Konferans- ANAMED, Istanbul: Güneşte Bir Viking: Harald Hardrada Akdeniz'e En İyi Belgelenmiş "Viking" Ziyaretçisi (İngilizce)

16 Ekim 2025-17.00

Koç Üniversitesi Sevgi Gönül Bizans Araştırmaları Merkezi (GABAM), İstanbul İsveç Araştırma Enstitüsü (SRII), ANAMED tarafından düzenlenen "A Viking in the Sun: Harald Hardrada as Best Documented "Viking" Visitor to the Mediterranean" (1Güneşte Bir Viking: Harald Hardrada Akdeniz'e En İyi Belgelenmiş "Viking" Ziyaretçisi") başlıklı yüzyüze konferans ile ilgili bilgiler aşağıdadır:

Konuşmacılar: Gianluca Raccagni, Bergur Thorgeirsson

Moderatör: Olof Heilo

“Harald Hardrada is especially well known, both within and outside academia, for his exploits as king of Norway, as testified by his popular epithets “hardrada” and “the last Viking.” They refer to his severe style of rulership and his death at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, which marked the end of the Viking Age in England and was a prelude to its Norman conquest. A Viking in the Sun is an international, collaborative, and interdisciplinary project that wishes to highlight Harald’s surprisingly unrecognized status as the best-documented “Viking” visitor to the Mediterranean. Moreover, the project also aims to use that status as a common thread to explore themes related to Mediterranean societies and their connections with the Nordic world in the liminal period between the late Viking age and the eve of the crusades. This paper illustrates the project, discusses the great variety of sources available on Harald’s Mediterranean encounters (including Old Norse, Latin, and Greek texts from across a geographical span that stretches from Iceland to Byzantium), shows how the project uses them for a thematic exploration of Harald’s times, and introduces its developing synergies with the virtual exhibition Nordic Tales, Byzantine Paths in collaboration with the Koç University Sevgi Gönül Center for Byzantine Studies and the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul.”

“Gianluca Raccagni is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History and Director of the History and Games Lab at the University of Edinburgh. He graduated in Medieval History from the University of Bologna and moved for his postgraduate studies to the University of Cambridge, where he subsequently held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, after which he was Canon Foundation Research Fellow at the Department of Occidental History of the University of Tokyo. Raccagni is the Principal Investigator of the project ‘A Viking the Sun: Harald Hardrada, the Mediterranean, and the Nordic World, between the Late Viking Age and the Eve of the Crusades.”

“Bergur Thorgeirsson is a literary scholar and a medievalist and studied at the University of Iceland and the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. He is the director of Snorrastofa, a cultural and medieval research center in western Iceland dedicated to the Icelandic medieval writer, poet, and chieftain Snorri Sturluson. He mainly studies the Old Icelandic _fornaldarsögur_ (legendary sagas) and Eddic poetry. He is also doing research on the reception of Old Icelandic literature in the nineteenth century and in the beginning of the twentieth. He is the chairman of the international project ‘Pre-Christian Religions of the North’ and the supervisor of the national project ‘Medieval Icelandic Literacy,’ initiated by Snorrastofa and funded by the government of Iceland.”

“Olof Heilo is a historian and director of the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul. He finished his PhD in Byzantine studies at the University of Vienna in 2010 and has since been teaching and working on South-East European and Middle Eastern history in a broad sense, with a special focus on empires.”

The in-person panel is open to public and no registration is required