The Irish Institute of Hellenic Studies at Athens invites you to a St Patrick's Day online lecture by Dr Eric Haywood (University College Dublin), entitled “St Patrick to the Rescue! Travelling from Constantinople to Ireland in the 15th Century”. This will take place at 5pm (Irish time)/ 7pm (Greek time) on Thursday 18th March. The lecture will be introduced by her Excellency Ambassador of Ireland to Greece Iseult Fitzgerald.

In the middle ages ST PATRICK’S PURGATORY was one of the most famous places of pilgrimage in Europe. Those who went there (and survived the experience) were reputed to be granted visions of the otherworld and earned a safe-conduct to Paradise in the afterlife. But according to a famous 15th-century Florentine writer, Andrea da Barberino, author of the picaresque novel Poor Little Guerrino [Guerrino il meschino], it also served as a missing persons bureau! Guerrino thought he was a Greek from Constantinople but then discovered he was an Italian from Apulia. He thought he was a free man, but then discovered he was slave, bought at the slave market of Thessaloniki. He thought he knew his parents, but then discovered they’d been missing for 20 years. So he set out to find them on a 10-year journey across the world, in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, until all was finally revealed to him at St Patrick’s Purgatory.

Eric Haywood is Associate Professor of Italian Studies (emeritus) at University College Dublin, specialising in Italian Renaissance literature. He is the author of Fabulous Ireland, Ibernia Fabulosa. Imagining Ireland in Renaissance Italy (Oxford, Peter Lang, 2014). His illustrated lecture will set Poor Little Guerrino in its historical context and tell you things about Ireland and St Patrick you never knew and wouldn’t believe!

Please register via Eventbrite below and you will receive the Zoom link to attend the lecture nearer the time

Email for any further information: irishinstitutegr@gmail.com