What happens when young writers visit the Acropolis? At the beginning of the month, our Summer Travel Writing course taught by Professor Romana Turina, embarked on meeting CYA Archaeology Professor Dr. Papadopoulos. The team then set off to explore the many sides of the legendary Rock!

 

Professor Turina’s course (Writing in Greece: Travel Writing Forms) uses Greece as a lens to examine the ways writers draw on Greece’s rich myths, history, and literary traditions. The students explore questions that arise when writing about place and travel. In what ways do our expectations and our actual perceptions merge into a narrative? And how do outsiders’ perspectives contribute to the literary composition and creation of place? The class travels across Greece while crafting and analyzing nonfiction prose.

What a better place to explore those fascinating questions, than the Acropolis of Athens – a place the myth of which precedes first-hand experience.

Dr. Papadopoulos teaches Archaeology in CYA (A367, A372, MS347 ) and is a specialist of the Prehistoric Era. For this day he led a walk around the monuments of the Acropolis designed to give the team a broad sense of the site’s history. Gaining “Context” and understanding “continuity” were the goals for the day, much valuable for the research of the writing students.

Discussing with Dr. Papadopoulos while walking across the imposing Propylaea, the complex and intricate Erechtheum and of course the Parthenon, the students rounded up their knowledge of the site, getting rid of misconceptions. The team learned to see the legendary hill for what it is: the unique combination of war, peace, power and constant change of circumstances through History. Time to spill some ink!

  

For more photos from that day, please visit the CYA facebook page