This chapter expands on the concept that the Travellers’ storytelling traditions function as negotiations of their marginalisation. First, it takes a close look at stories about place, then by returning to the story of Geordie McPhee introduced in Chapter 3. It provides further detailed examples of how super-empirical story spaces function as quintessential ideological locations. Throughout this chapter, we retain the term ‘supernatural’ in keeping with the literature with which we engage and to describe certain characters. The term super-empirical is reserved for the definition of the story spaces as a genre. Citing Degh, Braid notes that legends function to challenge listeners’ understanding of the world and invite them to modify their beliefs and worldviews (2002: 74). This chapter expands upon such conceptualisations of legends – this expansion is necessary because although the examples provided conform to ideas around ‘legends’, they also display characteristics that set them apart. For instance, the stories have alignments with ATU magic tales, take place in liminal story spaces, or have direct relationships with place-names. From this perspective, the narratives under examination in this chapter inhabit a particular ‘story space’ that does not necessarily require a label for the stories to be investigable. It is not that these stories defy classification, only that the present study's questions can be sufficiently addressed without engaging in it. At the same time, as we have seen in previous chapters, this study continues to draw comparisons between the Travellers’ stories and other cultural expressions to better understand the former.

One of the recurring themes in medieval agricultural manuals, which are mainly based on ancient agronomic knowledge, centres around the correlation between the geography of a region and the effects of this geography on the growth of various plant types and their specific requirements. In Filāḥa al-Nabaṭiyya (Nabatean Agriculture), compiled in 291/903 in Lower Mesopotamia, Ibn Waḥshiyya (d. 318/930) proposed two reasons to explain this relationship. First, he argued that everything in the world possesses a nature (ṭabʿ ) composed of the four elements of fire, air, water and earth. The differences between the nature of each region and each plant explain, for instance, why the dust that covers a vine's leaves is harmful to the plant in ‘the whole clime of Bābil (Babylonia)’, while it might be beneficial in another region. His second explanation contends that the unique properties (khuṣūṣiyyāt) of each region are connected to its position ‘in respect to the rotation of the sun and the other stars which rotate in the sphere (al-falak)’. While the present book does not aim to provide an in-depth analysis of the various cosmological and philosophical aspects of agricultural manuals, such examples attest to the perception of agriculture as a human engagement with nature which is strongly dependent on the geography. A primary explanation for this concern, as mentioned by Ibn Waḥshiyya, is the recognition that the most crucial factors influencing plant growth include water, air, the ‘warmth of the sun’ and notably, soil. However, as several scholars have emphasised, the scholarly literature on gardens of Islamicate regions has often overlooked the relationship between gardens and their surrounding landscapes.This oversight is particularly evident in the conceptualisation of ‘the Islamic garden’, which as Petruccioli pointed out, ‘has been considered a specific, self-contained entity removed from its context – its surroundings, the city, and the environment’.

Problem: The idea of continuity in garden traditions

Studies on ‘Islamic’ garden history have followed two paradigms whose generalising and essentialist character has drawn criticism from various scholars over the years. The first argues that the concept and types of gardens in the Islamic period – drawing on extant examples only from the fifteenth century onwards – were of ancient Persian origin, thus presupposing the idea of a continuous tradition. The second paradigm brings together gardens from different regions with Islamic rulers as ‘Islamic’ gardens, foregrounding a religious attribute for gardens in an extremely large and disparate geographical area including Arab Spain, North Africa, Syria, Iraq, Iran and the adjacent Persian-speaking regions up to India, despite the diversity of their regional and cultural traditions.

The idea of an ancient ‘Persian’ origin of ‘Islamic’ gardens and its continuity into the early modern period has been voiced since the beginning of the twentieth century. It mainly relates to the interpretation of the term chahārbāgh, found in the Persian textual sources from the fifth/eleventh century onwards, as a formal type of garden, indicating a garden divided into four quarters by two cross-axial water courses or paths. It is argued that this type can be traced back to pre- Islamic Iran, continued throughout the medieval Islamic periods and was transferred to other Islamic-ruled regions as well. Some scholars have also related the fourfold layout and chahārbāgh to the mythical Garden of Eden, from which, according to some traditions, such as the book of Genesis, four cosmic rivers, two of which were the Euphrates and Tigris, flowed towards the four corners of the earth.

As an intricate interplay of architecture and nature, a garden comes to life through its plants, living creatures, and the sensory experiences of scents and sounds. In comparison to a garden's solid structures, however, even fewer physical traces of the organisms that once populated it have survived over the centuries. Archaeozoological and archaeobotanical findings, in some cases, can help to identify certain varieties of living creatures and discern the plantings within a garden or the locations of certain plants. Environmental studies, including soil analysis, also provide valuable insights into whether an area was exposed to sunlight or shaded, featured high-growing or low-growing vegetation, and embraced a dense or sparse plantation. However, so far, no such investigations have been carried out in the Abbasid palace gardens of Lower Mesopotamia. Nor has archaeological evidence regarding horticulture, such as soil contours that could reveal the potential remains of flowerbeds, been recorded thus far. Furthermore, unlike ancient Mesopotamia, no representations of the royal gardens, depicting their plants or living creatures, are known to exist from the Abbasid period. Consequently, literary evidence remains the only source of knowledge regarding the flora and fauna of the Abbasid palace gardens in Mesopotamia. Nevertheless, the textual sources also come with their own set of limitations. They do not provide a comprehensive list of all plants or living creatures that existed in the royal gardens, nor do they offer details of planting arrangements or density. These sources, however, offer vivid glimpses into various species in the royal gardens and shed light on the types of plants and animals that were particularly appreciated. They also contribute to our understanding of how two main factors – prestige and climatic conditions – influenced the choice and organisation of plants within these gardens.

In Marcel Proust's seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time [À la recherche du temps perdu], the first-person narrator repeatedly affirms that we do not see things objectively but perceive the world through a subjective filter. In this narrative, leading toward the narrator becoming a writer, portrait photographs come to play an intriguing role. Insofar as photographs are pictures produced outside the narrator's consciousness, bearing a trace of “reality,” he must come to terms with their meaning and status, and they perform a singular attraction on him. Especially, portrait photographs of the women he dreams about feeds his desires, as they seem to promise access, contact, and love. As the narrative unfolds, this love of photographs gives insight into the sentimental education of the narrator.

Proust wrote The Search at a time when photographs were already spread widely, and the novel is rich in insight about the early days of technical images. The first volume was published in 1913, whereas the story of the whole series spans from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of the First World War. Just as Benjamin two decades later, Proust could thus look back at the rise of portrait photography and describe the spread of the medium as well as the various responses to it over time. Born in 1871, Proust witnessed the “industrialization” of photography firsthand and saw how private people started to purchase portrait photographs and learned to pose. He also saw how photographs travelled from the private to the public sphere, first with the popularity of celebrity cards and postcards and later with the emergence of the illustrated press. But Proust tells a story that Benjamin did not tell: depicting everyday responses to photographs, he shows what it was like to live with the new regime of technical images.

City/State/Performance/Archive

In November 2010, the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens hosted a major conference entitled Athens Dialogues.1 With leading academics invited as guest speakers, simultaneous translation in three languages and cutting-edge technology allowing it to be streamed across the globe, the conference aimed to showcase the historical importance of ‘Greek thought’ to the world: what the Greeks had done and the reason why it still matters. Only, in this case, most of the participants and certainly the larger part of the audience understood this to mean ‘Ancient Greeks’. Modern Greece, including its handful of powerful private institutions and their well-handled cultural globality, was once again seen as the quintessential archive of a perennial past. According to this logic, Athens was the perfect place to have this ‘international dialogue’ about the undisturbed relationship between the present and its past.

Less than five months later, in the same Onassis Cultural Centre, spectators were able to see an experimental play by the theatre group Kanigunda. The performance started with one of the actors in the role of ‘Myrtis,’ a girl who died of the typhoid plague that hit Athens in 430 and then again in 427/6 BC, in the middle of the Peloponnesean War.2 The Ancient Greeks, once again! Yet, the process now was somewhat reversed because this time, with the voice and face of ‘an ancient inhabitant of the Athenian city state’ who had died during the ghastly biopolitical crisis of a plague, the audience was introduced to a postmodern political satire about the concurrently unfolding Greek Crisis.

Cunningly entitled The City State, this play was one in a series of works to take the Greek Crisis explicitly as its subject-matter.

We have seen how one function of the stories within Traveller storytelling traditions is to express and transmit complex Travellercentric themes between the people who share them. In this chapter, we consider narratives where supernatural elements appear within empirical reality and see how supernatural narratives serve a crucial social function within the Travellers’ storytelling traditions. This chapter also reconceptualises the nomenclature in describing such stories, accounting for their status within the Travellers’ traditions and advocates the term super-empirical to describe ‘fantastical’ story spaces. The ubiquity of the fantastic in international traditions speaks to its universal relevance to social life, while its local manifestations are ideal subjects for interrogations into the social experience of discrete communities.

The super-empirical world is an exemplary conduit for the sense of cultural continuity that we have encountered time and again throughout this book. This chapter gives a brief summary of historical attitudes toward the supernatural in Scotland and how these attitudes affected later folkloric scholarship. This summary illuminates previous conceptualisations of the supernatural in Scotland's folklore to place the Travellers’ traditions within the context of the wider Scottish traditions. This summary is not intended to be comprehensive, but rather to invoke specific collectors of Scottish folklore, arguing that their contributions continue to shape the way we understand storytelling to this day. The chapter goes go on provide an overview of the fantastical in the Travellers’ traditions using extant examples from the SSS Archives and related literature. Insights from critical analyses of the fantastic are then brought to bear on the super-empirical narratives of the Travellers. Our purpose here is to reinforce the conclusions of the preceding chapters with further detailed evidence.

Weerie Winona, or the Film that Angelopoulos Never Made

At the 2019 Paris Book Fair, Alain Salles, the Le Monde journalist who has covered Greek culture and politics for years, chaired a panel on literature and the Greek Crisis.1 ‘The question of how the Greek Crisis has entered culture’ was, said Salles at one point, one of phantoms, of projects undeveloped or unfinished – ‘just like the phantom of the film that Theo Angelopoulos would have made, that film he was making when he died’. This is a statement that, perhaps in its willingness to find the Crisis chef d’oeuvre, gets things so wrong that it ends up getting some of them right.

Greek cultural collectives, artists and producers have been so active during the Crisis that it may sound somewhat dismissive to suggest that the defining cultural text of that period is actually an unfinished and lost work: the film that the master of a different era would have made, had he survived a fatal accident that occured on the set of his last production. Based on how Angelopoulos had reacted to the most recent Greek and international social developments in his last films – for instance, the critically panned and now forgotten The Dust of Time (2008), released in Greek cinemas the same year as Dogtooth and Strella – it is very probable that I alli thalassa/The Other Sea, the film during whose production he died in 2012, would not have been such a game-changer anyway.

The Other, the ‘Tinker’ and the Traveller

The groups referred to by policy makers today as ‘Gypsy/Travellers’ have been known by a variety of appellations in the past. The most common of these historical names for the Travellers in Scotland was ‘Tinker’, a term which, as noted above, is considered by many modern Travellers as derogatory and unacceptable. The wider pan-European perspective of Travellers as ‘Other’ is useful to consider before going into detail about the connotations of the term ‘Tinker’ and how its meaning became loaded with derision. The works of Heinrich Grellmann (1787), John Hoyland (1816), Walter Simson (1865) and David Macritchie (1894) are evidence of a fascination with the Other in elite European society during the lateeighteenth century, and throughout the nineteenth century. The editor's introduction to Simson's volume from 1865 captures the somewhat patronising interests precisely; ‘the discovery and history of barbarous races of men, besides affording exquisite gratification to the general mind of civilised society, have always been looked upon as important’ (James Simson 1865: 27). Grellmann's earlier account, Historischer Versuch über die Zigeuner [Dissertation on the Gipsies] (1787), began an association in the literature between native itinerant groups and immigrants from the Orient by consolidating various stereotypes. Grellmann's negative, stereotypical images of heathen wanderers who ‘like locusts, have overrun most European countries’ (1787: 2) homogenised all itinerant peoples who shared similar nomadic lifestyles. Hoyland's A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits & Present State of The Gypsies (1816) cites Grellmann often, and the stereotypical imagery of the latter's dissertation is replicated. The first Gypsies in Europe ‘appeared ragged and miserable’, says Hoyland, and ‘in like manner their descendants have continued for hundreds of years, and still remain’ (1816: 37).