GALLIPOLI 1915: IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE GREEKS

Professor Christopher Mackie

(La Trobe University, Melbourne)

7.30 pm Monday 14 May 2012

The Greek Club
29-31 Edmonstone Street, South Brisbane

View / Download a .pdf copy of this Invitation, here:

UQ_CHP_Alex_Kondos_Memorial_Lecture_MACKIE_FINAL_14 05 2012.pdf

The Greek Orthodox Community of St George, Brisbane, invites you to the Alex Kondos Memorial Lecture.

In the First World War Australians and Turks fought over a peninsula which had a long Greek history. Greeks had settled around Gallipoli – itself, the corruption of a Greek name – since the seventh century BC. Their mythical heroes had reputedly fought at Troy across the Dardanelles. It was here that Xerxes crossed with his great army in his unsuccessful attempt to capture Greece, the Athenians and the Spartans fought the last desperate battles of the Peloponnesian War, and a young Macedonian king called Alexander crossed into Asia to launch a war of conquest.

The western discourse of war emerged from these conflicts: Homer’s Iliad, Herodotus, Thucydides and the historians of Alexander the Great.

In 1915 the attack of the Allies on the Gallipoli peninsula echoed tragic aspects of these ancient campaigns. With death all around them Australian, British and French soldiers uncovered burials and inscriptions of the Greeks who had once lived around Gallipoli. They reflected too on how their own heavy losses mirrored those of the ancient peoples who had died there before them. In this important public lecture one of Australia’s foremost Hellenists reveals this untold story of the Greek background of the Gallipoli campaign of 1915.

Christopher Mackie is Professor of Greek Studies and Head of the School of Historical and European Studies at La Trobe University. He received his BA Honours from the University of Newcastle and his PhD in Greek and Latin from the University of Glasgow. He has authored Rivers of Fire (Washington, 2008), edited Oral Performance and Its Context (Leiden, 2004), co-edited, with S. Bryne and A. M. Tamis, Philathenaios: Studies in Honour of Michael J. Osborne (Athens, 2010), and is currently finishing a book on the ancient Dardanelles and how it haunts the Gallipoli campaign of 1915.

This event is co-sponsored by the Cultural History Project of the Faculty of Arts at The University of Queensland.

For further information please contact George Psaltis 0418 720 092

or

Dr David Pritchard 0401 955 160

Email Dr David Pritchard, here;