*The colloquium will be in English, the event is open to the public, light refreshments will be served after the talk.

Abstract:
Τhe art of wall-painting arrived at Akrotiri as a novelty from palatial Crete and very soon functioned as conspicuous evidence of the wealth and taste of the cosmopolitan society of Thera of the mid 2nd mill. BC.
An expression of an urban / bourgeois mentality and a means of display for an extroverted island society, the wall-paintings of Late Bronze Age Thera are undoubtedly the most important corpus of finds at the prehistoric settlement of Akrotiri providing countless pieces of information on the natural environment, daily life, society, the world of symbols and religion.

There is not a single house at Akrotiri that does not have at least one area with wall paintings. The murals in private houses usually decorated the large rooms of the first floor and were often visible from outside though the windows. In the public buildings, the painting is more extensive in staircases and most of the upstairs rooms.

The three story "Xeste 3", on which this talk will focus, was full of frescoes in all the rooms which constituted a painting project rich in narrative and symbolism. Fourty years after its initial excavation, this building for ritual / initiation activities provides through the corpus of superbly preserved wall paintings a uniquely large amount of information regarding the art, society and ideology of the prehistoric Aegean.


About the speaker:
Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Princeton (1998-1999) and Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (2001-2002). Undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Archaeology at the National and Capodistrian University of Athens, specializing in Aegean Prehistory.
His doctoral thesis (1995) negotiates the Late Mycenaean period on Naxos, for which research he received the Michael Ventris Memorial Award for Mycenaean Studies (1997).
His main research interests are the Mycenaean period in the Cyclades and the wall-paintings of Thera. Collaborator of Professor Christos Doumas in the excavation at Akrotiri, Thera. Director of the Vathy, Astypalaea Archaeological Field Project. (Archaeological Society at Athens).

Since 2009 Assistant Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology in the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Ioannina, he has taught also at the universities of Athens (2006-present) and of the Peloponnese (2004-2005), and has given lectures and seminars at universities in Europe, America and Canada.
He is the author of a two-volume monograph on Naxos and the Mycenaean Aegean in the Post-Palatial Period (12th c. BC), and the scientific editor of four volumes on Greek Archaeology (Melissa Publishing House, Athens).

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This event is part of the CyI Colloquium Series