"Cities as Palimpsests? Urban Evolutions in the Eastern Mediterranean" Conference at BAU

Cities as palimpsests? Urban evolutions in the Eastern Mediterranean (7-10 May 2019)

The first international conference of the research project Impact of the Ancient City, carried out at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Classics by Prof. Dr. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill and senior researcher Dr. Elizabeth Key Fowden with the financial support of the European Research Council (ERC), is being held in cooperation with Bahçeşehir University.

The project, in which Dr. Suna Çağaptay of the Bahçeşehir University Faculty of Architecture and Design has been working as field coordinator for Eastern Mediterranean cities since 2017, examines the urban, cultural and political transformation that ancient cities underwent after encountering the monotheistic religions.

At this conference, to be held on the BAU Beşiktaş campus on 7-10 May, participants will approach the reading of traces in the urban fabric of the Eastern Mediterranean using the metaphor of the palimpsest. Just as a parchment is scraped and written over again while faint traces of the erased writing remain, the conference will discuss and interpret how attempts to erase traces of the past for various reasons, to replace them with new fabric, or to revive traces of the past can be read in cities including Beirut, Jerash, Athens, Thessaloniki, Antioch, Ayasoluk/Ephesus and Constantinople/Istanbul.

For the program and details: https://impanccit.wixsite.com/impanccit