See with your own eyes

Delphi, September 2021.

The experience of ruins can lead to a wide variety of attitudes: from the deep melancholy of nineteenth-century travelers, to the desires for exploration actualized by the success of ruin porn, to the sudden confrontation with the finitude of the human experience, or to the momentary curiosity for an architecture, a culture, or the rituals of more or less ancient times. As we know, it can also be frustrating.
The sanctuary of Delphi, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is one of those areas where the recognized presence of ruins attracts a flow of funding, new excavations and all kinds of initiatives to enhance the site. With them come the tourists, modern pilgrims, walking through the sites to see with their own eyes the traces of an ancient civilization. In the footsteps of the ancient devotees, they often despair that the intelligibility of these places, behind the heaps of stones, is not easier. Against the sometimes fantastic reconstitutions, the panels written in Braille are also there to suggest them an additional modesty: to tread such sites is not enough, they will need additional efforts of decentering and reading to grasp, for example, the density of the beliefs that moved women and men coming from all over the Greek world towards this sanctuary.