The Church of St. Lazarus in Larnaka

It had been quite a few years since I had the chance to talk to student about the church of Ay. Lazarus in Larnaka on Cyprus. Yesterday, I chatted a bit about the church and its history with students from Reed College and Metro State University – Denver who were participating in the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project (Version 3).

This church is a pretty amazing building made only more amazing because it is pretty baffling architecturally and historically. That said, it is also prominent enough in the city of Larnaka and accessible enough to even the casual visitor to make it an appealing building with which to think. Since most of the students had only limited interest in the nitty-gritty of Medieval Cypriot architecture, it made sense to me to talk about the building in more big picture historical ways.

To do this, I decided to focus on how this building embodied a whole series of connections that characterized both the history and contemporary academic conversations about Ancient and Medieval Cyprus. The first connection I make is that the story of Lazarus of Bethany works along side the story of Paul and Barnabas to connect Cyprus (and in the case of Lazarus, Larnaka) to the Levant and Holy Land (which reminds us that ancient Kition was, for most of its history, oriented toward the East). 

Then I discuss the idea that St. Lazarus seemed to be particularly significant to Armenians and propose that the building reflects the connections between Cyprus and Cilician Armenia throughout the Middle Ages from long-standing economic connections between the region to the settlement of Armenians on the island under the Emperors Maurice and Heracleius and the reconquest of the island by Nikitas Chalkoutzes in 965.

I then discuss the how this church connects the city and the island to Constantinople. This connection, of course, works on two levels. First, historically there is evidence that the Emperor Leo VI translated the relics of Lazarus from Larnaka to Constantinople in the first decade of the 10th century. The relics suggest, of course, a church on the site, by the early 10th century, but it remains unclear whether it is the existing church. This matters to architectural historians who continue to ponder the character of Early Medieval Cypriot architecture. On the one hand, it may be that this church reflects trends characteristic of Constantinoplitan architecture, especially if one sees it as a series of cross-in-square churches aligned in sequence to form a basilica. This would tend to suggest an 11th or 12th century date for the building. On the other hand, it might reflect innovation in Cypriot architecture, particularly the long-tail of efforts to convert wood-roofed basilicas to barrel vaults or domes. 

Finally, I leverage a bit of Nassos Papalexandrou’s 2008 article in Journal of Modern Greek Studies to situate the relationship between the city of Larnaka and its salt lake. I concluded with the rival stories about the lake’s origins. According to post-Medieval sources, Barnabas cursed a woman who would not offer him water from a well and claimed it was brackish. He turned the well and the water from it brackish in response to her lie and thus the Larnaka salt lake was formed. Lazarus, in contrast, created the salt lakes as a gift to the city so that the community and the island would never be without salt.

I was fortunate yesterday that Tom Landvatter’s tour of other sites in Larnaka picked up on some stands of my rambling and discursive talk, expanded and clarified them, and used them to discuss the contemporary (and ancient) Cypriot (and Larnakan) identities.

Messene, Olympia, and the Greek Dark Ages

Last weekend, I had a chance to travel a bit and see a couple sites that I hadn’t seen for about a decade. We targeted sites and regions where there was some evidence for “Slavic” pottery and “late” urbanism (i.e. post 6th century).

We visited Messene which is perhaps best known for its imposing Hellenistic Walls. We were more interested, however, in the fourth-century Christian building, the sixth century basilica, the fifth to seventh century bath, the Early Byzantine water mill, and the beautiful views. To get a sense for why Late Roman and Early Byzantine Messene is so important, check out Nikos Tsivikis work at his Academia.edu page.

We then headed north to visit Olympia. While Olympia is best know for its important collection of Slavic Ware pottery, it was also the site of a relatively well preserved Early Christian basilica. Unfortunately, the weather was uncooperative and we barely avoided a massive thunderstorm and didn’t get much time on the site.

Fortunately, we had plenty of time to admire the “Slavic” pottery displayed in the final cases of the archaeological museum. The message is clear: all of the remarkable and far more famous objects, monuments, and stories associated with Olympia culminate in “Slavic” ceramics. The elegance, simplicity, and functional beauty of these pots humbles the rest of the museum by reducing the overwrought ornamentation of so-called “Classical” sanctuary to mere frippery. 

Baptisteries in Greece and Cyprus

For some reason baptistery projects take a long time to come out. This week, two baptistery related projects of mine somehow reached milestones. It’s a Christmas miracle.

The first is the MASSIVE Cambridge Guide to the Architecture of Christianity edited by Richard A. Etlin. I had only a tiny contribution to this gigantic and long simmering project: “Early Christian Baptisteries.” From what I can tell, I started working on this project in 2010 or so. In fact, this project took so long to come to pass that you have to go to my OLD blog to find a draft of the published manuscript: You can read that draft of it here. You can check out the table of content here. I’m particularly pleased to have slipped an image of the Lechaion baptistery into this article!

Yesterday, I completed a draft of another long simmering project on the Early Christian baptisteries of Cyprus. It is a companion piece to one that David Pettegrew and I wrote on the Early Christian baptisteries of Greece.  

If you’re into baptisteries and into Cyprus, I think this as good a place as any to start. Note the bibliography at the end for key additional reading and reference!

The Baptisteries of Cyprus

Scholars have long recognized Cyprus as a crossroads in the Eastern Mediterranean during the Late Roman period. This location of the island between the Levant, Asia Minor, and the Aegean and its wealth during the Roman and Late Roman period shaped its distinct ecclesiastical and Christian history. The island’s location made it a predictable stopover for St. Paul (Acts 9:27; 11:19-26). Its connection to the Levant inspired traditions of prominent early bishops on the island including Paul’s companion Barnabas and the resurrected Lazarus. By the fourth century, the island sent three bishops to the Council of Niceae including St. Spyridon and by the end of the century produced the charismatic St. Epiphanius whose status a heretic hunter drew him to Constantinople to participate, albeit briefly, in the machinations surrounding St. John Chrysostom’s condemnation at the Synod of the Oak in 403. The prominence of Cypriot bishops in the first half-millennium of Christianity is just one indicator of the political and religious significance of the island. Indeed, the sudden discovery of the relics of St. Barnabas in the 5th century, helped bolster the island’s case for ecclesiastical independence from the See of Antioch and reinforce the uniquely autocephalos relationship between the Metropolitan bishop of Cyprus at Salamis-Constantia and the Patriarch in Constantinople. The prominence of the church and its leaders also fostered the growing number of relics on the island and helped make the island a place for pilgrims to stop on their way to the Holy Land. Even in the 7th century, as the Late Roman Eastern Mediterranean started to dissolve under the pressures of religious and political schism, Cyprus remained a key node in Christendom. Displaced populations, such as thousands of Armenians captured during the Persian wars, and displaced bishops, such as Cypriot-born St. John the Almsgiver who fled Egypt in advance of the Persian attacks on Alexandria, found new homes on the island. Throughout the Early Christian period, the island’s location, economic and political prominence, and ecclesiastical stature ensured that its churches were both impressive and diverse in style and shape (see Gordon and Caraher 2018; Mecalf 2009; Zavagno 2017).

Considering its geographic, political, and ecclesiastical context, it is hardly surprising that Cypriot churches drew freely on the architecture of the Near East, Asia Minor, and the Aegean coasts. This diversity of church architecture on the island suggests the presence of different communities with different liturgical practices as well as different groups of builders with access to different material and techniques. Like many places in the Mediterranean, the paucity of clearly dated buildings also means that our chronology of these churches remains provisional. Only a handful of the over 100 Early Christian churches on Cyprus have dates established on the basis of published archaeological excavations (for the most recent catalogue of Cypriot churches see Maguire 2012). As a result, it is difficult to discern development over time or to link architectural trends to the ecclesiastical history of the island. This is particularly disappointing as Cyprus’s location, distinct ecclesiastical history, and remarkable continuity has make it a useful for understanding the dissemination and transformation of church architecture in the Early Byzantine period.

Despite the large number of churches excavated on Cyprus, there are only six well-preserved baptisteries. Three are in the neighborhood of Metropolitan See on the island, Salamis-Constantia: Ay. Epiphanios in the city itself, Ay. Triada and Ay. Philon on the Karpas Peninsula. The are also two well preserved baptisteries at the Episcopal Basilica at Kourion and the coastal site of Ay. Georgios-Peyias. Most recently, the Department of Antiquities excavated a baptistery at the site of Petounta in Larnaka district (Georgiou 2013). There are several poorly preserved or poorly published baptisteries that add to this meager corpus. At the site of Shyrvallos near Paphos, salvage excavations revealed a baptistery in the early 1960s (Metcalf 2009, 459 with citations). An unpublished baptistery stands to the west of the basilica excavated east of the harbor at Amathous. There is also evidence suggesting a baptismal installations at the Chrysopolitissa basilica at Paphos.

The small number of baptistries excavated on Cyprus appears to be partly an accident of discovery and partly a feature of the island’s distinctive ecclesiastical landscape. The best preserved examples of baptisteries suggest that there was a tradition of monumental and architecturally elaborate structures that often stood adjacent to, but separate from the main body of the church. As a result, these monumental baptisteries tend to appear most commonly at churches excavated extensively. Urban contexts for many of the churches on Cyprus and salvage excavation practices has meant that excavators only occasionally opened the kind of exposures necessary to reveal the presence of a baptistery complex. It is hardly surprising, then, that three of the six well-preserved baptisteries are associated with churches located amid large scale excavations (Ay. Epiphanios at Salamis, The Episcopal Basilica at Kourion, and the baptistery basilica at Ay. Georgios-Peyia). Conversely, the absence of monumental baptisteries at Paphos, for example, which was an important ecclesiastical city with Biblical associations and the absence of any substantial Early Christian remains from the city of Kition (modern Larnaka) almost certainly reflects accidents of discovery.

That said, there is also some evidence that Cypriots developed smaller and simpler alternatives to the large-scale baptisteries present at the basilicas identified by large-scale excavations. These alternatives may have included mobile fonts, the use of annex rooms common to the Cypriot churches, or even space in the aisles, atria, or narthex. The presence of the remains of a baptistery in the south apse of the Chrysopolitissa basilica at Paphos and may well indicate the use of moveable baptismal fonts. Stewart suggests that a gap in the opus sectile floor in the north apse of Amathus Acropolis basilica might represent the remains of a displaced baptismal font at this building that otherwise lacks a formal baptismal space (Stewart 2013, 292).

The monumental baptisteries present on the island suggest adult baptism which perhaps correlates with the large-scale conversion of the island over the course of the 5th century. The baptisteries at Kourion, Ay. Philon, and Ay. Epiphanios are on slightly different orientations from their associated churches which would seemingly suggest either earlier or later construction. The excavators at Kourion and Ay. Philon, however, saw the similarities in form between the baptisteries and the basilicas at these sites as evidence for their close contemporaneity. Megaw largely dated the church at Kourion on the basis of coins found in foundation trenches and argues for a fifth century date for the basilica and links it to the prominent bishop Zeno who attended the Council of Ephesus in 431 (Megaw 2007, 158). Ay. Philon appears to have a similar date on the basis of numismatic evidence and the perhaps tenuous attribution of this church to Ay. Philon, a descendent of Ay. Epiphanios (Megaw and du Plat Taylor 1981). The church at Ay. Epiphanios was famously dated on the basis of the Life of Ay. Epiphanios in which God tells the fourth-century Bishop Epiphanios to build a church. This dates the church to the late 4th century at earliest and considering the scale and opulence of the building, it is probably safer to date the church to the early 5th century with modifications continuing into the 6th century. The baptistery is likely associated with the first phase of the building. The similarities between the baptistery at Ay. Trias and that of the nearby Ay. Philon (as well as the baptistery at Kourion and Ay. Epiphanios) would seem to support a 5th century date for that structure and coincides with the date assigned by Papageorghiou at least partly on the basis of a coin of Honorius (395-425) (Papageorghiou 1964, 372-374). The baptistery and basilica at Peyia with its Aegean influences is an outlier in terms of design, but seems likely to date to the 6th century if it is contemporary with its associated church (Papageorghiou 1985, 316). The baptistery at the site of Mazotos-Petounta produced coins dating from between the 4th and 7th century (Georgiou 2013, 123). Without additional context for these finds, it remains difficult to assign to this building a narrower date, but its general form suggests a fifth or sixth century date. These centuries represents a period of aggressive church building perhaps linked as much to the growing Christian population on the island at to efforts by Cypriot bishops to assert their independence from Antiochene authority at the Council of Ephesus in 431 (Maguire 2012, 138).

Richard Maguire’s 2012 dissertation offers the most convenient, recent, and thoughtful survey of the churches on Cyprus. He argues that the design of the four baptisteries – Ay. Epiphanios, Ay. Trias, Ay. Philon, and Kourion – served to support a processional baptismal rite (Maguire 2012, 97-139). To this we can add, albeit tentatively, the baptistery at Mazotos-Petounta. The basilica associated with this baptistery was not excavated, but it nevertheless shares sufficient similarities with the four studied by Maguire to be added to that group. He proposes a rite involving four spaces linked by corridors. A large atrium space allowed the catechumens to gather prior to the start of the rite itself. The candidate then proceeded into an apodyterion where pre-baptismal rites took place and the individual undress before moving to the font itself. Cruciform fonts suggest at least partial immersion and complemented the role of movement associated with the processional rite. The candidate would have walked down into the font by means of a staircase on one of the font’s cross arms and ascended, newly baptized, by another. They would then continue to the chrismarion where the newly baptized Christian received anointing with oil. Presumably then the fully baptized member of the church would enter the basilica and experience the full liturgy. Maguire suggests a link to the baptismal rituals and architectural forms at Jerusalem, Sidé in Turkey, Gerash, and the pilgrimage church at Qalat Sem’an in Syria. Considering the close, if sometime fraught, connections between the church on Cyprus and the ecclesiastical landscape of the wider Levant, this seems plausible. Moreover, the character of Cypriot baptisteries do appear to emphasize processional movement through a series of discrete spaces that mediate the converts liturgical and physical entry into the church.

A mild outlier of this group is the baptistery at Peyia. Its circular font is unusual for Cyprus, with only the poorly preserved font at the site of Shyrvallos in Paphos sharing this shape. The location of the Peyia baptistery to the west of the atrium rather than connected to the main nave may hint at an alternative baptismal liturgy, the use of the atrium as the start of the baptismal processional route, or just constraints imposed by the neighboring buildings. A similar arrangement is apparently present at the still unpublished basilica near the harbor at Amathus which might have reflect the physical limits of the church’s situation near the coast (Keane 2021, 52).

The association of baptisteries with the seats of bishops has largely been a given on the island. The close association of the imposing church of Ay. Epiphanios with the bishops of Salamis-Constantia make it the obvious cathedral. The size, location, and opulence of the Kourion basilica, baptistery, and residential space makes it the cathedral of that city. The baptistery at Peyia likely seems to be associated with a cathedral as is evident in the presence of a synthronon at the church and the adjacent elite residence plausibly associated with the bishop. The later synthronon at the site of Ay. Philon and the elaborate annex rooms may well indicate that it was also a probable cathedral. At the same time, the presence of a baptistery some 20 km away from Ay. Philon at the site of Ay. Triada suggests that some non-cathedral churches may have been also equipped with baptisteries on the island. Metcalf suggests that the church and the baptistery at Ay. Triada predated the more elaborate cathedeal at Ay. Philon and the bishop moved his seat sometime in the fifth century (Metcalf 2009, 275). It is more difficult to explain within the limits of contemporary evidence why some cathedrals lacked obvious baptisteries. The scant evidence for architecturally distinct baptisteries at the massive basilicas at Paphos, including the largely unpublished Chrysopolitissa church, may suggest that in these contexts baptisms took place using moveable fonts or less substantial installations that stood within the liturgical space of the church itself. This would allow us to understand, for example, the Chrysopolitissa as the cathedral of the city despite its lack of a formal baptistery.

The handful of baptisteries on Cyprus reflect a certain amount of continuity of design, ritual and tradition likely centered on around the seat of the metropolitan bishop at Salamis-Constantia. There are, however, some indications for the perennial tension on the island between local practices and broader regional influences. The presence of an Aegean-style baptistery at Peyia on the western side of the island suggests that the influence of the church at Salamis may have had its limits. While this would be hardly surprising, the relative paucity of excavated baptisteries on Cyprus makes speculative any conclusion surrounding the traditions and practices broadly operating on the island. The likely use of moveable fonts which may have left only faint traces in the archaeological record, chronological ambiguities, and the limits to many excavations, further complicates our understanding of ancient practices on the island. The remains that do exist, however, suggest that Cypriot baptismal rituals centered on processional movements similar to those found elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean.

 

Bibliography

du Plat Taylor, J. and A.H.S. Megaw. 1981. Excavations at Ayios Philon, the Ancient Carpasia. Part II. The Early Christian Buildings. Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus, 209-250.

Georgiou, G. 2013. An Early Christian baptistery on the south coast of Cyprus. Cahiers du Centre d’Études Chypriotes 43: 117-126

Gordon, J. M., and W. R. Caraher. 2018. The Holy Island. In D. K. Pettegrew, W. R. Caraher, and T. Davis, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology. Oxford University Press. 475-494.

Keane. C. 2021. “More than a Church: Late Antique Ecclesiastical Complexes in Cyprus.” Ph.D. Diss. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich.

Maguire, Richard. 2012. “Late Antique Basilicas on Cyprus sources, contexts, histories.” PhD diss., University of East Anglia.

Megaw, A. H.S. ed. 2007. Kourion: Excavations in the Episcopal Precinct. Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks.

Metcalf, M. 2009. Byzantine Cyprus 491-1191. Nicosia: Cyprus Research Centre.

Papageorghiou, A. 1964. Ἡ Παλαιοχριστιανικὴ καὶ Βυζαντινὴ Ἀρχαιολογία καὶ Τέχνη ἐν Κύπρῳ κατὰ τὸ 1963. Ἀπόστολος Βαρνάβας 25: 153-162, 209-216, 274-284, 349-353.

Papageorghiou, A. 1985. L’architecture paléochrétienne de Chypre. Corsi di Cultura sull’Arte Ravennate e Bizantina 32: 229-334.

Stewart, C. 2013. Military Architecture in Early Byzantine Cyprus. Cahiers du Centre d’Etudes Chypriotes 43: 287-306.

Zavagno, L. 2017. Cyprus between the Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (ca. 600-800): An Island in Transition. London: Routledge.

On the Edge of a Roman Port

I have to admit that today’s blog post is a bit of a hot take on the very recently published volume: On the Edge of a Roman Port: Excavations at Koutsongila, Kenchreai, 2007-2014 edited by Elena Korka and Joe Rife. I’m not going to come out and say that this is the perfect holiday read, but runs to 1376 pages (about 400 pages longer than the new Cambridge Centenary Ulysses for some casual perspective). Like Ulysses, it’s probably best to realize that this is not a book that one can read in a single sitting.  

That said, it is an interesting and, at least for those of us invested in the Corinthia, an important book. It describes three major campaigns of excavation at the coastal site of Koutsongila on the littoral of the Eastern Corinthia. Koutsongila stands just to the north of the site of Kenchreai and features not only the northern and eastern extent of the Roman settlement but also a per-urban graveyard. The site primarily saw activity from the first century BC to the 7th century AD and then again during World War II when the Germans fortified the Koutsongila ridge with gun emplacements and trenches. The project directors embraced a diachronic approach that understood the importance of later activity at the site both in its own right, but also as contributing to site formation processes and how they understood the earlier material.  

It is also a significant book for those of us invested in thinking about the future of archaeological publishing. My hot take will introduce this work and offer some thoughts after spending four or so hours with it yesterday afternoon. In other words, this is not a review or even a definitive “take” on the book, but a series of excited observations inspired by my first few hours with this volume.

Here goes:

1. Lavish. This book is almost absurdly lavish. The cover is spectacular, graphics are sharp and abundant, and the pages are glossy. The design draws on the familiar format of the journal Hesperia which makes sense since this is a volume in their supplement series. 

The book runs to two volumes which together must weigh close to 10 lbs. As a result, this is very much an office, library, sturdy end-table book as opposed to “a work room in Greece” or “toss it in your carry on to use in the field” book. This is a bit of a shame since the detailed catalogue would be nice to use on the pottery bench.

Fortunately, the book will appear at some point in digital form via Jstor. 

More fortunately, much of the finds data is available via Open Context including this sexy little piece of Slavic Ware, which can then be located in its trench and locus (or excavation unit). Unfortunately, I can’t seem to figure out whether the also recorded deposit numbers (that is stratigraphic units) as part of their published dataset. It wouldn’t be very hard, though, to create a concordance of deposits to loci to allow a user to access all the material defined by a particular depositional context.

I do wonder whether the digital version of the book will include hyperlinks to the online data. This could be  massively helpful (or even something that a clever user retrofits at a later date).

2. This Is the End. Over the last year or so, I’ve been chatting with a bunch of folks about the future of archaeological publishing. Hecks, Jennie Ebeling and I even wrote a little “Op-Ed” about it in Near Eastern Archaeology. Generally speaking, we’ve been talking about whether it is worth planning volumes as the final or definitive publication of an archaeological project or whether we should start to think in terms of a wider range of interrelated outputs.

The Koutsongila volumes are traditional archaeological publications in their most refined and “late” form. Even the impeccable design and layout sensitivities of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens publication office, however, fell short of making this a genuinely user-friendly publication. The brilliantly reproduced illustrations, for example, often were hard to connect to the text or appeared several pages before they were discussed.

This is not a criticism of the layout!

This is just the reality of a visually rich publication attempting to accommodate equally robust textual interpretation and analysis. In fact, the ASCSA publication office even included key artifact illustrations (for example) in two places — once near the description of their context and once in the catalogue — so that the reader doesn’t have to flip back and forth between two volumes. This is thoughtful, but also must have been very demanding on the design team. Even with this kind of thoughtful detail, however, my effort to coordinate the illustrations with the text was not instinctive or natural. 

My point here is that the codex — even at its apogee — is not always well suited to reproduce in an intuitive way the complexities of archaeological information and the densely interwoven threads of archaeological knowledge making. This may be as far as our ability to adapt the codex form to intended task can take us. 

3. The Octagon. My hot take did go beyond my critique of the book’s form and consider its substance. The excavations at Koutsongila revealed a fairly lavish octagonal building dating to the 5th and 6th centuries that the excavators quite plausibly associated with some kind of Christian ritual activity at the site. Its connection with the surrounding cemetery and its octagonal shape make it plausible to assume that the building has connections to a local elite family or individual or even perhaps a local martyr cult. From what I could gather, the octagonal building does not have anything that they could plausibly associated with liturgical furnishings. So it seems unlikely to be a church. At the same time, its visibility and its contemporary date with the construction of a basilica on the south mole at Kenchreai suggests that it contributed to the Christianization of the town’s landscape and almost certainly reflected the growing prestige of town’s Christian community. It is interesting to note that the baptistery at Corinth’s western port of Lechaion is also octagonal in shape and plausibly associated with the martyr cult of St. Leonidas. Closer to Corinth, remote sensing near the still unexcavated so-called amphitheater church showed evidence for an octagonal anomaly that might be a baptistery. It seems that the Corinthians have a thing for octagons and the reproduction of this form at Lechaion, near Kenchreai, and perhaps at Corinth would have contributed to the experience of a Christian landscape.

4. Resilience. The excavators at Koutsongila do a great job demonstrating the resilience of the community over the 700 years of ancient activity at the site. By tracing the long life of structures at the site, the excavators demonstrate how the community adapted them constantly to changing needs and situations. 

Their ability to offer these kinds of observations and arguments emerges from the incredible care that the excavators took to document the material at the site. This includes analyzing of 220,000 objects (which must form an important dataset for making arguments about the kinds and proportions of material present at the site over time) and excavating with a keen eye for the human (and natural!) depositional processes  that shaped the site. As a result of this care, they have demonstrated how much it is possible to say about the long history of the site on the edge of a Roman port.

5. Koutsongila in Context. One of the great things about having such a thorough and thoughtful publication from a site in the Eastern Corinthia is that it raises the bar for everyone working in this region. More than that, it also presents a corpus of buildings, material, and developments that will invariably create a backdrop for analysis of, say, the analysis of the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey, the ongoing work of the Michigan State Excavations at Isthmia, and the ongoing work at the Corinth Excavations itself (not to mention ongoing field and publication work at Nemea, at the Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project, at the Lechaion Harbor and Settlement Land Project, and projects elsewhere in the region).

Even as my “hot take” cools to more tepid temperatures, On the Edge of a Roman Port: Excavations at Koutsongila, Kenchreai, 2007-2014 will continue to provide the kinds of fundamental data that will fuel  hypotheses ready to be tested, challenged, and confirmed with material, histories, and buildings across the region. I’m looking forward to digging into more of the book over the holidays!

More New Work on Early Christian Attica

At the end of the semester, I tend to experience a bit of priority creep as the number of “do right now” projects (grading, end of semester deadlines, and so on) begins to encroach on the “do sometime soon” or “wouldn’t it be cool to do?” projects. That kind of ontological ambiguity which is only heightened by the symbolic weight of the end of the year and gnawing fatigue that comes from the end of a semester causes bad decision making.

All this to say, I kept reading around some of the very recent work on Early Christian Attica. 

Three more things as a follow up to my post from yesterday.

First, I finished reading chapter 6 titled “Aspects of Christianity in Athens, Attica, and Adjacent Areas” in Cilliers Breytenbach and Elli Tzavella new book, Early Christianity in Athens, Attica, and Adjacent Areas, from Paul to Justinian (1st-6th cent. AD) published by Brill as the first volume in a series called Early Christianity in Greece (ECG).

It’s a really nice synthesis of the archaeology, textual, and epigraphic data with a view toward producing the kind of study that would support comparative analysis of Christianization both in Greece and the wider Eastern Mediterranean world. This kind of generalizable study is particular commendable for a city like Athens where archaeologists have tended to celebrate its uniqueness (especially in the Classical period) and the number and intensity of excavations and the city’s 19th and 20th century history creates a sample that calls into question how representative the city would be even for the later periods. That said, the sober analysis of Breytenbach and Tzavella drawn from cemeteries, epigraphy, architecture, and texts reveals a region that underwent gradual conversion to Christianity (perhaps punctuated by episodes of violence). 

The attention to cemeteries and associate inscriptions, on the one hand, allows the authors to probe social and economic organization of the Christian community on a granular level by noting the prevalence of family burials and the range of professions named in Christian epigraphy. They could contrast this with the story of monumental architecture which traced the consolidation of worship, certain aspects of the economy, and ecclesiastical authority around church buildings. Whether churches absorbed the function of civic and pre-Christian cults or developed a completely distinctive range of functions is left to the reader to decide.

Second, one particularly useful observation made in Breytenbach and Tzavella’s work is that the absence of monasticism in Greece has perhaps been overstated. Epigraphic evidence from Athens, Megara, and Argos suggest that monastic communities did exist in Greece despite the absence of architectural evidence for monasteries. To be honest, fourth fifth century monasticism appeared across a wide wide range of architectural forms from rural villas to urban palaces, massive purpose built monasteries, and scattered, ephemeral, and informal hermitages across the Eastern Mediterranean landscapes. The absence of explicit material traces for monasteries in Greece is no more surprising than the absence of evidence for house-churches or other spaces associated with an emerging Christianity that had not fully accommodated its institutionalize shape.  

Third, I very much enjoyed Georgios Deligiannakis’s “From Paganism to Christianity in Late Antique Athens: A Re-Evaluation” in Ilinca Tanaseanu-Döbler and Leonie von Alvensleben’s Athens II: Athens in Late Antiquity (2020). Deligiannakis turns his keen eye to the evidence of Christianization at Athens and in Greece and argues that despite the privileged position that Greece has enjoyed in the history of ancient religion, the evidence for the Christianization of Greece does not appear to be much different from the process as experience elsewhere in the Eastern Roman Empire.

He makes a few keen observations that I think benefit any archaeologist serious about Christianization in Greece. First, he observes that the absence of chronological control over the construction of Early Christian churches in Greece makes them a poor indicator of Christianization as a diachronic process. The excavation of a house church in Messenia which may have remained in use into the fifth century reveals that Christian communities may have continued to meet in a wide range of spaces even as monumental basilica-style churches sprouted across the landscape. 

He also argues that, if we accept Mango’s proposed fifth-century date for the conversion of the Parthenon into a church (rather than the more conventional seventh-century chronology), this changes significantly how we see the Christianization of Athens. Rather than assuming that the pagan cult practices tenaciously hung out against a Christian onslaught, it suggests a city that recognized its pagan past as part of its Christian present and rather than seeking to erase pre-Christian monuments sought to integrate them into the Christianized symbolic and ritual landscape. This finds parallels both in Greece (at Delphi and Olympia, for example, although these are not necessarily chronologically locked down) and at sites such as Aphrodisias in Anatolia which likewise saw a 5th century conversion of a temple.

That said, Deligiannakis points out that this doesn’t mean there were no episodes of violence between Christianity and paganism, but instead these appear sporadic and episodic. This not only proposed the kind of nuanced landscape that includes various individuals and groups with different levels of believe and commitments that manifests itself in different kinds of interactions. I was heartened to see that Deligiannakis took seriously my colleague Richard Rothaus’s work in the Corinthia (as well as Tim Gregory’s reading of the Christianization of Greece). 

There are a number of other interesting and useful pieces in the Ilinca Tanaseanu-Döbler and Leonie von Alvensleben volume including some that seek to survey recent developments (with particular attention to work done by Italian scholars) in the archaeology of Late Antique Athens. If this were to ever become a serious research concern for me, I am sure that I would eagerly devour these works. Even though that is unlikely at present, I will certainly consider the contributions in both of these volumes as I return to work in the Corinthia this spring.

New Work on Early Christian Attica

Every now and then I go back to reading something on Late Antique and Early Christian archaeology. It feels a bit like checking in with a favorite musician to see what they’re up to these days or watching the latest installment of a long running music franchise. You rarely expect something better or even different, but revisiting an old friend is always rewarding in its own right.

In that spirit, I’ve taken note of the recent buzz of activity in Early Christian and Late Antique Athens and Attica, and this weekend, I read parts of Cilliers Breytenbach and Elli Tzavella new book, Early Christianity in Athens, Attica, and Adjacent Areas, from Paul to Justinian (1st-6th cent. AD) published by Brill as the first volume in a series called Early Christianity in Greece (ECG). I have on my “desk” a copy of Ilinca Tanaseanu-Döbler and Leonie von Alvensleben’s Athens II: Athens in Late Antiquity (2020) that I will likely dip into today.

The Breytenbach and Tzavella book is nice work and while I haven’t made my way through all of it, I did read and enjoy the first two chapters and chapter four which was dedicated to the archaeological evidence. I might dip into chapter five, on epigraphy, and chapter six which seems to offer a social reading of the archaeological and literary evidence for Christianity in Attica. In other words, this is not a review of the book, per se, but a kind of sounding designed to discern whether the book warrants further excavations.

In that spirit, here are some thoughts:

1. Thorough Synthesis. I’ve always found the archaeological evidence for Early Christianity in Athens a bit daunting. Some of this is because the prestige of Athens has produced a particular kind of archaeology who is less a Greek archaeologist and more an archaeologist of Ancient Athens. These individuals tend to celebrate encyclopedic knowledge of both published and unpublished sites in the city and often flaunt obscure knowledge as a mark of their seriousness as a scholar. All in all, it’s pretty annoying.

That said, the centuries of archaeological work in Athens has produced a massive bibliographic record which includes thousands reports, publications, and dissertations. Claiming that any work is exhaustive even on a single monument is a fool’s errand, but Breytenbach and Tzavella do produce what appears to me to be a thorough synthesis of the diverse range of sources available for studying Late Antique and Early Christian Athens and that alone is worth noting.

2. Context Matters. What this broad synthesis has allowed them to do is to situate both monumental Early Christian remains (namely churches) and Christian epigraphy (and burials) in a broader archaeological and physical landscape. As a result, buildings (and burials) which habits of study long isolated from their archaeological landscapes suddenly appear again as the centers of settlements and garrisons, along transportation routes through the region, and, sometimes, as isolated monuments standing sentry over abandoned pagan sanctuaries. 

The relationship between settlements, churches, burials, and movement in the landscape drew heavily on the tradition of intensive and extensive survey work in Attica. Aside from some of the work that I’ve done with David Pettegrew in the Corinthia (and maybe some of the work that Thansis Vionis has done in Boeotia), I can’t recall much scholarship that combines excavated Early Christian architecture, burials, and settlements with the results of survey in such a careful way. This feels like a watershed for how we think about Early Christian landscapes. I need to dig into Chapter Six: Aspects of Christianity in Athens, Attica, and Adjacent Areas 

3. Catalogues. No work by a German scholar is complete without a catalogue and the tradition of cataloguing basilicas, burials, and sites is a long-standing one both in Late Antique Greece and in Athens and Attica. 100+ pages of catalogue of basilicas and burials is a useful description and a clear upgrade over my catalogue of Greek churches (which included those in Attica) and Ioannis Varalis’s catalogue in Greek. It may well supersede Laskaris’s Monuments funéraires paléochrétiens (et byzantins) de la Grèce (2000) for Attica.

4. Periodizing the Early Christian World. In a very recent review of the Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology that I edited with David Pettegrew and Tom Davis, J.-M. Spieser complained that our definition of the Early Christianity as “understood in the old, German, tradition of “christliche Archäologie” and not, as it is more usual by now, with a chronological meaning.” This is a fair enough criticism, I suppose, and I suspect he will find fault with this new Brill series and this volume on Athens and Attica. The volume’s scope from Paul to Justinian is both an unconventional chronological range (straddling both conventional understandings of Roman and Late Antique Greece) and an especially Germanic view of “Christian Greece” (i.e. Christian remains in Greece). 

I suppose if I were editing this volume, I might have extended the chronological range about a century later. This would be consistent with the recent trend to stretch Late Antiquity into 7th century (if not later) and to understand the disruptions of the later 6th and 7th century as part of longer term processes in the history of Late Roman Greece (as opposed to radical breaks or episodes of historical discontinuity). It would also be consistent with the ecclesiastical history of Greece during these centuries which remained under the jurisdiction of the Papacy (at least nominally) until the 8th century.  

5. Publishing the Early Christian Archaeology of Greece. Over the last couple of years, I’ve been invited to write up synthetic treatments of the Corinthia for various volumes dedicated to the Early Christian period in this region. It looks as though the ECG series will produce a volume edited by C. Zimmerman dedicated to Early Christianity in Corinth and the Peloponnese. 

I suspect most of these works represent efforts of publishers to cash in on the library market for synthetic studies and encyclopedic surveys of particular periods and places. Indeed, our Oxford Handbook project is another example of this same impulse among publishers. On the one hand, this is probably a good thing since the sale of these synthetic works likely subsidizes the ability of publishers to produce more specialized studies and monographs. On the other hand, I wonder how much scholarly energy is being drawn into projects like these that even when exemplary produce little new knowledge. The Breytenbach and Tzavella book is best case scenario because it produces a valuable new synthesis, but even then, an honest scholar will only recognize something new in about 20% of the book. In other words, 400 pages of this book is summary and catalogue.

Some Spooky, Dream, and Psychic Archaeology

As readers of this blog likely know, I have an growing interest in pseudoarchaeology and alternative archaeology. As any number of scholars have pointed out, these two forms of archaeological practice and knowledge making are largely political in character. Pseudoarchaeology, in its purist form, represents archaeological practices that seek deliberately to subvert conventional archaeological arguments either by suggesting that conventional archaeology is corrupt (somehow), demonstrating the conventional archaeological practices overlook evidence for alternative explanations, using the language or even the methods of conventional archaeology to propose radically different “solutions” to “problems” (which often involve ancient aliens or other supernatural phenomenon), or archaeology that advances explicitly racist, political, or ideological agendas. Because pseudoarchaeology is often a mash up of logical leaps, conventional practices, strange and disturbing assumptions, and tangled rhetoric, most archaeologists would admit that it is easier to recognize in practice than define, and the political goals of pseudoarchaeology—namely to cast doubt on disciplinary archaeology—tends to trump (heh) more tidy forensic descriptions.

Alternative archaeology, in contrast, tends to be more politically palatable because rather than challenging the validity of archaeology itself head on, it tends to simply propose another way of understanding the world and the past. Indigenous knowledge represents an important form of alternative archaeology especially archaeological practices that conform to cultural or social protocols that are difficult to reconcile with conventional archaeological methods. To this definition one might add that alternative archaeologies tend to embrace unconventional forms of reporting or publication. These are often political, but instead of challenging disciplinary archaeology on the grounds of its own practices and methods, proposes different ways and often incommensurate ways of using material remains of understand the past, to create more inclusive understandings of the present. In other words, pseudoarchaeology tends to propose new interpretations that are “right” and therefore render other ways of understanding the past “wrong”; alternative archaeology tends to recognize a plurality of pasts where one view might be “right,” but other views are irrelevant or unnecessary.   

Most of my interest in pseudo- and alternative archaeology is not in the sweet spot of either field where most archaeologists could recognize and accept general definitions, but around the edges of both nebulously defined categories where interesting incidents of cross pollination occur. In fact, these blurry edges often show the affinity between pseudo- and alternative archaeology and disciplinary archaeology. In this way, archaeology reveals itself not as the thoroughly modern (or even scientific[al]) discipline that we like celebrate (especially in moments of epistemic or political weakness), but to paraphrase the late Bruno Latour, a discipline that “has never been modern.”

My first interest in the rougher edges of various archaeologies emerged when I was in Athens as the “Melonaki” (effectively an assistant Mellon Professor) at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. I came across a reference to an excavation conducted by Anastasios Orlandos on the basis of an old woman’s dream. The excavation revealed an Early Christian basilica at the site of Daphnousia in Locris. This brief mention in the 1929 Proceedings of the Athenian Academy resonated with a similar account recounted by Yannis Hamilakis regarding Manolis Andronikos whose workmen (and a Greek American woman) dreamt of the discoveries of the Royal tombs at Vergina prior to their discovery in 1977. It struck me as very odd that two of Greece’s most preeminent 20th-century archaeologists would have noted the role that dreams played in their field work (even of Andronikos denies believing in such superstition). 

I connected the role of dreams in archaeology with the long tradition of dreams in Byzantine and Early Christian hagiography and history and as I’ll write about tomorrow, my interest in dreams in the early 2000s paralleled a growing interest in Byzantine dreams among Byzantinists.

My interest today is the presence of dreams and other psychic phenomenon in the archaeology, and especially Byzantine and Medieval archaeology, of the early 20th century.  I was thrilled to finally have a reason to read Jed Card’s book Spooky Archaeology (2019) which despite its playful name is a solid work of scholarship. He describes in some detail the role the psychic phenomenon played in efforts to reconstruct Glastonbury Abbey in the early-20th century. The architect and sometime archaeologist Frederick Bligh Bond earned the contract to rebuild the ruined abbey when it was acquired by the Church of England in the early 20th century. The site itself was already famous for the 12th century excavation of the graves of King Arthur and Lady Guinevere and had strong mystical, national, and archaeological associations. Bligh Bond employed psychic practices such as automatic writing to understand the ruins of the Abbey, guide his restoration plans, and to locate several chapels. Ultimately his use of automatic writing and appeals to the spirit world proved controversial and he lost the commission and several of his chapels and excavated foundations later proved fanciful.

Orlandos does not seem to have earned any approbation from his more successful excavations. This may be because any number of Orlandos’s contemporaries were on record for their belief in psychic and other paranormal phenomenon. In fact, in the same year that Orlandos reports his dream to the Athenian Academy, Konstantinos Kourouniotis published a small report in the journal Psychic Researches edited by the well known para-psychologist Angelos Tanagras. Kourouniotis tells the story of the use of telepathic powers to remove a massive swarm of bees from his house while he was conducting excavations in Asia Minor in 1920. (Kostis Kourelis, who has family ties to Tanagras discusses this story here). Another prominent Greek archaeologist (artist, poet, and philosopher), Alexander Philadelpheus, dedicates his 1924 book on the ancient monuments of Athens to Tanagras. It would appear, then, in this context, Orlandos use of dreams to guide his excavation was not especially unusual. o

Of course, this period is Greek history was one of immense upheaval with the “Great Catastrophe” of the Asia Minor campaign marking the end of the “Great Idea” which saw the modern Greek state as the historical and spiritual successor of the Roman (i.e. Byzantine) Empire. 

Scholars have long attributed the growing interest in esoteric traditions in Europe and American as part of a growing dissatisfaction with the modern world. The late 19th century had experienced violent economic disruptions and the first great depression of the Industrial Age. This fed the growing popular disillusionment with the failed economic, social, and political advancement promised by industrialization and, even, democracy. The catastrophe of the Great War further exacerbated the growing ambivalence and distrust of modernity and awoke long-standing hopes for transcendent experiences anchored in what appeared to be pre-modern practices. 

In Greece, the 1920s marked the failure of modern (and national) hopes (however cloaked in the hazy imaginary of Byzantine revivalism) and encouraged the intellectual elite of Greece to project their national aspirations inwardly. Orlandos’s dream excavation and contemporary reconstruction of houses of Mystras, for example, anchored Greek national identity and Byzantine traditions within the boundaries of the Greek nationstate and in domestic architecture (see Kourelis, who is my partner in this project, for a discussion of Orlandos and the domestic architecture in Mystras). Tanagras efforts to demonstrate that Greek folks traditions could reveal the parapsychological powers of the human mind further localized an individual’s capacity to transcend the contemporary conditions. Tanagras anchored his approach to parapsychology in the emerging discourse of psychology and Freudian psychoanalysis. His efforts to use modern techniques to excavate the primordial character of the human condition paralleled Freud’s interest in dreams as revealing unconscious desires. It is hard to avoid the idea that Freud’s analysis of dreams, filtered through the altogether more supernatural interpretations of Tanagras, reactivated the tradition of Byzantine dream archaeology and made it useful for relocating Greek national identity with the borders of Greece (a kind of physical unconscious of the modern state).

Such blurring of modern and strangely anti-modern ways of thinking in the tradition of Byzantine Archaeology echo the use of dreams to initiate the Great Palace excavations in Constantinople. As Kourelis points out, this project represented one of the earliest example of stratigraphic excavation at a Byzantine site. (You can read more about these links at Kostis’s blog here). The site was discovered, however, through the work of British spiritualists David Russell, James Houston Baxter, and Tudor Pole who used a sapphire blue bowl apparently excavated from Glastonbury (apparently also located through psychic practices at that site in 1906!) as a conduit to the spiritual realm. By 1917, their efforts were reinforced by a group of Russian migrants (including monks!) who after the Revolution settled in the UK under David Russell’s patronage. Baxter, a professor of church history and a spiritualist himself, connected the efforts of these scholars to the more serious archaeological work of the Great Palace excavations.

It would appear that pseudoarchaeological practices were not just present among early 20th-century archaeologists, but fundamental to the discipline’s formation.

Perhaps this is why today so-called “scientifical” archaeologists are so adamant in their efforts to discredit and reject pseudoarchaeology. While pseudoarchaeology’s contributions to racist agendas cannot be denied, it seems impossible to imagine Byzantine Archaeology without acknowledging its roots in just just premodern practices, but explicitly anti-modern efforts to find meaning in a world increasingly deprived of its humanity at the hands of the scientific production, warfare, and competition.  

Lecture this Fall: Late Antiquity at Polis: Recent Research

I’m spinning my wheels a bit this fall and trying to get traction after a long and somewhat exhausting summer of research and other work. Fortunately, several projects have become a bit more insistent lately and some new projects have popped up to fill the void.

Among the projects that I have appeared from the ether to structure my semester is a talk that I was invited to give at the University of Cyprus’s Archaeological Research Unit.

Here’s the abstract that I submitted: 

Starting in 1984, the Princeton Cyprus Expedition excavated areas around the village of Polis-tis-Chrysochous in northwestern Cyprus. These excavations revealed a wide range of buildings and contexts dating from the Late Antique period including two Early Christian basilica style churches surrounded by various buildings that appear to stretch along the northern edge of the city. At some point in Late Antiquity, most of this area appears to have become a massive cemetery, presumably centered on the two churches. Recent research has revealed that the buildings along the northern edge of the city underwent continuous renovation and reconfiguration even as burials encroached.

Along with a few photos:

My current plan for the talk is to start the talk with a broad overview of Late Antique Polis and then focus on four or five issues that have emerged from our work. These issues will start with the most “settled” (and even published) and move onto some more speculative ideas about the city of Arsinoe in Late Antiquity.

1. Untangling Legacy Data. The first thing I’ll discuss is the challenges of working with “legacy data” at a project that flirted with the dawn of the digital age while still adhering to analogue practices. This will be a nice way to introduce the audience to the archaeological contexts for my paper’s analysis.

2. The Phases of the South Basilica. In some ways, this section will confirm that the methods we employed to combine legacy data with new analysis have the potential to produce meaningful results. It will largely summarize conclusions published a few years ago in Hesperia. 

3. Regionalism and Trade on Cyprus. This section will start to take our research into more speculative areas by demonstrative the value of publishing larger ceramic datasets and showing how they can contribute to understanding connectivity within a broader regional context. Some of our conclusions here have appeared in various publications, but they’re very much still tentative because of the changing chronologies associated with Late Roman ceramics in the Eastern Mediterranean more broadly.

4. Creating Some Late Roman Horizons. As a follow up to the last point, I will introduce our efforts to construct some Late Roman “horizons” at Polis that have the potential to be starting point for both refining ceramic chronologies on the island and proposing new dates for the transformation of the built environment on the island from the 6th to 8th centuries.

5. Fragments, Features, and Functions in the Late Roman Cityscape. Finally, the paper will conclude with some observations on how excavations along the northern edge of Late Antique Arsinoe revealed by the Princeton Cyprus Expedition can offer a fragmentary, but suggestive view of the changing character of the city. In this way, we hope that the work at our site can contribute to our emerging understanding of Late Roman urbanism elsewhere on Cyprus.  

 

The lecture will occur, I think, on November 28th and delivered via The Zooms, so I should, hopefully, have a link to share with people closer to the date. I’ll also share the text of my paper once I get around to putting words on the page. 

Three Things Thursday: Early Christian Greece, Mineral Rites, and Jimmy Carter

I’m taking a real, honest to goodness vacation over the weekend. In fact, I’m going to vacation so hard that I’m not even taking a laptop! I reckon the last time that I vacationed without a laptop was in 2000 or 2001 when I was living in Athens.

To celebrate this unlikely situation, I’m going to offer a very short Three Things Thursday:

Thing the First

It’s pretty rare that I get genuinely excited about a new archaeological discovery and even less frequently that I get really excited about a discovery in the Late Antique Peloponnesus, but I was genuinely thrilled after reading Nikos Tsivikis’s recent article in the Journal of Epigraphical Studies 4 (2022), 175-197, titled “Christian inscriptions from a third and fourth-century house church at Messene (Peloponnese).” You can download it here.

This article provides some pretty solid evidence for a late-third century house church that continued in use into the fourth century. Tsiviki’s argument is grounded in both epigraphy and excavation evidence although the levels are primarily dated on the basis of numismatic evidence. The building is a modified urban villa in the city of Messenia and the inscriptions record the presence of a reader and then a bishop who provided a mosaic for the modified room.

Of course, textual evidence tells us that there were Christian communities in Greece from the first century AD, but archaeological evidence for pre-Constantinean Christianity in Greece has been pretty thin on the ground and comprised mostly of wishful thinking. In fact, there’s precious little indisputable material evidence for fourth century Christianity in Greece. This building will change that and provide the first archaeologically secure (at least to my knowledge) evidence for third (perhaps optimistically) or early fourth century (almost certainly) Christianity in southern Greece. This is exciting.

Thing the Second

I’ve been enjoying Bob Johnson’s Mineral Rites: An Archaeology of the Fossil Economy (Baltimore 2019). I’m not finished the book, but I appreciate his efforts to trace the significance of the fossil economy from the oil fields to the hot yoga studio. His efforts to demonstrate the deep entanglement of fossil fuels and our modern world is perhaps not entirely unexpected, but Johnson offers very readable and highly “textured” (to use a word from the book’s blurb) descriptions of how fossil fuels shape our daily lives. Johnson weaves fossil fuels into the story of the Titanic, various efforts to understand the human equivalency of fossil fuel energy, and a brilliant comparative chapter that considers the difference between Lewis and Clark’s journey and our modern road system. I’m still working my way through his study of the reality TV series Coal and the modern novel.    

Years ago, my buddy and collaborator Bret Weber suggested that we write a paper or an essay that tracked a drop of oil from the well to the atmosphere. Because I’m kind of a jerk, I rolled my eyes and said something jerk-ish about that idea. Years later and after giving it more and more thought, I think it’s really brilliant. In fact, I think Johnson’s book provides an appealing model for how the life of that “drop” of oil could be traced through our system and how much “life” it provides.

Thing the Third

There are a couple cool things from North Dakota Quarterly this week. First, I’ve posted over on the NDQ a poem by David Starkey which will appear in a forthcoming collection from the author. It’s a pretty nice little poem that features a cigarette as a prop. As I say in my post, I like poems that feature things.

There’s also this blog post about the time that NDQ published some of Jimmy Carter’s poetry. For some reason the pages of this issue were scanned or processed out of order so you have to scroll back from the first page, but do check out Lane Chasek’s post here and follow his link to NDQ 60.1 where we feature four of Carter’s poems. Then scroll backward from the first poem to read the three others.

From Corinthian Twilight to the Busy Countryside: Remaking the Landscapes, Monuments, and Religion of the Late Antique Corinthia

One of my summer projects was collaborating with my good friend and colleague, David Pettegrew on an article that surveys the Corinthian landscape in Late Antiquity. It’s for an edited volume published in Germany and directed primarily toward a European audience. 

This paper doesn’t so much propose any radically new analysis or interpretations, but offers a solid step toward a new synthesis of what we know and how we understand the Corinth and the Corinthian countryside.  

Since we have no real idea when this will come out, we thought we should share a complete working draft should anyone be interested. 

You can download it here.

This years should be a banner year for those interested in the Roman Corinthia. First, in May, Paul  Scotton, Catherine de Grazia Vanderpool, and Carolynn Roncaglia have published The Julian Basilica: Architecture, Sculpture, Epigraphy, which is Corinth XXII for those of you who still keep a scorecard. Here’s the announcement.

Earlier this month, John W. Hayes and Kathleen Warner Slane published Late Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman Pottery, which is Isthmia XI on your scorecard. Here’s the announcement.

Finally, I remain optimistic that we’ll see Eleni Korka and Joe Rife’s On the Edge of a Roman Port: Excavations at Koutsongila, Kenchreai, 2007–2014 which will appear as a Hesperia Supplement. Here is the announcement page for this volume.