Legendary Turkey and the Turquoise Coast

Luca Zavagno is an associate professor in the Department of History and the Department of Archaeology at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. He has authored many articles and essays on early medieval and Byzantine Mediterranean, covering topics such as urbanism, Cyprus from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages, and the history of cross-cultural encounters in the medieval and early modern eras.

A graduate of the University of Venice, Luca obtained his PhD at the University of Birmingham with a dissertation on the society, economics, and politics of Byzantine cities in the early Middle Ages. He was twice awarded the Dumbarton Oaks Summer Fellowship as well as the prestigious Stanley Seeger Fellowship of the Hellenic Studies Center at Princeton University. He was also recently appointed one of Notre Dame University’s Andrew Mellon Fellows.

Hipólito Rafael Chacón is the Bruce and Suzanne Crocker Director of the Montana Museum of Art and Culture and a professor of art history and criticism at the University of Montana-Missoula. During more than 30 years of teaching, he has lectured on a broad range of subjects, from the Renaissance to Ancient Egyptian art, to the influence of Islamic art on southern Europe during the Middle Ages. He received his PhD in art history with honors from the University of Chicago, having been awarded numerous research fellowships to study in Europe and the Mediterranean basin, including an award from the Spanish Ministry of Culture for his dissertation on Michelangelism in Renaissance art. Rafael has written on a range of topics related to Renaissance and baroque art, both in Europe and in the Americas, most recently focusing on revival-style architecture in the U.S. during the late 19th century. He has been awarded the top national and international prizes for his research in the field of vexillology, or flag studies. Rafael has been an expert for many Smithsonian Journeys programs and has twice walked the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage route across France and Spain.

Roger Crowley is a UK-based writer and historian and a graduate of Cambridge University. As the child of a naval family, his fascination with the Mediterranean world and its surrounding area started early, on the island of Malta. He has lived in Istanbul, walked across much of western Turkey, and traveled throughout the region over many years—from Spain and Portugal to the Black Sea. His interests are the Portuguese, Byzantine, Venetian, and Ottoman empires, seafaring, and eyewitness history. He has lectured to a wide range of audiences and groups of travelers, appeared on television and radio programs, and written for many different publications, including Smithsonian Journeys Travel Quarterly about Venice. He is the author of six much acclaimed books, including 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople; Empires of the Sea; City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas; Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire; The Accursed Tower: The Fall of Acre and the End of the Crusades; and most recently Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World.

Allan Langdale grew up on Vancouver Island wondering what the rest of the world was like and has spent much of his adult life finding out. Allan is an art and architectural historian, photographer, filmmaker, and travel writer who received his Ph.D. in art history from UC Santa Barbara. He has taught courses in Italian Renaissance art, Greek, Roman, Byzantine (including Georgian and Armenian architecture), and Indian and Islamic art and architecture. He currently teaches art history at UC Santa Cruz as a lecturer.

Along with several articles, Allan wrote the definitive architectural field guide to the little-known region of Turkish Cyprus, In a Contested Realm (2012) and also made the award-winning documentary film The Stones of Famagusta: the Story of a Forgotten City (2008). His travel books include Palermo: Travels in the City of Happiness (2015) and The Hippodrome of Istanbul / Constantinople: An Illustrated Handbook of its History (2019).

A popular Smithsonian Expert, Allan has traveled extensively in the eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea region, the Middle East—including Jordan and Egypt—and India.

Dr. Lawrence Butler is an art historian whose teaching and scholarly interests range from medieval Europe and the Islamic world across pre-modern Eurasia—including the Silk Road connections between the Mediterranean world and East Asia. While teaching at George Mason University, Larry served as director of the art history program and as coordinator of the Ancient Mediterranean Art and Archaeology minor. 

Larry received his BA and MA from Oberlin College and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. He was a Fulbright Research Fellow in Turkey in 1982-83, and has been an active participant in the Semester at Sea program, taking students on academic study tours around the world. He also taught at Hiram College and held research positions at a number of museums.

In 2004, Larry was awarded George Mason University’s Teaching Excellence Award and in 2005 he was elected to Phi Beta Delta, the honorary society for international education. He lectures frequently for the Smithsonian Associates on the arts and cultural history of Spain and Portugal, Turkey, China, and many other places in between.

Carrie Weaver is a Mediterranean archaeologist and research affiliate of the University of Pittsburgh. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and has been teaching, writing, and researching for over 15 years. Her area of specialization is the art, architecture, and archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean world, with an emphasis on funerary art and architecture, burial practices, and the analysis of human bone. She has excavated in Pompeii and Sicily, and analyzed human remains from Rome, Sicily, Turkey, and the UK. Carrie is the author of The Bioarchaeology of Classical Kamarina: Life and Death in Greek Sicily (University Press of Florida, 2015) and Marginalised Populations in the Ancient Greek World: The Bioarchaeology of the Other (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), and the co-editor of The Ancient Art of Transformation: Case Studies from Mediterranean Contexts (Oxbow Books, 2019).

Janet Duncan Jones, Professor Emerita of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Bucknell University, is an archaeologist with over 40 years‘ experience in the field. She has participated in excavation projects in Turkey, Greece, Tunisia, and Jordan. Her experience as a glassblower out of college ignited a career long research interest in preindustrial technologies and the lives of early craft workers. While living in villages in the Middle East she became interested in the impacts of preindustrial technologies on the ancient environment and the evolution of cultural landscapes. Her publications include studies of the ancient glass from sites in Turkey and Jordan, and synthetic considerations of the landscape of ancient ruins and of the messages and impacts of ancient mega-engineering projects. Recently she has focused her work on the impact of the Moors in southern Spain on urbanism, architecture, technology, and intellectual history.

Janet has lived in Turkey and Greece, and has traveled widely with an eye toward the messages that landscapes send us about the values and concerns of past peoples. She holds degrees from the College of William and Mary and from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she also acquired a devotion to ACC basketball. She lives in the mountains of central Pennsylvania with her geographer husband and hounds descended from those she originally imported from the Euphrates Valley in southeastern Turkey. 

Stephen Clancy is an art and architectural historian with expertise in ancient, medieval, and Renaissance art and architecture. He recently retired as professor of art history at Ithaca College in New York, where he taught for 27 years. He received his PhD from Cornell University, and his research career began with a focus on 15th-century French and Flemish illuminated manuscripts, for which he received a Fulbright scholarship in Brussels, Belgium. Stephen also received grants from the Hewlett and Keck foundations to investigate how technology can open up new avenues for understanding the architecture of the distant past. This culminated in his work with a team from the University of Melbourne in Australia on an interactive tool entitled “Virtual Chartres Cathedral.” As a visiting fellow at the Australia National University in Canberra, he focused on interactions between Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the Mediterranean basin during the Middle Ages.

The academic pursuit he has enjoyed above all others is teaching and sharing his knowledge of art and architecture. A popular Smithsonian Journeys Expert, he has led more than 20 tours and cruises through the Mediterranean region and northern Europe.