Zeus’s law: a moral code where strangers must be treated with the necessary respect, and vice-versa. In a modern context, we talk about hospitality and often in relation to tourism. But modern xenia can also show up outside the typical tourist-host setting, like when a friend gives you insider tips or words of warning, even if they’re not physically there with you. Another thought: when it comes to tourists, we seem to lack the linguistic nuance to distinguish between those who’d be safe under Zeus (educated and mindful tourists), and those who may be struck down (extractive and culturally indifferent ones). Maybe it’s time we changed that.

Hubris

This means excessive pride or overconfidence, and when humans overstep their boundaries before the gods. We live in a time of Icarian acts in many arenas: AI, geopolitics, even FIFA’s recent display of corrupt audacity. And of course: humanity’s ecological overreach. The heatwaves, the wildfires, all of these things are consequences we are living with as the result of immense greed and civilisational hubris. It’s a tale older than we think, and Greek mythology is full of humans paying for their audacious mistakes.

Anyway! Here are our contributors for August:

What to expect this month

• Deana Kotiga, on Croatian hospitality, women’s labour and the hottest room of the house. Deana is a qualitative researcher, anthropologist and photographer whose experience spans ethnographic fieldwork, semiotics and strategy for brands. She guest lectures at UCL on visual ethnography and splits her time between Istra and London.

• Yesmine Abida, with a reimagining of her Tunisian hometown Nabeul that combines diasporic memory and climate realism with magical worldbuilding. Yesmine is a museum professional, cultural researcher and writer whose work explores nostalgia, urbanism and the affective dimension of place. She holds an MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from Oxford, and her writing has appeared in various publications including Dazed MENA.

• Christos Koukis, on how an overheating London could adapt if it started borrowing Mediterranean architectural logic. Christos is an architect and Design Lead at The Place Bureau. He trained at Die Angewandte in Vienna, has worked at architectural studios including Zaha Hadid, and has lived urban experience from Greece, China, Italy and the UK.

• Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee, with a speculative thermography of Athens, reading the city through its surfaces, bodies and their relationship to heat. Elizabeth is an artist, research director and lecturer whose practice moves through post-tropical environments, the semiotics of hotness and gothic materialism across a range of mediums. With roots in Singapore and now settled in Athens, her observations will be coming from on the ground.

One more thing: once the season has wrapped up, I’ll be posting an end-of-summer recap note, just like last year.

Wishing you all the best August,

Philip