Browsing by Author "Martin. Julia"

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    Hit by the machine: reading a local protest poem on the island of symi, 120 years later
    (Routledge, 2024) Martin. Julia
    The poem ‘Χϵιμϵρινός όνϵιρος,’ or ‘Winter Dream,’ by Metrophanes I Kalafatas, was written in 1903 in the hope of influencing the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid Han II to ban the new deep-sea diving suits which had recently started to be used in the Aegean sponge industry at a devastating cost to both individuals and the social body. 120 years later, the poem’s bold rage against modernity and the Machine seems poignantly ineffectual and nostalgic. Yet its lyrical account of the non-commodifiable qualities of life on Symi before the arrival of the skafandro still offers a positive image for the contemporary renewal of sustainable eco-social community on the islands