Student Life
New analysis of Deep Maniot Greeks reveals a unique genetic time capsule in the Balkans
Our study demonstrates how geography, social organisation, and historical circumstances can preserve ancient genetic patterns in certain regions long after they have become altered elsewhere.
Lead author, Associate Researcher Dr Leonidas-Romanos Davranoglou (Oxford University Museum of Natural History)
Set among rugged mountains, dramatic coastlines, and distinct stone tower houses, the Mani Peninsula of the Peloponnese, Greece, has long captivated travellers, historians, and writers, most famously, Jules Verne and Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor. Now, an international research group has found that the Deep Maniots living at the very southernmost tip of the peninsula form a rare genetic “island” within mainland Greece – predating the major population movements that reshaped the ancestry of mainland Greeks and other populations in the Balkans after the fall of Rome.
The research team, comprising scientists from the University of Oxford, Tel Aviv University, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, the Areopolis Health Centre, the European University Cyprus, and FamilyTreeDNA, found that Deep Maniots largely descend from local Greek-speaking groups living in the region before the Medieval era. In contrast to many other mainland Greek populations, they show little evidence of absorbing later incoming groups, such as the Slavs, whose arrival transformed the genetic and linguistic landscape of much of southeastern Europe.
The findings revealed that most paternal lineages trace back to Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Roman-era Greece. Their geographic and temporal dispersal lineages closely mirror the distribution of Deep Mani’s characteristic and globally unique megalithic residential and religious structures, supporting the hypothesis that present-day Deep Maniots may descend from the same communities that built and inhabited this landscape more than 1,400 years ago.
Lead author Dr Leonidas-Romanos Davranoglou (left) with Deep Maniot sculptor and painter Michalis Kassis. Credit: Vinia Tsopelas.
‘Our results show that historical isolation left a clear genetic signature,’ said lead author, Associate Researcher Dr Leonidas-Romanos Davranoglou (Oxford University Museum of Natural History, University of Oxford, Tel Aviv University, and National and Kapodistrian University of Athens). ‘Deep Maniots preserve a snapshot of the genetic landscape of southern Greece before the demographic upheavals of the early Middle Ages and likely descend from the same people who constructed the unique type of megalithic buildings that are found exclusively in Deep Mani.’
Maternal lineages, however, were found to be more diverse, reflecting sporadic contacts with populations from the eastern Mediterranean, the Caucasus, western Europe, and even North Africa. Senior author Professor Alexandros Heraclides (European University Cyprus) said: ‘These patterns are consistent with a strongly patriarchal society, in which male lineages remained locally rooted, while a small number of women from outside communities were integrated. Our study is the first to recover the untold histories of Deep Maniot women, whose origins were largely obscured by male-centred oral traditions.’
The study also revealed that over 50% of present-day Deep Maniot men descend from a single male ancestor who lived in the 7th century CE. Such an extreme pattern points to a period when the local population was reduced to very few families, likely because of plague, warfare, and regional instability. The results also indicated that the founders of some of the present-day Deep Maniot clans lived in the 14th and 15th centuries, suggesting that these clans may trace their origin to that period.
‘Many oral traditions of shared descent, some dating back hundreds of years, are now verified through genetics,’ said Athanasios Kofinakos, co-author and research advisor on Deep Mani genealogical and historical matters. ‘Deep Mani’s geographical isolation and limited economic resources galvanised the warlike character of the locals. In such a harsh environment, family alliances became paramount for individual and collective survival.’
Anargyros Mariolis with a member of the Deep Maniot community. Credit: A. Mariolis.
The team included researchers from FamilyTreeDNA, who curate the most extensive human phylogenetic trees. By carrying out high-resolution analyses of paternal (Y-chromosome) and maternal (mitochondrial DNA) lineages, the researchers compared Deep Maniot genomes with more than one million modern individuals from around the world, as well as with thousands of ancient DNA samples. The analysis found almost no matches to other populations, showing how isolated and distinctive Deep Maniots are from a genetic perspective.
The inhabitants of Deep Mani have long intrigued historians and archaeologists. While much of the Balkans experienced repeated waves of migration during Late Antiquity, historical sources describe Deep Mani as unusually resistant to outside control. Even the Eastern Roman Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (905–959 CE) remarked on the Deep Maniots’ unusual origins, noting that they ‘are not of the lineage of the Slavs, but of the Romans of old who were called Hellenes.’* He further recorded that Deep Maniots continued worshipping the Olympian gods well into the 9th century,* which is an extraordinary oddity since the Empire had been fully Christianised many centuries earlier.
Together, these historical observations have long suggested that the inhabitants of Deep Mani followed a demographic and cultural trajectory distinct from much of the Greek-speaking world. The new genetic findings provide strong biological evidence supporting this view.
As many villages in Deep Mani are inhabited by a single clan, the research team worked closely with the community to ensure volunteers originated across multiple villages and clans, so that a representative range was included in the study. This approach was made possible by long-standing relationships of trust built over years of local medical and community service by co-author Dr Anargyros Mariolis, MD, Director of the Areopolis Health Centre.
The study ‘Uniparental analysis of Deep Maniot Greeks reveals genetic continuity from the pre-Medieval era’ has been published in Communications Biology.
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* Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De administrando imperio , ed. G. Moravcsik, trans. English by R. j. H. Jenkins, Washington 1967.
Tanjil Rashid is currently the Culture Editor of the New Statesman, although he has worked previously as a bookshop assistant and a civil servant and even, unfortunately, endured torrents of abuse as a comprehensive-school supply teacher. Having grown up in Ilford in East London, he now lives marginally to the north in Walthamstow. “I haven’t moved very far in life,” he jokes. In fact, he has been on quite a journey.
Rashid was born in 1990. “My parents had quite modest lives and I grew up in an immigrant Muslim Bengali family. My father immigrated to Britain to provide labour in the post-war economy, working up north in factories and then worked as a waiter and eventually getting an office job. My mother has been a housewife all her life. But they stressed education, as families like mine tend to; I went to a grammar school and became interested in literature and the arts. Public libraries were very good back then, they had lots of old books that you don’t find there anymore.”
He got into Cambridge and had a very good start in journalism at the Financial Times. After that he ended up landing in television, which he didn’t enjoy, and remained a freelance writer for many years until he was chosen to become the Culture editor of the New Statesman. He is doubtful, however, that people from backgrounds like his would in the future end up with such a prestigious position in the literary world.
“I grew up in a world that was changing and was still pretty analogue. The first fifteen years of my life were pretty much internet-free. Children from families like mine probably don’t have much exposure to print culture anymore. Children in intelligentsia families, the kind where they get the London Review of Books in the mail, probably still do. When I was growing up, my father was a great reader of newspapers, he’d sit there reading the paper while my mother was doing the shopping, and she also enjoyed reading Bengali newspapers.”
It was the early exposure to print culture which, though not a unique experience, turned Rashid towards the world of letters. “There are two kinds of people who go into journalism: one, people who really love news and current affairs; the other, people who like the written word. I’m someone who loves words, likes reading and writing. It’s hard to say why I specifically became interested in culture, art, fiction – I just for some reason got interested in that.” He pauses. “In some way literary journalism is a strange career to have. It’s not really a real career. It’s really too fun to be taken too seriously.”
Rashid, who has been a journalist for over a decade, is ruminative about the state of his chosen profession. “Fifty or a hundred years ago, it was in book reviewing and literary journalism that the great journalists were to be discovered.” Indeed, his predecessors as literary – now Culture – editors of the New Statesmen include V.S. Pritchett, Claire Tomalin, and Martin Amis.
While he does not agree the literary world is in the crisis some make it out to be in, he accepts changes are afoot. “The novel, like the epic poem, is no longer as central to the culture as it was. It’s impossible to know what new literary forms will take the place of the novel. The old ways of writing and understanding the world are changing. Critics must respond to this in a critically intelligent way. The people who are just being born or will be born in ten years’ time will express themselves as humans always do, but perhaps not writing novels. We recently did a piece, for instance, on how AI is reshaping the opera.” He stresses, however, that continuities remain. “Even now there are brilliant writers coming through in journalism. That supply of literary talent is proliferating. I’m constantly being amazed by youngsters who want to write about literature, and are remarkably well-read and write impressively.”
Identity is a recurring theme in Rashid’s writing. When I ask him about this, he reflects that this is not a conscious choice. “It happens to be the case that I am Muslim, I am British, and I am many other things, and these things inevitably shape what I write. These things are probably just noticed more because I have an – unusual identity. There aren’t many Bengali journalists in the media. There are so few of us that we often get mistaken for each other. For instance, I’m always getting mistaken for Faisal Islam, for some reason.” He laughs. “There are probably only two or three British Muslims in literary journalism. So, if you read my writings you’ll probably notice I have a slightly different identity, different perspective because of it. My identity doesn’t completely determine my perspective, but it certainly informs it.”
Earlier this year, Rashid interviewed Salman Rushdie. “Certainly, when it comes to a writer like Rushdie, a British Asian of Muslim heritage, there will be a way that I relate to his work and his life in a way that others don’t, because we share something of the world. There has been a lot of talk about diversity in the last decade or so but actually I don’t see the literary world becoming any less parochial. Things probably were better in decades past. In the decades after decolonisation you had Commonwealth writers such as VS Naipaul and Salman Rushdie being widely read and acclaimed, but today, even though we like to think of ourselves as more modern and contemporary and open, a novel such as Midnight’s Children would not be understood or read as widely.”
Identity certainly informs the multicultural Britain depicted in Rashid’s fiction. (As well as literary essays, articles, interviews, he has turned his hand to short stories, too.) “The Fanatic”, is particularly funny in the way it turns tropes and stereotypes on their head: it is the story of an imam who is expelled from his mosque for being a dangerous fanatic, but the fanaticism of which he stands accused is an inflexible, irrational love of Manchester United. “It was a wonderful thing to have short stories published in magazines and that sort of thing,” Rashid admits, “but it’s not a living.”
I ask him about his future ambitions. He pauses and looks down at the magazine – guess which one – that lies on the table. “My ambition, really, is to keep producing good literary coverage, good writing by the famous and brilliant writers I’m already publishing as well as finding new ones. The New Statesman has always been a venerable institution but since Tom McTague became editor the magazine has become absolutely essential to the national conversation – see the coverage of the Labour leadership contest, for instance. I would like to keep the literary pages of the New Statesman among the best in the world.” On the question of whether he might follow up his short stories with a novel, the reply, hesitantly given, is, “No comment.”
Many Cherwell readers – and certainly most Cherwell editors – are mulling over the prospect of a journalistic career, and will be seeking tips as to how to thrive in the profession. Rashid advises: “Have a day job: at this point in history, writing is an amateur sport, not a career. More importantly: Read. Read everything. Don’t just read what’s fashionable. Read science writing, travel writing, the Bible, read all kinds of words. Go back in time and read Shakespeare and Dickens. If you want to be a writer you have to understand language in all its subtleties, and to do that you have to read omnivorously.”
Fresh off the back of Our House and Macbeth, Cross Key Productions presents an original three-hander focused on the complexities of grief and young love. Produced by Madi Boutcha and Adam Peterson, the show is Louis Bennyworth’s first dalliance with the art of writing musicals. The show offers a heartfelt premise and a talented cast, and is set to move to the Edinburgh Fringe once its run in Oxford is complete.
In Oxford’s Michael Pilch black box theatre, we meet Euan in the midst of his grief, faced with the mammoth task of preparing a eulogy for Helen, his mother. The stage is set with a wooden set of ladders, mugs dotted, and half finished notes fanned across the floor in piles, the result of Euan’s inner turmoil. His girlfriend, Isla, seeks to aid him in this journey, but struggles to meet his needs whilst remembering her own. Over the course of the play, we learn more about Euan’s relationship with Helen, and in turn her relationship with Isla. We find a complex woman, at times too independent and brusque, who has raised Euan to be a man of great moral strength but also great anxiety.
The show’s greatest credit is undoubtedly the earnestness with which it portrays grief. Thomas Perry’s performance captured the simultaneous pain, anxiety and guilt that characterises loss, and provided an engaging centre for the show. As a character, Euan seems lost, turned young again by his mother’s death. We also get to see Isla’s grief (portrayed by Katie Gill), a more subtle and shared pain, both at the death of a woman she once knew, and the impact that had on the man she loves. The most thoughtful performance of grief, however, was that of Helen herself. Nicole Palka’s astute portrayal of Helen’s willful ignorance of her own ill-health, and her decision to keep that from Euan and Isla for as long as possible is one of the heavier points of the musical, and arguably the one that stays with you the longest after curtain call.
The production flourished in its depiction of childhood wonder and lent the play an added element of thoughtfulness. The prop department offered a visual display that invited us into the mind of Euan as he visualised his mother’s stories. As he shares these tales with Isla, the production does well to exaggerate the contrast between Euan’s childlike ignorance and Isla’s increasing discontent with the story’s overall message.
The use of shadow, though underutilised, was effective in reminding us of the looming figure of Euan’s mother in his life, for better or for worse. It also served well in displaying the nature of memory, as her stories invaded his brain and sailed through, whilst conversations and moments carry on in real time.
Bennyworth’s first foray into the musical genre is commendable. The ending polyphony in particular serves to show the beauty of the three-hander, with Perry, Gill and Palka offering emotive harmonies for a fitting final flourish. Yet, the lyrics themselves demand a more thoughtful reconsideration. Some lyrics felt clumsy (“we focus on it superfluously”), whilst others leant too heavily on overused metaphors that cheapened the emotive meanings behind them (“like a kite flying high on the evening breeze”).
This thought should be extended to the story more broadly – in part, it felt unfinished. Whilst the eulogy is finally delivered, and conversations are had, the denouement feels surface level, and largely a pretence. Strings of plot that were pulled out over the course of the show were left unaddressed. Isla’s critique of Euan’s mother triggers a collapse in their relationship: but only for five minutes. By the next scene the issue remains unresolved and yet the characters have moved on – Isla’s comments feel pointless, offering no real material change to the way Euan views his mother. What could have been a tale of coming to terms with the reality of inconsistent parenting and its legacy, ended up uncertain where it stood.Similarly, the mother’s character remains underdone. So intense is Euan’s mythologising of her, and so little time is devoted to her character, that she feels more like a plot device than a character in her own right.
By far the most fleshed out character, Isla, does not receive a fitting ending either. Working at an internship during the day, she is uncertain where her life will lead, and the role Euan will play in it. At times unlikeable, her character feels most realistic out of the three. Euan’s grief places her in the position of carer, and though she loves him and wants to support him, she fears the relationship will swallow up her life, leaving her with nothing that is her own. The conflicted feelings are captured beautifully by Gill. Still, the play sets a perfect grounding for a study into how to handle the grief of a loved one, and how it interacts with relationship dynamics, and yet offers only a surface level commentary on both its difficulties and its solutions.
Through the course of an evening the relationship ebbs and flows from places of safety to places of real distress and uncertainty. The extent of the disharmony between them at times makes the ending unbelievable. Though they both sing of a new certainty and hope, little has been done to address their resounding fears. In the final few moments, the ending felt like one of forced hope, where really there were deep wounds temporarily glued together.
I wasn’t too sure what to expect when I went to see Wide Eyes Productions’ The Slip last week (written and directed by Orla Wyatt and produced by Milo Ghiandai). In two years at Oxford, I had somehow never made it to a piece of original student writing, and I arrived armed with all the usual, slightly cynical expectations: clunky, over-earnest monologues, low-budget visuals straining under ambition, and an audience politely disengaged.
However, opening night of The Slip immediately dispelled all those assumptions. From the moment I entered the Burton Taylor Studio, I was gripped. It is not a large space, but its intimacy only heightened the emotional stakes of Wyatt’s story, bringing the audience uncomfortably close to every revelation, accusation, and fracture in the group’s relationships.
Based on a true story once heard by the writer-director, The Slip centres around a fatal car accident on a country road. The premise is deceptively simple: Archie (Callum Beardmore) is driving friends Christina (Maisie Lambert), Billy (Sam Drury), and Daniel (Alex Smith) back from a house party during the early hours, when they hit a woman walking by the side of the road. As police questioning unfolds under the scrutiny of Inspector (Cait Kremenstein), the truth emerges piece by piece. What initially appears to be a tragic accident is gradually revealed to be something darker: Billy, drunk and reckless in the passenger seat, had grabbed the wheel and swerved towards a pedestrian with the chilling joke: “ten points for a pedestrian”.
The strength of Wyatt’s script lies not in this final revelation, but in the moral fallout that follows. Rather than constructing a conventional whodunnit, The Slip asks what happens when a group of friends become bound together by a secret. That a fox crossing the road had caused the car to suddenly swerve. The tension comes not from discovering who is responsible, but from watching each character negotiate guilt, loyalty, and self-preservation, all complicated by alcohol-fuelled uncertainty and a tangled web of personal relationships.
Callum Beardmore’s Archie carries much of this emotional burden. While the police investigation provides the play’s structural framework, Archie’s simmering resentment towards Billy provides its emotional core. As layers of their shared history are stripped away, we learn that Billy has long occupied the role of the charismatic golden boy: more popular, more confident, always seemingly one step ahead. Archie, by contrast, is left wondering why he has remained in Billy’s orbit for so many years, even after leaving university. Beardmore impressively navigated this transition from controlled anxiety to explosive anger, culminating in a final act that felt genuinely unsettling.
Sam Drury’s performance was equally compelling. While it would be easy to play Billy as a straightforward villain, the performance avoided this generalising caricature. Billy’s recklessness is undeniable, yet the play also exposes his insecurity and self-destructive tendencies. Drury excels at capturing the contradictions at the heart of the character: the effortless charisma that draws others into his orbit, alongside a deep immaturity that ultimately proves destructive both to himself and those around him. As his confidence is gradually stripped away, moments of vulnerability begin to emerge, complicating the audience’s response to him without ever excusing his actions. The result is a character who remains frustratingly human even as the audience’s sympathy evaporates, embodying the play’s wider exploration of toxic friendship, masculine insecurity, and the devastating consequences of thoughtless cruelty.
Caught at the centre of these tangled loyalties is Christina (Maisie Lambert), perhaps Wyatt’s most tragic figure. Blackout drunk at the time of the accident, she is kept in the dark by the others for much of the narrative. As a result, she becomes a focal point for the group’s collective dishonesty. Chrstina’s complicated relationships with both Billy (her ex-boyfriend) and Archie (who she has been sleeping with) contribute to this, adding another layer of messiness to the group’s dynamic. Whether her involvement with Archie is genuine affection or an unconscious attempt by him to wound Billy remains unresolved, and the play is stronger in its refusal to provide a definitive answer. Lambert brought real depth to the role, conveying Christina’s mounting moral unease as she gradually realises that those closest to her may be concealing the truth about the accident.
Meanwhile, Alex Smith’s Daniel functioned as the uneasy mediator of the group, caught between competing loyalties and increasingly aware of the moral cost of silence. His constant back and forth between truth and lies provides an important counterpoint to Archie and Billy’s increasingly volatile rivalry, grounding the play’s larger questions of guilt and accountability. As an ensemble, the cast succeeded in creating a web of friendships that felt genuinely lived-in long before the audience’s arrival. Their interactions carried the easy familiarity, private jokes, and unspoken tensions of relationships forged over years, making the gradual disintegration of those bonds all the more compelling to watch. By the play’s conclusion, not only the mystery had been unravelled, but also the friendships themselves.
The technical elements of the production deserve equal praise. Juliet Taub’s lighting design made particularly effective use of the Burton Taylor’s intimate space, helping to delineate shifts between police interviews the night before and the present moment. At key points in plot, changes in lighting and colour subtly heightened the sense of unease without ever becoming distracting. Ice Dob’s sound design complimented the production’s visuals, building tension and underscoring the emotional weight of the play’s most dramatic revelations. Together, these elements elevated the play from an Agatha Christie-like whodunnit to a psychologically-charged thriller.
Opening night of The Slip demonstrated an impressive confidence from Wyatt, who serves as both writer and director. The play as a whole had a remarkable command of both character and atmosphere. The result was a tense and morally complex drama that explores not only the consequences of a moment’s recklessness, but also the fragility of friendship, the corrosive effects of guilt, and the stories we tell ourselves to avoid confronting the truth.
Wyatt’s script handled the pacing of these weighty themes and gradual revelations with remarkable assurance. This was no mean feat given the play’s fragmented structure, which moves fluidly between interrogations on night of the accident, its aftermath, while also shifting between competing perspectives and imperfect recollections.
As the lights came up, I found myself still turning over the production’s questions – perhaps the strongest endorsement a piece of theatre can receive. The Slip is proof of the calibre of Oxford’s original student writing and theatre, as what could have been a simple mystery became a compelling study of guilt, friendship, and the consequences of a single reckless decision. Sharp, unsettling, and emotionally intelligent, The Slip is a striking showcase of the ambition and talent behind Wide Eyes Productions, while establishing Wyatt as a writer-director to watch.
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