Yuri Svoyski

Archaeological excavations of the expedition conducted by the Centre of Classical and Oriental Archaeology at the Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies, HSE University, were held in the city of Agrigento, on Sicily. The Second Archaeological School, which was based on that expedition, took place from the 4^th to the 25^th of September, 2021.

This year’s field season is over, and despite the difficulties caused by the pandemic, archaeologists from the Centre of Classical and Oriental Archaeology at the Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies (IOCS) were able to undertake their scheduled expeditions to Italy, Turkey, and Abkhazia. The Centre is the only Russian institution that conducts regular archaeological research in the Mediterranean region—the heart of ancient civilization, where neither Soviet nor Russian classical archaeologists have ever worked before.

On 26 March 2021, it was announced that Dr Arkadiy Avdokhin, Associate Professor at the Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies, Senior research fellow at the Centre for Medieval Studies, HSE University, was successful in his application for a research grant to fund a 4-year Russian-Austrian project on pilgrims’ inscriptions in Byzantium and Old Rus’. The project has received funding from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR) and the Austrian science fund (FWF Der Wissensсhaftsfond).

In 2019, HSE will begin accepting students to its new Master's programme in Classical and Oriental Archaeology for the first time. Prior to admission, however, prospective students had the opportunity to participate in an archaeological school in Sicily, where they discovered rare bronze phialae dating back to the 6th century BC during the excavations.

From the 1st to the 12th of May, 2019 an Archaeological School took place in the city of Agrigento on the Sicily, Italy. It was organized by the Centre of Classical and Oriental Archaeology, IOCS HSE (Prof. Dr.hab. Askold Ivantchik, Prof. Dr. Valentina Mordvintseva, Yuri Svoyski, Engineer). The School was conducted in the frame of an international archaeological expedition (University of Bordeaux-Montaigne, France and HSE, Russia, with the participation of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, USA).