Mischief Managed: Gino’s Fellowship, Part II

Gino with guests at the reception following his lecture at the CIG

Since my last blog, I have had a ridiculous number of adventures in Greece. I am now writing this blog in the field, trowel-sprained in the wrists and covered with cuts from thorns, since I am now back to excavating in the Greek-Canadian archaeological project at Kastro Kallithea, looking back at an extraordinary year.

In the month after my last blog, I gave a lecture on the research on Thessalian religion that I had been doing at the CIG, and it turned out to be a well-attended lecture. I was also pleased with the grand total of nine people who tuned in to watch the lecture online. It was a great experience; the feedback from the audience gave me questions to look into for my future research.

Gino inside the Tomb of Clytemnestra at Mycenae

I visited more of Greece this year than in all of my previous trips combined. I started 2013 year off with a trip up to the Pagasitic Gulf for some personal research, followed by a visit to Corinth to see some friends. Not long after, I visited a couple of sites in the Argolid. I tagged along with the Australian summer students on their trip to Delphi. I also tagged along with the American School students during their trip to Euboea, during which I ended up crawling through the narrow tunnel underneath the theatre at Eretria. During the Easter holidays, I went on a long road trip with three friends around mainland Greece, going from Athens to Thebes, the Itean Gulf, the Ambracian Gulf, Ioannina, Vikos Gorge, several mountain villages in Epirus, Kalambaka, Karditsa, Lamia and then back to Athens.

Gino's road trip around mainland Greece during the Easter break

I also had a great experience working with the digitization of the CIG archive. After I finished doing all the background research on the different CIG projects, I began to upload images and information onto the website. I have to give an enormous amount of credit to the previous interns, Rachel Dewan and Alisha Adams, who did a lot of the hard labour for the scanning and entering of information onto the website. Without their work, my job would have been a lot harder. Every image I uploaded required the creation of several entries, several numbers, and the manual entry of repetitive data. It was long and tedious…but necessary. The whole process of doing background research and getting first-hand experience at helping create the archive has been a great experience which has given me many practical research skills.

Gino bartending for the CIG Open Meeting

My fellowship ended memorably with the Canadian Institute’s Annual Open Meeting for which I prepared the food and bartended for the reception. I can honestly say I had never made so much food in my entire life.

This year, there were numerous things that I did that I did not think I would do during the tenure of my fellowship. Among them, was wearing a dress for the Frocktober party at the American School, performing a small role as a Roman dinosaur-emperor in a student-directed musical, and eating frog legs in Ioannina. I have made an enormous number of new friends in Athens this year and my fellowship would have been a lot less colourful without them.

Gino Canlas
Alföldi-Rosenbaum Fellow, CIG