Holy Places and Sacred Spaces in Ancient Greece

For thousands of years, travelers have been astonished at the physical beauty of Ancient Greek sites such as Olympia, Delphi, and Delos. For anyone who visits these numinous sites, it's easy to see why the Greeks believed that the gods loved them, too. In this course we will be exploring the notion of sacred space in Greek, with emphasis on sanctuaries, topography, archaeological phenomenology, and pilgrimage. We will research and discuss sites and sanctuaries from literary, archaeological, and other material and theoretical perspectives; we will also ask what about certain spaces and places leads us to regard them as 'sacred'.