Healing Rituals in Modern and Ancient Greece: A Comparison
Lecture by Dr. Evy Johanne Håland (Government Grant Holder (Norwegian, statsstipendiat), Emerita/National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Department of Archaeology and History of Art, Marie Curie Intra-European Fellow, Emerita. Senior lecturer at SeniorUni Norge AS)
Main content
We are delighted to announce an upcoming lecture by Dr. Evy Johanne Håland (Government Grant Holder – Norwegian statsstipendiat; Emerita/National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Department of Archaeology and History of Art; Marie Curie Intra-European Fellow, Emerita; Senior Lecturer at SeniorUni Norge AS). The lecture will take place on Monday, 20 October 2025, at 7:00 p.m. (EEST) at the Norwegian Institute at Athens.
The lecture, titled “Healing Rituals in Modern and Ancient Greece: A Comparison,” will be held in a hybrid format, accommodating both in-person and online attendance via Zoom.
Registration is required for both in-person and virtual participation.
To attend in person, please register at norwinst@uib.no
To attend online, please register via the relevant Zoom link.
Abstract
How can we try to understand such cores of ancient Greek culture as its healing rituals, generallycarried out during festivals and rites connected with life-cycle passages, when the male authors ofour sources did not and could not know much of what occurred, since the rituals were carried out bywomen? One way of facing this problem is to attend similar healing rituals in modern Greece,carried out by women, and compare that information with ancient sources, thus providing new waysof interpreting the ancient material we possess. This methodological approach to ancient sources ispresented and discussed in the author’s recent book, Women, Pilgrimage, and Rituals of Healing inModern and Ancient Greece: A Comparison (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,2023), on which the talk is based, and in which parallels between modern and ancient healing ritualsare central. These might also be seen as transmissions of ancient medical heritage into the modernGreek and Mediterranean region. This concerns material culture, such as amulets and votive gifts,both from resilient material such as stones and organic substances, or compounds such asapotropaic herbs and flowers, which have been important during religious rituals and everyday life,especially within the female sphere. The topics have also been central in pilgrimages to religiouscenters in which dream healing miracles have been an important part within societies all around theMediterranean in the ancient Greek and the modern Christian and Islamic worlds.The lecture therefore combines ethnography—especially firsthand fieldwork carried out since1983—with historical sources to examine the relationship between modern Greek healing ritualsand ancient written and visual sources on the subject of healing, aiming to present some of myfindings, thus using modern sources in conjunction with ancient ones to shed fresh light on both theancient and modern worlds from a female perspective.
Biographical Information
Dr. Evy Johanne Håland, is a Norwegian Researcher, Dr/PhD, History, appointed a Governmentscholar (Norwegian, statsstipendiat) by the Norwegian Ministry of Culture. Emerita from May 2024.Since 1983, she has had several periods of fieldwork in the Mediterranean, mainly in Greece andItaly. Her publications combine fieldwork results with ancient sources, and the most importantinclude, Women, Pilgrimage, and Rituals of Healing in Modern and Ancient Greece: A Comparison(Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing/CSP) from 2023, Competing Ideologies inGreek Culture, Ancient and Modern (CSP) from 2019, Greek Festivals, Modern and Ancient: AComparison of Female and Male Values (CSP) 2 vols from 2017, Rituals of Death and Dying inModern and Ancient Greece: Writing History from a Female Perspective (CSP) from 2014, and theedited book Women, Pain and Death: Rituals and Everyday-Life on the Margins of Europe andBeyond (CSP) from 2008. She has published many articles and book chapters on festivals and ritualsin modern and ancient Greece. She presently works on the project, Greek travellers and travellers toGreece through the ages. In the period 1990-2008 Håland was affiliated with, inter alia, theUniversity of Bergen, Norway, where she worked as Lecturer/Research Fellow in history. Since 2009she has lectured at several European Universities, and in the period 2011-213 she worked as a MarieCurie Intra-European Fellow in the Department of Archaeology and History of Art, National andKapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.
