tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-63294502024-03-17T23:03:53.618-04:00OBJECTS-BUILDING-SITUATIONSMUSINGS ON ARCHITECTURE AND ARCHAEOLOGY BY KOSTIS KOURELISKOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.comBlogger538125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329450.post-68868288369554095362019-09-24T18:49:00.002-04:002019-09-24T21:48:52.037-04:00Map of Greek America 1909
An article on Materialities that Bind under review (sadly twice as long as the mandated minimum, so lots to cut if accepted), an article comparing the spatial distribution of Greek immigrants in two Pennsylvania towns just accepted (written with the brilliant digital humanist David Pettegrew), an article on documenting site abandonment in press, and an article comparing Greek and Italian KOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329450.post-25824540341361208112019-06-24T14:45:00.000-04:002019-06-24T14:56:21.876-04:00Baptismal Records Greek Philadelphia
The Greek American Heritage Society of Philadelphia possesses a rare collection of parish records from the establishment of Philadelphia's Greek community in 1906. The records consist of hard-bound log books on membership, marriages, baptisms, and funerals. In summer 2016, my students digitized some of the logs, but the project slowed down because of the difficulty in transcribing the Greek andKOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329450.post-9443596511182275302019-05-27T21:53:00.003-04:002019-05-27T22:09:26.813-04:001894 First Greek American Type Face
Newspapers offer an invaluable source of information for Greek American history. Atlantis (founded 1894) and the National Herald (founded 1915) were the two competing Greek language newspaper, which represented a double political dichotomy; Atlantis was Greek monarchist and US Republican, while the National Herald was Greek Venizelist and US Democrat.
Atlantis, whose publication ended KOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329450.post-59519309900104876492019-05-23T16:45:00.001-04:002019-05-27T22:03:27.166-04:001898 Greek Human TraffickingThe first Greek newspaper in the United States was Atlantis, published in 1894. The Balch Institute (founded in 1971 to collect ethnic histories) has a continuous edition of the newspaper, now housed at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The newspaper came out once a week and covered Greek and American news. It included a column on diaspora news that is simply incredible, as it provides rareKOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329450.post-77178586093143410782019-03-26T11:06:00.001-04:002019-03-26T13:51:10.841-04:00Ann Arbor's First Greek Garage Church: Holy and Unholy Spirits
Greek immigrants of the early-20th century held religious services in a diversity of spaces including stores, houses and garages. Last week, I had a chance to explore one such space, a garage in Ann Arbor, Michigan where Greeks held their first church services in 1927. The garage was also busted for illegal alcohol in 1930, and its owner (the priest's son) was arrested. The congruence of KOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329450.post-26794678514068415452018-02-15T18:47:00.000-05:002018-02-15T18:47:56.996-05:00Skyros MinesBack from fieldwork in Greece, and eager to share some ideas. One site of research was the Island of Skyros, where I traced the footsteps of the painter Georg von Peschke. Back in Athens, I was passing through the American School and I ran into Betsey Robinson, who introduced me to Ruth Siddall, the geoarchaeologist from University College, London. Over a glass of wine at Omorfo, Ruth told KOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329450.post-35302782468608099722018-02-13T20:47:00.000-05:002018-02-13T21:08:52.595-05:00Digital City: First Year Seminar
Franklin & Marshall College's general education curriculum includes first year seminars known as Connections. I have proposed a new CNX seminar for Fall 2018 that explores further last semester's class Migration Architecture: Intro to Spatial Analysis (ART 175). Rather than introducing students to migration architecture from antiquity to the present, this new seminar takes Lancaster as a KOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329450.post-65249263479849944802018-02-12T10:31:00.001-05:002018-02-12T10:35:15.295-05:00Student Life at Sayer Hall 1908Sayre Hall of Mercer College (now University of North Dakota) was built in 1908, the first in a series of four buildings. We have an extraordinary document, a biography of a 1908 student who gives explicit details of student life in the Hall during its first year of occupation. (See previous post for details)
Roy Thompson of Cando, ND, enrolled at the Grand Forks Preparatory School for his KOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329450.post-24882707885676583002018-02-09T11:12:00.003-05:002018-02-09T11:34:38.326-05:00College and University 1908 North Dakota
Bill Caraher, my partner in many writing crimes (Punk Archaeology, Man Camps, Refugee Archaeology), began a salvage archaeology project on his campus and kindly invited me to collaborate. The issue is this handsome 1908 Beaux Arts building that will be torn down this June. Our task is to archaeologically document as much as we can before demolition. Bill has set up a one-credit class KOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329450.post-4330628187189791052018-02-05T10:09:00.003-05:002018-02-05T10:38:42.104-05:00Philadelphia: The Birthplace of Rembetiko
Rembetiko is Greece's urban blues. Like the tango in Argentina, rembetiko was considered criminal, low-class, and unworthy of recording creating a typical paradox. One of Greece's national music genres was practical illegal in Greece. In comes immigration. The first rembetiko songs were recorded in the United States under the growing industry of ethnic music. The economic equation is simple. TheKOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329450.post-6093339116597074732017-11-26T22:39:00.001-05:002017-11-27T09:02:46.587-05:00Kountouriotika Refugee Settlement: 1923 Red Cross Films
How is it possible that the first organized humanitarian action by the Greek immigrants in the U.S. could disappear from the annals of history? Although I have not quite verified this by any primary sources, Greek-Americans raised funds in 1923 to build the earliest refugee settlement in Athens. The settlement was known as Emirikon or, more commonly, as Kountouriotika, after Greek Admira KOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329450.post-48227132927456417702017-10-11T10:48:00.000-04:002017-10-11T10:57:10.408-04:00Greek Philadelphia Business Directories 1904 and 1911While my students map Greek residences in Philadelphia from the 1920 US census, I tackle the business directories. Beginning in 1904, entrepreneurial Greeks in New York began publishing almanacs to direct new immigrants navigate the new land. In addition to general information, they included business directories of Greek establishments in cities throughout the U.S. The directories provide KOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329450.post-14814868855325365382017-09-27T18:54:00.001-04:002017-09-27T18:55:45.431-04:00Teaching Thursday. Growing GIS Pains
The first major project that my Migration Architecture students have to complete is a spatial analysis of sixteen blocks in Philadelphia. Located in the southeast quadrant of William Penn’s city, this is both the colonial core of the city but also the epicenter of the African-American, Russian-Jewish, Greek and artist enclaves. Our goal is to create new digital data. We will digitize KOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329450.post-57054630775779818652017-09-15T09:53:00.004-04:002017-09-15T10:09:12.330-04:00Teaching Thursday: Graphic Novel Migration Architecture
The first week of my Migration Architecture class is over.
With the anxieties of a new class and a new group of students waning, I am ready to talk about it. The class has three objectives, to introduce
students to spatial analysis as a discursive tool, to explore the inherent
tension between migration and architecture, and to compare the
American melting pot of the 1920s to migration today. KOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329450.post-56204053775556556372017-09-14T08:25:00.000-04:002017-09-14T09:01:48.397-04:00The Greek Laborer in America: 1907 Account
The textual sources for the archaeology of Greek immigration in the US are varied and relatively scarce. I am particularly interested in evidence on the materialities of dwelling. One type of source I'm working with includes a genre of guide books produced in the US and distributed to potential immigrant in Greece, as well as newcomers. They typically contain useful contact information (KOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329450.post-15001258084703066562017-06-01T11:42:00.002-04:002017-06-01T11:42:56.438-04:00Pallet Gardening
William Caraher has been recording pallets throughout his travels and, at one point, has even proposed a book on the subject. This spring I noticed for the first time the recycling of pallets into urban gardening. This pallet garden was on the sidewalk of S 700 Front St block, near the Cypriot restaurant Kanella. This trend has been going on for a couple of years in Philadelphia. The South KOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329450.post-7342678581564406222016-11-03T10:10:00.000-04:002016-11-03T15:51:09.865-04:00Remote Ethnography
Working on vernacular architecture, I've engaged in various loose forms of ethnography. Truth be told, I have become an architectural historian and archaeologist because I prefer working with the stillness and remoteness of mute rocks than the complexities of inner subjectivities that come with people. For years now, I have conducted interviews that fit the category of "salvage ethnography," KOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329450.post-76433314863015714842016-10-28T10:13:00.001-04:002016-10-28T10:13:24.582-04:00Wool and Rubble Walls: Domestic Archaeology in the Medieval Peloponnese
Back in March 26, 2015, I participated in a conference on Byzantine textiles at Dumbarton Oaks, "Liminal Fabrics: Furnishing Textiles in Byzantium and Early Islam." I made the argument that piles of rubble walls and ceramics from archaeological survey tell a much better story about medieval textiles (through production) than the few surviving pieces in museum collections (through artistic KOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329450.post-62165030912073421942016-10-27T10:37:00.001-04:002016-10-27T10:51:28.838-04:00Archaeologies of CareI am so thrilled to be part of a panel on "Archaeologies of Care: Rethinking Priorities in Archaeological Engagement" at the annual meetings of the Society of Historical Archaeology in January 2017. The session is organized by Christopher Matthews, whose Archaeology of American Capitalism (2010) was monumental in my research and Richard Rothaus, best known for his work in Greece, KOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329450.post-20597874683163572752016-10-20T12:13:00.003-04:002016-10-26T10:37:40.167-04:00Velouchovo Cave
In 2014, the Lidoriki Project concentrated on the survey of the acropolis of Ancient Kallion which housed the medieval fortified settlement of Velouchovo. The site was surveyed by Petros Themelis in the 1970s during the salvage excavations of the Mornos Reservoir, which ultimately submerged the modern village. In the 1980s, the Dutch Aetolian survey carried out a pedestrian surface survey (KOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329450.post-55301567976614538112016-10-19T11:46:00.002-04:002016-10-19T12:05:19.842-04:00Lidoriki PillboxOne of the main themes in our survey of the deserted village Aigition/Strouza has been the archaeology of destruction in World War II, when the village was burned and its residents shipped to a concentration camp in Athens. As we process the material for publication, I lament the lack of comparative studies (in contrast to Spain, U.K., Norway). In order to add to the discussion, I process the KOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329450.post-5660371305443651722016-10-14T09:46:00.001-04:002016-10-14T09:47:24.208-04:00Aegina Orphanage 1829-1834I argue that we need to embark on a refugee archaeology in order to confront the current crisis head-on, on the one hand, but also to make up for lost ground in having ignored the modern Greek periods as archaeologically valuable. There are three foci for our historical archaeology 1820s/1920s/1940s and the refugee crisis following the nation-states three greatest moments of crisis before the KOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329450.post-48611508664485055032016-10-11T18:35:00.000-04:002016-10-11T18:35:00.414-04:00Doxiadis: The Archaeology of WWII Destruction
We have started working on the book manuscript for the deserted village of Aigition/Strouza. This is the site that we have been surveying for the last four years, a village founded around 1850, with many houses built with remittances from the U.S. in the 1910, burned by the Germans in 1943 (its population taken into a concentration camp in Athens), reoccupied and abandoned slowly.
There is KOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329450.post-77847406111479075472016-10-06T15:46:00.002-04:002016-10-06T15:49:14.834-04:00Kandinsky, Small Worlds IV
The Phillips Museum of Art at Franklin & Marshall College has some wonderful pieces. One of my favorite prints is the Kandinsky lithograph of Kleine Welten IV (1922) that we recently exhibited . We don't know very much about how we acquired this piece (but hope to find out).
Kandinsky arrived at the Bauhaus in 1922 to teach mural painting and visual principles. In the summer months, KOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329450.post-15751235670357964382016-10-04T21:46:00.000-04:002016-10-04T21:46:00.002-04:00Cretan Black Lives Matter
There is an interesting intersection between Black Lives Matter and Greek refugee camps. The exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey after the 1922 Asia Minor disaster, lead into the massive deportation of Greece's African population. Having been brought to Greece as slaves during the Ottoman Empire, many became free and congregated in urban enclaves in Greek cities. One such enclaveKOSTIS KOURELIShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10337635437028881328noreply@blogger.com5