To the ancient Greeks, Arcadia was a pastoral paradise — the word itself became synonymous with rural innocence in the European imagination. British photographer Stuart Franklin went looking for that idyll in the Arcadian valley south of Megalopoli and found something else entirely: a village being systematically erased by excavators to reach the brown coal beneath it. The photograph he made of Anthochori's last standing church — balanced on a tall column of earth while the surrounding ground was scooped away — appeared in Time magazine on 17 September 2008. By November of that year, the church was gone too.
Anthochori — the name means 'flower village' in Greek — sat about three kilometers south of Megalopoli, in the broad valley of the Alpheios river. It was a small, self-contained community of farmlands and lanes, with neighboring villages to the east, southeast, and southwest. Greek National Road 7, running between Kalamata and Tripoli through Megalopoli, passed east of the settlement; a branch railway line connected the village to the broader Tripoli-Kalamata line.
The village had another, older name: Karoumpali. According to local historian Theodoros Katrivanos, the name derived from the Karum Ali Estate (Καρούμ Αλή τσιφλίκι), an Ottoman landholding in the Leontario vilayet during the eighteenth century. In 1927, the village was officially renamed Anthochori. It remained an independent administrative community until 1999, when reforms consolidated it into the Municipality of Megalopolis.
Lignite — brown coal — had been extracted in the Megalopoli basin since the 1970s. Greece derives a significant portion of its electricity from lignite, and the Megalopoli power plant complex was among the country's largest energy installations. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the open-pit mine expanded gradually. By 2002, mining machinery stood one kilometer to the northwest of Anthochori. The direction of travel was obvious.
Prolonged legal battles followed. By 2006, the Public Power Corporation had financially compensated the majority of private property owners in the village. That same year, the mine reached the first houses. Village homes became targets for looters as residents departed; the settlement was effectively abandoned by 2007. Then, starting from the northwestern end, demolition crews moved through the village: homes were leveled, their remains dumped to the south, roads removed, farmlands and forest scraped away. What had been a living community became a working face of a mine.
Until late 2008, one structure remained. Anthochori's main church, dedicated to the Presentation of the Virgin to the Temple — Τα Εισόδια της Θεοτόκου — stood at the center of the former village. The demolition workers were not willing to destroy it. And so, as the earth around and beneath it was excavated, the church came to rest on a tall column of undisturbed soil, rising like a pedestal above the stripped landscape.
This was the image Stuart Franklin photographed in 2007. When it ran in Time under the caption 'Last Church Standing,' it became one of the defining images of industrial displacement in early twenty-first century Europe. Franklin described it in The Guardian: 'To the ancient Greeks, Arcadia was a rural idyll. Instead of a lush, bucolic landscape, I found one devastated by the hunt for fossil fuels.' On 29 November 2008, the church collapsed. With it, all visible evidence of Anthochori's material existence ended. By mid-2009 the ground had been leveled entirely, the earth extracted for coal.
The demolition of Anthochori generated several disputes that outlasted the village itself. Questions about the disposition of at least €280,000 in compensation funds for the community's public property — transferred to the Municipality of Megalopolis — were still being raised as late as November 2008. The Megalopoli Mine's expansion into Anthochori was reported to represent the final phase of the mine's growth, which in turn was said to signal the beginning of the end for the coal-fired power plant that had shaped the regional economy for decades.
For some years after the demolition, digital maps continued to show Anthochori as a populated place — an internet ghost, as it was called. Satellite imagery lagged behind reality; a Google Earth photograph taken in August 2003 was still in use well into 2009, showing the village intact, its geometry of houses and church completely visible. The village had been erased from the ground while still appearing on screens. Eventually even the digital traces were updated, and Anthochori disappeared from maps as it had from the earth — gradually, and then all at once.
The area where Anthochori stood lies at approximately 37.367°N, 22.133°E, in the Alpheios river valley south of Megalopoli in the Arcadian interior. From the air, the opencast lignite mine is unmistakable — a vast brown scar in an otherwise green landscape, its terraced working faces visible from considerable altitude. The nearest major airport is LGKL (Kalamata International), roughly 60 kilometers to the southwest. Approach the area from the west at 4,000–6,000 feet to see the mine in relation to the surviving town of Megalopoli and the surrounding mountains of Arcadia. The Alpheios valley is notably flat here compared to the rugged terrain on all sides.
Coordinates: 37.367°N, 22.133°E, in the Alpheios valley south of Megalopoli. The Megalopoli lignite mine is a prominent landmark visible from high altitude — a large opencast excavation in the valley floor. Nearest airport: LGKL (Kalamata International), approximately 60 km southwest. Recommended altitude: 4,000–6,000 feet. The contrast between the green Arcadian landscape and the brown mine workings is striking from the air, especially in morning light.