Today, it is no longer possible to begin a text on the Mediterranean with sentences about a bygone era of prosperity and well-being. Thus, if “peace” is a category at all, in our time when it feels most distant, anything we write will inevitably bear the shadow of an apocalypse—of this world, not some other. All the more so in the Mediterranean!
The Sign of the Victors’ Triumph: Peace
Humanity’s unique ideal is that the closer we draw to peace, the farther it recedes. Even in rare intervals without conflict, its very existence is contested; rather than a lived condition, it is a longed-for dream. Pax is a concept that rose from the Mediterranean. Pax Romana (mid-first century BC) is perhaps not the oldest but the best known of pax formulations, which we owe to the bloody wars of Augustus—Rome’s most belligerent emperor—, who turned the Mediterranean, including Illyria and above all Spain and Gaul, into a Roman lake. Augustus, referred to not as imperator but as princeps (the first among citizens), and the “Good Emperors” who followed him, brought peace by drenching the Mediterranean in blood with armies numbering between a quarter and half a million. For Rome, this peace meant extraordinary wealth through plunder and exploitation; what it meant for the defeated and those who lived on those lands is harder to say. Yet if the defeated could speak, it is not difficult to imagine they would not choose words that ease the heart.
A few centuries before Augustus, around 375 BCE, when the Athenians won a naval battle against Sparta, they founded a cult of peace and called it Eirene. Peace again stood with the victor. This graceful young woman—born of Zeus, whose wrath and protection are unpredictable, and Themis, who symbolizes order and justice—was identified with spring. If we go back seven more centuries, in Homer’s Iliad, the Mycenaean alliance’s tragic victory over the Trojans also culminates in peace. No matter how much we discuss the gods’ impartiality—Hera’s preventing Zeus from intervening until the Trojans were defeated—it is in vain. Peace, that longed-for state, is a quietness that arises from the victor’s hegemony; in other words, the silence of the defeated.
The Hebrew shalom and the Arabic salam should be understood, beyond their meaning of peace, as the hand extended when the self meets the other. In the Arabic greeting—an exchange of peace[1]—each party wishes serenity upon the other and alludes the beginning of a possible friendship. This linguistic affinity, however, has remained unanswered in history and geography, and in our day—when we tacitly witness the annihilation of the Palestinian people—seems condemned to meaninglessness.
From Israel’s establishment as a small nation-state—backed chiefly by the British Crown and the great powers of the West—to its rise over nearly eighty years to a hegemon of the Middle East, it is impossible to find a period in which peace prevailed in the Eastern Mediterranean. The words of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, upon returning from the visit he paid to the newly elected President of the United States, are still fresh: “The decisions we made in the war have already changed the face of the Middle East. Our decisions and the courage of our soldiers have redrawn the map. But I believe that, working closely with President Trump, we can redraw it even further and for the better.”[2] Very soon afterward, Israel’s attacks to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure made clear what “further” and “better” meant in that sentence.
Most recently, on 10 October 2025, a “peace plan” bearing the name of US President Trump—who at every opportunity reiterates his unwavering support for Israel—was signed; yet it too rests upon the defeated accepting terms of surrender.[3] Only days after the plan, which in its opening clauses envisages silencing the guns, it became apparent that the ceasefire would be applied upon the withdrawal of the already defeated Hamas, while the aggressor—emboldened by power—continues to bomb. If this is to be a peace at all, perhaps it would be more apt to call it Pax Hebraica.
The Place of Imperative and Strenuous Migrations
For centuries, the Mediterranean, long the site not only of wars but also of cultures and civilizations, was a region whose natives called the incoming strangers “barbarians”, as they did not understand their languages. Though the newcomers were not initially welcomed, they eventually blended with and into the old inhabitants. As the French sociologist Henri Lefèbvre put it, Mediterranean cities almost welcomed the “invaders” with tolerance but made them resemble themselves.[4] What made the Mediterranean the Mediterranean we know today was precisely this diversity of people with different roots whose lives and fates converged.
Neither history nor a reflection on human movements offer us pleasing words. Dispossessed masses from the East and South of the globe—caught in the flames of war and/or ravaged by hunger—are driven westward and northward in convoys that are hard to stop and impossible to reverse; not much concerned with where they will end up, just fleeing for their lives. Even if their final destination lies farther away, a considerable number end up stuck on Turkey’s Aegean coast, or in camps on Italy’s Lampedusa or Greece’s Lesbos islands or hidden away in various places. Meanwhile, more and more asylum seekers are pushed back from the Mediterranean, regarded nowadays as the European Union’s frontier. A few figures suffice to show this reverse forced migration, or pushback. The number of migrants who arrived in Lampedusa in 2024 was around 46,000. Yet in just the second half of 2023 the number was close to 81,000. By a rough calculation, one could say that in 2024 the number fell by about a quarter.[5] Another figure, however, tells a different story. According to Frontex, the EU’s border force, the number of pushback incidents at Europe’s land and sea borders reached 120,000 in 2024.[6] While NGOs strive to expose Italy’s role[7] and extend aid to those pushed back, the Labour Party Prime Minister of the UK congratulates Italy’s far-right Prime Minister for methods that “reduce migration.”[8] Italy’s method rests on agreements with the governments of Libya and Tunisia, the southern points of departure. Aside from its blatant violation of international law, this policy is indefensible on humanitarian grounds: migrants are incessantly shunted around the Mediterranean—from Bulgaria and Greece back to Turkey, from Greece to Italy, and so on.
Looking to the Mediterranean’s present in order to find traces of its past and to draw conclusions by following those traces, may seem futile. Yet consulting big narratives of the past to discern continuities and ruptures could be a valid method; so is recalling ways of living and making that continue quietly in the least visible places.
Three Main Pillars: Navigation, Hospitality, and ‘Emporio’
To greet the day without knowing what it will bring, and to do so with a certain cheerfulness, is a Mediterranean optimism. In the Iliad, Homer tells of war, heroism, stratagem, and death in the sight of the gods; in the Odyssey he recounts Odysseus’s ceaseless journeys that end only to begin anew. The formula he repeats, as if asking us never to forget it, is “rosy-fingered dawn.” Night, filled with fears of enemies, of the sea even under moonlight, or of mountains rising beside it, has ended; with the new day, the ship’s crew take up their oars with renewed hope and appetite. Once the moorings are loosed, the adventure-filled voyage peculiar to the Mediterranean begins: navigation. What makes the sea between the lands into the Mediterranean is above all navigation, a coming and going in all directions found in no other sea and also the opportunity to encounter and meet the other.
“But tell me honestly who you are and where you come from? What is your native town? Who are your parents? And since you certainly cannot have come on foot, what kind of vessel brought you here? … Is this your first visit to Ithaca, or has my father received you before—he used to entertain in our house just as often as he visited abroad.”[9] Thus asks Telemachus, son of Odysseus, when the goddess Athena, mentor and companion to Odysseus, described by Homer as having “flashing sea-green eyes” epithet, arrives in Ithaca in the guise of Mentes. In the Mediterranean, thanks to navigation, those living around the sea have at least heard of one another even if they have not met. The questions posed to the stranger stepping ashore stand in for today’s passport.
What must be particularly emphasized is Telemachus’s final sentence: in the Mediterranean, visiting is reciprocal. The “citizens” of this “world” come and go. After the passport control questions comes the turn of hosting. A brief detour through languages helps clarify this. In Persian, guest (mosāfer) is “one set on an expedition” (safar); the host is consequently the one who offers him a roof. In Arabic, ḍayf (guest) gives ḍiyāfa (hospitality, banquet). A millenary tradition opens its door: the guest is not merely welcomed but entertained. A place of comfort is offered, the sturdiest animals are sacrificed, and “sweet wine in a golden goblet” is served, often accompanied by music. Hospitality is inscribed in the DNA of the Mediterranean. Once the stranger is known not to be an enemy, he is seated at the head of the table.
Navigation is also the perfect carrier for the circulation of objects and goods. Emporion: broad marketplaces; agoras displaying wares from different lands; the open meeting places of Mediterranean cities. In Ancient Greek, the (em)poros is as much a trader as a traveler.[10] The Emporion has been indispensable not only for trade between ports, but for competition and for establishing measures and rules with which all must comply—thus making possible the Mediterranean’s cultural diversity. Phoenician settlements and necropolises found in the mid-20th century on the southern Iberian Peninsula date to the 8th-7th centuries BC, proof of colonies founded by those who traveled from the Levant to the remotest west of the Mediterranean.[11] The traces of such exchanges and intermingling enabled by navigation are still visible: Levantine communities that continue to live on the eastern Aegean coast, Greek colonies central to Alexandria’s cultural wealth, the Jewish community that has long played a leading role in Casablanca’s economy. The list of examples is endless and ever-expanding. Expressed in the great marketplaces, the emporia have been decisive in mutual learning among Mediterranean port cities.
Alongside today’s seemingly unending sufferings, three enduring elements of the past—navigation, hospitality, and trade—continue to constitute life in the Mediterranean. In a time when nation-state borders have become hard-to-surmount walls, finding places where all three persist unscathed is not easy.
Perhaps we should call the Mediterranean a sea of islands: from Cyprus to Malta, from Crete to Sardinia, an archipelago estimated at around 10,000 islands large and small; islands where life flows in distinctive ways, maintaining a rhythm clearly different from that of the mainland. The Latin word for island insula (and its descendants isola, isla, île) denotes land surrounded by water—ocean, sea, lake, river, or marsh. Over time the word has also come to signify what is surrounded by hollowness, what stands alone, the “isolated”. The island in Arabic, al-jazīra, derives from the root jazr—the recession of waters: land that remains when the waters withdraw. Both words point to being able to exist on one’s own.
Looking to the Future from the Islands
On the Mediterranean islands, despite the world’s dizzying, uncatchable speed and the looming climate change that seems to invite catastrophe, life proceeds differently. Rather than looking to cities rapidly turning into metropolises, it may be better to look to the islands, distinctive and increasingly depopulated, and to draw lessons from their ways of life.
Two examples from Pantelleria, which I recently visited. The island’s distance from Sicily to the north is nearly twice its distance from the city of Tunis to the south: it lies somehow in the very middle of the Mediterranean. Its geographical position and historical layers—from Phoenicia to Rome, Carthage, and Byzantium—summarize the exchange between the northern and southern shores.
Two interrelated features of the island caught my attention: first, an architecture that foregrounds respect for geography and climate, and an attentive agricultural tradition that accounts for the scirocco blowing from the South and the mistral from the North; second, the island’s dominant architectural element, the dammuso. Thanks to their whitewashed domes, these houses store every drop of rainwater where fresh water is scarce. The low Zibibbo /Alexandria Muscat vines are irrigated with this carefully collected water and protected by stone walls set all around. The island’s near-monoculture grape yields zibibbo wine and the sweet passito made from dried grapes—inseparable elements of its identity. As one tours the island, one also sees jardinu—tall, circular stone enclosures open at the top; each protects a single citrus tree, a token of islanders’ respect for the island’s rhythm.
These two arrangements, which at first glance may not seem important, make life possible on volcanic, rocky Pantelleria. They suffice to remind us that only when humans are at peace with nature and the past can a future be envisioned. If we look closely and with understanding, we can still find in the Mediterranean’s remote corners practices grounded in ancient knowledge that illuminate sustainability.
Globalization is a process that levels existing diversities to the smallest common denominator—a process hard to resist. Under such conditions, islands find it increasingly difficult to persist as true “islands”, especially those close to the mainland and open to its influences. “Being an island” is not a concept that can be easily defined and then generalized. Judging from what islands have experienced thus far, in our age of uncatchable speed their defining traits may be these: to remain slow; to be largely self-sufficient; to be the “first refuge” for those who arrive from outside; and to recognize as Islanders those who count themselves as being “of here” and behave accordingly. Many Mediterranean islands still exhibit these traits.
Can we then imagine an “inter-insularity”, an archipelagic ethos to be a dialogue and sharing among islands? As land and sea borders become ever more impassable, as visas make even journeys around the Mediterranean increasingly impossible, as ecological disasters and climate change’s destruction are compounded by endless wars of total extermination, it may be apt to say that such common ground can only be the product of imagination. Yet despite all contrary developments, the Mediterranean’s deep, fecund narratives, exchanges in every direction between North-South and East-West, and, most importantly, the bright trace it has left in humanity’s imagination still make one say: perhaps there remain things that can be done.
Of all the seas in the world, the Mediterranean is perhaps the most desired; a microcosm whose stories, whose wealth and poverty, wars and civilizations, catastrophes and miracles, heroes and victims all intermingle. While on the one hand it continues to give us all lessons with its history, on the other, it presents a chaotic theater of disaster that seems to be unsolvable and often threatens the lives and wrings the hearts of all humans, and, indirectly, all living creatures on Earth. The problems of the Mediterranean and the methods and solutions it will find as it solves them will shed light on everyone’s future.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
—Constantinos Cavafy, Ithaca.
[1] Alaykum salam in response to as-salamu alaykum, both meaning “peace be upon you”.
[2] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/06/24/the-challenges-of-a-pax-hebraica-in-the-middle-east_6742655_4.html
[3] Surrender, with its Arabic equivalent istulam with the three consonants s—l-m, clearly reveals that peace and surrender are inseparable.
[4] See Henri Lefèbvre and Catherine Régulier, “Attempt at the Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Cities”, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (trad. Stuart Elden, Gerald Moor), London, Continuum, 2004, p. 85-101.
[5] https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/62189/italy-more-than-120000-migrants-passed-through-lampedusa-since-2023.
[6] https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/02/17/eu-borders-recorded-over-120000-migrant-pushbacks-in-2024-says-report-by-ngos
[7] https://www.msf.org/eu-sponsored-shameful-abuses-central-mediterranean-must-end
[8] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/uk/uk-pm-starmer-praises-italys-meloni-for-reducing-illegal-migration/articleshow/113400961.cms
[9] Homer, Odissey (trans. V. H. Rieu), London, Penguin Books, 2003, p. 38.
[10] Poros: passage, voyage.
[11] Eric Gailledrat, Michael Dietler and Rosa Plara-Mallart (ed.), The Emporion in the Ancient Western Mediterranean, Trade and Colonial Encounters from the Archaic to the Hellenistic Period, Montpellier, Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2018, p. 79.