Glimpses of the 2016 Harvard Summer Program in Greece

Alumni describe their participation in the program as life-changing, unforgettable, culturally and intellectually enriching.
The 2016 Harvard Summer Program in Greece (Comparative Cultures Seminar) came to an end on July 31. The five-week-long Comparative Cultures Seminar is the oldest continuously running and one of the most successful Harvard study-abroad programs. Divided between the seaside town of Nafplio and the historical city of Thessaloniki, the program celebrated its fifteenth year during this summer.
Since the summer of 2002, when it was launched, a total of over 275 students from the four corners of the world have come to Greece, for an intensive five-week course on the theme of “Comparative empires in the Eastern Mediterranean and Eurasia; A survey of cross-cultural interaction from ancient times to the present.”
The Program is fundamentally interdisciplinary, combining historical, literary, philosophical, and linguistic approaches to cultural exchange. The pedagogical model is interactive and research-driven, with several faculty members and students exchanging ideas around the seminar table, making it a real laboratory for comparative and collaborative thinking. The diversity of its participants, enhancing the program’s cross-cultural focus, is supported by several scholarships that the Center for Hellenic Studies awards every year to students from Greece and China.

The Center for Hellenic Studies is pleased to introduce the 2016 team in the following video:

This past summer, the group spent three weeks in Nafplio and two weeks in Thessaloniki, attending seminars and visiting local sites and museums. Among others, in Thessaloniki, the group visited the Museum of Byzantine Culture, where students were guided in the exhibition by an expert archaeologist and attended one of their seminars in Melina Merkouri Amphitheater (hosted and kindly sponsored by the Museum of Byzantine Culture). Moreover, the students also visited the Town Hall of Thessaloniki, where they met with the Mayor, Mr. Boutaris.
To learn more about the programs, join our travels in the past fifteen years.
In summer 2017, the program will start on June 25 and conclude on July 30, spending three weeks in Nafplio and two weeks in Thessaloniki, as in the recent past. Applications will open in early December.

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