Corinthian Matters

Category: Corinth in the Mind

  • Life Among Ruins

    The Department of Archaeology at the University of Amsterdam recently launched a new website “Byzantine & Ottoman Archaeology: Digging up answers in the Medieval Mediterranean”  as the official site for their VIDI-Research Project on material culture in the eastern Mediterranean after antiquity.  The project researchers Joanita Vroom, Fotini Kondyli,  and Yasemin Bagci are examining the…

  • The Vampire on the Isthmus: A Halloween Tale

    It is hard to know why ancient writers found Corinth and its territory a region suitable for placing ghosts, witches, and vampires, and whether the region was any more haunted than other towns and countrysides of the ancient world.  The destruction of Corinth by the Romans in 146 BC made the city a gloomy ghost…

  • Oscar Broneer, St. Paul, and Wicked Corinth (and a new blog)

    In a recent blog post at Objects-Buildings-Situations, Kostis Kourelis has pointed out that Ohians have the tendency to blog about Greece, and especially post-classical Greece and their experiences with the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.  He refers to Bill Caraher’s Archaeology of the Mediterranean World, Katie Rask’s Antiquated Vagaries, and now Dallas DeForest’s…

  • Historical Fictions

    Since antiquity, the Corinthia has formed a rather fitting stage for imaginative narratives and outright fictions.  In the long Roman era, we have frequent examples of writers (e.g., Apuleius, Lucian, Libanius, and Themistius) placing their fictional characters and events in Corinth and the Isthmus. And in the modern era, scholars have often turned to the…

  • Bungee into the Abyss

    If it looks unsafe, it probably is.  That’s what I have often thought while watching extreme sport types jump 80 meters head first into the Corinth Canal.  For 60 Euro you can pay Zulu Bungy to jump from the old national road bridge and hang suspended above the canal for a couple of minutes.  It…

  • Corinthian Scholarship (May-June 2011)

    It’s been a couple of months since the last Corinthian Scholarship update, so we have a full list here.  The following list compiles the works I happened to see and the (imperfect) results of various google alerts.  If you have material to add to these monthly compilations, send to corinthianmatters@gmail.com.  As usual, 1 and 2…

  • Corinthian Projections of the Past

    One of the goals for our trip to Albania and Greece was to encourage students to think comparatively about the two countries. Leaving aside the current economic crisis, Greece often evokes positive images–mountains, sea, and plain; blue skies, blue seas; democracy and theaters and philosophers; ancient ruins in a scenic landscape; Mama Mia and Traveling…

  • Korinth: A Tale of Zombies

    One problem in running Google searches on “Corinth” is the unwieldy number of hits returned.  The reason for the numerous false positives is that the USA has a good number of cities and churches named “Corinth”.  On the first two pages of a Google search, one encounters sites related to Corinth Mississippi, Corinth Vermont, the…