Postcards from Greece

Graduate student Erika Weiberg has spent the past academic year in Greece as a Bert Hodge Hill Fellow at The American School of Classical Studies at Athens, participating in the Regular Program of the School. Below, she shares some of the highlights of her time in Greece. 

Erika Weiberg
Graduate Philology student

While visiting the Cyclopean walls of Asine, the Nobel Prize winning Greek poet George Seferis imagines that he is touching the same stones that the Mycenaean king of Asine once touched. As a Regular Member at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens this year, I have traveled throughout Greece looking for traces of the people who once inhabited the ruins we visit, though unlike Seferis, I am more interested in the ordinary people of ancient Greece than a king mentioned once in Homer. Along the way I found more than I was looking for: an oracular tree, ancient graffiti, mythical street names, the revival of ancient games, warrior women, and olive harvests. This photo essay captures my favorite moments from this year of time travel.

The starting line at ancient Olympia: In a spontaneous revival of the stadion, a 200 meter foot-race, we crouched at the starting line in the stadium at Olympia and waited for our cue to start. Though there were no praise poets or choruses of revelers waiting to lead the victory celebration, the names of the winners (Sebastian and Scarlett) will nonetheless live forever in our memories. We raced at many of the stadiums we visited along the way, including the Panathenaic stadium in Athens, but the stadion at Olympia is still the most prestigious race to win. | Photo by Danielle Smotherman

Works Cited:

Fermor, Patrick Leigh. 2006 repr. Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese. NYRB Classics.New York: New York Review of Books.

Seferis, George. 1995. “The King of Asini.” In Collected Poems: George Seferis. Translated, edited, and introduced by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Photos courtesy of Erika Weiberg