British School at Athens

May 19, 2025

Professor Eyjólfur Kjalar Emilsson (University of Oslo), “Idealist, dualist or something else? Plotinus on the status of the sensible world”

In this paper I shall discuss Plotinus’ views on causation of and in the sensible sphere—by “the sensible sphere” I mean the physical world around us. The main focus is on the question whether all causes are ultimately mental and, if so, what conclusions can be drawn from that about Plotinus’ ontology. Is he a dualist with respect to the mind and the body? Or is he perhaps…

May 12, 2025

Dr Georgia Flouda (Archaeological Museum of Heraklion), “Adventures in the Archives: Reconstructing archaeology in Nazi-Occupied Crete”

his presentation explores the institutional and political context of the Wehrmacht’s Kunstschutz (‘Art Protection’), established in 1941 following the conquest of Crete, through archival testimonies and the case studies of two young archaeologists, August Schörgendorfer and Ulf Jantzen. Recruited under the guise of protecting…

May 5, 2025

Dr Alessandra Ricci (Koç University), “How did it begin?: The Institutionalization of Byzantine Studies in Turkey and Sir Steven Runciman”

It was probably sometime in 1941 or early 1942 when İzmet İnönü, the second president of the Turkish Republic, summoned the minister of national education, Hasan Ali Yücel who confirmed – as İnönü had suspected – that Byzantine topics were not taught at the university level in the young Turkish Republic. Yücel was asked to immediately remedy the situation…

April 28, 2025

Dr Roderick Bailey (University of Oxford), “Anglo-American attitudes to the protection of Jewish cultural heritage in Thessaloniki, 1943-46”

During the Second World War, more than four-fifths of Greece’s Jewish population, including ninety-five per cent of Thessaloniki’s 50,000 Jews, were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. That war…

March 26, 2025

Dr Artemis Papatheodorou (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), “The Ottoman laws on antiquities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries”

In the long nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire promulgated not one but four regulations on antiquities: the first one in 1869, the second one in 1874, the third one in 1884 and the final one in 1906. These regulations reflected…

March 17, 2025

Lady Marina Marks, “The Uses of Oppression: The Ottoman Empire through its Greek Newspapers, 1830–1862”

During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a generation of Ottoman Greeks was caught up in radical social and political changes, including the period of reforms known as Tanzimat. The Ottoman Greek press was both a product and an agent of these changes. The Uses of Oppression follows…

January 27, 2025

Jan Sienkiewicz, “Islands Between Palaces: The ‘Mycenaean’ Civilisation Reconsidered”

According to the dominant scholarly narrative, after the collapse of the Neopalatial civilisation, the Aegean societies underwent the so-called ‘Mycenaeanisation’, as the regional centre of cultural, economic, and political influence shifted from ‘Minoan’ Crete to the ‘Mycenaean’ southern Greek mainland. This narrative, however…

January 20, 2025

David Ricks, “Poetry between Languages: Writing and Translating Poetry in English and Greek”

This hybrid panel session, held on 20 January 2025 at the British School at Athens, takes as its starting point With Signs Following (Reading: Two Rivers Press 2024) the newly published poetry collection of David Ricks (Professor Emeritus, King’s College London). The two-hour-long session starts at 17:00 (Greek time) and will be chaired by Professor Sir Roderick Beaton, Chair of the BSA Council. The speakers are…

December 17, 2024

Professor Islam Issa, “The Alexandrian dream”

Islam Issa is an award-winning author, broadcaster and curator, named by the BBC as ‘one of the UK’s most significant new thinkers’. He is Professor of Literature and History at Birmingham City University, has written several academic books and curated internationally renowned exhibitions. He writes regularly for BBC History Magazine and…

December 2, 2024

Professor Dimitris Plantzos, “Greeks, Macedonians, Thracians, and a few others: Inventing the Ancestors in Southeastern Europe

In this lecture, Dimitris Plantzos examines the complex interplay between archaeology and nationalist imagination in Southeastern Europe. Focusing on the construction of ancestral narratives, he explores how modern nations…

Upper House Seminars