Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies

Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

The 'Menoikeion Research Project,' organized and supported by the Program in Hellenic studies and cosponsored by the Greek Archaeological Service, studies the cultural tradition of the homonymous mountain region, in relation to the history of the Monastery of Hagios Ioannis Prodromos, founded between 1270 and 1275, near Serres in northern Greece. Since 1986, an active community of nuns has maintained this long monastic tradition. Today, the well-preserved architectural complex, surrounded by a relatively untouched rural environment, is considered a primary example of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine monastic art and architecture. In June 2006, Princeton University students and faculty members returned to the monastery for a second season of fieldwork, research and seminar meetings. This workshop will serve as an introduction to this monastic world. Short presentations will address different aspects of the team's work and its encounters with the realities of a living monastic tradition.

Mount Menoikeion in Context: A Preliminary Assessment and Plans for June 2007
Nikolas Bakirtzis *06 (Columbia University) and Heath Lowry (Near Eastern Studies)

Entering a Monastic Reality and its Habits
Christian Sahner ’07 and Clayton Marsh '85 (Stanley J. Seeger Fund Trustee)

The Archaeology of a Living Tradition
Matthew Milliner (Art and Archaeology) and Nebojsa Štanković (Art and Archaeology)

From Memory to Record: Tracing Oral Tradition on Mount Menoikeion
Nikos Michailidis (Anthropology) and Nikolas Bakirtzis *06 (Columbia University)

Manual Labor and Shared Experience: The Chores of Daily Life at the Nunnery of Prodromos
Nancy Khalek *06 (Rutgers University) and Jamie Kreiner (History)

The 2007 summer season for the Menoikeion Research Project is scheduled from June 15 to July 1. Fieldwork: June 15-25 (students only). Seminar: June 25-July 1 (faculty and students). This workshop will serve as an introduction for students and faculty interested in participating. A brief information session will follow after the presentation.

Dimitris Plantzos (University of Peloponnese)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

Time is essential to history, art history included. In the course of the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth century, classical archaeologists have been able to produce a sophisticated blueprint for the development of Greek Art. Their endeavour was based on a strictly positivist epistemological paradigm, ostensibly rooted in Cartesian logic and Newtonian physics, though actually masterminded by nineteenth-century empiricism. The Greek-art narrative as we know it assumes a linear understanding of the cause-and-effect relation in history, subject to an implicit belief in the finality of history. Under closer scrutiny, however, this "story" of Greek art may be found to be severely flawed. Is it addressing epistemic needs that are no longer present? Has Classical archaeology been trapped in a paradigm that has ceased to be valid? Can we understand the antique without knowing time?

Dimitris Plantzos studied Classical Archaeology at the University of Athens and the University of Oxford. He is the author of Hellenistic Engraved Gems (Oxford University Press, 1999) and has published a number of articles and studies on Greek art and archaeology. Recently he published a modern Greek translation of the Imagines by Philostratus the Elder, with introduction and commentary. His recent research focuses on theoretical approaches to Classical culture and the history of Greek archaeology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A former Curator (1998-2003) of the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, he has taught Classical art and archaeology at the Universities of Oxford and Peloponnese, the Hellenic Open University, and the International Center for Greek and Mediterranean Studies, Athens.  [last updated 2007]

This event is made possible by the Cycladic Art Foundation, New York, as part of their Alexander Papamarkou Lecture Series.

Cosponsored by the Program in the Ancient World, The Princeton University Art Museum, and the Department of Classics

David Olster (University of Kentucky)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

Kostis Kourelis (Clemson University; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: Efthymia Rentzou (Program in Hellenic Studies and Department of French and Italian)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

American archaeologists discovered Byzantine Greece during the same two decades that the avant-garde appropriated Byzantine aesthetics for the polemics of modernism. American industrial barons and Greek Demoticists deployed Byzantium in the construction of two separate, but related, national identities. Archaeological and artistic avant-gardes met in the excavations of the Athenian Agora and the Corinthian Forum. The talk will explore the intersection between Byzantine archaeologists in the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the Greek Generation of the 1930s, focusing on four specific questions: (a) what cultural background elevated Byzantium as a legitimate period of study in America; (b) how did this academic milieu intersect with, and/or deviate from debates over modernity and nationalism in contemporary Greek circles; (c) what new methodologies did American scholars develop in order to investigate this period, and finally; (d) how was the Byzantine chapter of Greek history rewritten as a result of the archaeological rigor imposed on its material culture. An investigation of the work of Alison Frantz (and her archives at Princeton), Rhys Carpenter, Charles H. Morgan II and others will illuminate the radical nature of American archaeology and its defiance of classical antiquities between 1920 and 1940.

Kostis Kourelis is Assistant Professor in Art History at Clemson University, specializing in architectural history and the archaeology of the medieval Mediterranean. Currently, Kourelis is directing a field school on Crusader architecture in the Peloponnesos (Clemson); he is publishing the excavations of an Arab-Norman village in western Sicily (Stanford); and he is studying the urban remains of Byzantine Chersonesos, Ukraine (University of Texas, Austin). Rural settlements and landscapes, daily life, peasant histories and non-elite material culture are major areas of research, along with archaeological theory and method. Kourelis has published on medieval villages, the historiography of architectural studies, popular culture and Greek-American immigration. His research as field director of the Morea Project appeared in Houses of the Morea: Vernacular Architecture of the Northwest Peloponnesos (1205-1955). His book-in-progress builds on many years of archaeological involvement with the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and focuses on the largely unknown dialogue between Greek and American modernism during the 1920 and 1930s and the rich history of the institution.  [last updated 2007]

Edmund Keeley (Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English, Emeritus. Professor of English and Creative Writing, Emeritus)
Pavlos Avlamis (Department of Classics)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

This reading of poems in Greek and new English translations offers a selection from a Norton anthology in progress covering Greek poetry from Homer to the present, edited in collaboration with Peter Constantine, Rachel Hadas, and Karen Van Dyck. The selection of translations by Edmund Keeley, in association with Pavlos Avlamis, consists of two parts: epigrams from what has come to be known as "The Greek Anthology," sometimes called "The Palatine Anthology," dating from the 7th century B.C.E. to the 6th century C.E., and several more recent poems from the Modern Greek folk-song tradition and the rarely translated work of Kostis Palamas. The focus will be on themes first established by the ancient Greek epigrams and carried forward into the modern period: polymorphous love, longing requited and unrequited, and the cost to human aspirations of time’s passing.

Edmund Keeley is the author of seven novels, ten volumes of non-fiction, and fifteen volumes of poetry in translation. He taught English, Creative Writing, and Hellenic Studies at Princeton for forty years, and retired as Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English Emeritus. His latest books are a literary history, Inventing Paradise: The Greek Journey, 1937-47, a novel, Some Wine for Remembrance, and a memoir, Borderlines.

Pavlos Avlamis is a graduate student in the Princeton Classics Department. His interests lie in Hellenistic and Imperial Greek prose and poetry. He is writing a dissertation on popular literature under the Roman Empire.  [last updated 2007]