British School at Athens : Video Gallery

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...

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...

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...

Paul Halstead (Professor Emeritus, University of Sheffield), “The importance of olive growing and oil exports in Archaic-Classical Athens: the contribution of ‘citizen science’”

Scholars have long argued about how ‘primitive’ or ‘modern’ was the ancient Greek economy. In this context, arguments over the scale of olive growing in Archaic-Classical southern Greece and of oil exports therefrom assume broad importance for our understanding of early polis societies. A law attributed to Solon of Athens...

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...

The Work of the BSA: 2025 Annual Open Lecture London – The Moving Van of Metaphor: An Anglophone poet, translator, and classicist in Greece

Annual Open Lectures of the British School at Athens on Tuesday 18th February 2025 held at the British Academy

The Work of the BSA: 2025 Annual Open Lecture Athens – The Coastal World of Minoan Palaikastro

Annual Open Lectures of the British School at Athens, Thursday 13th February 2025, the Archaeological Society (Lecture Hall), 22 Panepistimiou Street, Athens.

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...