Gonies is located on the northern flanks of the mountain Psiloritis on the island of Crete, an hour’s drive from the capital Heraklion. Until the 1960s, the village was a thriving place, where people mostly lived on agricultural activities. The social life took place in several shops, taverns, and coffee shops located in the village. However, socio-economic changes and reduced incomes from traditional agricultural activities motivated many young residents to move to the cities or even abroad, resulting in a rising average age of the people who stayed and still stay in the beautiful village. The village and its immediate surroundings are rich in cultural heritage and many stories are told from generation to generation about all aspects of life and landscape. With fewer and fewer people living in Gonies, these stories are threatened to be forgotten and lost. That’s why HERITAGE organizes intensive campaigns, summer courses and workshops to capture these stories through interviews and creating a digital archive. While the content of this archive is initially considered non-spatial, they form the perfect starting point for creating a virtual ‘storytelling’ environment, where folklore is literally tied to spatial locations.

 

To kickstart this process, HOGENT students and faculty used digital tools to model Gonies heritage (laser scanning, image 3D modeling and GIS). These techniques are being used to create a digital 3D model of the entire village. Furthermore, several buildings have been measured down to the smallest detail, resulting in a large series of architectural orthopics and digital elevation models of multiple facades.