All students enroll for four 4-(quarter) hour classes, each of which is described below. For more complete details, click the title of the course.
1 intensive course in Modern (Demotic) Greek
An instructor fluent in Demotic Greek accompanies the group for the first three weeks of the trip. In 2005 our instructor was Christophoros Dunne, who holds a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Athens. We hope that he will be able to serve as our instructor for the 2008 trip as well. Because of the excellence of the program and the students’ background in Classical Greek, most students become proficient enough to carry on basic conversations during the 3-week course, and their spoken Greek continues to improve as they use it during the remaining 7-8 weeks of the trip. In addition to the pragmatic value of learning modern Greek for travelling in Greece, we have found that learning modern Greek helps students to hear ancient Greek as a real spoken language and not merely as a written code to be laboriously decoded.
1 course in the history and archaeology of Greece
This course is taught largely via site visits and site reports. Typically, the group visits many sites in and around Athens: the Acropolis, the Keramaikos, the Agora, the National Museum and some more distant sites (Delphi, the Amphiareion, Marathon, Sounion). We also visit major sites in the Peloponnese, Crete, and Thira (Santorini) along with the beautiful old Crusader city of Rhodes, which serves as our home base.
2 intermediate/advanced Greek reading courses: Homer and Plato.
We will read 7-10 books of the Odyssey and a number of Platonic dialogues. Most of our Classical reading takes place on small untouristed islands. After breakfast we find a quiet place and read until lunch. Then, after lunch we reassemble and read for another three or four hours. Our reading is always aloud and largely at sight. We try to read each text through at least twice. Many students have commented that in this baptism-by-fire approach they have come to feel comfortable with Greek as a real language for the first time and that they get their first real sense of the rewards of reading a text in Greek because they can read enough in a single setting to notice the overall meaning and structure of the text rather than fixating on grammar.
What kinds of classrooms will we have?
Greek in Greece uses no “school.” We have no classrooms, nor do we need any. Discussions and readings take place wherever it is convenient: sitting on beds in hotel rooms, sitting on stones at Epidaurus or Mycenae, on untouristed beaches, on ferry boats, at tavernas (restaurants). Often we will wish we had traditional classrooms because we will get cold or hot, our backs will get sore, and we will have to talk over street noise or Mediterranean waves. That is the price we pay for traveling and seeing a lot of Greece, and most participants find it a small price. I personally love the feel of authenticity that comes from doing school in the real world. Sitting in a taverna reading Homer or discussing Plato or the construction of Classical temples while sitting on an ancient wall makes me realize how normal and appropriate an activity it is for humans to think and contemplate the past. There’s something strangely sad and artificial about restricting such glorious activities to classrooms.
