Inventing the Martyrial Colosseum. Cultural Memory and the Fragility of Early Christian Heritage
ENCOUNTERS II – Lecture by Dr. Christina Videbech
(Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and
Religion, University of Bergen)
The Norwegian Institute at Athens has the pleasure of inviting you to the second lecture of ENCOUNTERS, a joint lecture series organised by the Norwegian Institutes in Rome and Athens, alternating between the two cities. Launched in October 2025 in Rome, the series gives the floor to early-career scholars from Norway, Italy and Greece on topics connecting the cultures, histories, and academic traditions of the Mediterranean and the Nordic countries.
Abstract
The Roman Colosseum is today widely imagined as the quintessential site of Christian
martyrdom and early Christian suffering. This lecture offers a critical reassessment of that
assumption by confronting the striking absence of late antique evidence linking the amphitheatre to martyrdom, Christian ritual, or devotional memory. Unlike other Roman amphitheatres, which are explicitly connected to martyr narratives, cult practices, or later commemorative traditions, the Colosseum is conspicuously absent from early Christian textual, epigraphic, and archaeological records. No ancient martyr acts are set there, and no late antique Christian graffiti mark the monument. Instead, the Colosseum’s Christianization as a memory space seems to have been the product of later politically and religiously driven processes of cultural memory. From the early modern period onward, the monument was retrospectively recast as a universal symbol of persecution, suffering, and Christian triumph, drawing on generalized notions of Roman violence rather than historically grounded traditions. This transformation reveals the fragility of heritage narratives that privilege symbolic resonance over evidence-based historical continuity. The Colosseum thus emerges as a powerful example of how imagined pasts are constructed, re-imagined, and changed over time.
Biographical Information
Christina Videbech is a classical archaeologist specializing in Late Antiquity and Early
Christianity, with a particular focus on the transformation of urban space, memory, and religious practice in Late Antique and early Medieval Rome. She completed her PhD at the University of Bergen in 2023 with a dissertation examining the Forum Romanum, Forum Traiani, and St Peter’s Basilica as dynamic spaces shaped by human agency and collective memory between the 4th and 7th centuries. Her work integrates archaeological, textual, and spatial approaches to explore how Christian communities reimagined and inhabited the material remains of the Roman past. As a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Bergen, in collaboration with Aarhus University, she continues to investigate processes of Christianization, with a growing emphasis on graffiti, epigraphy and lived religious practices. Her research highlights the agency of both institutional and non-elite actors in shaping sacred topographies. She has published on memory, martyr cults, and urban transformation, and has several forthcoming articles on Christian graffiti, pilgrimage, and devotional practices. Videbech has also taught at the University of Bergen and contributed to the development of interdisciplinary curricula in cultural heritage management.
Through her work on the Erasmus+ “Ancient Cities”-project, she co-developed a multilingual MOOC, producing academic content, interactive materials, and educational videos for a broad audience. Most recently, she co-authored the book Sindets Ild. Sindssygdom og galskab i antikken with Poul Videbech (Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Copenhagen).
ENCOUNTERS II takes place at the premises of the Norwegian Institute at Athens, on Tuesday, 12 May 2026, at 6:00 p.m (EEST). It presents Dr. Han Lamers, Professor of Classics at the University of Oslo and Director of the Norwegian Institute in Rome (DNIR) who will introduce the mission and current work of the Rome Institute, and our guest speaker Dr. Christina Videbech, Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bergen who will deliver the keynote lecture titled “Inventing the Martyrial Colosseum. Cultural Memory and the Fragility of Early Christian Heritage”.
The event is in hybrid format.
Registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance.
To attend in-person, please register at [email protected]
To attendvia Zoom, please register via the following link: