Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies

Dimitris Antoniou (University of Oxford, Visiting Graduate Student, Anthropology & Hellenic Studies)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

The establishment of places of worship for minority religious groups often signifies the commencement of public debates during which issues, ranging from national identity and collective memory, to church-state relations and legal modernization, are discussed. What follows is an account of the Greek Orthodox Church’s participation in the debate over the establishment of a central mosque in the town of P, in the suburbs of Athens. In contrast to similar cases in Europe, Australia, and the United States, this debate did not lead to the construction of an actual mosque and the Church was amongst the first to be blamed for preventing its realization. But was it really responsible? In this paper, I offer an "ecclesiastical anthropography" in order to challenge this popular assumption. Based on my ethnographic experiences in P, I describe the workings of a political machinery and the process of "capita"-based assessments conditioning the Church’s logos in order to argue that the latter’s stance was less rigid than popularly believed.

Dimitris Antoniou studied Social Theology at the University of Athens and Oriental Studies and Anthropology at the University of Oxford, St. Antony’s College. He has published several articles on Western Thracian Muslims and Muslim organizations in Athens. He is currently a visiting graduate student at Princeton, under the Princeton-Oxford Exchange Program on Culture and Religions of The Eastern Mediterranean World. In 2007 he was offered a teaching position at Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies where he now also serves as Assistant Director of Education. [last updated 2007]

Richard Hodges (University of East Anglia)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

The lecture will describe the historical and landscape setting of Butrint, ancient Buthrotum, in south-west Albania. Emphasis will be placed on the archaeology of later Roman and mid-Byzantine Butrint and its environs, illuminated by major excavations since 1994. The lecture will end by considering how these excavations shed light on the Adriatic Sea region in this period, and in particular the major historical theses recently published by Michael McCormick and Chris Wickham.

Richard Hodges is one of the leading authorities on the archaeology of the Roman and early medieval periods in Europe. He has published over 20 books and many articles on sites in the Balkans, Italy, Turkey and England, and has served as archaeological consultant to governments and non-governmental organizations. He is currently Visiting Professor in the Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield, England.   [last updated 2007]

Alexandros Vl. Levidis (Artist-in-Residence, Princeton University)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

In 1858, Gladstone, following an examination of "Homer’s perception and use of color," came to the conclusion that the Greeks of the Homeric Age suffered from some kind of color-blindness. This argument has triggered a series of misinterpretations of the ancient Greeks’ perception of color, which have contributed to the proliferation of a problematic and deficient understanding of the relevant ancient sources. Drawing on both theoretical studies of ancient sources and empirical knowledge of painting, this presentation will explore some of Plato’s and Aristotle’s comments on color, in the Timaeus and On Sense and Sensible Objects, respectively. Visual materials will be used in order to illustrate certain aspects of the issue of color in antiquity.

Alexandros Vl. Levidis is a practicing artist and writer based in Athens. He studied Stage Direction and Set Design in Paris (1965), as well as Architecture in Geneva (E.A.U.G. 1969). He has held eighteen individual shows and participated in twenty five group exhibitions in Greece and Europe. He has published eight books-exhibition catalogues and he has also worked as set designer for the theatre. He has published a translation of Pliny the Elder’s 35th Book of Natural History into modern Greek, accompanied by an extensive commentary based on a combination of theoretical knowledge and experience in painting techniques. The book received an Academy of Greece Award (1995). His research interests focus on ancient Greek painting, and he is currently involved in the study of color perception in ancient Greece, based on the texts of the pre-Socratic philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, and on archaeological evidence. He is working on the translation and commentary of Pseudo Aristotle’s De Coloribus, while also completing a study on the representation of the suicide of Ajax by Exekias.   [last updated 2007]

Presented by Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan (American School of Classical Studies at Athens)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

A 1947 documentary unearthed from the archives of the American School shows life returning to normal after the devastation of war. The 40-minute color film was used for fundraising purposes, and the narrative intersperses the archaeological work of the School with scenes of rural life. In her brief introduction, the speaker will describe how the film came to be made, and she will cast a critical eye over the motivations of the film-makers.

Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan is Archivist at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. She was trained as an archaeologist at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and earned her doctorate from Bryn Mawr College with a dissertation on Hellenistic pottery from the South Slope of the Acropolis of Athens. Her recent publications deal with the production and circulation of wine in Crete in Hellenistic times, as well as on the archaeology of houses and households in Crete.   [last updated 2007]

William Westerman (Writing Program, Princeton University)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

At the southeastern corner of the European Union, Greece has become the front line in a general trend to restrict the flow of undocumented laborers and political refugees from the Middle East and South Asia. Nonetheless thousands of people arrive every year and apply for asylum, even though asylum rates in Greece have dropped precipitously since the early 1980s. This lecture looks at the experiences in particular of Afghans and Bangladeshis, two of the groups coming to Greece in large numbers in the past five years. Ethnographic fieldwork in the Omonoia and Attikí neighborhoods of Athens and the refugee center in Lavrio reveals deep conflicts between Afghan and Bangladeshi notions and expectations of hospitality, and the practical realities of a continent re-examining its commitment to widespread protection from persecution.

William Westerman is currently a full-time lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program teaching a course entitled "Refugees, Immigrants, and Social Justice." Prior to this he was Director of the Cambodian American Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial in Chicago. Throughout his career he has worked with immigrant and refugee communities in museums, arts and social service organizations in the United States. A folklorist and ethnographer by training, he has published numerous articles on immigrant and refugee cultures in addition to co-authoring a book on Cambodian folk opera. As a human rights activist, he works extensively on the issue of imprisonment of asylum seekers worldwide.  [last updated 2007]

Followed by discussion with Hande Gumuskemer, Director
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

The people of the Aegean, Greeks and Turks, have a long and painful common ethnic, social and religious history. Both sides of the Aegean do not know enough about each other’s modern history, so they cannot reach an unbiased understanding of "the other." Owing to limited communication between the two nations, state policies have undermined social and cultural interaction between Greeks and Turks. Since 1998, after meeting many Greeks, Greek-Cypriots and Greek-Americans in the United States, Hande Gumuskemer has sought to understand what is myth and what is reality in modern history, and what has kept these two nations apart by feeding on "enemy" myth. From a distance, one’s national history seems very different than the version taught in his or her native country. "Between Venizelos and Atatürk Streets" is a comparative study of the refugees of 1922. The film attempts to shed light on a painful chapter of modern history from the perspective of the refugees themselves. This documentary aims to raise questions about the subjective discourse of "the other" that has been nurtured by school textbooks and mainstream media channels.

Hande Gumuskemer was born in Istanbul, Turkey. Due to her father's profession, her family moved every two or three years, criss-crossing the country - east to west, south to north. This nomadic lifestyle gave Hande a chance to observe the ethnic, social and cultural history of Turkey. After receiving her Bachelor's degree from the Department of Radio-TV-Cinema, University of Ankara, in 1993, she worked for several national newspapers, and TV stations in Turkey. In 1996 she moved to the United States and earned her Master of Science degree in Film Production from Boston University in 1998. Hande has been working in documentary film distribution business since then, acquiring and marketing hundreds of educational films to schools and colleges across the United States.

More information.

After the capture of the Constantinople in 1204 by the forces of the Fourth Crusade, western invaders conquered and occupied the provinces of the Byzantine Empire. One crusader state created as a result of this occupation proved to be especially durable. The Principality of Achaia remained viable from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries with its heartland in the Peloponnese, or the Morea.

It was eventually replaced by the Byzantine Despotate of Mistra, before that too surrendered to the Ottomans. Other political interests - Catalan, Venetian - also intervened in the same geographical region during the late Middle Ages. This story has exercised a fascination over travellers, playwrights, novelists and poets alike. Since the seventeenth century, it has also offered an attractive subject of research to scholars, with various academic methodologies and intellectual paradigms competing and combining with each-other.

Whether from a colonialist or a multi-culturalist perspective, the medieval Peloponnese has yielded a wealth of studies during the twentieth century regarding the intersection of two great civilizations, Latin Catholic Europe and Greek Orthodox Byzantium. In the last two decades, in particular, the traditional interpretations of the political, social, economic and cultural history of this region have been extensively revised. This is due to advances in the interpretation of textual sources, as well as to the increase in archaeological field-work. The major contribution, however, has been the upsurge in cross-disciplinary dialogue.

This colloquium aims to bring together a community of scholars from the disciplines of history, art history, archaeology, numismatics and literary criticism to discuss the medieval Peloponnese. By asking people to present work-in-progress, the opportunity will be provided to set out the current state of research, but also reflect on future directions of inquiry.

Teresa Shawcross (Princeton University)
Identities in Transition: Individualized Experience of Regime Change in Thirteenth-Century Greece
abstract

Erica Gilles (Princeton University)
"He makes you an in-law so that he may exterminate you"
Marriage and Diplomacy in Frankish Greece
abstract

Alan Stahl (Princeton University)
Coinage and Money in the Morea after the Fourth Crusade
abstract

Kostis Kourelis (Clemson University)
Beyond the Text: Archaeological Narratives from the Peloponnesian Countryside.
abstract

Program Committee: Dimitri Gondicas, Kostis Kourelis, Teresa Shawcross