Despina Chatzivasiliou, research engineer in ancient history

When did the " city " come into being ?

The urban form of construction, as we understand it today, has its roots in the Archaic period (7th^century BC). Before that, cities had a form that is less familiar to us, at least in the Western world. Of course, you can't build a city in a snap of the fingers; it takes several generations.

Since its birth, the city has been made up of a whole series of spaces, both public and private. Its focal point is the agora, in the sense of " market ". There are also places of worship, education, administration and so on. What remains most enduring in a city's history are its places of worship. A temple, a church, a synagogue or a mosque have an important symbolism in the collective imagination, whether you're a believer or not. A city speaks for itself because of these buildings and their organization in space.

It's the process of structuring urban and peri-urban space and its symbolisms that I'm studying in Antiquity, through urbanistic and topographical analyses, and by contributing my own elements for reading space.

What is topography ?

It's a term that comes from the Greek topos (place) and graphie (writing). Topography reveals how a place takes shape at each moment in its history. The city is a body in constant motion. And this body is alive, because it has a past that is as legendary as it is patrimonial. How do places remember certain aspects of their past ? This is one of the key questions of topography. We can talk about it from the largest to the smallest : from the reason why a city was founded in a specific geographical location, to the detail of a monument's sculptural decoration.

The difficulty with the ancient world is that we don't have the image in front of us, and this is all the more true for the Archaic period, which has left us few elements. So we have to put the puzzle together, with missing pieces. It's as essential to be able to read ancient Greek as it is to identify anachronisms in the sources, or to date archaeological remains..

I try to arrange the sources in chronological order, to associate the right description with the right remains, and to understand how everything works as a whole.

Acropolis hill, Athens.

You come from Greece and spent part of your academic career there..

The Greek system is very different from the French one. I passed the equivalent of the baccalaureate, then a national competitive entrance examination for university, which could correspond to the French "classes préparatoires". In Greece, this is a prerequisite for anyone wishing to pursue higher education.

Among the four sections offered in these preparatory classes, I chose humanities, and later specialized in archaeology. I particularly liked this, as it was the most practical course in the humanities : an archaeologist talks much more with the material than a linguist.

During my studies, I was asked to translate from French into Greek a book on the topography of a little-known ancient region west of Delphi. At the time, I didn't have a very good level of French, so it wasn't easy !

For this work, I had to ask permission from the École française d'Athènes, and I got in touch with a professor who suggested I do a DEA (equivalent to a Master's 2) in France, at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE), with the subject of my research being the aforementioned little-known region, the Locrida of the West.

Did it come naturally to pursue a doctorate ?

Yes, because I developed a taste for this topographical approach : studying the buildings, places and associated events described to us by sources, in time and space.

I then began a joint thesis with François de Polignac (EPHE) and Didier Viviers (Université libre de Bruxelles). François de Polignac encouraged the decompartmentalization of disciplines, unlike many other professors who wanted to categorize me as either an architect, an institutional historian or a classics scholar..

During my PhD, François de Polignac referred me to John Scheid, holder of the Chair of Religion, Institutions and Society in Ancient Rome (2001-2016), to set up a collaboration on ancient places of worship. I came to the Collège de France to work with John Scheid and, after his retirement, I managed to secure a position by proposing a research project at the interface between four chairs of the Ancient Mediterranean Worlds cluster of the Institute of Civilizations.

In practice, however, I have not become a specialist in all these chairs. My usefulness lies more in my experience of setting up projects : grasping the technicalities of administration, meeting deadlines, contacting stakeholders, updating bibliographies, etc.

How do you contribute to the activities of these Collège de France professors ?

My role is to understand and translate the professors' wishes into a form that is scientifically coherent and meets the needs of a certain audience. This can take the form of a publication, a book, a seminar, a database, and so on.

For example, I contribute to the archaeological chronicles of the journal  Kernos, which specializes in ancient Greek religion and is directed by Pr Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge. These columns report on current archaeological developments in the field of ancient Greek religious facts and phenomena. I contribute to the columns and give a picture of the progress of research by region and period. It's a form of scientific journalism.

I'm also involved in the scientific mediation around the exhibition " Le papyrus dans tous ces États, de Cléopâtre à Clovis ", commissioned by Pr Jean-Luc Fournet, particularly with regard to the format of the guided tours, even though I'm by no means a papyrologist !

My schedule is very heavy, and I have to be efficient. After the birth of my son, I learned to get things done quickly. Admittedly, it's extremely difficult to combine family life and research life in a fair and balanced way. There are no limits to either : you can't stop thinking about your subject at six o'clock in the evening ! Researchers are like artists : there's a lot of work to do, but there's also an element of inspiration and creation.

At the same time, you also carry out personal research..

Reconstruction of the column depicting the legend of the founding of the sanctuary ofAsclepius. On the back, the sanctuary door and a stork on a tree trunk, alluding to the location of the sanctuary near the Pelargikon wall. In ancient Greek, the word Pelargikon is related to the word Pelargoi, meaning " storks ". Acropolis Museum, Athens.

In addition to my research at the Collège de France, I have been a lecturer at the EPHE for several years. This year, I'm working on the Athens Pelargikon. This is the first fortification of the Acropolis of Athens, the rocky limestone plateau rising up from the center of the city. These great walls date back to the Mycenaean period, in the ^12th century BC, and are made of huge blocks of stone. Extracting, moving and erecting them required highly sophisticated skills and techniques.

Later, in the ^6th century BC, i.e. some six hundred years after the walls were erected, and when their defensive role was no longer relevant, a legend attributed their construction to the Pelasges, Pelasgoi in ancient Greek. They are said to be a people of foreign sailors who were invited by the Athenians to build the walls. Hence the name Pelargikon. The legend also tells of the presence and activities of the Pelasges in various parts of Attica, the territory of Athens, and of their journeys further afield.

Drawing on the history of this mythical people and many other sources, I want to arrive at an image that shows that the Pelargikon, which marks the boundary of the Acropolis hill, is a remarkable representation of the centralization of Attica's territory. The legend, textual data and remains associated with this major construction give us elements of the unification of the Attic territory from east to west.

In people's minds, the cityscape is purely conceptual. It is created not by the actual distance between two places, but by the symbolic distance between them.

Through these arguments, what cause do you wish to defend ?

I'm campaigning for the idea of change and the perpetual movement of civilization and the city, because our modern era masks this. Museums, for example, give us a rather fixed image of the history of art in antiquity.

In my current lectures at the EPHE, I want to show that the Acropolis hill in Athens was much more accessible and changeable than we generally want to believe, no doubt for pedagogical or simplification reasons. This tendency crushes all nuances from one place to another, from one era to another, from one community to another. When it comes to antiquity, however, we must be wary of universal theories.

In the collective imagination, the contribution of sciences such as medicine is visible and immediate. What we historians do is just as important, but we mustn't confuse urgency with importance. Studying a civilization, in this case Greco-Roman antiquity - since Europe is considered to have inherited it - is extremely formative for understanding the world we live in.

----------

Despina Chatzivasiliou is a research engineer in the Ancient Mediterranean Worlds department of the Institut des Civilisations. She works for four professors at the Collège de France : Jean-Pierre Brun, chair of Techniques and Economies in the Ancient Mediterranean ; Jean-Luc Fournet, chair of Written Culture in Late Antiquity and Byzantine Papyrology ; Dario Mantovani, chair of Law, Culture and Society in the Ancient Rome and Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge, chair of Religion, History and Society in the Ancient Greek World.

Interview by Océane Alouda