The names of Gilbert and Stewart Bagnani were well-known around Trent University and Peterborough, Ontario. It wasn’t just that they had taught part-time in the Classics Department after retiring from the University of Toronto, but their hospitality at Vogrie, their country house in the rolling hills near Port Hope, was legendary. An oasis of knowledge, the home was filled with stories of antiquity and excavations and art manifest in their enormous art gallery/library added to the house.
Gilbert died in 1985, leaving most of his property to Trent. Before her death in 1996, his wife Stewart donated many cartons of letters and photographs to the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Although unfortunately I never met the Bagnanis, when I heard that their papers had arrived in the archives at Trent in January 1998, I contacted the archivist who told me that among much else there were hieroglyphic texts! That was the beginning of a multi-faceted project lasting decades.
The most critical link in the project was Prof. Thomas Symons. After having been a student of Gilbert’s at the University of Toronto, by happenstance he became his neighbour in Toronto and, later as the Founding President of Trent University, also Gilbert’s employer at Trent. With so many social and professional links to both Gilbert and Stewart, Prof. Symons was always keen to support any research and public awareness of them.
It eventually became evident that their early lives in Europe could be neatly subdivided both chronologically and geographically: Gilbert’s student years in Greece in the early 1920s, their travels separately around Europe and North America and Egypt in the late 1920s, and their excavations in Egypt in the 1930s before emigrating from Rome to Port Hope, Ontario, Canada.
In particular Gilbert’s adventures around Greece were a narrative gift: the Odyssey meets Gone with the Wind. The life of a young archaeologist with a secret identity and on spy missions seems like fiction but was actually documented in Gilbert’s letters to his mother in Rome. Through the archaeological sites he visited he was transported to earlier Greek worlds, underwent an ordeal of sweltering heat, and eventually emerged a more mature hero.
The research for a second volume will require more time and travels in the Bagnanis’ footsteps around Italy, Hungary and Germany, postponed by COVID restrictions.
Due to the history of other related archives, the research for a third and final volume to complete the trilogy is well underway. Prof. Carlo Anti asked Gilbert to assist him in his Italian excavations at Tebtunis in the Fayyum basin south-west of Cairo in 1931 but was promoted in 1932 to become the Rector of the University of Padua, leaving Gilbert to act as Field Director until 1936. As a result, the relevant excavation archives are scattered not only in Toronto and Peterborough in Canada but also in Padua and Venice in Italy. A decade ago my Italian colleagues initiated an international collaborative project to research and publish these old previously unpublished excavations. Many academic papers have been presented at international conferences and subsequently published in Italy.
Photo ©Art Gallery of Ontario
Sincerest thanks to Dr Begg for this contribution to the Archaeopress Blog.
Read full details of Gilbert Bagnani’s Greek adventures in Lost Worlds of Ancient and Modern Greece (2020), published in the Archaeopress Archaeological Lives series (Hardback: £25, eBook: from £16).
For more information, or to contact the author, please visit: https://www.lostworlds.ca/
Watch Dr Begg’s recent presentation at the Canadian Institute in Greece: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFJEoGzs3NPPdo-2qa1vNKA
Book reviews for Lost Worlds of Ancient and Modern Greece:
This is a lively account of a formidable personality, scholar and archaeologist in the making. – Sir Michael Llewellyn Smith (2020), British Ambassodor to Greece 1996 – 1999
This first of three volumes based on {Bagnani’s] personal letters and news’ reports covers the momentous years from 1921-1924… We are treated to highly-entertaining sketches of leading archaeologists in Greece, and the way fieldwork was conducted, as well as the social life of the political class and wealthy elite of Athens. Informative, excellently-edited and a delight to read. – Professor John Bintliff (2020), Edinburgh University
This book stands as a major contribution—and an accessible one—to our understanding of the history of Greece in the years 1921-1924. In bringing Gilbert Bagnani back to life through his subject’s letters and through his own careful delving into primary sources, Ian Begg joins a group of scholars (among them Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan, Jack L. Davis, Susan Heuck Allen, Kostis Kourelis, Artemis Leontis, Despina Lalaki) who have examined the personal lives, attitudes and idiosyncrasies of archaeologists, artists and performers, anthropologists, and historians as entryways into the discoveries they made, using their personalities as lenses for their scholarly or artistic methods. Such approaches by later generations of scholars shed fresh light on the work of their predecessors and enlarge our understanding of the histories they wrote or performances they created. – Robert Pounder (2021): Bryn Mawr Classical Review
The titles of some books act like magnets. They pull you towards them and command attention… It is not about the lost worlds of Ancient Greece alone but also about the lost worlds of Modern Greece… Who is Gilbert Bagnani and what adventures is he having in Greece before and after the Asia Minor Catastrophe? Any hesitation you may have had vanishes into thin air when you start reading this absorbing, literate, informative and simply wonderful book. – James Karas (2022): Greek Press, Toronto, March 4, 2022
In 2022 Greece will be commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of the Asia Minor Catastrophe. There are only a few books in English accessible to a broad audience that consider the events of 1922. These include, for example, Michael Llewellyn Smith’s Ionian Vision (1973), Lou Ureneck’s The Great Fire (2015), and Philip Mansel’s Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean (2010). To these we should now add Begg’s Lost Worlds. Lost Worlds of Ancient and Modern Greece is also the first part of a projected trilogy that will follow Bagnani and his future wife Stewart (Mary Augusta Stewart Huston) throughout the 1920s and 1930s before they finally left Europe for a new life in Canada. We should all very much look forward to learning about the next stops in this journey… – Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan (2022): Journal of Modern Greek Studies
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