Project Description
This project aims to explore and bring awareness to the rich, complex, and remarkable historical and cultural heritage of Mount Athos in Greece, and its connection to Princeton. Mount Athos is an autonomous region in Greece housing more than 20 Orthodox monasteries. This peninsula, while small and remote, has had a deep spiritual, cultural, and artistic influence throughout the centuries, capturing the imagination of visitors, travelers, and pilgrims.
Princeton students and faculty have been drawn to Mount Athos time and again, but its histories have not been told, in some cases because the collections have been misplaced and forgotten, and in others because the materials are not accessible, as they have not been digitized and researched yet. These collections include holdings in Visual Resources and the Index of Medieval Art in the Art & Archaeology Department; the Mendel Music Library; and the Graphics Art Collection and Manuscript Division at PUL. Examples of the holdings range from Weitzmann’s negatives of the photos he took in his 1930s expeditions; the photo cards and iconographic descriptions of manuscripts, frescoes, and icons in the physical catalog of the Index of Medieval Art; the post-Byzantine manuscripts; postcards; photographic prints, and engravings of the holy mountain in PUL.
An international team of faculty, staff, and students will collaborate to make the Mount Athos collections on the Princeton campus more discoverable and accessible by digitizing, organizing and contextualizing them for teaching and research. Access to Mount Athos and its immense treasures is not always straightforward and these collections can help bridge this gap allowing scholars to study these materials for the first time. By making these collections held at Princeton available to the broader scholarly community, we aim not just to bring awareness to the histories and invaluable collections held on campus, but also challenge issues of accessibility by creating an international team that will engage in research, teaching, digitization projects, and descriptive cataloging between 2023 and 2026.
This project is generously funded by the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, with the support of the Dimitrios and Kalliopi Monoyios Modern Greek Studies Fund, the Art & Archaeology Department at Princeton University, as well as the Index of Medieval Art and Visual Resources in the Art & Archaeology Department. Funding is also provided by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the Mount Athos Foundation of America, and the Princeton Humanities Council.
International partners on this project are the Mount Athos Foundation of America and the Mount Athos Center in Thessaloniki.
Project Organizers
Charlie Barber is Donald Drew Egbert Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. He specializes in the history of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine art. Professor Barber has written Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (2002) and Contesting the Logic of Painting: Art and Understanding in Eleventh-Century Byzantium (2007).
Julia Gearhart is the Director of Visual Resources within the Department of Art and Archaeology of Princeton University.
Maria Alessia Rossi, PhD., is an Art History Specialist at the Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University. She is the author of Visualizing Christ’s Miracles in Late Byzantium: Art, Theology, and Court Culture (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2024). Rossi is the co-founder of the initiative North of Byzantium and the digital platform Mapping Eastern Europe.
Project Team
Find out more about our team members in these interviews!
Talia Goldman, class of 2027, is anticipating a major in Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. She has joined the team as a Digital Imaging Specialist and is spending the 2023/24 and the 2024/25 academic year helping to digitize the Kurt Weitzmann collection of photographic negatives of Mount Athos manuscripts.
Nadia D. Makuc, class of 2026, is currently majoring in Classics with a minor in Medieval Studies at Princeton University. She has joined the team as a Digital Imaging Specialist and is spending the 2023/24 academic year helping to digitize the Kurt Weitzmann collection of photographic negatives of Mount Athos manuscripts.
Earnestine Qiu is a graduate student in Byzantine Art in the Art & Archaeology Department at Princeton University. Her focus is the artistic and theological exchanges between Byzantium and Armenia. She will be joining the team in spring 2024 helping on the digitization of the Index card files related to Mount Athos.
Kyriaki Giannouli is a doctoral candidate specializing in Byzantine History at the University of Ioannina and a professional conservator of paintings. Her research focus is the significance of Greek landscapes within the travelogues of Western Holy Land pilgrims spanning from the 12th to the 17th centuries. She has joined the team in spring 2024 to work on the digitization of the Index card files related to Mount Athos.
Beatrice Spampinato is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Venice and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. Her current projects focus on architectural sculpture in the medieval architecture of eastern Anatolia and on the historical landscape of the South Caucasus as seen through the Italian photographic campaigns of the 1960s. She joined the team to help uncover the art historical narratives of the 1929 Expedition to Mount Athos photographic collection held by Visual Resources.
Vangelis Maladakis is a Byzantine archaeologist at the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Ephorate of Antiquities of Chalcidice and Mount Athos. He studied History and Archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessalonike (PhD, 2014), and he has taught as an adjunct lecturer at the University of the Peloponnese, the University of Athens and the National Hellenic Research Foundation. His research interests focus on Byzantine archaeology and art, and on the historiography of the Athonite studies (https://auth.academia.edu/VangelisMaladakis).
Dubravka Preradović is an art historian at the Institute for Balkan Studies, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Her research partly focuses on historiographical studies of medieval heritage in the Balkans. She is the author of In the Name of Knowledge and Homeland (2023) and editor of two volumes: one on Gabriel Millet’s research on Serbian medieval architecture (2021), and the other on Vladimir R. Petković scholarly legacy (2024).
Aleksandar Vasileski is an Associate Researcher at the Institute of Old Slavic Culture in Prilep, North Macedonia. His research work is focused on Orthodox art and architecture in the Balkan from the 11th to the 19th century, with a particular emphasis on the cultural heritage of the Ohrid Archdiocese. He has authored numerous publications and actively participates in various archaeological and conservation projects at significant historical sites in the region.