| At Princeton |
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The Sacred Grip:
Kostis Kourelis (Franklin and Marshall College)
Tuesday, May 12, 2009 Mount Menoikeion near Serres, Greece, preserves a rich tradition shaped around the thirteenth-century monastery of Saint John Prodromos. The monastery evolved into a major monastic center, surviving through volatile chapters of Balkan history. It is a spectacular monument of Byzantine art and architecture surrounded by an equally spectacular natural environment. In 1986, the deteriorating architectural shell was taken over by a female community of nuns whose spiritual guide, the Athonite monk Elder Ephraim, resides in Arizona. The Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University established an annual field seminar to investigate the site's complexities in its modern and contemporary Greek context. Since 2005, the Mount Menoikeion Workshop has brought together a diverse group of scholars and students from anthropology, archaeology, history, classics, religion, music and art history. In preparation for the 2009 summer research season at Mount Menoikeion, this presentation will focus on two aspects of the monastery's history: landscape and wall paintings. The early modern landscape of Menoikeion reveals an inherent tension between the ideal of monastic wilderness and its aggressive human exploitation; the monastery's eighteenth and nineteenth century frescoes illuminate the post-Byzantine aesthetic trajectory of mainland Greece. Kostis Kourelis is assistant professor in Art History at Franklin and Marshall College, specializing in architectural history, archaeology, cultural theory, and preservation. He received his Ph.D. in the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World from the University of Pennsylvania. He works on urbanism, rural settlements, and houses in the medieval Mediterranean. His field projects in Greece (Peloponnesos, Boeotia, Macedonia), Sicily (Monte Polizzo), Tunisia (Jerba), and the Black Sea (Chersonesos) are an integral part of his research and teaching. His articles on the Greek grand tour, on modernism and Byzantium, on medieval manifestations in film and on Greek-American immigration represent theoretical preoccupations that supplement his work on domestic archaeology. Matthew J. Milliner is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. He has a B.A. from Wheaton College and an M.Div. from the Princeton Theological Seminary. His dissertation examines the migration of a Byzantine icon type from Cyprus to Crete, Italy and beyond. He has explored intersections between art, architecture and theology in numerous articles, and is the research coordinator for the Mount Menoikeion Monastery Seminar. In 2009/10 he will be a junior research fellow with the Marie Curie project, "T.I.E.M." (Tracing Identity in the Eastern Mediterranean), hosted by the Cyprus Research Institute in Nicosia. |