Digital Periegesis

Tracing the places and legends of ancient Greece in the footsteps of Pausanias

The Project

The Periegesis Hellados is the title of a work by a certain Pausanias of Magnesia, who was writing in the second century CE/AD. Known in English as the Description of Greece, the term periegesis derives from the verb periēgeisthai, “to lead or show around”. It is this double sense of movement (through space) and description (of place) that we wish to explore in this digital periegesis. Read more

The research project is hosted by the Centre for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences at Uppsala University. The team consists of researchers currently located at Uppsala University, Sweden, the Swedish Institute at Athens and Open University, Great Britain. Read more about the research team.

Introducing the Digital Periegesis

Pausanias Periegesis Book Cover

Such in my opin­ion are the most fa­mous leg­ends (lo­goi) and sights (the­o­rê­mata) among the Athe­ni­ans, and from the be­gin­ning my nar­ra­tive has picked out of much ma­te­r­ial the things that de­serve to be recorded.

Pau­sa­nias, De­scrip­tion of Greece 1.39.3

Some­time over the course of the 2nd cen­tury CE, a cer­tain Pau­sa­nias of Mag­ne­sia set out to write a de­tailed ac­count of a jour­ney (or, bet­ter, jour­neys) through main­land Greece. The re­sult is the Perie­ge­sis Hel­la­dos (De­scrip­tion of Greece)a ten-vol­ume sur­vey of the hu­man foot­print on that land­scape, which pre­sents a wealth of in­for­ma­tion about the towns, build­ings, mon­u­ments and arte­facts from At­tica to Pho­cis, tak­ing in a counter-clock­wise route through the Pelo­pon­nese along the way.

Project and Affiliated Members

Elton Barker

Elton Barker

Anna Foka

Anna Foka

Brady Kiesling

John Brady Kiesling

Kyriaki Konstantinidou

Kyriaki Konstantinidou

Linda Talatas

Linda Talatas

Vasiliki Tsoumari

Vasiliki Tsoumari

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Recent Texts

 Date Geography of Pausanias Periegesis

Date Geography of Pausanias Periegesis

Following Pausanias on the map, paragraph by paragraph

2025-12-23

We assigned a narrative location to each of the 3170 paragraphs of the text of Pausanias, along with a notional date, one day per paragraph, between 160 and 175 CE. This allows us to visualize fairly neatly...

Category: Networks Graphs

 Place Type Icons Used by Nodegoat and Recogito

Place Type Icons Used by Nodegoat and Recogito

Right Click to Save

Category: Networks Graphs

 Maps Over the Administrative Levels of Greece

Maps Over the Administrative Levels of Greece

2025-12-18

Category: Networks Graphs

 Within a Map and a Table - Search, Filter and Download Data from Recogito Annotation of Pausanias Periegesis

Within a Map and a Table - Search, Filter and Download Data from Recogito Annotation of Pausanias Periegesis

Search all fields by free text to filter and download specific data in CSV, JSON or XML.

2025-11-19

Differences between the Total Rows of the table and the total number of data entries in Last Data can occur for two reasons: For maps with only Markers, the difference is caused by imperfect CSV rows,...

Category: Data from Recogito

Annotation statistics

Statistics over the persons, places and events from Pausanias Periegesis that have hitherto been annotated in maps.

Places

21 784

Persons

18 254

Events

1 753

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Please note that the site is under development!

Please note that the site is under development!

Information in existing articles might be changed and new information might be added.