6.41 FC – Discovering Byzantium through Athonite Collections on the Princeton Campus

Travelers, scholars, and pilgrims have been drawn to Mount Athos time and again, but their histories have not always been told, in some cases because the collections have been misplaced and forgotten, and in others because the materials are not accessible, as they have not been digitized and researched yet. This session will showcase the work accomplished by the Connecting Histories. The Princeton and Mount Athos Legacy project. At the heart of this project is an international collaborative effort to value the Mount Athos collections on the Princeton campus and make them more discoverable and accessible by digitizing, researching and contextualizing them for teaching and research. The papers in this session will offer insights into six different collections related to Mount Athos held in Visual Resources and the Index of Medieval Art in the Art & Archaeology Department, and Graphic Arts in Special collections in Princeton University Library. These collections include the 1929 expedition to Mount Athos (with its film); the plethora of materials compiled in the 1930s by Professor Kurt Weitzmann; Professor Slobodan Nenadović’s collection of Hilandar monastery; the Index of Medieval Art holdings related to Mount Athos; the engravings related to Mount Athos in Special Collections; and the Gabriel Millet archive from the Collections of the EPHE and the Collège de France in conversation with graphic arts materials at Princeton.