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

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.

Recent Texts

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
Right Click to Save
**Category**: Networks Graphs

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

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

Tracing the places of ancient Greece and
the stories associated with them

Digital Periegesis

The Project

Introducing the Digital Periegesis

Project and Affiliated Members

Elton Barker

Anna Foka

John Brady Kiesling

Kyriaki Konstantinidou

Linda Talatas

Vasiliki Tsoumari

Funders and Partners

Recent Texts

Date Geography of Pausanias Periegesis

Following Pausanias on the map, paragraph by paragraph

Place Type Icons Used by Nodegoat and Recogito

Right Click to Save

Maps Over the Administrative Levels of Greece

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.

Annotation statistics

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