In the Gaze of Saints: A Journey through Medieval Greece

  Greece

• Athens: 
Athinai (Athens)

Term: Summer 

Description: Throughout its thousand-year history, the Byzantine Empire managed to maintain a strong connection to the Greek classical past. Despite this link, however, scholars have been slow to recognize it, partly because of a persisting bias which sees all medieval periods as regressive and inherently inferior to their classical predecessors.
Throughout the course, we will pay special attention to parallels and deviations between Byzantine culture and the ancient Greek past. Are there cases of continuity? If so, what form do they take, and how can we account for them? Conversely, which factors can be cited as cases of discontinuity or rupture? Finally, and more generally, how are the different historical periods related to one another? Is it even possible to speak of a continuous history of 'Greece'?

Byzantium remains an image of exotic medievalism  a chimerical dreamscape, remote in both time and space. We hope to make the Byzantine period both more real and more accessible. To do so, we will need to make both the familiar strange and the strange familiar. In the process of stripping away our preconceptions and prejudices, it is hoped that a newer, fresher  and clearer  impression of both the foreign and the familiar will emerge.

Credits and Grades
You will earn the following semester hours of credit: 3 per session

Admission Requirements
GPA Requirements: 2.8 on a 4.0 scale.

You must be in good academic standing and not on disciplinary probation. You need to submit a complete application including a transcript, letter of recommendation, and an advisor's form before your application will be considered.

Highlights: Your travels will begin in Athens where you will have orientation and then move on to Thessaloniki to view the famous Galerius Palace Complex, built in 300 A. D. to become the administrative and religious center of Roman Thessaloniki. From there, you will climb the rock monasteries of Meteora and Osios Loukas (near Delphi).

Other visits include Paros, Sparta (and the Byzantine ghosttown of Mystra), and Monemvasia, a settlement founded in the 6th century A.D. and maintains many well-preserved civic and sacred monuments.

During your travels you will be invited relate your discoveries to the cultural paradigms which have informed your lives up to now. This requires a critical method which can be reduced, in its most elemental expression, to that of comparison and contrast. Our perception of the world begins with comparing one thing to another and it is how we establish our sense of self and others, as well as making sense of the more diverse and complex phenomena around us.

Cost in US$: please visit website

Experience Required: no

This Program is open to Worldwide Participants.