Events

2023-2024 EVENTS PROGRAMME

Friday 10 November, 2023, 6-8pm
Chancellor's Hall and the Hellenic and Roman Library
Professor Michael Wood: In the Footsteps of Alexander. Further reflections on an epic journey
The lecture will be followed by a reception in the Library. This is a fundraising event for the Hellenic and Roman Library. Please book online here:
https://www.romansociety.org/Events/Event-Booking/EventId/12
Or complete the flyer.

Tuesday 12 December, 2023, 7pm
Hellenic Centre, Paddington Street W1U 5AS
Professor Roderick Beaton and Sir Michael Llewellyn Smith
From the Paris Peace Conference to the Treaty of Lausanne (1919–1923)

Two diplomatic agreements concluded in the Swiss town of Lausanne one hundred years ago, in 1923, drastically changed the lives of millions of people on Europe’s southeastern borders and very largely established the boundaries of today’s Greece and Turkey. The ‘Convention concerning the exchange of Greek and Turkish populations’, signed at Lausanne on 30 January 1923, enforced a mass movement of people between the two countries; the Treaty of Lausanne, in July, concluded the terms of peace between them, with an important mediating role played by Great Britain. The event will focus on three aspects of this story: first, a brief narrative of events from the Greek landing in Smyrna/Izmir in May 1919 to the victory of the Turkish Nationalists under Mustafa Kemal (later known as Atatürk) in September 1922; second, an assessment of the role of the Greek statesman Eleftherios Venizelos in the Greek defeat; third, thoughts on some of the British, Greek, Turkish and other politicians, diplomats and others who met at Lausanne to draw up the terms of the Treaty.

There is no charge for this event, but please email: secretary@hellenicsociety.org.uk to reserve a place

Wednesday 7 February, 2024, 7pm
Hellenic Centre, Paddington Street W1U 5AS
Professor Polly Low (Durham)
Imperial tyranny? Rethinking Athenian imperial power

There is no charge for this event, but please email: secretary@hellenicsociety.org.uk to reserve a place

Joint Event with the Roman Society
Tuesday 26 March, 2024, 5.30pm
Room G22/26, Senate House
Changing Attitudes to the Olympic Games
Paul Cartledge (Cambridge): Was there an ancient Hellenic 'Olympic Ideal'?
Tom Scanlon (University of California): Cynisca, breaker of Olympic gender barriers or political pawn?
Shushma Malik (Cambridge): Nero’s Olympic failures and why they matter
Mike Armstrong, Alex Donnachie, Danny Miller: The Hellenic Games: An Immersive Family Show

Joint event with the Hellenic Society and the Society of Antiquaries
Thursday 9 May, 2024, 1-2pm
Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House, Piccadilly W1J 0BE and online
Professor David Mattingly (Leicester): Talking to the Ancestors: Iron Age Painted Tombs of the Wadi Draa, Morocco

The Iron Age peoples of the Sahara remain poorly studied archaeologically, so we have little to counteract the dismissive views of desert communities found in the ancient sources, where they tend to be characterized as barbarians and nomads. The Oasis Civilisations project in southern Morocco has been investigating the Iron Age and Medieval inhabitants of an important desert valley, the Wadi Draa. This lecture will present a stunning archaeological discovery of tombs with painted annexes, featuring both geometric designs and human figures. These pictures open a fresh window on the late Iron Age population and their relationship with the Roman empire to their north. They allow us to compare and qualify the accounts of Greco-Roman writers so as to present a more complex and richer picture of these people, their clothing, lifestyle and beliefs. The lecture will also link to the new data to themes in my recent book on Africa in the Roman Empire.

To book, please visit the Society of Antiquaries website:
https://www.sal.org.uk/event/talking-to-the-ancestors-iron-age-painted-tombs-of-the-wadi-draa-morocco/

Saturday 8 June, 2024, 2pm
AGM and Colloquium
More details to follow

Joint event with the Roman Society and the Society of Antiquaries
Thursday 3 October, 2024, 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/