CURE

The story of Crete’s unique cultural heritage is a story of sieges, captures and conquests, but also a story of encounters initially of hostility and eventually of interaction and coexistence, not without tensions, but still peaceful.

The general objective of the project is a turn from theoretical studies (Byzantine Studies, Archaeology, Ottoman Studies, Modern Greek Studies) to cultural experience via applied sciences. Data relevant to the cultural memory will be digitalized and organized in databases.

A mobile software application will mediate between the databases and the user.

The project aims:

1. to collect pieces of information relevant to the collective memory of the history of Crete and to configure them into narratives,

2. to link these narratives to material remains, such as buildings and more generally objects of cultural heritage and places of memory, which will be recorded digitally (primarily photographs, videos, maps, graphical representations and texts),

3. to combine these data -textual and visual- in a cloud based repository,

4. to develop an application for mobile devices and a web portal, which creates a location-based Mixed Reality experience by fusing Augmented Reality with Virtual Reality to allow users of the application to gain instant access to information on their smartphone or tablet, relevant to the place -buildings, places, sites of memory- where they are.

 

The part of the project implemented by the Institute for Mediterranean Studies/FORTH follows the route of the seventeenth-century Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi in Crete.

 

The project is funded in the framework of the Greek National Action "Bilateral and Multilateral S&T Cooperation Greece-Germany" which is co-financed by Greek National Resources and the European Union and in particular by the European Development Fund (ERDF) in the framework of the Operational Program "Competitiveness, Entrepreneurship and Innovation (EPANEK)" of the ESPA 2014-2020.

 

Partner institutions: University of Hamburg, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (Institute of Computer Science & Institute for Mediterranean Studies), NovelTech, Society of Cretan Historical Studies (subcontractor).

 

Project team at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies/FORTH: Maria Anastasiadi, Antonis Anastasopoulos, Melis Cankara, Elias Kolovos.