Upper House Seminar Sebastian Marshall (Cambridge/BSA), “Beyond the Classical Landscape: Photographs of Rural Greece from the SPHS Image Collection” Abstract: Since the earliest days of modern travel to Greece, landscape and the rural environment have been an object of fascination among foreign visitors. A preoccupation with ancient ‘topography’ and ‘picturesque’ views are familiar tropes in […]

Upper House Seminar Organised as part of the Modern Greek Studies program run by Dr Lamprini Rori (University of Athens) and Dr Eirini Karamouzi (Sheffield) Prof. Gelina Harlaftis (IMS/FORTH), “Onassis Business History, 1924-1975” Abstract: Aristotle Onassis is the most famous shipowner of the 20th century, the archetype and image of the shipowning magnate, the symbol of Greek […]

BSA Upper House Seminar Dr Matthew Evans (BSA/Warwick), “Group Identity, Representation, and the Gymnasium on Late Hellenistic Delos” Abstract: In the corpus of inscriptions from Delos during the Second Athenian Domination (167/6 – 88 BCE), we come across various formal and informal groups associated with the island’s athletic education institutions. This paper explores the role […]

BSA Upper House Seminar Prof. Kostas Kotsakis (Professor Emeritus, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), "A solar flare in 5259 BCE solves the Dispilio riddle"   Abstract: Dispilio by Kastoria Lake is Greece's first systematically excavated wetland site. It contains waterlogged wooden piles, C14 dated to the 6th millennium BCE at a density of almost 1000 piles […]

  View of the Lasithi plateau from the north. Photo: Andriana-Maria Xenaki. Upper House Seminar Andriana Xenaki (University of Cambridge/BSA), "'A view from the mountain’s top': modelling the use of mountainous areas in Eastern Crete" Abstract: Using legacy data from eastern Crete’s most dominant landscape features – its rugged terrain and iconic mountains – this paper […]

Image credit: Australian Associated Press 2023. Migrants gather between Pazarkule border gate, Edirne, Turkey, and Kastanies border gate, Evros, as they try to enter Greece, on Saturday, Feb. 29, 2020. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Saturday that his country's borders with Europe were open, as thousands of refugees gathered at the frontier with Greece. (AP […]

Upper House Seminar Dr Georgios Mouratidis (British School at Athens), "Athletics and Paedeia. Monuments in Context"   Abstract: The hundreds of statue bases of athletic monuments that have survived to our day, suggest that athletes have always been figures of fascination and admiration. But what makes athletes so admirable to deserve to be immortalised through […]

Grave Circle A, Mycenae. Photo: Rachel Philips  Upper House Seminar Rachel Phillips (University of Cambridge), "Curating the Dead: Body and Matter in Early Mycenaean Burials" From the start of the Late Bronze Age, people on the Greek mainland were buried with hundreds or even thousands of objects, made from exotic materials and embellished with figurative […]

Upper House Seminar Dr Stamatoula Panagakou (University of Cyprus), "Aspects of the Political Philosophy of the British Idealist Philosopher Bernard Bosanquet" Bernard Bosanquet (1848-1923) was one of the most important British Idealist philosophers. Author of numerous books which cover topics from logic, metaphysics and aesthetics to ethics, religion and political philosophy, and of more than […]

image: Red-figured water jar (hydria), signed by Meidias as potter, British Museum, 34465002  Upper House Seminar Professor Amy Smith (University of Reading), "Redressing Aphrodite on Sir William Hamilton’s Meidias hydria" In anticipation of the Meidias hydria’s first return to Athens since its unspecified journey to Etruscan shores in antiquity, Professor Smith reevaluates the message of […]

Ali Onay (born Rethymnon 1918), famous for his collection of Cretan heirlooms on Cunda Upper House Seminar Bruce Clark and Sophia Koufopoulou, "The Treaty of Lausanne (1923) and its impact on the Muslim population of Crete" Speakers: Bruce Clark, author of Twice a Stranger: How mass expulsion forged modern Greece and Turkey, and Athens: City […]

  PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS TALK HAS BEEN POSTPONED. IT HAS BEEN RESCHEDULED FOR JUNE 6TH   Abstract From the start of the Late Bronze Age, people on the Greek mainland were buried with hundreds or even thousands of objects, made from exotic materials and embellished with figurative and abstract motifs. Through the twin representational […]

Douglas Forsyth (University of St. Andrews), "Social Strategies for Dealing with Scarce Precipitation; Examples from the Iron Age Cyclades" Abstract This presentation will explore some of the ways in which past human societies have dealt with living in areas of scarce or low precipitation. The examination will focus primarily on archaeological evidence from the Iron […]

Image: Drawing of the stucco cornice from the dome of the Katholikon of Hosios Loukas from the Schultz and Barnsley notebook BAR-2, p. 66, British School at Athens Dr Flavia Vanni (University of Birmingham, The Richard Bradford McConnell Student/BSA), "Looking at Byzantium through materials: the case of stucco (ca 850-1453)" Abstract In 1890, Robert W. […]

Dr Michael Loy (University of Cambridge, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow), "Roads and resources on Archaic/Classical Samos"   To attend IN PERSON (Athens) please register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/roads-and-resources-on-archaicclassical-samos-tickets-586873874557 To attend ONLINE please register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_iOzgtjPqSHWMBtDp7dzXlA

Dr Tulsi Parikh (A. G. Leventis Fellow in Hellenic Studies / British School at Athens), "Bodies in motion: Experiencing the sacred in ancient Greece, the case of Ancient Karthaia, Kea" Abstract How did sacred landscapes shape religious experience and to what extent were sacred landscapes in turn shaped by religious experience? In this paper, I […]

Elizabeth Foley (Macmillan-Rodewald Student, BSA), "Cycladic Cities and Hegemonic Powers in the Hellenistic Period" Please register to attend IN PERSON here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cycladic-cities-and-hegemonic-powers-in-the-hellenistic-period-tickets-577006751727 Please register to attend ONLINE here: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_b85vM7USQUC4JMswtxB9yA   Monday 13 March, 4pm (UK) / 6pm (Greece)

Dr Carlotta Gardner, "Revisiting ancient ceramic production in the northern Peloponnese: the ceramic landscapes of Corinth and Sikyon " Abstract The northern Peloponnese provides evidence of prolific ceramic production from all periods and across the entire region, documented in the excavated ceramic assemblages and by the growing number of confirmed production centres and kiln sites. […]

Image:"In the vicinity of the fortified farm at Malathrea, southwestern modern-day Albania (Investigated by the Albanian Institute of Archaeology)" Nefeli Pirée Iliou, "In Search of the Greek and Roman agricultural economies in Epirus during the early Imperial period" Abstract In the ancient world different farms and country houses existed. Some have held the spotlight, like […]

Postcards from Greece: This Afterlife, a poetry reading and conversation to mark the publication of Stallings’ Selected Poems Alicia (A. E.) Stallings will read and discuss work from her four published collections of poetry gathered into her new selected poems, This Afterlife, poems that explore Greek mythology, classical reception, ancient and modern Greece, and the diachronic strata of […]

Sir Michael Llewellyn Smith, "A.A. Pallis, from Greek abroad to Greek in Greece" Abstract The talk will introduce the life and work of A.A. Pallis, son of the Alexander Pallis whose translation of the Gospels caused such scandal. A.A. Pallis described himself as a Ξενιτεμενος Ελληνας. His work carried him from Manchester and Liverpool to […]

Image: Two Sisters by Per Krohg Lyndsay Coo (University of Bristol / BSA Visiting Fellow), "New approaches to sisterhood in Greek tragedy" Abstract: Greek tragedy contains numerous scenarios where the relationship between sisters is implicated in political action: these include the Danaids in Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women, Antigone and Ismene in Sophocles’ Antigone, and the Erechtheids in Euripides’ Erechtheus, to […]

Dr Antonis Kalogeropoulos (University of Liverpool), "Digital News Consumption in Greece" Abstract Greece is a global outlier in digital news consumption. Trust in legacy news organizations is very low while Greeks online rely heavily on alternative sources like social media for their news. Dr Kalogeropoulos will present qualitative and quantitative data that address how Greeks […]

Vasif Sahoglu (Ankara University), "New Evidence for Thera Eruption Tsunamis at Çeşme - Bağlararası in western Anatolia" Abstract Disasters, whether natural or anthropogenic, can be drivers of landscape and cultural change. The Late Bronze Age Thera eruption was one of the largest natural disasters witnessed in human history. Its impact, consequences, and timing, has dominated […]

Dr Antti Lampinen (Finnish Institute at Athens), "Nativism in Herodes' Sophistic Attica: Rural Heroes, Hellenic Purity and the Bust of 'Sauromates'" ABSTRACT: That some second-century figures under the broad umbrella of Second Sophistic entertained nativist conceptions of Hellenicity is not news as such. Dio of Prusa was not only a fairly outspoken critic of the […]

Sophia Zoumbaki (The National Hellenic Research Foundation) and Constantine Cartalis (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens), "Monuments of cultural heritage threatened by climate change: A suggestion of how to read the past and protect the future" Abstract Climate change is an inevitable natural process which human communities always had to face. Nowadays this phenomenon is accelerated by […]

Michael J. Boyd with Colin Renfrew and members of the Keros team, "The creative cultural nexus of Keros" Abstract The third millennium in Europe is marked by expanding horizons, the increasing importance of information, and by new identities forged in connectivity. In the Aegean, these changes are manifest in a series of creative social experiments […]

Dr Mairi Gkikaki (University of Warwick / The Open University of Cyprus), "Tokens in Late Classical and Hellenistic Athens" Abstract Although, symbola, the Greek term for tokens, are first attested in the Archaic Period in the context of hospitality, in Athens of the mid-fifth century BC a remarkable transition may be observed from the private […]

Dr Anna Judson (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, British School at Athens),  "Scribal training in Mycenaean Pylos" Abstract At least 30 people are known to have written administrative documents in the Mycenaean  palace of Pylos immediately before its destruction c.1200 BCE. These “scribes” are, however, entirely anonymous: they did not sign their texts, and so are identified […]

John Bintliff (University of Edinburgh) and Anthony Snodgrass (University of Cambridge): "The City of Thespiai, Central Greece: Its Precursors, Florescence And Successors, a Narrative Of 7000 Years of Community Life" Abstract The Boeotia Survey project has since 1982 completed total field surveys of five ancient urban centres in this region of Central Greece.  This lecture will […]

Professor Maria Mina (University of the Aegean), "Manifestation or mirage? The cultural construction of insularity in the south-east Aegean" Abstract The lecture assesses the position of islands of the south-east Aegean in relation to diachronic prehistoric phenomena, such as colonisation, interaction, and perceived acculturation. The scope of the presentation is twofold. On one hand, it […]

Professor Markos Katsianis (University of Patras), "Excavation archives in 3D: Digital documentation and curation workflows" Abstract: 3D recording methodologies at the intra-site level have greatly enhanced the quality of the produced archaeological record and facilitated novel ways to interact with its content. In addition, they have opened exciting opportunities to revisit mixed and traditional documentation […]

Professor Violetta Hionidou (University of Newcastle), ‘Using emmenagogues and abortifacients in Modern Greece, 1830-1967’ Abstract Greece currently has one of the most liberal laws on abortion. While we know quite a lot about abortion in Greece in the second half of the 20th century, we know much less about earlier times. This paper will explore when, […]

Elias Kolovos (University of Crete), ‘Romaiika: Towards a History of the Greek Lands under Ottoman Rule’ Abstract The seminar will discuss the history of the Greek lands under Ottoman rule, between the fourteenth and the early nineteenth century, as a shared history of Christian and Muslim communities: to the south of Mount Olympus, more or less, […]

Dr Carrie Sawtell (BSA, Macmillan-Rodewald Student), "Χρηστὸς / χρηστή in 4th and 3rd century BC Attic Epitaphs" Variously translated as excellent, good, useful and worthy, among others, the epithet χρηστὸς / χρηστή when used in fourth-century BC Attic epitaphs is taken as denoting the servile status of the deceased. The epithet was used across the […]

Michael Loy (BSA, Assistant Director), "Luxury and commodity shipping routes in archaic Greece"

Dr Polyxeni Adam-Veleni (Director, General Directorate of Antiquities, Hellenic Ministry of Culture & Sports): 'Θεσσαλονίκη: μια μεγαλειώδης μητρόπολη της Αρχαίας Μακεδονίας'

Robert Pitt (CYA): ‘Early British Travellers to Athens and the Hunt for Inscriptions: Some Overlooked Epigraphic Manuscripts of the 17th and 18th Centuries’

Dr Chryssanthi Papadopoulou (BSA Assistant Director), "Exorcising Fear: Ritual Performances in Classical Athens"

Charlotte Van Regenmortel (BSA Macmillan-Rodewald Student / PhD candidate, University of Leicester), "Warriors into workers: Military service as wage labour in the Late Classical and Early Hellenistic periods"

Christina Ichim (BSA Richard Bradford McConnel Student / PhD candidate, UCL), "Dying to connect: a mortuary approach to southern Aegean connectivity in the middle and late Bronze Age"

Prof. Judith Barringer (University of Edinburgh), “The message is in the medium: White-ground lekythoi and stone grave markers in Classical Athens.” Video

Prof. Dimitris Plantzos (University of Athens), "Mind the gap: revisiting Greece’s national “sites of trauma”