One traveller, three media: preserving Vasyl Barsky’s multimodal record of Cyprus (1735)

Abstract

In 1734-35 Vasyl Hryhorovych-Barsky, a monk from Kyiv, crossed Cyprus on foot and recorded what he saw in three ways: a journal for distant readers, architectural drawings as eyewitness testimony, and inscriptions on church walls addressed to whoever would later stand before them. Each medium spoke to a different audience, yet together they form a single act of communication. Digitisation tends to separate them: drawings are scanned, texts transcribed and inscriptions photographed, each in its own repository.

This session asks what is lost when we digitise media but not the relationships between them. Drawing on the BARSKY ROUTES project (2026-2028), it shows how structured data and image annotation can reconnect narrative and visual sources, with a short demonstration in Adno. The second half of the session is an open discussion on what a complete digital record of heritage should contain.

Biography

Mia Gaia Trentin is an archaeologist and historian specialising in historic graffiti and digital heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean. She is Project Manager and Researcher at Citizens in Power, Cyprus, and Principal Investigator and scientific lead of BARSKY ROUTES (2026-2028), funded by the Research and Innovation Foundation of Cyprus. She is also a research affiliate of the Institute for Medieval Studies at NOVA FCSH, Lisbon. She holds a PhD in European Social History from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and a Diploma in Palaeography, Diplomatics and Archival Studies from the State Archive of Venice. After postdoctoral positions at the University of Illinois (NCSA) and The Cyprus Institute, she led the RIF-funded projects GRAFMEDIA and DIGIGRAF. Through them she developed the first CIDOC CRM ontology and the first open-access repository for historic graffiti, combining multispectral imaging, RTI, photogrammetry and 3D documentation. More recently she worked on the Horizon Europe project HERITALISE at the Digital Heritage Research Lab, Cyprus University of Technology. She has published critical editions of eighteenth-century parish registers from Larnaca and published on various aspects of historic graffiti.