02 May

Posted at 11:35h in Other


Retracing Connections and the Swedish Institute at Athens are presenting an online research dialogue with
Fotini Kondyli (Virginia/Patras)
moderated by Milan Vukašinović (Uppsala)

 on the topic of

Layers of Urban History: From Modern to Byzantine Athens through the Athenian Agora Excavations Archives

Can modern urban experiences shape the way we understand Byzantine cities? In this dialogue, we will discuss  the impact of modern urban experiences on the interpretation of Byzantine Athens, drawing from archaeological records and contemporary socio-economic phenomena. In doing so I follow two distinct story lines. Through an examination of the Athenian Agora Excavations Archives, Fotini Kondyli discusses how the excavation and recording of the Byzantine layers at the Agora informed narratives about Athens’ post-classical life and urban development. I then turn to contemporary experiences such as Greece’s economic crisis and Athens’ bottom-up urban projects in the crisis aftermath to highlight the relevance of contemporary experiences in enriching our understanding of Byzantine Athens’ spatial configuration and urban dynamics.

The Dialogue takes place online via Zoom on Tuesday, May 7, 2024, at 18.00 (Athens).

Register here. 

08 Mar

Posted at 11:45h in Other

The contemporary art exhibition  “Translating Worlds,” focusing on issues of translation and travelling stories, was curated by Milan Vukašinović and Nilüfer Şaşmazer, as a part of the Retracing Connections programme. The exhibition took place at Depo, Istanbul between November 2023 and January 2024. It featured existing and new works from fifteen international artists, including paintings, drawings, embroideries, sculptures, video and audio installations, and a lecture performance. The exhibition was conceived not only as communication outlet for the programme’s research results, but as an additional research activity that aimed to amend the inability of contemporary Translation Studies to account for all the meanings and practices of translation in the Middle Ages.

This webinar presents the academic and creative process behind this exhibition, the final artistic products, as well as the intellectual contributions it provided to the overall research project. It asks the questions of compatibility between translation studies, Byzantine and peri-Byzantine texts, historical processes, tavelling stories, trans-linguistic storyworlds and the medium of contemporary art. In this multifaceted intersection, contemporary art became the venue for untranslatability, negotiating between the personal, the poetic and the political. As it encountered the composite Byzantine worlds, it elucidated transhistorical instances of co-creation and communal existence. At the same time, by reintroducing medieval texts into the physical space, the artists gave them new material, visual and auditive forms. Thus, this collaboration probed the possibility of new secular rituals for the premodern artistic production, previously severed from its original ritual contexts through the intellectual practices of postmedieval, Western academia.     

The webinar by Milan Vukašinović (Uppsala University)
is organized by the Center for Medieval Arts & Rituals (University of Cyprus)
on April 4, 2024, at 16.30 (EET).
For more information and registration contact Andria Andreou.  

08 Mar

Posted at 11:35h in Other

Retracing Connections and the Swedish Institute at Athens are presenting an online research dialogue between
Myrto Veikou (Patras) and Markéta Kulhánková (Prague),
moderated by Ingela Nilsson (Uppsala) on the topic of

From narrative to lived spaces: Digenis Akrites in recent researche
Digenis Akrites holds a special place in both Byzantine and modern Greek literature. Previously often seen as a kind of national epic, it is now most often read as a heroic and romantic poem set in the Eastern borderlands of Byzantium. Surviving in different versions, the time and place of the poem’s composition are difficult to determine, but there is a general agreement on a twelfth-century Constantinopolitan context for the writing down of
an orally transmitted story. Recently, Digenis has been re-read in various ways related to space. John Kee drew on narrative theory and geography in his article in Byzantinoslavica (2022) and Myrto Veikou is currently applying a landscape perspective to Digenis in a comparison with the Arab Epic of the Holy Warrior (Dhat al-Himma). At the same time, Markéta Kulhánková, who translated Digenis into Czeck together with Ondřej Cikán (2018), is now finishing her work on a narratological commentary in which narrative space has come to play a significant role. What is the difference between narrative space and the physical landscape in which the story of Digenis is placed? How are the two related? Why do we care about the narrative space of Digenis? How can a storyworld be understood as a lived space? And why does space even matter? These are questions that will be addressed in a discussion between Myrto Veikou and Markéta Kulhánková, moderated by Ingela Nilsson.

The Dialogue takes place online via Zoom on Tuesday, March 19, 2024, at 18.00 (Athens).

Register here. 

17 Jan

Posted at 16:14h in Other

A research school in early languages and digital philology has been awarded funding from The Swedish Research Council (2023–2027), hosted by the Faculty of Languages at Uppsala University and coordinated by Ingela Nilsson. The profile of the research school partly overlaps with the interests of Retracing Connections and thus opens for fruitful collaboration over the coming years.

The aim of the research school DigPhil is to create a strong and state-of-the-art doctoral research environment for PhD students in early languages in Sweden. In light of recent developments in digital philology and Digital Humanities at large, many of the comparatively small research units for ancient and medieval languages (ranging from Greek and Latin to various medieval and early modern languages) are struggling to keep a sound balance between traditional methods and modern developments. The proposed research school would allow an efficient coordination of competences and resources, so that Sweden will equip PhD students in early languages with relevant tools to work as modern philologists. These tools include a better understanding of the philological tradition and its relation to Comparative Literature and Linguistics, but also a general competence in Digital Humanities that enables not only a successful career in digital philology, but also interdisciplinary collaboration with computational linguists and computer scientists. Such a development would stop the current trend towards isolation and, on the contrary, help put philology back into the Humanities and in touch with the Social Sciences.

16 Dec

Posted at 14:44h in Other

The Swedish Institute at Athens and the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul present the Gustav Karlsson Lecture on Byzantine Culture and Literature, given by Stratis Papioannou (University of Crete & Swedish Institute at Athens), on the topic of Readerly Pleasures in Byzantium. 

The lecture takes place on Tuesday, December 20, 2022, at 19h (Athens time), at the Swedish Institute at Athens, Mitseon 9, and via zoom link. To participate either way, please register.