Naxos as Nexus or back to Herodotus. The World of Adjacent Lands and Reciprocal Inspirations

Cycladic Island Naxos on the Aegean Sea in the context of the presented exhibition, Resonances of Stones: TMMSAC© at Naxos 2025 is symbolic. It emerges as a nexus on the sea, recognized as the central water basin for the ancient world. Connected with Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, the Bosporus, the Black Sea, the Kerch Strait, and the Sea of Azov it composed the complex system that allowed ancient Greek mariners to differentiate between adjacent lands, that together were forming a single, interconnected “world island,” the Orbis Terranum, recognized later as the Old World, juxtaposed to the New World. This view can be found in Herodotus who in the 5th century BC was writing “Another thing that puzzles me is why three distinct women’s names should have been given to what is really a single landmass”, and in Emanuel Bowen, who in 1752 wrote that “A continent is a large space of dry land comprehending many countries all joined together, without any separation by water. Thus, Europe, Asia, and Africa is one great continent, as America is another.”

The descriptions of continents and their boundaries, which have evolved over millennia, mark a fascinating journey through ideological, geopolitical, and even racial conceptualizations of the world inhabited by humans. Differentiating one from another in one mass of land, due to political and cultural reasons, turns out to be a human characteristic. This, however, is not eternal, nor does it cherish transcendental standing, but is something that we, as people, do on the way and transform on the way, sometimes solidifying certain notions in religious interpretations or in considered to be objective scientific textbooks.

In one mass of land composed of Europe, Asia, and Africa, despite the inland waters seeping into its tissue, the relations constituted by trade, culture, and politics were always present. Art from the Hellenic region was spread all around the water basin of the Mediterranean Sea, and the art from the Middle East and Maghreb countries from later periods was strongly inspiring European culture, which was explicit in times of Orientalism in the 19th century. Thus, exhibiting Kenyan basalt sculptures by contemporary master sculptors in the historical walls of Castro of Naxos town that resonate physically and virtually in an immersive audiosphere, helps us to listen carefully to the resonances of times in our common land – the Old World.