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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the forest in Greek folk tales, especially from Tinos, as a space where human and nonhuman worlds meet. It highlights the forest as an active narrative force, entangling nature, culture, and ecology in folk imagination.

Paper long abstract

The forest constitutes one of the most powerful motifs in folk narratives worldwide. Often situated at the margins of human habitation, it emerges as a liminal space where nature and culture meet, interact, and transform each other. This paper examines the representations of the forest in Greek folk tales, particularly those collected in the Cycladic island of Tinos, while also situating them within a broader comparative framework.

In the narratives, the forest functions as both a physical environment and a symbolic landscape: it can be a site of danger, exile, and death, but also of refuge, transformation, and initiation. Heroes who enter the forest confront not only supernatural beings, witches, dragons, or animal-helpers, but also the uncertainty of nature itself. These encounters highlight the entanglement of the natural and the supernatural, the human and the non-human, within a space that resists binary oppositions.

By tracing these motifs, the paper argues that the folk-tale forest operates as an assemblage of nature-culture: a place where ecological imagination and social values intertwine. The analysis further considers how such representations shift in relation to historical and environmental contexts, and how the narrative forest can be re-read today in light of contemporary ecological concerns, including climate change and the human impact on natural environments.

Through this approach, the study seeks to demonstrate that the forest in folk narratives is not merely a backdrop but an active agent of storytelling, mediating human experiences of nature in ways that remain relevant to both past and present.