In October 2025, the “Journeys to the Ancient World” Conference Cycle was inaugurated at the D. Diogo de Sousa Archaeological Museum, an event that will feature the participation of several invited speakers.

 

• On October 10, 2025, the first lecture in the series, entitled Journeys to places in Greece where I’ve never been” was given by Professor Carlos Fiolhais.

Synopsis:

One of my fondest memories from high school history classes was discovering Ancient Greece. The teacher would show us slides full of light and ruins. The first article I wrote for a newspaper was about the Parthenon, for which I consulted the book “Hélade” by Maria Helena Rocha Pereira. At university, I taught History of Science, so I spoke about science in Ancient Greece, which dawned with Thales and Anaximander of Miletus, and developed with Pythagoras of Samos, Aristotle of Stagira, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, Archimedes of Syracuse, and Hipparchus of Nicaea, among others. I have been to many places in the world, scattered across almost every continent. In Europe, I have been to most countries, but, due to chance and much to my regret, I never had the opportunity to visit the lands of these wise men. The closest I came was when I visited what remains of some Greek cities in Turkey, in Bodrum/Halicarnassus and Cnidus. I couldn’t help but get emotional, since I am, like everyone in Europe and the world, an heir to the ancient Greek world. I will talk about these and other sites in Greece that I have never been to but long to visit, emphasizing the debt that science owes to those people.

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• On November 21, 2025, the next conference in the series was titled GNÔTHI S’AUTÓN OR FROM PHYSICS TO ETHICS – The Ancient World and the Genesis of the Human Sciences, and was given by Professor José Carlos de Miranda.

Synopsis:

Humanity has never existed without the mythical and symbolic thought developed in religions. And it continues to draw meaning from it to give to existence. But the mastery of the world afforded by science and technology that we enjoy today is due to the emergence of another kind of thought, logic, which was added to it around the 5th century BC. It is the thought that attempts to describe the world in terms of cause and effect. Its first exercise came to be called Philosophy, and the object that attracted its first practitioners, the “physicists,” was Nature (Physis). When this thought turned from the world to be known to the subject who knows it, a new Philosophy, Ethics, the matrix of all Human Sciences, was added to Physics, the matrix of all Natural Sciences. We will thus see how this classification, which continues to so profoundly structure Science and Education today, originates in the Ancient World.

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• On January 16, 2026 will take place the third conference, From Roman villas to recreational or cultivated farms, for recreation and rest“, given by Professor Teresa Andresen.

Synopsis:

To explore a typological continuity of ordered structures inscribed in the landscape as places of production and leisure, as a pretext for interpreting the cultural evolution of rural space and for questioning the challenges it faces today. From a productive and rational connection to the land—symbol of sustenance, order, and business, associated with refuge and distance, pleasure and contemplation, and leisure—to a disengagement from the land toward a new re-connection.

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• On February 27, 2026, the conference Orient Express: Routes Through Antiquity in the (Pre)Islamic Universe“, the fourth of the Cycle, will be presented by Professor Jorge Correia (EAAD/Lab2PT/IN2PAST).

Synopsis:

In 1883, a train journey between Paris and Istanbul was inaugurated that would become legendary: the Orient Express. It carried its passengers to the gates of Asia and the Grand Tour, opening the way to the vestiges and ghosts of Western history, now “disfigured” by Arab, Persian, and Turkish cultures—all of Islamic origin. This lecture proposes a journey that, departing from the ruins of Constantinople, traces itineraries through time, (re)discovering landscapes and cities of archaic and classical Antiquity, as well as the present-day Islamic world stretching across the Middle East and North Africa. From the indigenous civilizations of the Fertile Crescent to the first wave of Greek expansion, from Hellenistic and Nabataean regionalisms to the rings of Roman colonization, the route is composed of personal impressions transformed into a shared journey, albeit a virtual one. Including even Byzantine echoes, countless crystallized ruins remain that we read as stone testimonies of a colonial and Orientalist culture; others, reconfigured in continuously occupied cities, help us understand the spatial characteristics of Islam.

 

More information about the conference series: HERE