Making Landscapes, Building Communities. A Journey along the Kopais Corridor in Boiotia

Abstract

Summary This article explores how the narrow passageway along the southern shores of Lake Kopais evolved into a sacred landscape that provided space for the building of a political community among the inhabitants of ‘two Boiotias’. The Kopais corridor was a highway for the movement of people and ideas since the Late Bronze Age. Its high frequency of cult sites offered ample opportunity for the nourishing of sentiments of togetherness. The first section of this article surveys the key determinants in the relations between the two major cities on either end of the corridor, Orchomenos and Thebes, prior to the creation of their first federal union. This lays the groundwork for the second step of the analysis, when the article examines the local environment of the Kopais corridor. Revisiting its cult sites, the discussion delves into the experience of local place – each one distinct and with its own sacred aura, but lined up along a path and linked with other places. In conclusion, the findings are put in the wider context of storied environments and sacred landscapes in the Archaic Age. It will be argued that the union of the Boiotians was subject to the dynamics of sacred landscape making in the Kopais corridor, a dynamic that allowed the ethnos to relate to a space critical to its origins.