ABSTRACT. The Mediterranean is routinely approached as part of broader Europe. This is a mode of thinking that considers Europe as a unified and homogeneous world and concept, erasing difference and sufferings. Southeast Mediterranean has been Northwest Europe’s expansion project prior to the New World and lived through wars and conquests. Islandic Southeast Mediterranean has been studied as an exemplary unit of analysis due to the islands’ unique ecosystems and local environments, as distinct places romanticising insularity associated with otherness and isolation, as crossroads of civilisations, as a necessary asset for geopolitical projects due to the strategic location between Europe, Africa and Asia, as well as compartment(s) of metropoles through colonisation. Even Édouard Glissant deploys the Mediterranean in dialectical opposition to the Caribbean and the Pacific. Glissant considers the Mediterranean an inner sea that concentrates, a gesturing of the one, contrary to the Caribbean and the Pacific as a sea that diffracts, a gesturing of Relation. However, this generalisation and compartmentalisation of the Mediterranean erases its plurality, its relationality and its particularities by focusing exclusively on the dominance of the major. This contribution brings together Mediterranean studies and travel anthropology along critical island studies and Édouard Glissant’s philosophy of Relation. Notions of difference and relation, insularity and islandness are prompted through studies and archives, artworks and mythology. ‘Που τα φύλλα της καρκιάς μου τζ̆αι τα βάθη της ψυσ̆ιής μου: Heartfelt’ is a form of worlding education, vivifying thinking beyond stagnant representations and proposing archipelagic ontology as a way of affirming Life in its intensity and diverse multiplicity.

Keywords: difference; relation; insularity; islandness

How to cite: Savva, A. (2025). Που τα φύλλα της καρκιάς μου τζ̆αι τα βάθη της ψυσ̆ιής μου: Heartfelt. Knowledge Cultures, 13(3), 187–212. https://doi.org/10.22381/kc133202512

Received October 5, 2025 • Received in revised form November 16, 2025
Accepted November 16, 2025 • Available online December 1, 2025