Take care: mineralization, hydrochemistry and the environments of greek thermalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
EMBARGOED UNTIL 2027-05-21
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2024
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Doctoral Thesis
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yes
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EMBARGOED UNTIL 2027-05-21
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Abstract
The scientific analysis of mineral springs, rocks, and soil in Greece in the late nineteenth century led to a new understanding of the country’s landscape and resources: its airs, waters, and places. In a process of conceptual mineralization, the terrain was documented as a broad chemical network with healing properties. Doctors, chemists, and geologists constructed knowledge through fieldwork, laboratory studies, and treatises. From geochemical evaluation to proposals for actual buildings, minerals such as sodium chloride, magnesium, and sulfates became the impetus for a major construction endeavor. Greek Thermalism – a nationwide taking of the waters – peaking in the interwar and postwar eras. The state sought to take care of its citizens through the promotion of natural treatments for a wide range of medical symptoms. Minerals were the matter of care. State-funded bathing towns at hot springs known as Loutropolis emerged across the country with corresponding buildings: hydroclinics. Tourism flourished in these new urban centers; the water bottling industry, roads, railway networks, and other infrastructures grew around them.
My research discusses how scientific writings translated into tangible built environments, exploring their connections to prevailing notions of progress and the geopolitical shifts that characterized the era. Presenting the study of mineral waters as a key strategy of national self- definition employed by the newly-founded Greek State, it investigates the manifestation of the movement as it is materialized in the field surveys and laboratories, institutions, hydrotherapy buildings, parks, kiosks, hotels, and factories. These environments of Thermalism incorporate definitions of nature blending pagan and modern visions. This analysis enables me to connect material transformations to the historic circumstances in which they occurred: nation building, a search for identity, and socio-urban changes. I examine these phenomena through “petrography,” writing through stones, and by employing the techniques of new materialism. From ground to water to the body, minerals are simultaneously a medium, actants for transformations, and loci for care. As non-human agents in their various states and forms – seismic, volcanic, geologic, tectonic, healing, steamy, vaporous, liquid, muddy, sublime – they mobilized a scientific, medical, political, institutional, and legislative apparatus. In the process of its creation, new social relations and forms of leisure emerged.
In decline for decades, this scientific and cultural effort with its built artifacts remains largely undocumented, and in danger of being forgotten or transformed into sites of luxury tourism. The recent financial crisis in Greece and associated healthcare cuts have further accelerated the disuse and deterioration of the buildings. Through the writing of micro-histories, my dissertation uncovers their significance as evidence of a larger environmental movement, as a network of places, and as individual architectures; urging towards the future use and preservation of these once-hallowed places in the Greek landscape: as sites of care for all.
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published
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ETH Zurich
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Subject
Care; Healing; healthcare; Minerals; Hot springs; BATHS + BATHS HOUSES (ARCHITECTURE); GREECE (SOUTHEAST EUROPE). HELLENIC REPUBLIC; Architectural History; mineralization; public health; NATURE AND SOCIETY (NATURAL HISTORY)
Organisational unit
02601 - Inst. f. Geschichte u. Theorie der Arch. / Inst. History and Theory of Architecture