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The Hindu : Threading the past with the futureD. MURALICephalus, in Greek mythology, is a lover of the dawn goddess Eos. Named after him is Kefalonia, the largest of the Ionian Islands in western Greece, with an area of nearly 700 square kilometres.In August 1953, Kefalonia was devastated by a series of earthquakes. “People on the islands were left homeless and their economy was shattered.” This tale is about one of the villages in Kefalonia: Farsa. Its surviving residents abandonedtheir mountainside village for a new settlement located down the slope.Decades passed by…**“The faculty programme director from Huxley College of Environment at Western Washington University, Bellingham WA, U.S., asked the Kefalonia Governor whether the island would benefit from an American university-sponsored, applied research programme to address the island’s most pressing priorities,” narrates one of the essays in the latest issue of ‘Journal of Education for Sustainable Development’ ( www.sagepublications.com).Farsa was chosen as a pilot project. The village had remained uninhabited for 50 years, and the remnants of the 160 former structures were intact, when students from a university decided to apply their learning to the rebuilding work.“Thefaculty met with the Farsa village leadership to devise a research programme based on the community service learning model. Village leaders emphasised the importance of respecting the village’s past while planning a sustainable future.”New curriculumTherefore, an interdisciplinary curriculum was drawn up, involving “urban design and planning, environmental resource management, historic preservation, sustainable technology, agro-ecology, transportation planning, and social anthropology.”Introduced in 2005, the curriculum evolves each year based on the progress accomplished.Using GIS (geographic information system), CAD (computer-aided design) and so on, the students could accurately develop baseline site plans of the 400-year-old historic village design, because the skeletal template was undisturbed post-quake.“Surrounding the village lie extensive olive orchards, abandoned bee hives and vineyards, which comprised its agricultural economy,” the essay’s author Nicholas C. Zaferatos describes.Right features“With the assistance of the former villagers now…More