MIO-ECSDE, an environmental non-profit NGO that federates 133 institutions and associations in the Mediterranean basin, aims to promote sustainable development and protect the natural environment and cultural heritage of the Mediterranean. Through the platform HYDRIA, MIO-ECSDE illustrates and shows to visitors the unique archeological heritage of Mediterranean water civilizations.
Since 2008, MIO-ECSDE is coordinating the HYDRIA Project, serving as a virtual museum that unfolds the tangible and intangible Mediterranean water related heritage. The HYDRIA Project promotes digitization of water cultural heritage as a key factor for unlocking its potential assets for sustainable development. The HYDRIA online platform (in three languages: English, Arabic and Greek) has digitalized 36 cases from countries of the Mediterranean on representative water cultural heritage including water monuments and hydraulic works and sites of the distant and more recent past, studying them in a systematic way.
Here the link to the project web-page: www.hydriaproject.info
Large scale water management works (aqueducts, water galleries, river management and dams), small scale works at the level of buildings and building complexes (cisterns, wells, watermills, fountains etc) and water heritage sites of specific importance are presented through animations and illustrations, texts and timelines, to explain operation, techniques and concepts as well as illustrating the links to natural and cultural heritage of the places. In this way, the HYDRIA project using water as a “vehicle” unfolds the diverse, tangible and intangible Mediterranean cultural heritage.
HYDRIA offers the opportunity to its e-visitors to browse and discover the case studies in three different ways:
(i) by type (cisterns, aqueducts, foggaras, water management large scale works, water mills, fountains, etc)
(ii) by time period (when these water monuments were constructed)
(iii) by location.
HYDRIA targets all citizens, particularly Youth as well as the formal and non-formal educational community; it highlights the role of young citizens as water consumers and makes them reflect and reconsider their responsibility towards more sustainable water consumption and management.
HYDRIA has been granted and awarded as a good practice by UNESCO (2011) and the Anna Lindh Foundation (2010).
MIO-ECSDE through the HYDRIA was among the founding members of the Global Network of the Water Museums launched in Venice in 2017
