Friday, April 17, 2009
Hollins professors offer afternoon's journey to Crete
Priscilla Richardson | Special to The Botetourt View
Chris Richter and Tina Salowey are married professors at Hollins who are Springwood residents.
Priscilla Richardson is columnist The Botetourt View. You can contact her at 981-3430 or via e-mail.
Priscilla Richardson
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Especially when you come from flat land, this area can really enchant. It happened to Springwood's Tina Salowey and her husband Chris Richter, two professors at Hollins. They will be speaking at the Glebe on April 30, 3:30 p.m. in the free Life Long Learning Lecture series. All the fun of college without the exams, so don't miss it.
"I met my husband at Hollins," Salowey said. "We met and courted and got married. We weren't really looking for a house, just looked around to see what we might like. When we found this [Springwood] house we liked it because it was a log house. It was raining that day, but we came back to look again on a clear day. You could see the mountains. It knocked our socks off. We looked at each other and said, 'this is it.' Beauty at the end of the day, coming home to this part of the world. It's a treat."
And their joint lecture should be a treat, too, because they both know so much about their topic, Crete. Salowey has spent years studying the classics field. Chris Richter specializes in communications, but he's also taking a class in modern Greek. They both led a tour for Hollins students to Crete this January. You will share in that.
"One of our goals for the trip," Salowey said, "was to learn about Greece from ancient times to present, and Crete in particular. There's so much wonderful stuff there. I like to look at Crete as an island. And as an island it has a certain amount of isolation, with unique biological areas, where plants and animals thrive that don't thrive anywhere else in the Mediterranean.
"When you live on an island, there's a certain continuity of life. The way they dealt with olives is the same as today. They use everything: the fruit, the oil and the pits. They grind up the pits and make bricks to burn for heat. Researchers have found this same fuel in Minoan hearths of 4,000 years ago. Potters up in the mountains are using the same clays and glazes and techniques they used 4,000 years ago, so it's often difficult to distinguish an old pot from a new.
"We expect them [students] to master some facts but also to get a sense of the culture from ancient times to the present. And get the sense that Crete has been a real crossroads of the world since ancient times, between Europe and the East and Africa."
Richter, 56, started his work life after an English degree as an administrator at Ohio State University. "But I wanted to get into academia as a teacher. So I lighted on communications and went back to school full time. I taught as a graduate student and then came to Hollins in 1995.
"My interest in Greece started when I met Tina. For our most recent trip I did my best to cover the more modern aspects of Crete's history and kind of fell in love with the country. We both like Greek food and cooking Greek food very much."
Salowey, 49, with a double undergraduate major in chemistry and classics and then a master's in organic chemistry, at first worked in the pharmaceutical industry. "But I would read Homer," she said, leading her to a master's in classical languages and then a Ph.D. in classics. She got her doctorate at Bryn Mawr, a school that pioneered graduate education for women in classics over a hundred years ago.
Each professor will come to area schools when asked, so be sure to spread that word. But for now, bring your questions about Greece and come to be enchanted with a trip to a time and land far away.
