Lecture by Dr Georgios Mouratidis at the UWr Library
From 19 to 22 October, the Centre for the Study of the Ancient World will host Dr Georgios Mouratidis, Deputy Director of the British School at Athens. His visit, at the invitation of dr Joanna Wegner, is sponsored under the “Visiting Professors” scheme of the Initiative for Excellence – Research University (IDUB) programme.
You are warmly invited to attend Dr Georgios Mouratidis’s lecture entitled “The spatial and sociopolitical context of athletic inscriptions in the sanctuary of Olympia”, which will take place on 20 October at 3:30 p.m. in Room 4 of the UWr Library in Wrocław.
About the lecture
Athletic monuments were erected in great numbers in cities in eastern Mediterranean, and especially in big Panhellenic sanctuaries, such as Olympia and Delphi. From a modern point of view, it is easy to underestimate the density of honorific statues, their effect on the city’s landscape, and their powerful impact on those who viewed them. The huge variety of different views about athletics was partly a result of the large number of viewers in regular contact with these athletic images. Some scholars have begun to see how that ever-present quality is a factor in the variety of athletic opinions, but that work only scratches the surface of the epigraphic material. Even though in recent years, epigraphists have moved the scholarly discussion about the materiality of texts intelligently forward, such studies rarely take into consideration the wealth of athletic inscriptions, making reference to this material only in passing, if at all. This paper builds on earlier scholarship, but offers a new way to read athletic inscriptions, in the process also revealing conceptual links among art, epigraphy, and literature, as well as among cities and Panhellenic sanctuaries during the Hellenistic and Imperial Period.
Date of publication: 15.10.2025
Added by: M.K.
