About This Project

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Athens’ diachronic history is often overlooked. After being absorbed into the Roman sphere in the 2nd century BC, the Byzantine Empire – Rome’s successor in the Eastern Mediterranean from the 4th century AD – ruled over Athens for 900 years. After the Fourth Crusade (1202 – 1204), Athens was controlled by Frankish lords and the Catalan Company until the Ottoman conquest in 1458. Daily life in medieval Athens remains today misunderstood, understudied, and often unpublished. Athens of the Middle Ages (ca. 400 – 1500 AD) was certainly different from its well-known Classical ‘glory days’ (5th – 4th c. BC), but nor was it an insignificant rustic backwater. Byzantine Athens was much more dynamic, creative, and independent than the history books have been suggesting.

What is the significance of this project?

I will work with Dr. Kondyli to draw plans and reconstructions of some of the hundreds of Byzantine houses that were excavated by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens over the last century. Architecture can speak volumes about how people live, and there is much to be discovered about the lives of ordinary Athenians across nearly a thousand years of history by studying these ruins. But most of them no longer exist – they were cleared away to allow excavators to dig deeper to access earlier levels of history. My drawings will aggregate, organize and clarify the unpublished field notes taken on these houses to accompany Dr. Kondyli's written reports. This research will enhance our understanding not only of the Middle Ages and the Byzantine world, but of Greek history as a whole.

What are the goals of the project?

The goal of this project is to create a portfolio of architectural illustrations in Adobe Illustrator (measured plans and reconstructions) of 3 - 10 Byzantine houses and their structural changes across all phases of their occupation. Drawings are essential here because we cannot photograph what is not there -- with research and a little imagination, however, we are able to present a possibility of what the past looked like. Drawings also have the power to transcend linguistic differences, enhancing the accessibility of this research. They express spatial and visual relationships more easily and concisely than verbal description alone. Alongside Dr. Kondyli's written reports, these images will communicate a more complete story of the houses and facilitate their discussion and study.