The Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture is pleased to announce the final lecture in our 2025–2026 lecture series.
Spindle Whorls and Women’s Work: Reframing Middle Byzantine Lives in the Athenian Agora
Fotini Kondyli, University of Virginia
March 4, 2026 | 12:00–1:30 pm (Eastern Standard Time, UTC -5)| | Zoom
Over 150 Middle Byzantine spindle whorls in bone and steatite have been uncovered in the Athenian Agora Excavations, found in domestic and work spaces as well as in burials. In this lecture, I move these objects out of the artifact catalogues where they often linger and let them speak, telling the stories of the women who used them and the non-elite lives they illuminate.
By tracing the “biographies” of these tools—their birth (materials, making, design), working life (use, skill, transmission), and economic movement (exchange, display, disposal)—we can reconstruct rhythms of women’s labor and situate spinning within the urban economy of Byzantine Athens. Highly decorated surfaces, combining polished planes with incised grooves and circles, reveal a tactile aesthetic meant to be felt as much as seen. These designs, often associated with sacred or protective motifs, suggest that spindle whorls were not merely functional but active participants in religious experience and domestic protection. Decoration also connects these objects to a wider world: parallels with Islamic spindle whorls from the 9th–10th-century point to cultural exchange through textiles and luxury goods, and their appropriation for aesthetic and apotropaic purposes in Byzantine contexts.
Portable and publicly performed, spinning transformed these tools into communication objects, signaling skill, status, and adherence to social norms, while transmitting tacit knowledge across generations. Thinking through these encounters, this lecture reframes spinning as a socially and religiously meaningful, economically consequential performance at the heart of Middle Byzantine urban life.
Fotini Kondyli is Associate Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology at the University of Virginia. She researches spatial practices, community-building processes, the material culture of Byzantine non-elites, and cultural, economic, and political networks in the Eastern Mediterranean in the Late Byzantine period (13th-15th centuries).
Advance registration required. Register: https://maryjahariscenter.org/events/spindle-whorls-and-womens-work
Contact Brandie Ratliff (mjcbac@hchc.edu), Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture with any questions.
