In March 2025, I had the privilege of studying at the 2 week Greek Numismatics course at the British School at Athens. Here’s some general information about the course, as well as some personal reflections.
The course runs in March every 2 years- the next scheduled course will therefore be in March 2027. It is open to students pursuing postgraduate degrees: places are limited to 12 and the course tends to be oversubscribed. The application process took place in November 2024 and places were allocated in early 2025- I would expect the application process for the 2027 course to follow the same timescale. This was a summer course in previous years but most of the attendees (including myself) were happy with the 18-20 degree Celsius temperatures rather than 30 plus! The British School at Athens is a beautiful building located in a private compound in the stylish Kolonaki area of Athens, home to various embassies, upmarket shops and a range of restaurants and cafes. Syntagma Square and the Acropolis are within easy walking distance, and the Evangelismos Underground Station is a stone’s throw away.
Here’s a link to the BSA website: https://www.bsa.ac.uk/
The BSA is ideally set up as a venue for courses of this nature. As well as having an extensive library and rooms for teaching, there is an integral hostel, with bedrooms (mainly shared) and shared cooking facilities and a dining room. A basic breakfast is supplied and some meals. Partners of course participants are not generally offered accommodation in the hostel, but there is a good choice of rental accommodation in Kolonaki and surrounding areas.
The course lecturers are Claire Rowan and Mairi Gkikaki of Warwick University, both world renowned published numismatists, as well as various local lecturers, all experts in their own particular fields. The standard of teaching was consequently phenomenally high, with all lecturers enthusiastically engaging with the students and producing some lively debates.
Participants were asked to arrive on Sunday and teaching began on Monday. The school was very accommodating for people who found it suited them to arrive a day or two earlier or leave a day or two later. We also received our museum pass at this point, which is valid for an incredible 3 years! The museum pass is not valid for the private museums and the entry cost of public museums is generally very reasonable, but this still represents a valuable perk of the course.
Now to discuss the actual course. We had a general orientation on Monday morning, followed by brief presentations by the students to introduce themselves: students varied from those with minimal experience of working with coins, to those with more experience who were looking to expand or develop their knowledge. Then followed the hard work! Lectures were from 9am to 4pm with morning and afternoon breaks and an hour for lunch. The ‘early’ finishes were very popular with some of the participants, as museums were often open late and were much quieter in the evenings. Some of the private museums operated ‘free days’ which again was very popular. The lecture content started on the Monday with the presentation of 2 coins from the BSA collection to each student to identify from scratch- a scary concept when you had never done anything like this before! And to make matters worse, we were informed that one of the coins was a forgery: no-one was looking forward to being the student to miss a fake! The lecturers were on hand though, to give us help and guidance. Lectures started with general principles of numismatic orientation, pre-coinage, numismatic resources and die studies. During the first week we were taught about the coinages of individual areas such as Classical Athens, Macedonia, Aegina and the signing artist coinage of Sicily. A visit was also arranged to the nearby American School at Athens to have a look at a selection of their coin collection. This was a new excursion for the course, and one which is likely to be repeated: they were a friendly bunch, with yet another selection of amazing coins.
On Friday, we had a morning visit to Laurion in the southeastern part of Greece, where the silver mines and ore washeries were located in antiquity. This was an amazing experience. A wonderful seafood lunch by the beach in the shadow of the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion was followed by an unforgettable trip to the Temple of Poseidon itself.
After Saturday morning lectures, with the Saturday afternoon and Sunday free, the second week was just as intensive, with lectures on the coinages of the Persian Empire and Ptolemaic coinage, amongst others. A particular fun activity was a die study exercise: interesting and enjoyed by all (Fig. 2). Arranged visits were to the Agora of Athens, the Museum of the Bank of Greece, and the phenomenal Numismatic Museum. There was also time taken out to work on our coins, as well as do our 5 minute presentation on each coin. My favourite presentation coin was a very cute Aegina Sea Turtle from around 500 BCE. Wish I could have taken it home!
A few points about the course:
- The 2025 cost was £800 per person for teaching, accommodation, trips, the museum pass and some meals. Travel and incidental expenses are not included. Funding was available for some subsidised places through the Royal Numismatic Society- you can apply for a course bursary with a short statement in support of your request at the same time as your general course application. Some students had also managed to get their airfare funded through their university. However, if you don’t manage to get funding this cost still represents very good value for money. If you prefer to arrange your own accommodation you will also get a discount on the overall cost- my bill was reduced to £500 because I wasn’t residing in the hostel.
- This is an intensive, fast paced but extremely enjoyable course. It was very organised, with a good balance between lectures, hands on numismatic experience and excursions. It is a course which can be accessed from a place of varying levels of prior experience, allowing each student to develop their numismatic knowledge and research skills on an individual basis. A particular personal highlight was the lecture on the signing artist coinage of Sicily, which I intend to research further, particularly in view of the extensive collection of these coins held at the Hunterian. Overall, this course was an amazing experience, and I would highly recommend it. Here’s a video on YouTube with some course highlights!
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