Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies

In Exchange For Five Apartments and One Shop (subtitles), 2004, 110 min.
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103.

A documentary on the architectural and social evolution of Athens as shown in the Greek fiction films (1924-2004). The main vehicle of this journey is the narration of four Greek stars that have marked different periods of Greek cinema: Nikos Xanthopoulos, Xenia Kalogeropoulou, Nikos Kalogeropoulos, Mirto Alikaki. In total, 530 shots of Athens taken from 184 films. They all prove that although Athens has been radically transformed in this period, it remained in close contact with the stories of the films and the way of living of the Athenians.

Entire Film Schedule

The Dragon (no subtitles), 1956, 105 min.
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103.

Thomas, an insignificant bank clerk, is going to spend new year's eve alone, when he discovers, much to his horror, that he looks exactly like a famous and much wanted criminal nicknamed by the press as "The Dragon of Athens." When the police starts chasing him, Thomas hides in a night club where he meets a gang of criminals who think he is really the "Dragon." The gang proposes to him to participate in a big robbery. Thomas, who wants to escape from his empty life, agrees. The end will be tragic.

Entire Film Schedule

The Group for the Study of Late Antiquity presents:
Jairus Banaji (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)
Room 211 Dickinson Hall

Peter Mackridge (University of Oxford; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

In September 2004 the Archbishop of Athens asked priests in his diocese to see to it that henceforth, in the Sunday liturgy, the relevant extracts from the gospels and epistles be read out in an approved Modern Greek translation as well as in the traditional version that is found in the Greek New Testament. This decision, and the reactions it provoked in the Greek press, will be used as a starting point for an investigation into Greek attitudes, covering a period of about 200 years, towards Greek as a sacred language. This presentation will mention reactions to earlier translations of the New Testament and will culminate in some ideas about the Greek language as a mark of Hellenic and Christian identity.

Peter Mackridge is Emeritus Professor of Modern Greek at the University of Oxford and an Emeritus Fellow of St Cross College. He has authored The Modern Greek Language (1985) and Dionysios Solomos (1989), co-authored a comprehensive grammar (1997) and an essential grammar (2004) of Modern Greek, edited two novels by Kosmas Politis and the volume Dionysios Solomos, The Free Besieged and other Poems (2000), and co-edited (with Eleni Yannakakis) books on the development of Greek Macedonian cultural identity (1997) and on contemporary Greek fiction (2004). He has also published a large number of articles on medieval and Modern Greek language and literature. [Last Updated 2005]

Dustin Ferrer '05, Jonathan Hepburn '05, Jason Murphy '05, Richard Suchenski '05 and Daphne Ypsilanti '05
with
P. Adams Sitney, Program in Visual Arts
Jeffrey Stout, Department of Religion
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

Film Screening
Reflections on Markopoulos's films and the idea of Temenos
www.the-temenos.org

Short presentations and discussion will follow

With the support of Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Studies fellowships, we traveled to Greece last summer (2004), along with Professors Jeffrey Stout and P. Adams Sitney, in order to attend the Temenos screening. The three-day open-air screening, which took place in the village of Lyssaraia in Arcadia, consisted of the first cycles of Gregory Markopoulos's final work entitled Eniaios. Our experience at the Temenos was enhanced by several visits to sites and museums in the Peloponese and in Athens, where we spent a week after the screening. The film and the reports that we will present reflect on our experience and reaction to Markopoulos's Eniaios in the context of our trip to Greece.

Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

Stella (Melina Mecouri), a fiery singer with an insatiable appetite for men, defies the rules of conventional morality by refusing to marry. Determined to keep her independence, she discards her timid lover (Alekos Alexandrakis) and begins a torrid affair with Miltos (George Foundas), a brash local football hero who satisfies her hunger for unbridled passion. But when Miltos forces a marriage proposal upon her, Stella faces losing the freedom she desperately craves. The first Greek film to achieve international recognition, Stella confirmed Michael Cacoyannis' talents as a director of exceptional originality and vision.

Molly Greene (Department of History and Program in Hellenic Studies)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

The legal principles which structured international trade in the early modern eastern Mediterranean have not received much attention. In this paper it is argued that there was a major shift from the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries. In the earlier period, a "regime of sovereignty" was dominant: being a Venetian or an Ottoman subject was more consequential for a merchant than his religious identity. By the seventeenth century the reverse was true. Both of these regimes, however, were imbued with ambiguity. It is the Greeks, with their liminal status as both Christians and Ottoman subjects, who best bring out the unresolved tensions in these two regimes.

Molly Greene is an Associate Professor in the History Department with a joint appointment in the Program in Hellenic Studies. An Ottoman historian, trained at Princeton (Ph.D., Near Eastern Studies, 1993), she has a particular interest in the history of the Greeks under Ottoman rule. Her book, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean, was published by Princeton University Press in 2000. A Greek edition is in press. She is currently at work on a project on the relationship between Greek commerce and Catholic piracy in the seventeenth century Mediterranean.  [Last Updated 2005]

P. Voulgaris, Anna's engagement, 1972, 80 min (with subtitles)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

Anna is a poor village girl who has been working for an Athenian middle class family for ten years. When her mistress, an elderly lady, decides that it is time for her to get married, Anna's perception of her life changes dramatically.

Alexander Kazamias (Coventry University; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

In the early 1960s, most of Egypt's remaining Greeks - the country's largest non-Arab minority since the 1840s - left their homes and jobs en masse to start again their lives in new homelands. Ever since, all scholarly and personal accounts attributed this dramatic event to Nasser's Egyptianisation and Nationalization Laws of 1957 and 1961. A closer examination of the evidence, however, suggests that Nasser's Egyptianisation Laws and the forced expulsion of the British, French, and Jewish minorities, left the Greeks almost entirely unaffected. This presentation will also argue that the Greek exodus from Egypt was not an expulsion, but an overreaction to Nasser's Nationalization Laws, caused by the minority's earlier failures to modernize along with Egypt's newly emerging post-colonial society.

Alexander Kazamias is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at Coventry University. He holds a Ph.D. in Diplomatic History from the University of London (2001). He specializes in Contemporary Greek political history, Greek Politics and Political Philosophy. He has written several articles in English and Greek in these areas and he is a regular contributor to the magazine ANTI. His chapter on the "Rise and Fall of the Simitis Government" has recently appeared in the book Entanglement of Reforms in Greece, published by Papazisis (2005). [Last Updated 2005]

Riki Van Boeschoten (University of Thessaly; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Loring Danforth (Bates College)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103