University of Pennsylvania Professor Robert Ousterhout delivered the Walton Lecture on Byzantine Constantinople twice this year: at the Gennadius Library in Athens (March 2) and at the Museum of Byzantine Civilization in Thessaloniki (March 4th).
Geography and Travel
Joannes Gennadius formed the best collection in the world of travel accounts on Greece and its neighboring countries. The collection includes the accounts of travelers who visited Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean and left their impressions for later generations to read. Many of the travelers, particularly in the Middle Ages, were pilgrims visiting the Holy Land and the various places associated with the Bible. These are supplemented by the accounts of merchants and sailors and, beginning largely in the sixteenth century, by a growing number of scholars and tourists who came to visit the places of classical antiquity.
These travelers’ accounts are interesting in their own right, as they describe the pleasures and perils of travel in an age when movement was slow and frequently dangerous. The accounts also shed light on past customs and institutions, and they frequently describe or illustrate monuments and archeological sites that have perished or been seriously damaged. These works are therefore important historical documents. The Library’s collections include the first edition of excerpts from the notes of Cyriacus of Ancona, who traveled through the Eastern Mediterranean in the first half of the fifteenth century, the important account of the Turkish traveler Evliya Celebi (1611-1679) and those of the English travelers Spon and Wheeler. Many of these journals are illustrated.
An invaluable catalog of the travelers’ accounts in the Gennadeion has been published by Shirley H. Weber (2 vols. Princeton, 1952-53).