PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Program in Hellenic Studies
Sotiris Rizas (Research Center for Neohellenic History, Academy of Athens; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: Neophytos Loizides (Department of Politics and Program in Hellenic Studies)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
Based on recently released American archival sources, this paper is an attempt to study the United States involvement in Greek-Turkish relations in the mid-1970s, with particular emphasis on a six-month period from March through September 1976. The central argument of this paper is that, although the alliance of Greece and Turkey with Washington with respect to both NATO and bilateral dimensions did not prevent the outbreak of crises, it served as a useful framework for preventing the escalation of the controversy into war. The tendency of Greece and Turkey towards a situation of conflict signified undoubtedly that national interests, as perceived in Athens and Ankara, had a priority over the Atlantic alliance and Cold War considerations. It also emphasized the fact that political elites and public opinion in the two countries adopted a more autonomous and critical attitude towards the United States. However, the policies formulated by Greece and Turkey were still oriented towards Washington in the belief that the United States had the capability to resolve the conflict or at least prevent a major debacle for the national interest of each party.
Sotiris Rizas (mailto:srizas@princeton.edu) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Research Center for Neohellenic History in the Academy of Athens. His publications include the following books (in Greek): The Presidency of the Republic in Greek Politics 1924-1935 (Athens 1992); The Macedonian Question: Foreign Intervention and Greek Policy (Athens 1996); Enosis-Partition-Independence: The United States and Britain in Search of a Solution for the Cyprus Question 1963-1967 (Athens 2000); Greece, The United States and Europe, 1961-1964: Political and Economic Aspects of the Security Question from the Cold War to Ditente (Athens 2001); The United States, the Dictatorship of the Colonels and the Cyprus Question 1967-1974 (Athens 2002); From Crisis to Ditente: Constantinos Mitsotakis and the Greek-Turkish Rapprochement (Athens 2003).
Alan M. Stahl (Princeton University Library)
Respondent: Anastasia Stouraiti (Program in Hellenic Studies)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
In 1401 a young Greek man signed on as an oarsman on a Venetian galley. For the next forty-five years, he sailed with the Venetian fleet throughout the Mediterranean and as far as the Netherlands. He rose to the rank of admiral, a rare achievement for someone who was not a native Venetian. In 1434, this man, who called himself simply Michael of Rhodes, set down in a 450 page manuscript various aspects of his world. He wrote out, in Venetian dialect, a long arithmetical treatise, a calendar of saints, various astronomical and astrological tracts, portolan descriptions of coast lines, and the earliest extant text on ship construction. The manuscript, which has been in private hands since its composition and has never before been available for scholarly examination, is now being prepared for publication by an international team of scholars working under the auspices of the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT, with funding from the NEH and the NSF. Alan M. Stahl, who has recently come to Princeton as Curator of Numismatics, is co-director of the project. He will discuss the manuscript and its implications for our understanding of the culture of the medieval Mediterranean world.
Alan M. Stahl (astahl@Princeton.EDU) is Curator of Numismatics in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library. He holds a Ph.D. in Medieval History from the University of Pennsylvania. He was Curator of Medieval Coins and of Medals at the American Numismatic Society and has taught as a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, Rice University, the University of Notre Dame, and the Universita di Venezia. He is the author of seven books and eighty articles. His two most recent books are an edition of notarial documents from fourteenth-century Crete published by Dumbarton Oaks and a monograph, Zecca; The Mint of Venice in the Middle Ages, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. He is currently co-director of the international team publishing the Codex of Michael of Rhodes and is working on the volume on the coinage of central Italy for the series Medieval European Coinage published by the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Tuesday, February 1, 2005 6:00 p.m.
Francois Bredenkamp (Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
This talk will attempt to formulate an interpretation of the Greek literary, political and ecclesiastical sources of the fifteenth century which illuminate the Greeks' sense of their situation after the Ottoman conquest, especially as they strove to preserve their 'core values' during the difficult times following the conquest. The presentation is grounded in a methodology which relies on reading and analysing capita selecta (an Ottoman firman, a synodal act, Kritovoulos and a monody) from the fifteenth century Greek accounts of their adjustment to Ottoman hegemony. A methodologically accountable approach to the interpretation reveals dynamic social processes of interaction at work.
Francois Bredenkamp (fbredenk@Princeton.EDU) completed a Masters degree on early Christian political theory in 1975 and a Ph.D. in Byzantine History and Historiography at the Rand Afrikaans University in Johannesburg in 1983. He has taught Greek language, literature, and history at three South African universities and became research specialist in the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa in 1989. Since 1997, he has served as Director of Research and Development on the Ga-Rankuwa Campus of the Tshwane University of Technology. His publications include The Byzantine Empire of Thessaloniki (1224-1242) Thessaloniki, 1996), The State: Theory & Practice (Pretoria, 1997) (in Afrikaans), and a number of articles (mostly in English) on the Patristics and on approaches to ancient historiography. His translation of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations into Afrikaans, with notes and comments, is scheduled to appear in 2005. He is a member of the South African Academy for Arts and Science (Section: Humanities and Social Sciences).
Nancy Khalek (Department of History)
Respondent: Jack Tannous (Department of History)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
This talk aims to clarify the processes by which Damascus, Syria, was transformed from a Byzantine city into the capital of the early Islamic Empire. It does so by analyzing monumental and residential appropriations made during the late seventh and eighth century, and by re-reading literary renditions of the seventh-century conquests with an eye on Byzantine-Muslim relations, conflicts, and military encounters. This talk will provide a general overview of the project, as well as focus on specific aspects of the encounters between Byzantines and Arabs, non-Chalcedonian Christians and early Muslims, Byzantine Generals and Arab commanders. In these moments of encounter, theological polemics and identity politics are simultaneously inscribed upon the landscape of early Islamic Syria. At the same time, developing early Islamic self-conception was undeniably rooted in and measured against the Byzantine world.
Nancy Khalek (nakhalek@Princeton.EDU) received undergraduate degree in History at Princeton in 1999 and an M.A. in Islamic History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2001. She is currently a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the department of History at Princeton. Her research interests include late antique and early Islamic history, Syriac Christianity, and Byzantine History and Architecture.
Heath W. Lowry (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
This talk will serve a dual purpose. The first is to share the preliminary results of the speaker's long-term project which surveys the establishment and nature of Ottoman rule in the fifteenth century Balkans. This project includes the creation of a database of over 12,000 Ottoman administrators who served as fief holders in the towns, villages, and fortresses of the region. The data is extracted from the surviving corpus of contemporary Ottoman tax records. The second is to present an illustrated tour of Northern Greece, focusing on the fifteenth century Ottoman architectural legacy (both military and civil) extant in the region. Special emphasis will be given to the fortress complexes of Zihne (Zichne), Selanik (Thessaloniki), Avrethisar (Gynaikokastro), and Platomona (Platamonas), and to the city of Siroz (Serres).
Heath W. Lowry (ataturk@Princeton.EDU) has been the Atatürk Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies at Princeton University, since 1993. In the 1980s he was the Executive Director of the Institute of Turkish Studies, Inc., a non-profit educational foundation headquartered in Washington, D.C. Author of eight books, his most recent publications include a series of three books on early Ottoman history: Fifteenth Century Ottoman Realities: Christian Peasant Life on the Aegean Island of Limnos (Eren Press: 2002); The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (SUNY Press: 2003); and Ottoman Bursa in Travel Accounts (Indiana University, Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies Publications: 2003). Tuesday, February 15, 2005 5:00 p.m. Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103.
Damianos, To the Ship (3d part subtitles), 1966
A film triptych: Three stages in the life of a mountain villager, who comes down to the valley and from there to Piraeus, to emigrate to Australia. The third part takes place in the poor neighborhoods of Piraeus. Alexis Damianos's film was an attempt to do "auteur cinema" outside the dominant studio system of commercial Greek cinema during this period.
S. Drakopoulou, M. Gastine, Athens : In Search for the Lost City (subtitles), Documentary, 60 min: The urban development of Athens seen through commercial fiction films from 1926 to 1980.
Nicholas de Lange (University of Cambridge; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: Peter Schäfer (Department of Religion)
Room 103, Scheide Caldwell House
It is generally well known that the books of the Old Testament preserved by the Greek Church derive from translations from the Hebrew that were made and used by Jews in the period from the 3rd c. BCE to the early 2nd c. CE, the heyday of Greek Jewish culture. According to Origen, by his day (early-mid 3rd c.) the Church had claimed these books as her own, and Jews tended to prefer another translation, ascribed to Akylas (Aquila), while various other translations also circulated. Virtually no integrated research has been done on the various Greek Bible translations used by Jews in Origen's time and later. In this paper it will be argued, largely but not exclusively on the basis of newly-discovered manuscript fragments from the Cairo Genizah, that Greek Jews continued to use various translations throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. An attempt to describe the character of these translations and their relationship to the ancient versions will be made. If correct, this thesis has important implications for editors of the Greek Bible, for readers of the Palestinian rabbinic literature preserved in Hebrew and Aramaic, for students of medieval Jewish religion and culture, and for those interested in the Bible in Byzantium.
Nicholas de Lange (nrde@princeton.edu) is Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies in the University of Cambridge. His publications include: Origen and the Jews : Studies in Jewish-Christian Relations in third-century Palestine (Cambridge, 1976); (with M. Harl) Origène, Sur les Ecritures : Philocalie, 1-20 (Paris, 1983); Greek Jewish Texts from the Cairo Genizah (Tübingen, 1996); (ed.) Hebrew Scholarship and the Medieval World (Cambridge, 2001).
Patrick Gray (York University;Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: Iaian Torrance (Princeton Theological Seminary)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
The trial and condemnation of Eutyches by a standing synod of Constantinople in 448 is a neglected episode in the tumultuous series of events that took place between the outbreak of the Nestorian Controversy in 428, and the Council of Chalcedon in 451. In the perennial dispute between Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian churches over the history of this troubled period, it has been to the advantage of the former to neglect Eutyches, while the latter, having eventually been maneuvered into condemning Eutyches, never grasped the strategy used so successfully against their cause in this episode, let alone its implications. A close analysis of the records shows that the trial of Eutyches actually had nothing to do with what he really believed, and everything to do with an audacious campaign by his condemners to claim the mantle of Cyril of Alexandria for beliefs Cyril himself despised. That Eutyches was maladroit enough in the face of the ploys used against him to let himself be dismissed as a genuine mixophysite was an unexpected gift to his opponents. He thus made it possible for them to construe Chalcedon not just as true to Cyril, but also as the judicious middle course between the symmetrical errors of Nestorius and Eutyches. They were able, then, to disguise the radical departure from Cyril's teaching Chalcedon's final statement of faith really represented.
Patrick Gray's (pgray@princeton.edu) long term interest in the fifth and sixth centuries began while he was studying history of theology at Trinity College, Toronto, and at Yale. He started his teaching career as a tutor at Trinity and St. Michael's Colleges. Except for a stint at McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario, he has spent most of his career teaching Humanities and Religious Studies at York University, Toronto, where he is currently professor. Additionally, he teaches graduate courses for Trinity College in the Toronto School of Theology. His doctoral work led to the publication of The Defense of Chalcedon in the East (451-553). Since then he has published numerous articles on early-byzantine Christology, Palestine, Justinian, and the creation of the canon of church fathers in the East. Work begun many years ago on a fellowship at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies has recently come to fruition in an edition cum translation of the sixth-century theologian Leontius of Jerusalem.