Euroclassica Newsletter number 10, February 2002 Contents
Report of the Academia Aestiva 2001
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- Report on the EUROCLASSICA Annual Meeting in Basel
Report of the Academia Aestiva 2001EUROCLASSICA SUMMER SCHOOL, ANAVYSSOS, 7-16 SEPTEMBER 2001 This was the 8th EUROCLASSICA Summer School, and certainly among the most successful and enjoyable. We had nearly 50 students from 13 different European countries - Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Greece, Italy, Latvia, The Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. We maintain a high proportion of students from Eastern Europe, with this year's complement of 14. First, a short note for those following in our footsteps to Greece. The new Athens airport is so far a rather mixed blessing. It certainly has better facilities than the former two airports at Glyfada, but waiting for luggage to arrive on the carousel can take an age. The baggage trucks have to make several journeys of half a mile or so to pick up the bags from the aircraft, so one has to be patient. And the location of the airport in the very centre of Attica is still causing problems. So far the roads into Athens are not completed (they should be by 2003), there is no metro link, and at most times of the day the journey between the airport and the centre of the city on the airport buses takes around an hour and a half. If you are thinking of going to Athens, do allow enough time. For our purposes on the EUROCLASSICA Summer School the problems were somewhat lessened by the fact that Anavyssos is a mere 40 minutes from the airport, along the back roads of rural Attica, which remain remarkably unaffected where not eaten up by the new airport. Our hotel was the Xenia Helios, a training hotel for the tourist industry with excellent conference and classroom facilities. The hotel overlooks the bay of Anavyssos, with an excellent beach for leisure moments. Most days, however, there were not too many such moments. We had our usual programme of lectures and drama workshops for the first few days. The lectures are planned to inform the site visits that are to follow, but we also had a debate on the Parthenon Sculptures (often called the Elgin Marbles in England, but rarely in Greece!) and group discussions on the ancient and modern concepts of democracy. We had three drama workshops. There is no question of opting out, but simply of opting in to one of them. Even the least dramatic amongst us had fun. And we had two hours of Greek music and songs. The site visits occupied five days. We went to the Argolid, visiting Nemea, Mycenae, Nauplion, and Epidauros. We went to Delphi, a long day but always among the favourites with the students. We followed the Persian invasion of 490 BC (in reverse), visiting the burial mound at Marathon and translating Simonides' epitaph on the Athenian dead, going on to the little Marathon museum, and then going across the ferry to Eretria with another excellent little museum. And we paid two visits to Athens, to the Acropolis, the Agora, the National Museum, and (some of us) to the Kerameikos Cemetery and the Goulandris Museum. In our evaluations of the Summer School we always ask students about the 'European Dimension' of the course. Without exception all students find this a distinctive and stimulating aspect of the EUROCLASSICA Summer School, to be with students from other parts of Europe, to join with them in discussion and to realise the common ground amid the multiplicity of cultures and languages. We have now had over 350 students on this Summer School since 1994, as well as 150 on the Academia Homerica since 1998. Many of these students will be the future classical teachers in European schools. We hope that EUROCLASSICA will have contributed to their classical education and to their commitment to Europe. Thanks to Jose Luis Navarro, who directs the course and makes drama come alive, to Anton van Hooff who entertains us with his palaeogynaecophilia, to Miguel Peñasco who looks after the money and us, and to Maria Eleftheria Giatrakou who gives us a taste of modern Greece and its music. John Thorley PS: Next year's EUROCLASSICA Summer School will be at Anavyssos 6-15
From 22nd to 25th August 2001 the Euroclassica Annual Meeting took place in Basel organised by SAV (Schweizerische Altphilologen Verein). There were 60 participants from different European countries. After the opening speeches from the presidents of both associations we set off by looking at the Transjurane, a new motorway (A16), which for a large part of its route goes parallel to a Roman road, giving an outstanding chance for archaeological exploration. This talk was followed by a lecture on the impact of the Roman army on road traffic and the road network in Helvetia. In the evening there was a recitatio entitled “Roms sprechende Steine”: a tour through Rome by way of Latin inscriptions from the past 2000 years. Klaus Bartels (author of a book of the same title which has just appeared) introduced the inscriptions and translated them while his colleague Walter Fausch read them aloud. Even for experienced visitors to Rome was there something new to discover. The following day we were introduced to the problems of dating mountain roads. On the rocks there are grooves cut out to stop the wagons sliding off the road, but since these were used not only in Roman times but as late as the 18th century by wagons and horses, dating of this sort of road is very difficult. Given these problems we have still a lot to discover about these mountain habitations. This lecture was followed by an excursion to Augusta Raurica (Augst). The remains of the Roman city are spread out under the modern buildings and without a guide it is almost impossible to find certain features. The whole site rather resembles Xanten with many foundations and here and there a partial reconstruction . In the Odeion we ran into a class of schoolchildren. They were dressed in togas and deeply involved in a senatorial debate. Lunch was in the Roman style and afterwards we made a visit to the small museum where there were items of daily life and an extensive amount of silver found in Augst. Friday’s lecture was on the lakes and rivers of Switzerland and the role they played in the economic development and romanisation of the Helvetii. After a tour around the ancient parts of Basel, lunch was in a school (gymansium). This was followed by the presentation of an educational project run by the university of Neuchâtel to promote ancient languages and cultures (more information on the net: http://www.unine.ch/lca/). Students, teachers and university staff are collaborating on this ambitious project. In the afternoon the congress closed with a visit to the Museum of Antiquities. Besides this already extensive programme I also visited an excellent Böcklin exhibition (with an Odysseus and Calypso) in the Museum of Art and in the Beyeler foundation there is an excellent museum of modern art where at that moment there was an exhibition entitled “Ornament und Abstraktion”. This was an intriguing exhibition where art and applied art from all over the world were juxtaposed: Mycenean grave jars and works of Mondriaan next to each other revealed the connections and tensions between ornament and abstraction. Eva and I also found out by personal experiment that Caesar’s exploit in swimming against the current in the Rhine was truly a remarkable feat! Liesbeth Berkvens Download 255.23 Kb. Share with your friends:
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