[MGSA-L] FW: U of NOTTINGHAM / Centre for Spartan and Peloponnesian Studies: Online Publication of Conference Proceedings HONOURING THE DEAD IN THE PELOPONNESE

Martha Klironomos mkliro at sfsu.edu
Tue Sep 6 07:21:04 PDT 2011


Of possible interest.

Martha Klironomos
SFSU



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                                                                                       University of Nottingham

                                     Centre for Spartan and Peloponnesian Studies (Online publication)



                   Honouring the Dead in the Peloponnese


                      Proceedings of the conference held in Sparta 23-35 April 2009.


                                        Edited by Helen Cavanagh, William Cavanagh and James Roy.


                                                http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/csps/open-source/index.aspx


The Editors write in their introduction: “The Conference … reflected a wide range of recent academic research in the Arts and Humanities on public and private commemoration... the theme ‘Honouring the Dead’ has significant current reverberations in popular culture, especially in Greece. Purposely held in Sparta, … this conference sought to exploit such exceptional current interest as a starting-point for a more broad-ranging exploration of the theme acrossthe Peloponnese from prehistory to the 21st century. The human responses to death and burial are highly-charged with emotion and yet also formalised and bound by convention. From the Iliad onwards these tensions have struck a note in Greek life, art and literature: the lament, the memorial and the iconography of death, the address over those killed in war, hero cult and the cult of relics, war monuments and literature.Consequently, the aim of the Conference was to bring together experts from a variety of disciplines (Classicists, Byzantinists, ancient and modern historians, ethnographers, archaeologists, art historians and social historians) to discuss a number of aspects where the

combination of their different contributions might open up new vistas.”



The Proceedings  –“a mosaic of studies exploring in different ways how death was memorialized”-  comprise 43 chapters which address:



a) Heroization, Politics and Heroic Death from the Bronze Age to the Late Byzantine period.



b) Lament and Threnody.



c) Memorials, Monumentality and Memory -from the prehistoric through historic periods to modern monuments.



d) Burial, Identity and Representation -commemoration of those who have died, through material culture and iconography.



The Conference provided some modern day aspects on these themes including:


 Leonidas Petrakis’ “A child’s remembrance of living through the Nazi atrocity against the ‘118Spartans’ in autumn1943”;


Dimitrios Katsoulakos’ and Theodoros Katsoulakos’ two papers on the Maniot moiroloyia; and


Georgia Kakourou-Chroni’s  tracing the development of Nikiforos Vrettakos’s reflections on death from an early phase to his late poetry that was transformed by his experiences of World War II.



Note: The following Link is to the  Table of Contents / Editors' Introduction / Abstracts of All Papers/ and Chapter 32, the sender's contribution.


http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/csps/documents/honoringthedead/petrakis.pdf










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