Аграфа: Горный регион Греции и его история

Mountainous region in mainland Greece

Agrafa (Άγραφα, ) is a mountainous region in Evrytania and Karditsa regional units in mainland Greece, consisting mainly of small villages. It is the southernmost part of the Pindus range. There is also a municipality with the same name, the Municipality of Agrafa, but it covers only a small percentage of the area.

"Agrafa" in Greek means "unwritten", a reference to the region's remoteness and difficult terrain. As a result, the Ottomans were never able to successfully control the region. Agrafa maintained a form of self governance and semi independence, which included having its own militias and dispute arbitration systems. These privileges were recognized by the Ottomans in a treaty in 1525. The fiercely independent spirit of its people, known as Agrafiotes, is matched by a harsh and forbidding landscape.

Before modernization, most people's occupations in the Agrafa involved harvesting nuts and fruits from orchards, farming, shepherding, and textile manufacturing. Most of the produce from the Agrafa are traditional cold weather crops or crops which can survive in poor soil. The proceeds of the timber sales from the forests purchased from the monasteries continue to benefit the community as a whole. The most famous person from the Agrafa and the driving force behind modernization was the colonel Nikolaos Plastiras, who was elected prime minister of Greece after the Civil War. It was his vision to create a hydroelectric dam in the region so that nearly all of mainland Greece, excluding the Peloponnese, would be supplied with electricity, particularly the many fractured villages and rural communities. A spin off from this project was the mass irrigation system developed to supply the farmers in the plains of Thessaly with water and increase the yields of cash crops such as cotton, and also the creation of Lake Plastira which has met increasing tourist development in the last decades. Construction began during the 1950s. The Plastiras Dam contributed to the economic development of Greece. The majority of the workers on this project were Agrafiotes themselves.