Two students reflect on their experiences as participants in the Yale ISM 2016 Spring Break travel seminar.
This past March, a group of students enrolled in the seminar “Art and Ritual at Mount Sinai” (co-taught by Professors Vasileios Marinis and Rob Nelson) journeyed across the globe to see visual art in its original context. Contrary to what the course title might suggest, however, we didn’t actually get to visit Mount Sinai. When safety concerns in Egypt emerged early in the semester, our instructors redirected our focus: instead of merely studying Sinai, we also began reading about what is now Eastern Europe, a region heavily influenced by the Byzantine Empire. During our trip, we visited several different cities, churches, and monasteries throughout Serbia, Kosovo, and Macedonia. Perhaps a more appropriate name for the course, in light of all that transpired, might be “Art and Ritual in Byzantium and Beyond.” And as we soon discovered, it was the “beyond” portion of the seminar that turned out to be the most enriching part of our experience, broadening both our research interests and our worldviews.
The trip was a whirlwind. Over the course of eleven days during Yale’s Spring Break, we visited nineteen monastic Eastern Orthodox churches in three separate countries, listened to twelve presentations from our classmates, and gazed in awe at thousands of painted figures and icons. Each church we visited was covered from floor to (often towering) domed ceiling with frescoes depicting narrative biblical scenes, royal figures, saints, bishops, and other icons. They were like nothing I had seen before.
I took notes on my phone for the duration of the trip. These notes are usually only a sentence or two long, reflecting the frequent need to look up from writing to marvel or move along. They are sometimes related to the subjects we traveled to study (“Dormition image above the exit to the nave/naos extends to the ceiling; it shows the Virgin laying horizontally and the Virgin’s soul personified as a swaddled infant, contrastingly vertical in Christ’s arms,” I wrote on the first day of the trip near Ziça Monastery). Sometimes the notes simply recorded things that I found odd or humorous: “First song heard in Serbia: ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody.’ Apparently our bus driver is a Whitney Houston fan.” On the second day of the trip I wrote, “If you had told me a year ago that I would be attending a vespers service at an Eastern Orthodox monastery in Serbia for Spring Break, I would have laughed at you. But that’s just what I did.” Most often, though, I wrote about the experience of being in a new place, an educational, enriching experience that is altogether more formative than any seminar or library or lecture alone could ever hope to be.