Our project takes a fresh look at the history and mythology of the mountains of Greece.
At the heart of the project is a steadily expanding archive of posts looking at different mountains in turn. The posts combine hiking routes and photographs with a deep dive into some of the amazing mountain scenes from ancient Greek and Roman literature. They also cover the extraordinary archaeological sites on the mountain slopes and summits.
We want to share some of the thrill of exploring these places, both on foot and in the imagination.
We feature occasional guest posts on other topics, for example:
- On environmental and botanical heritage.
- On mountains in medieval and modern Greek history.
- On the mountains of Greece in 18th- and 19th-century travel writing.
- On landscape policy in Greece and beyond.
Every so often we will look beyond the present-day national boundaries of Greece at other mountains that played an important role in ancient Mediterranean culture.
A second phase of the project focuses around a conference at the British School at Athens, 23-24 October 2025. It looks at Greek mountain heritage more broadly. It asks how that heritage can best be protected for the future, in the context of the current rapid expansion of mountain tourism and development in Greece.
We hope you enjoy reading!
Disclaimer
We can’t accept liability for any accidents. Mountains are dangerous places. The mountains of Greece can be very hot, shadeless and waterless in summer; very cold and often snowy in winter.
- Please make sure you have the right clothes and footwear, and lots of food and water.
- The maps provided here are designed to give an outline impression of the best routes, but not for detailed navigation. Please make sure you have a good map and take responsibility for using it to plan your own route.
- Make sure you tell someone where you are going.
- We would recommend taking a stick, even if it’s just a folded trekking pole. Occasionally sheepdogs can run at hikers in Greece, and that can feel intimidating, but a stick will usually give you the protection you need.
- Different people move at different speeds in the mountains, so we deliberately haven’t given times for any of the routes on the site. In all cases we give overall distance and vertical ascent, and some detail on the state of the paths if we think that is going to be helpful, so you should be able to get a rough idea of timing easily enough with that information.