The terraces, the common footpaths, with a plethora of local names in the Aegean and the Mediterranean, constitute another world that steadily fades from our visual field and will gradually recede from our collective memory in the decades to come. And yet, until relatively recently, the terraces of the Aegean have been for centuries, even for millennia, an unparalleled tool for land management and an excellent aid to human survival, providing and preserving cultivable land, enriching the soil with precious rainwater, serving as a stepping stone to inaccessible slopes, where the people of the Aegean settled to live.
Today, apart from their primary purpose, which no longer exists, we discover other roles that terraces have played over time, roles related to the heritage that has been passed down to us: our natural heritage, as together with the dry stone walls that define the boundaries of the fields, the terraces have functioned and continue to function as unique habitats for plants and animals, both for the microclimatic conditions they offer in a dry and warm environment, and for the food they provide to their wild inhabitants; our cultural heritage, as this human creation, inseparably linked to the traditional agricultural landscape, is an indelible mark of the timeless agricultural toil. Surrounded by the memory of countless generations that have touched and utilized it, this landscape bears Doric impressions, original productive solutions perfectly adapted to local conditions, which constitute models of folk architecture and aesthetics, monuments of locality. Along with the olive groves and humble scrublands, the stone-built settlements and the undulating shores, they constitute the timeless landscape of the Aegean.

This perspective aims not only to evoke memory but, if possible, to invite action, believing that the gradual alteration of the cultural landscape of the Aegean can still be restrained.