Citational Fragments

Chorophilia – choros and topos

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Antigone by Frederic Leighton, 1882

“To differentiate certain special features in the experience of places many Greek writers used two separate words – chora and topos – as distinct verbal representations. Ptolemy’s perspective, which assigns to chorography the “quality” of places includes the oldest significance of the term chora. The word, the prefix of “chorography” meant place, and in different contexts it also signified region, or country, or space. The word topos, prefix of “topography,” also meant place, but the subtle and changing relations between choros and topos makes an important chapter of intellectual history. Chora stands out as the oldest Greek word for place, appearing in Homer & Hesiod. Topos emerged initially in the work of Aeschylus, that is, not until around 470 B.C.

In antiquity a writer could say chorophilia for love of place but never topophilia. In the classical language, topos tended to suggest mere location of the objective features of a place, and Aristotle made it into an abstract term signifying pure position. The older word chora -or sometimes choros– retained subjective meanings in the classical period. It appeared in emotional statements about places, and writers were inclined to call a sacred space a chora instead of a topos […] Sometimes the two words appeared together.

For example, in the opening of Sophicles’ Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone and her blind father, Oedipus, stop at a resting place, and she says “As for this choros it is clearly a holy one.” He enquires where they are. She replies she does not know the choros, but also asks him if she should go and find out what topos it is. Later in the play, he tells Theseus that he will show him the choros where Oedipus must die, but warns Theseus not to reveal the topoi in which it lies. Here, topos stands for the mere location or the container of the sacred choros, the grave.”

Walter, E,V. (1998) Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment, USA: UNC Press Books, pp.120. Chapter 6, The Energies of Places. Image Antigone by Frederic Leighton, 1882, reproduced from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigone (accessed 03/10/22).

Res gestae

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Sir Francis Bacon

Res gestae,”things done,” all circumstances surrounding and connected with a happening.

…The antiquarians delved into what Sir Francis Bacon termed “history defaced, or remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.” He depicted it as a kind of salvage operation “though the memory of things be decayed and almost lost, yet acute and industrious persons, by a certain persevering and scrupulous diligence, contrive out of genealogies, annals, titles, monuments, coins, proper name & styles, etymologies of words, proverbs, traditions, archives and instruments as well public & private fragments of histories scattered about in books not historical,    — contrive, I say, from all these thongs or some of them, to recover somewhat from the deluge of time.”

Bacon in (Swann 2001, p108)

Image reproduced from https://www.elizabethan-era.org.uk/sir-francis-bacon.htm (accessed 30/09/22)

Curiosities & Texts

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Cartographic repesentations “aim at synchronic representation”, chorographic descriptions of the countryside, by contrast, opt instead for the diachronic.” Reconstructing a topographically organised historical account in a specific area. Hence in Marchitello’s formulation:

“Chorography is the typically narrative and only occasionally graphic practice of delineating topography not exclusively as it exists in the present moment, but as it has existed historically. This means not only describing surface features of the land (rivers, forests, etc.), but also the “place” a given locale has held in history, including the languages spoken there, the customs of it’s people, material artefacts the land may hold, and so forth.” Marchitello in (Swann 2001, p.101)