Events

2024-2025 EVENTS PROGRAMME

Green Lectures

The Hellenic Society is grateful to Professor J.R. Green for a generous donation to support a lecture series. We are delighted that Dr Lindy Crewe (Director, Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute) will deliver the 'Green Lectures' in 2024.

Programme (download the complete programme with abstracts: The Green Lectures 2024)

Monday 30 September, 6pm: Room G35, Senate House, London
Beef and beer: Working and feasting on Bronze Age Cyprus
(No booking required. This lecture will also be filmed and available to watch on the Hellenic Society YouTube channel)

Tuesday 1 October, 1pm: Djanogly Theatre, Lakeside, University of Nottingham
Beef and beer: Working and feasting on Bronze Age Cyprus
This is a University of Nottingham Talk

Wednesday 2 October, 6.45pm: Queen’s University Belfast (with the Classical Association in Northern Ireland)
Easing gently into the Bronze Age: The case for a connected Chalcolithic Cyprus at the transition from the 4th –3rd millennia BCE

Friday 4 October, 3pm: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research seminar room, Cambridge
Easing gently into the Bronze Age: The case for a connected Chalcolithic Cyprus at the transition from the 4th –3rd millennia BCE

Monday 7 October, 6pm: Room G35, Senate House, London
Easing gently into the Bronze Age: The case for a connected Chalcolithic Cyprus at the transition from the 4th –3rd millennia BCE
(No booking required. This lecture will also be filmed and available to watch on the Hellenic Society YouTube channel)

Joint event with the Roman Society and the Society of Antiquaries
Thursday 3 October, 5-6pm
Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House, Piccadilly W1J 0BE and online
Dr Elizabeth Key Fowden: The Evliyan Marbles: Ottoman viewers of Athenian Antiquities

Long treated as a fantastical storyteller, the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi has been taken more seriously in recent years as an attentive interpreter of Athenian antiquities. Evliya belongs to the handful of writers who saw the Parthenon intact as a mosque before Morosini’s bombardment in 1687. In Evliya’s account the City of Sages, as Athens was known in Arabic and Ottoman, is alive with ancient Greek philosophers whom he imagines to be in telepathic communication with the philosophers of Golden Age Baghdad. His enthusiastic descriptions of figural art disappoint any expectations of Islamic iconophobia. Two later Ottoman descriptions of Athens also linger on the city’s wonders – it had, after all, become a tourist destination for Ottomans too by the eighteenth century. A generation after Evliya, an Athenian cleric named Mahmud Efendi in his History of the City of Sages makes inventive use of ancient history drawn from Greek sources combined with autopsy and Muslim practice in order to make sense of the ancient buildings, above all the citadel mosque. As rarely studied evidence of early modern engagement with Greek antiquity, these accounts allow us to bring Ottoman viewers too into our assessment of the universal resonance of Athens.

Elizabeth Key Fowden is a cultural historian interested in the places where Hellenism and Islam meet. Her forthcoming book The Parthenon Mosque explores Ottoman engagement with ancient Greek culture. At the University of Cambridge her research has been supported by both the Faculty of Classics and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre of Islamic Studies. This bridging of Greece and the Middle East at Cambridge has taken various forms, including her role as Senior Researcher in the ERC Advanced Grant ‘Impact of the Ancient City’ with Andrew Wallace-Hadrill (PI); as co-PI with Tim Whitmarsh in the interdisciplinary project ‘Greece between Europe and Asia: regionality, religion, and culture’; as organiser with Lily Farhoud and Claudia Tobin of the exhibition and symposium Jerusalem in exile: Artist’s books by Kamal Boullata at the West Court Gallery, Jesus College; and organiser with Deniz Türker of the international curators’ symposium Eastern Mediterranean Embroideries, at the Mohammed Ali Research Center in Kavala, as a prolegomenon to the 2023 Fitzwilliam Exhibition Mediterranean Embroideries for which she produced, together with Marianna Koromila, the accompanying online film.

To book, please visit the Society of Antiquaries website:
https://www.sal.org.uk/event/evliyan-marbles/

Presidential Lecture: Professor Paul Cartledge
Thursday 21 November, 6pm
Senate Room, Senate House, London
“Periclean” Athens, “Periclean” Democracy, “Periclean” Greece? What's In a Name? Revisiting Biographical History
(No booking required. This lecture will also be filmed and available to watch on the Hellenic Society YouTube channel)

2025 Events will be advertised here soon.