FRIENDS OF ñ WEBINARS
Who Were the Thracians? Exploring an Enigmatic Ancient Culture at the Getty Villa Museum
Friends of ñ present the next webinar of the 2024-2025 season on December 4, 2024, at 7:00 pm EST, presented by Dr. Sara E. Cole. This webinar will be free and open to the public. Registration through Zoom (with a valid email address) is required. Please note that this webinar will not be recorded.
The land of ancient Thrace comprised present-day Bulgaria, much of Romania, and parts of Greece and Turkey, and the tribal peoples who inhabited these territories of the North Aegean region were the Thracians. They were renowned for their skill as warriors and horsemen, as well as for their wealth in precious metals, but they left few written records, and knowledge of their history and customs has long been dependent on brief accounts from ancient Greek authors, particularly Herodotus and Thucydides. Thracians appeared in Greek myth as formidable adversaries in the Trojan War, cruel kings, and followers of the god of spiritual ecstasy, Dionysos. Spectacular archaeological discoveries made in Thracian lands during modern times, however, have provided firsthand evidence of this remarkable culture, illuminating Thrace’s interactions with Greece, Persia, and Rome.
This rich history is the subject of the current special exhibition at the Getty Villa Museum in Los Angeles, Ancient Thrace and the Classical World: Treasures from Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece (on view November 4, 2024 – March 3, 2025). The exhibition, which is organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture, Republic of Bulgaria, and the National Archaeological Institute with Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (NAIM-BAS), is part of the Getty’s ongoing series The Classical World in Context, which includes major international loan exhibitions, related publications, and programming that feature the diverse cultures and civilizations that interacted with and influenced Greece and Rome. In this lecture, Sara E. Cole, associate curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum and one of the exhibition’s co-curators, will discuss the Getty’s presentation of Thracian history, culture, and art.
Dr. Sara E. Cole holds a PhD in Ancient History from Yale University and is an associate curator of antiquities at the Getty Villa Museum in Los Angeles, CA. Before joining the Getty in 2016, she served as the graduate curatorial intern in the antiquities department of the Yale University Art Gallery, where she worked with the YUAG’s collection of ancient glass and curated the 2017 exhibition “Drink That You May Live”: Ancient Glass from the Yale University Art Gallery.
Sara is managing curator of the Getty’s ongoing initiative The Classical World in Context and she has curated or co-curated multiple Getty exhibitions exploring the ancient cultures of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Nubia, Persia, and Thrace. She co-edited the 2022 Getty exhibition catalogue Persia: Ancient Iran and the Classical World, which won the Association of American Publishers PROSE Award in the category “Art Exhibitions.” The 2018 Getty exhibition catalogue Beyond the Nile: Egypt and the Classical World, which she also co-edited, was a finalist for the College Art Association Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award and the Association of American Publishers PROSE award in the category “Art Exhibitions.”