Santorini, the volcanic island

As promised in my last post about the conference I recently attended on Crete, here’s one about the short holiday I took en route back to the UK – a couple of days on the island of Santorini (aka Thera), the largest of several islands formed around and inside a caldera (crater) left by a series of volcanic eruptions. The first thing to say: even before getting off the ferry, the views of the steep cliffs forming the side of the caldera are stunning, and they only get better once you’re at the top:

View from Skaros headland towards Fira (the main town of Santorini)

International Congress of Cretan Studies

ICCS poster at the new Heraklion Cultural and Conference Centre

I’ve just returned from a trip to Greece to attend the 12th International Congress of Cretan Studies. The ICCS takes place every 5 years in different locations around Crete – this time, it was in the capital, Heraklion, which I’ve visited a couple of times before. It’s a huge conference – several days of two or three simultaneous sessions going on at once, and that was just the Prehistoric/Classical stream I was attending (there are also streams on Byzantine/medieval and post-medieval Crete). This year’s theme was ‘mobility’, and within that was an extraordinary large range of papers relating to the movement of people (migration, travel, changing settlement patterns), goods (trade and exchange), or ideas (practices, ideologies, beliefs).

Arthur Evans’ Gardens

The British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans (1851-1941) is best known for his excavation and reconstruction of the Bronze Age palace of Knossos, on Crete (which I’ve posted about before), but also spent a considerable amount of his life in Oxford, where he was Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum (which now houses his archive as well as a considerable collection of finds from Knossos).

Jarn Mound Wild Garden

Evans built a large house, called ‘Youlbury‘, on Boars Hill (just to the south-west of Oxford), which, sadly,  no longer exists (much of the former grounds is now a Scout Camp). One place that can still be visited in the area, though, is the Jarn Mound Wild Garden, created as a public garden by Evans (along with the Oxford Preservation Trust), and I thought I’d share a few pictures of a recent visit there.

Celebrating UK Archaeology

The Festival of Archaeology is a two-week celebration of archaeology in the UK, encouraging people to find out about the archaeology that’s going on in their local area – which seems like a good excuse to share some information about two excavations I’ve been following with particular excitement recently, plus some archaeological cakes!

First up is an excavation I was lucky enough to visit last summer – the Ness of Brodgar on Orkney. This Neolithic site, dating from c.3000-2400 BCE, is basically rewriting the entire archaeology of the Neolithic in the UK – ongoing excavations are revealing a huge complex of monumental buildings, with finds ranging from pottery to slate roof-tiles and even the remains of painted walls.

The Ness of Brodgar site in summer 2015

Travels in Crete

As the Cambridge winter starts drawing in, the natural response (at least as far as I’m concerned) is to start daydreaming about warm sunny places in the Mediterranean. Fortunately, one of the advantages of Classics is that it provides the perfect excuse to go to said warm sunny places and sit on a beach eating ice-cream benefit from the informative and educational experience of visiting Classical sites and museums. New graduate students may like to know that you can apply for Faculty funding not just for research trips (conferences, library/museum visits, etc) but also for travel to ‘Classical lands’ (i.e., pretty much anywhere the Greeks and/or Romans got to) that’s not directly connected with your research, especially if you haven’t had the opportunity to visit said Classical lands before (information and application forms are on the Classics Graduate Moodle, accessible by current students only via Raven).

In the tradition of Res Gerendae travel tips for students visiting Classical (or not-so-Classical) places, I offer a few  recommendations from my recent trip to Heraklion, Crete, to study some Linear B tablets in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum.

A Classicist in Madrid

I recently had a flying visit to Madrid: two days’ conference, one day’s sightseeing, far more Spanish food than was reasonable given the length of my stay (top food tip: the Mercado de San Miguel, an entire market of stalls selling every possible kind of tapas…). However, as is traditional for RG travel reporters, I selflessly devoted much of my free time to tracking down Classics-related features of the city for the benefit of our readers. First up: an iconographic tour of the city centre, starting with the Plaza Mayor, home to the Casa de la Panadería (‘House of the Bakery’, though it’s now a town hall). This was built in the 17th century, but in the 1990s the front was redecorated with a new series of frescos depicting figures from classical mythology:

A Visit to Athens

Just before Christmas I was lucky enough to go on a research trip to Greece, where I spent a happy couple of weeks in various museum workrooms. Naturally I also managed to get in some sightseeing around Athens (helped by the fact that Greek museums are only open for work until 3pm), so I thought I would share a few tips of things to do/see for any RG readers who may be visiting in future.

Obviously, the first four things to visit in Athens are the Acropolis, the Acropolis Museum, the Agora, and the National Archaeological Museum, but I’m pretty sure most readers of this blog would already be heading for those as soon as the plane touched down. So, assuming you’ve already been in Athens a couple of days and have seen all of those, here are my top suggestions of what to do next: