THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA, MEMORY OR MYTH ?

MAPS:

In France, the history of Provence, connected with Roman history is very different from that of Northern frontier or the Atlantic coast. In the Iberian Peninsula, Spain is Mediterranean, but Portugal is Atlantic. Both are oriented in the direction of the New World (and even at the origin of its discovery), but the history of Spain is linked to Morocco and the Ottoman Empire. Morocco, then, is the only country in North Africa with an Atlantic coast and the only one never to have been a vassal of the Ottoman Empire. Italy and Greece are among the most “immersed” countries around the Mediterranean Sea. But, in both cases, the northern part of the country is much more defined by its proximity to Middle Europe or to the Balkans. And could we define the Balkans as Mediterranean countries? Or Turkey, with its eleven wars against Russia to master the Straits, and its orientation towards the Black Sea and Asia ? Not to mention either the birthplace of writing, culture, religion in the Middle East countries and Egypt. Or to evoke the great Rush to the West, through what we call Maghreb (North Africa) today, of the Abasside and Seldjukide Arabs from Damascus to Spain, or the Algeria of the Barbary Pirates or of Saint Augustin.

But, more than the differences, we are interested by the common story and the similarities:

- Prehistory and Antiquity: Lebanon and the invention of writing, the influence exerted by Persia on Greece, democracy. Trojan war and the wars against Asia (what is the real boundary of the Mediterranean world ?). Egypt. Greece and Sicily. Punic wars and the relationships between North Africa and Europe.

- The Middle Ages : The Mediterranean map of Christianity (Saint Augustin, but also the Greeks and Bulgarian Orthodox, the heretics), the Mediterranean map of Islam (the Andalusian long parenthesis).

- Renaissance in the West, the Byzantine Empire, then the Ottoman Empire, after the Roman Empire of the East and the West (the Arab Emperor Septime-Sévère, the African Caracalla).

- The Mediterranean Sea as a nerve centre of trade, shippind and cruises. The importance of a city like Marseille, at the end of the XIXth century and at the dawn of the XXth century. Could we consider the Mediterranean Sea more as an open or a closed space? The remaining of the past: Gibraltar or Melilla.

ROADS :
- The triangle Athens-Alexandria-Rome, and its extension to Constantinople.
- Ulysses’ journeys
- Roman roads, merchants’ roads, pirates’ roads: The Roman roads have been very important in diffusing of the ideas of prosperity and Law. For example, the ancient via Domitia was the work of proconsul Domitius Aenobarbus, dating from the beginning of the conquest of the “Gaule narbonnaise” (south-west of France), at the end of the second century B.C.), linking Italy with the Iberian Peninsula
- Roads of the War, expansion, invasions. Omeyyades, Abbassides, Seldjoukides. Vandales and Wisigoths in Spain The crusades (the role of the island of Malta).
- Roads of the Pilgrimages.
- Roads of Agatha Christie, of the writers and artists. Agatha Christie, from the Riviera to Egypt. The Mediterranean sunny world as a contrast to the Northern world of ice and cold, and as expressed in the Bible and the Greek stories and poems which have shaped our European collective unconscious.

HABITS :

- Fashion throughout the Mediterranean World : dresses, suits, cooking, tales and children books, nursery rhymes, proverbs.
- The Mediterranean Family.
- The Mediterranean Woman .
- Fossils and submerged cities.
- High Tech researches and laboratories.

ANNEXES :