What is the meaning of life? This year’s Humanities students explored answers to this essential question by looking at how past civilizations gave their life meaning with their exhibition "Sailing to Byzantium."  The exhibition included a variety of creative artifacts such as paintings, drawings, poems, photographs, mosaics, and sculptures inspired by their class field study trip to Mystra and the Monasteries at Daphni and Kaisariani this past October.

Each student’s project was based on some aspect of his or her observations which were recorded on-site in the student’s field study notebook.

The title of the exhibition derives from Yeats’s famous poem “Sailing to Byzantium” (1927), in which he takes a spiritual journey to eternity through “monuments of unageing intellect” left behind by the Byzantine civilization.

The exhibit reflects the aspiration of the two-year Humanities course: to encourage and guide students in discovering their own humanity by studying the magnificent monuments of human civilization.

“Sailing to Byzantium”

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence:

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

---   Excerpt from W.B. Yeats