Arcadia

This article explains the Greek countryside and Arcadia prefecture; for other meanings of the same name, see Arcadia (disambiguation) .

Arcadia Regional Unit Περιφερειακή Ενότητα Αρκαδίας (Αρκαδία)
Basic data
State :	Greece
Region :	Peloponnese
Area :	4,419 km²
Residents :	86,685 (2011)
Population density :	19.6 inhabitants / km²
NUTS 3 code no. :	-
Structure:	5 municipalities
Website:	www.arcadia.gr

Arcadia ( modern Greek Αρκαδία Arkadia , ancient Greek spelling Ἀρκαδία ) is a landscape in the center of the Peloponnese and one of the five regional districts of the Greek region of Peloponnese . Arcadia was established as a prefecture after Greece gained independence in 1833 and lost this status due to the Greek administrative reform in 2010 . As a regional district, Arcadia sends eight members to the regional council of the Peloponnese, but has no further political significance. The main town is the city of Tripoli .

geography

Today's area consists of the closed mountain and highlands Arcadia, as known from antiquity, and the coastal landscape of Kynuria , which forms the relatively narrow access to the Peloponnesian east coast on the eastern slope of the Parnon Mountains . In contrast, the Arcadia of antiquity was only the highlands away from the coasts and not significantly more southern than Megalopoli .

The region is on average 500 m above sea level, in the north peaks reach up to 2376 m ( Ziria ), 2355 m ( Chelmos ) and 2224 m ( Olonos ). The rock is limestone with various karst features . Between mountain ridges there are sometimes basins without drainage , some of which form lakes or swamps.

Arcadia is predominantly forested with conifers and sparsely populated. Agriculture in the valleys is not very productive, traditionally the region was used for pasture farming.

structure

Arcadia includes the parishes of Gortynia , Megalopoli , Notia Kynouria , Tripoli and Voria Kynouria .

Population development

• 1951: 154,361 (population density 34.93 / km²)
• 1961: 134.950
• 1971: 111,263 (population density 25.18 / km²)
• 1991: 103.840
• 2001: 102.025
• 2005: 100.611
• 2011: 86,685

history

Early history

So far, only a few prehistoric finds have been made in Arcadia. The Arcadians considered themselves the oldest Greek people. According to Greek mythology , Pelasgos is said to have been the first ruler of this landscape and to have given the indigenous people their first cultural instructions. Arkas , after whom the region was named, is mentioned among the later prehistoric and mythical kings . Arcadia is also said to have been the scene of several of Heracles ' adventures . King Agapenor led the Arcadian forces in the Trojan War .

The landscape, which is difficult to access, was only touched by the Doric migration in the southwest . The political and cultural development of Arcadia, whose inhabitants retained their main occupation as small farmers and shepherds, began on the northern and eastern plains in which cities were formed, including in the north Alea , Stymphalos , Kynaitha , Pheneos , Kleitor , Psophis , Thelphusa as well as in the east Tegea , Mantineia and Orchomenos . More important parishes in the west were Heraia and Phigaleia . But most of western Arcadia remained a rural district for a long time; and here it only came about around 368/67 BC. BC to found a larger city, Megalopolis . The Temple of Zeus on the Lykaion Mountains was a communal place of worship for all residents. Due to the remote location of the landscape, the conditions in the religious sector in particular were very primitive for a long time.

Aristocrates , a king of Orchomenus, is said to have been in the 2nd half of the 7th century BC. At the time of the Second Messenian War, the Messenians , who were allies of the Arcadians, treacherously delivered into the power of the Spartans and stoned by their own subjects for this, but the kingship in Orchomenos was abolished. In the 6th century BC Sparta tried to gain hegemony over Arcadia in order to gain access to the Isthmus of Corinth . Around 550 BC The landscape became a member of the Peloponnesian League and thus had to submit to the supremacy of Sparta.

Classical Greek time

In the early 5th century BC The Arcadians fought on the side of the Greeks fighting for the preservation of their independence. Around 473 BC They tried to free themselves from the Spartan hegemony; only the people of Mantineia did not join the uprising. The Spartans won a clear victory over the Arcadians at Dipaia . Mantineia and Tegea rivaled in the 5th century BC. Chr. Constantly with each other, which seriously impaired the political effectiveness of Arcadia. After the Peace of Nicias , Mantineia concluded in 420 BC. An alliance directed against Sparta with Athens , Argos and Elis , whose troops, however, in 418 BC. Suffered a decisive defeat against King Agis II in the battle of Mantineia . Arcadia came again completely into the power of Sparta. After that, numerous Arcadians hired themselves abroad as mercenaries , for which they became famous.

Only after the Spartan defeat against the Theban general Epaminondas in the Battle of Leuctra (371 BC) Arcadia was able to shake off the Spartan supremacy. Its cities united to form the Arcadian League , the capital of which was the megalopolis that was created shortly thereafter. The ongoing opposition between Mantineia and Tegea soon caused a split in the league, so that some of its members were on the side of Sparta, the other on the side of Thebes. This inner-Arcadian dispute subsequently led to the Battle of Mantineia (362 BC), in which Epaminondas fell. Afterwards Arcadia was divided into a north and a south league. Since Megalopolis was repeatedly fought by the Spartans, it allied itself with Macedonia , when its ruler, Philip II and then his son Alexander the Great, ruled Greece. In contrast, the rest of the Arcadian League rose in 331 BC. After the first successes of the Spartan king Agis III. against the Macedonian general Antipater . Because Megalopolis did not participate, it was from Agis III. besieged; but Antipater brought relief and decisively defeated the Spartans and their allies in a battle . Megalopolis received war compensation for 120 talents and an oligarchical constitution to secure Macedonian influence, while on the other hand the last remnants of the Arcadian federal constitution were removed.

Hellenistic era and Roman rule

Arcadia often suffered very badly from the wars that were fought during the Hellenistic era . During the Lamian War the Arcadians remained calm, although they tried to persuade an Athenian embassy to join. After Antipater's death in 319 BC BC Arcadia surrendered to Polyperchon, who was appointed by Antipater as his successor . Only Megalopolis stood by Kassander and was therefore besieged. Kassander conquered 315 BC BC Stymphalos and Orchomenos and secured themselves in the peace of 311 BC. Chr. The possession of the whole Peloponnese. 303 BC BC Demetrios Poliorketes appeared as a liberator and put an end to Kassander's power. All of Arcadia except for Mantineia fell to him.

Lydiadas practiced from about 244 BC. Chr. The tyranny in Megalopolis, but after ten years voluntarily renounced the rule over the city, which then became a member of the Achaean League like most other Arcadian cities . Arcadia came in the 2nd century BC. Like the rest of Greece under Roman rule. Strabon reports that the landscape was deserted in the early imperial times.

Middle Ages and Modern Times

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History of the region in the Middle Ages and modern times

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Arcadia has belonged to the Byzantine Empire since late antiquity . At the time of the Great Migration , it suffered a lot from the invasions of the Goths . In the 8th century, the sparsely populated land was occupied by the Slavs , but they gradually adopted the Greek language. In the 14th century the immigration of the Albanians took place. In 1458 Arcadia came to the Ottoman Empire . During the Greek struggle for independence (1821-29), the landscape was contested for its strategic importance.

Arcadia myth

Poussin, Et in Arcadia ego

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The Arcadians were considered to be rough pastoral people in ancient times . Certain characteristics of Arcadia can be explained by its isolated geographical location. Its inhabitants see themselves as the oldest Greek people at all. Already in the time of Hellenism , Arcadia was transfigured to the place of the Golden Age , where people lived as contented and happy shepherds in an idyllic nature, unencumbered by laborious work and social pressure to adapt . Accordingly, it established itself as the topos of ancient bucolic literature , for example Virgil's shepherd poems . In ancient Latin literature, the place originally located in Greece is often relocated to Sicily .

The shepherd novel Arcadia by Jacopo Sannazaro was decisive for the revival of the genre in the European Renaissance around 1480 . In the baroque and in the 16th to 18th centuries countless texts and paintings with motifs in mythical Arcadia were created.

Reception of the Arcadian Dream in the early modern period

Landscape at Leonidi's .

In the early modern period, the myth of Arcadia gave rise to the idea that life beyond social constraints was possible. At its core, these were political fantasies that were fueled above all by the high nobility, who came under considerable pressure of discipline under the political pressure of the stabilizing early modern state. Under the surface of this aristocratic escapism , the idea of individual freedom was born and preserved, which, although it meant the freedom of the noble noblewoman , had been inherited by the bourgeoisie since the 17th century in the Netherlands and then in France and Germany since the 18th century has been.

An essential part of this dream of Arcadian freedom was the shepherd ideology, a diverse system of ideas, the core of which was pastoral literature and which was also reflected in the diverse motifs of the decorative arts since the 17th century. According to these ideas, nobles were able to flee to the country from society, which had become unbearable, in order to then disguise themselves as shepherds and thus come into contact with the “real” shepherds who worked there. The theme of the actions of these literary shepherds or book shepherds is above all love. Occasionally, however, the shepherd's idyll is massively haunted by the reality of a violent life (as in the Galatea by Miguel de Cervantes ) or the world of knights and their acts of war (as in the Astrée by Honoré d'Urfé ), which is a clear trait with all the symbolism of the pastoral for realism represents. Death, which in Nicolas Poussin's Arcadian Shepherds refers to itself with an auto-referential inscription on the epitaph , plays out a structure analogous to reality on the symbolic level of the mythological image: namely, the presence of death in real life in the midst of a happy life .

What initially appeared only as a mask game became a pictorial program in the symbolic self-presentation of the nobles: aristocrats had themselves painted in shepherd's costumes and presented themselves as shepherds. This was the symbolically exaggerated form in which the archaic idea that the ruler is always a shepherd of his people has survived and updated in modern times as part of noble claims to rule and legitimation of power.

Part of the reception of the idea of ​​happy Arcadia also included presenting the area over which a nobleman exercised his territorial rule as a new Arcadia. In this way the aristocrats sought, at least on the symbolic level, to withdraw their sphere of influence from the power of the royal central authority.

Such Arcadian landscapes existed in early modern Europe primarily as literarily conveyed constructions and fantasies. Honoré d'Urfé had the plot of his shepherd novel L'Astrée set in his home town of Le Forez (today in the Loire department ) . In this way, Le Forez is transformed, at least in the poetic image, into a modern Arcadian landscape. Similar phenomena could be seen all over Europe, especially in the context of horticultural projects. Another example from this tradition is the flange landscape near Schloss Hundisburg .

Exhibitions

• 2019 "Where are you going to Arcadia?" Special exhibition with Regine von Chossy, correspondence between art, porcelain and architecture, in Porzellanikon , Selb: April 6th - September 8th, 2019

• 2014 Arcadia - Paradise on paper. Landscape and Myth in Italy , Kupferstichkabinett Berlin , March 7 to June 22, 2014

About 100 Italian works, created between the middle of the 15th and the beginning of the 17th century, the time of Botticelli , Parmigianino , Campagnola and Guercino , show the richness of the ideas of Arcadia as a place of longing: nature is idealized and with a mystical-mythical flair that also expresses a bond with her.

Concept artist Peter Kees has been working with Arcadia since 2006 . At the Havana Biennale (2006), at the Berlin gallery artMbassy (2006), at the ACC Weimar (2006), at the PAN Palazzo delle Arti Museum in Naples (2007) and at the Kunsthalle Rostock (2011), he presented the “Embassy of Arcadia ”. Since 2013 he has been annexing individual square meters of land around the world and declaring them to be Arcadian territory (e.g. in Finland, Switzerland, Germany, Poland, Austria and the Netherlands).

See also: Akadien , Et in Arcadia ego

traffic

• Europastraße 65
• National road 7 , SW, S, Zen., O
• National Road 33 , NW
• National road 37 , Zen., S
• National Road 74 , Zen., NW, W
• National Road 76 , W SW

Quote

"I too was born in Arcadia ...
but the short spring only gave me tears."

- Friedrich Schiller (1787)

TV

• Arkadikí Radióphonia Tileórasi

literature

• Reinhard Brandt: Arcadia in Art, Philosophy and Poetry . Rombach, Freiburg i. Br. 2005, ISBN 3-7930-9440-5 .
• Ideal image of a new Arcadia. Fame and post-fame of Palladio . In: Joachim Fest (ed.): Abrogated past . Stuttgart 1981, p. 194-207 .
• Berthold Heinecke, Michael Niedermeier (Ed.): The dream of Arcadia 1. Contributions to the conference in Hundisburg from September 16 to 18, 2005 . ISBN 978-3-00-020890-4 .
• Berthold Heinecke, Harald Blanke (Hrsg.): Revolution in Arkadien. Contributions to the conference in Hundisburg on October 19 and 20, 2006 . Hundisburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-00-022454-6 .
• Berthold Heinecke, Harald Blanke (Ed.): Arcadia and Europe. Contributions to the conference in Hundisburg from April 27 to 29, 2007 . Hundisburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-00-022455-3 .
• Petra Maisak: Arkaien: Genesis and typology of an idyllic dream world (= European university publications , series 28, art history , volume 17). Lang, Frankfurt am Main / Bern 1981, ISBN 3-8204-7053-0 (Dissertation University of Cologne 1978, 396 pages).
• Barbro Santillo Frizell: Arcadia: Mythos and Reality , Böhlau, Cologne / Vienna 2009 (translated from the Swedish by Ylva Eriksson-Kuchenbuch), ISBN 978-3-412-20307-8 .
• Johann-Karl Schmidt: Arkadien - Critique of an Idylle , Villingen-Schwenningen 2010, ISBN 978-3-939423-22-5 .
• Winfried Wehle : Arcadia or the Venus principle of culture , in: Friedlein, Roger / Poppenberg, Gerhard / Volmer, Annett (eds.): Arcadia in Romance literatures: in honor of Sebastian Neumeister on his 70th birthday , Heidelberg 2008, p 41-71. ( PDF; 481 kB )
• Winfried Wehle: Human becoming in Arcadia: the rebirth of anthropology from the spirit of art , in: Wehle, Winfried (Ed.): About the difficulties, (s) I to say: Horizons literary subject constitution , Frankfurt am Main 2001, p. 83 -106. (PDF; 103 kB)
• Winfried Wehle: Arcadia, a dream country . In: Compar (a) ison . No. 2 , 1993, p. 19-35 ( PDF ).
• Winfried Wehle: Arcadia - an art world . In: W. Stempel, K. Stierle (Hrsg.): Plurality of Worlds - Aspects of the Renaissance (Romanistic Colloquium IV) . Munich 1987, p. 137-166 ( PDF ).
• Gustav Hirschfeld , Friedrich Hiller von Gaertringen , Konrad Wernicke : Arkadia 1 . In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume II, 1, Stuttgart 1895, Col. 1118-1137.

Web links

Commons : Arcadia  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Wiktionary: Arcadia  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

• Poem by Novalis

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Results of the 2011 census at the National Statistical Service of Greece (ΕΛ.ΣΤΑΤ) ( Memento from June 27, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) (Excel document, 2.6 MB)
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Ernst Meyer : Arcadia. In: The Little Pauly (KlP). Volume 1, Stuttgart 1964, Col. 593 f.
3. ^ Arcadia , in: Edward Tripp (ed.), Rainer Rauthe (translator): Reclams Lexikon der antiken Mythologie , ISBN 3-15-010451-3 , 6th edition 1999, p. 99 f.
4. ↑ ^{a b} Arcadia. In: Hellmut Brunner, Klaus Flessel, Friedrich Hiller (eds.): Lexicon of old cultures. Vol. 1. Meyers Lexikonverlag, Mannheim 1990, ISBN 3-411-07301-2 , p. 190.
5. ^ Franz Kiechle: Aristokrates 1. In: Der Kleine Pauly (KlP). Volume 1, Stuttgart 1964, Col. 568.
6. ^ Friedrich Hiller von Gaertringen : Arkadia 1 . In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume II, 1, Stuttgart 1895, Col. 1118–1137 (here: Col. 1126 f.).
7. ↑ Arcadian League. In: Hellmut Brunner, Klaus Flessel, Friedrich Hiller (eds.): Lexicon of old cultures. Vol. 1. Meyers Lexikonverlag, Mannheim 1990, ISBN 3-411-07301-2 , p. 190.
8. ^ Friedrich Hiller von Gaertringen: Arkadia 1 . In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume II, 1, Stuttgart 1895, Sp. 1118-1137 (here: Sp. 1131).
9. ^ Friedrich Hiller von Gaertringen: Arkadia 1 . In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume II, 1, Stuttgart 1895, Col. 1118–1137 (here: Col. 1131 f.).
10. ↑ Strabon, Geographika 8, 8, 1, p. 388.
11. ^ Announcement on the exhibition ( Memento of August 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on August 2, 2014.
12. ^ ^{A b} Embassy of Arcadia

Coordinates: 37 ° 30 '  N , 22 ° 23'  E