Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies

1:30 - 4:30 PM
211 Dickinson Hall
Reception to follow
Reading packets are available in the Departments of History and Classics or by contacting Kevin Kalish at kkalish@princeton.edu.

Ioannis D. Evrigenis (Tufts University; Visiting Fellow, Princeton University Center for Human Values)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

As Enlightenment educational projects began to infuse their curricula with rational ideas, secularize them, and make them available to broader audiences, they turned to ancient Greek texts, in search of universal principles. These works were not only eloquent sources of such principles, they were also pagan and unclaimed - they belonged to all mankind. Inspired, on the one hand, by this program to educate the world, and driven, on the other, by a desire to see his fellow-countrymen liberated from the Ottoman yoke, Adamantios Koraes, an expatriated Greek living in Paris, began, in 1805, to edit ancient Greek texts so as to make them accessible to modern Greeks. Seeing his compatriots as the natural heirs of these texts, Koraes hoped that his Hellenic Library would become the foundation for the formation and consolidation of a Greek national identity, a necessary first step on the road to freedom. Koraes prefaced his scholarly editions of such texts as Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Theophrastus's Characters with discussions of the significance of language, education, and civic responsibility, often mirroring the subjects and methods of his European contemporaries. Encapsulating, as they do, the tension between the particular and the universal, these prefaces mark a singular moment in the development of modern national identity, and offer a unique insight into the continuities and discontinuities that mark the trajectories of national traditions.

Ioannis D. Evrigenis is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, and Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow, at the University Center for Human Values, at Princeton. He received his PhD from Harvard University, in 2005. His doctoral dissertation was awarded the Herrnstein Prize. He has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Earhart Foundation, among others, as well as five Certificates of Distinction in Teaching from Harvard University's Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. He is co-editor of Johann Gottfried Herder's Another Philosophy of History and Selected Political Writings (Hackett, 2004), and the author of Fear of Enemies and Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and of articles on a wide range of issues in political thought. At present, he is working on a study of the state of nature in political thought, and another on Plato's Socrates.  [last updated 2008]

Exploring the Living Tradition of a Holy Mountain
Impressions from the Seminar's Third Season, June 2007
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

Christian Wildberg (Classics), Christopher Heuer (Art and Archaeology), Cecilia Ramos (Architecture), Matthew Milliner (Art and Archaeology), Nikolas Bakirtzis *06 (Columbia University)

The Mt. Menoikeion Seminar studies the cultural heritage of the mountainous region close to Serres in Northern Greece. The broader area of Mt. Menoikeion preserves a rich tradition shaped around the monastery of Hagios Ioannis Prodromos founded in the Middle Byzantine period and continuously inhabited since then. Organized by the Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University and hosted by the community of Hagios Ioannis Prodromos nunnery, the seminar's primary aim is to provide an inspiring learning experience and to stimulate participants' direct involvement in field research by working closely with faculty members and specialists. At the end of the seminar, students participate in a workshop designed to complement the year's field research and fosters an exchange of facts and ideas between students and faculty. In June 2007, Princeton University students and faculty members returned to the monastery for the Seminar's third season. Join us for a group presentation in which last summer's seminar participants will speak about their work and impressions from their stay at Prodromos monastery.

This presentation will also serve as an introduction for students and faculty interested in participating in the 2008 seminar season, which will convene from June 21 to July 4, 2008. The theme for the 2008 season is "Claiming a Holy Mountain; Monks, Metochia and the Networks of Monastic Landscapes."

Heather E. Grossman (University of Illinois at Chicago; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Room 103, Scheide Caldwell House, Princeton University

This talk examines the architectural evidence of Latin-Orthodox cultural interaction during the post-Fourth Crusade Latin rule over the Peloponnese. Several Peloponnesian churches thus far have been categorized according to the canons of medieval architectural history, as separated "Western" or "Byzantine" products. This talk instead posits a hybrid category of "Moreote" architecture that encompasses not only the stylistic qualities of the finished products but also the architectural processes associated with patronage, construction and reception. Looked at in this way, the churches reveal a mixed heritage reflective of the syncretic society of the Orthodox and Latin elites of the thirteenth-century Peloponnese. This case study highlights the need for new methods of conceptualizing style in art history and for rethinking the canon.

Heather E. Grossman is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her primary field is the architectural history of the medieval Mediterranean and cultural exchange between East and West in the Crusader period. Her work has been supported by the Archaeological Institute of America and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. As a Senior Fellow of the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (Koç University, Istanbul) in 2004-5, Grossman wrote on nineteenth-century photography of ancient and medieval sites and its role in modernization and nation-building efforts in Greece and Turkey. Her book-in-progress, Building Identity: Architecture and Interaction in a Medieval Mediterranean Society, investigates the post-Fourth Crusade churches of Greece and questions of historiography and style.  [last updated 2008]

All sessions to take place in 211 Dickinson Hall

Contact Richard Payne for time and all info.

Kindly sponsored by the Department of History, Council for the Humanities, Shelby Cullom Davis Center, Group for the Study of Late Antiquity, Center for the Study of Religion, Princeton Environmental Institute, Department of Classics, Department of Art and Archaeology, Program in Hellenic Studies and Program in Medieval Studies.

George Syrimis (Yale University)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

Despite his brief reign of less than two years, emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus (331-363), or Julian the Apostate, as he has come to be known, has never ceased to inspire both scholarship and literature. The paper examines some of the major literary re-workings of Julian's story from the post-Enlightenment period and analyses modernity's enduring and self-reflexive fascination with his ambitious yet ultimately failed project of pagan revival. Focusing mainly on the works of Ibsen, Cavafy, and Kazantzakis the talk addresses the texts' refracted questioning of the uneasy relationship between religion and secularism, their insistence on extracting and providing psychological - rather than intellectual or spiritual - justifications for Julian's motives, and their discomfort with the contradiction of Julian's pagan aesthetics and his asexuality.

George Syrimis is the Associate Chair of the Hellenic Studies Program at Yale University. He received his B.Sc. in Education from Cornell University. He subsequently pursued graduate work at Harvard University where he studied Modern Greek, Classical Greek, and Modern Spanish literature. His dissertation on the poetics of C.P. Cavafy's love poems was entitled "'Try to Guard Them, Poet': Homoeroticism and the Poetics of Opacity in C. P. Cavafy." He has published articles on the oral tradition, Georgios Vizyenos, Cavafy, Mikis Theodorakis, and Nikos Kazantzakis. In addition to his academic work, he has also developed two electronic projects (Lexis and Ikones) for the instruction of Modern Greek. His research interests include music and national identity, religion and literature, cultural studies and gender and sexuality. His current project focuses on the literature on Julian the Apostate from the Enlightenment to the present.  [last updated 2008]

Yiorgis Yerolymbos (University of Thessaly)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

Contemporary Greek photography addresses social issues by reinterpreting the country's recent past, and puts forward ideas for the future by linking global trends and focused creativity. In this presentation the work of Panos Kokkinias, Nikos Markou and Yiorgis Yerolymbos will be used as case studies, in order to offer views of the contemporary Greek landscape, natural and constructed, commentary on the social identity of the people who act on it, the character of human action on the environment, and the feel of the prevailing techniques, aesthetics and thematic approaches.

Yiorgis Yerolymbos is a photographer and architect, currently a lecturer in photography at the School of Architecture, University of Thessaly. He studied photography at the Technological Institute of Athens and architecture at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. He subsequently pursued a graduate degree at Goldsmith's College, University of London, and completed his Ph.D. at the School of Art and Design of the University of Derby, UK. His photographic work has been published in a number of books on landscape and architectural photography. In addition to his academic work, he also exhibits his work in solo and group art exhibitions in Greece and abroad. His research interests include the process of beautification of landscape in contemporary photography, the construction of identity through lived-in space. His current project, supported by the Fulbright Foundation, focuses on the American landscape and how its visitor-user perceives it.  [last updated 2008]

Claudia Rapp (University of California, Los Angeles; Senior Visiting Scholar, Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

In the fourth to sixth centuries, in Egypt and Palestine, men and women in search of spiritual perfection severed their ties with society and established themselves in monastic communities of varying size. As this lecture will argue, their embrace of radical asceticism did not mean a complete rejection of all social interaction, but resulted in the establishment of relationships that were conceptualized either through use of legal terminology or in kinship terms. Of particular importance are the one-on-one relationships between two young men who enter the monastic life together, as they may provide a key to the origin of ritual brotherhood (adelphopoiesis) that would later become a prominent social networking strategy in Byzantium.

Claudia Rapp is Professor of Late Antiquity at UCLA. Her awards and honors include fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study and Dumbarton Oaks, and she is a former President of the Byzantine Studies Conference. She is a member of the editorial board of "Translated Texts for Historians" (Liverpool) and of several learned societies in the United States, Great Britain and Germany. Her numerous publications include Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature of Christian Leadership in a Time of Transition (University of California University Press, 2005). Currently a fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford, she is working on a book-length study on Writing and Mimesis in Byzantium.  [last updated 2008]

Maria Couroucli (CNRS; Université Paris X-Nanterre; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

Recent ethnographic research has focused on religious spaces shared by both Muslims and Christians in the Balkans and in the wider post-Ottoman region. These phenomena, which have sometimes served as evidence for a past characterized by "tolerance" towards the religious other, seem in fact to be quite independent from the larger political sphere. On the one hand, they are local answers to situations of cohabitation of more than one group in one place; yet they can also be viewed as variations of one basic pattern spreading from the Balkans via Anatolia to Egypt. The ethnographic starting point of this paper is a long-term observation of the annual festival taking place at one of the sites traditionally visited by both Christians and Muslims in Istanbul, one that is still attracting tens of thousands of people: Saint George at Prinkipo Island. This paper highlights the specific concepts of space and representations of the local community involved by examining, in comparative perspective, local configurations of such sacred places in the Eastern Mediterranean, where Christianity and Islam have a long tradition of coexistence.

Maria Couroucli, a research fellow at the CNRS (Laboratoire d'Ethnologie), holds a doctoral degree in Social and Historical Anthropology from the École des hautes études en sciences socials, as well as B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral research was carried out in Corfu, and was published as Les oliviers du lignage (Paris, 1985), a study which led her to investigate kinship and family, identity and nationalism. Her current research interests include shared religious practices in the post-Ottoman world as well as questions of memory and identity in relation to the Greek civil war (1946-49). She teaches in the post-graduate program of the Departement d'Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative at the University of Paris X-Nanterre, and is a member of the editorial board of Ethnologie Française.  [last updated 2008]

Elias Kolovos (University of Crete; Institute for Mediterranean Studies, Crete; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: Heath Lowry (Department of Near Eastern Studies)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

The Christian Orthodox monks of Mount Athos accepted the rule of the Ottoman Sultans in the 1350s, securing special protection for their revered religious center, as well as for their economic networks during an age of insecurity. For an Islamic dynasty that would construct an empire in the late medieval Balkans and Anatolia through a series of military victories, as well as through alliances with and integration of different social and cultural traditions, the protection extended to the Athonite monks should have promoted the empire's prestige, especially among its Christian Orthodox subjects. During the long transformation of the early Ottoman state into an early modern Islamic polity the monks of Athos had to negotiate their status with successive Ottoman administrations, and had to cope with the crystallization of the Ottoman institutions during the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. Their successful adaptation into the new realities of an expanding Islamic state sheds light on the economic and political technologies of the Christian Orthodox monastic institutions, which managed to flourish during the Ottoman centuries and well beyond. At the same time, the story of the Athonite monks' successful integration into the Ottoman enterprise is important for the study of the diverse paths in the construction of Ottoman society.

Elias Kolovos  is Lecturer in the Department of History and Archaeology of the University of Crete and research associate of the Institute for Mediterranean Studies, Foundation for Research and Technology, Hellas (F.O.R.T.H.), in Crete. He holds Ph.D. in Ottoman History from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. His doctoral dissertation on Athonite monks and peasants in the countryside of Salonica under Ottoman administration forms the basis of his book-in-progress. His publications focus on the history of monasteries under Ottoman administration; Ottoman peasant history; and island societies in the Ottoman Empire (fourteenth to eighteenth centuries). He is the author of The Island Society of Andros in the Ottoman Context (Andros, 2005, in Greek) and co-editor of Ottoman Rule and the Balkans 1760-1850 (Rethymno, 2007) and The Ottoman Empire, The Balkans, The Greek Lands: Toward a Social and Economic History (Istanbul, 2007).  [last updated 2008]

Charalambos Bakirtzis (Hellenic Ministry of Culture; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: AnneMarie Luijendijk (Department of Religion)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

The paper addresses some aspects of the transformation from Roman to Early Christian Thessalonike by focusing on two important institutions: the hospital (xenon) in the basilica of Saint Demetrios and the theatre life in the city. In the hospital of Saint Demetrios, scientific techniques of Greek empirical and Hippocratic medicine were practiced at the same time and in the same location as the miraculous cures of Saint Demetrios were effected in visions by incubation. The iconography of the mosaics in the basilica is linked to the operation of the hospital. In the realm of theatre, two texts in dialogue form and with stage directions are included intact in a collection of lives, martyrdoms and miracles of Christian Saints. Taken out of the religious context in which they have been transmitted, the texts can be understood as two unknown mime parodies, performed in Thessalonike: On the Tragedian and The Martyrdom of the Seven Martyrs.

Charalambos Bakirtzis is Ephor of Byzantine Antiquities, Emeritus, Hellenic Ministry of Culture. He served at the Greek Archaeological Service (1964-2007) in Eastern Macedonia and Thrace (1976-1997), and in Thessalonike and Central Macedonia (1964-1973 and 1997-2007). He has been a regular member of the Central Archaeological Council of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture (1999-2007), Assistant and Associate Professor of Byzantine Archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessalonike (1988-1998), and Director of the Greek Archaeological Expedition at Haghios Georghios, Paphos, Cyprus. He has also served as Vice-President of the International Committee for the Conservation of Mosaics, Vice-President of the Association Internationale pour l'Etudes des Céramiques Médievales en Méditerranée, and consultant on preservation of archaeological and cultural heritage of the A. G. Leventis Foundation. He is the founder and director of the Centre of Contemporary Archaeology, Thessalonike. [last updated 2008]