Graffiti are often seen as providing a window into the emotions of ancient peoples. However, Byzantine graffiti has been viewed as an exception, with the formulaic Greek texts written between 300 and 1500 taken as evidence of communal identity, rather than individual expressiveness. However, variations in these texts can reveal much about an individual author and their personal experiences. In particular, certain formula suggest the dangerous situation an author survived, including incarceration and sea travel. This paper focuses on Corinth, Syros, and Tinos where individuals experienced danger, and how their fears and needs were manifested in the graffiti they left behind.

This article looks at Byzantine dogs for the first time from the animal's point of view, i.e. not for what our textual sources tell us about their contribution to Byzantine human history, society, and culture, but for what they may enable us to trace regarding the dogs' own sensory and emotional experience, reactions and dispositions, individuality and agency. Methodologically this is made possible by using methods and insights from Animal Studies, especially by exploiting the benefits of a modern biological and ethological understanding of the nature of dogs, and of posthumanistic approaches that collapse the human–animal divide.

Jubilees are good to think with, obviously. They provide a fitting opportunity to look back, to take stock, and to offer some thoughts about the future. As a scholar working on Byzantine history (and only slightly older than BMGS at that) I recognize that the state of the field has changed immensely in the last fifty years. First, there was a major expansion in departments and programmes dedicated to Byzantine studies, followed more recently by a contraction. And yet, even while Byzantine studies are offered in fewer academic institutions, there is an immense proliferation of academic research and publications on the Byzantine Empire – trend accelerating. Exact numbers may be hard to come by, but a quick search on WorldCat for books published in 2023 with the word ‘Byzantine’ in the title brought forth almost two hundred books – in English alone. If we add journal articles (there are over twenty major journals devoted solely to Byzantine studies), chapters in edited volumes, and, especially publications in languages other than English, we would probably reach the low thousands, all in one year. To survey, much less to read with care and absorb all this new knowledge, has become impossible. How handy would it be if someone else took over this task for us – processing research and synthesizing it in a clear, concise and readable volume. It is highly doubtful that such a book could be produced today, but there is a work that fulfilled these functions for a very long time, one of the most cited and recommended textbooks in Byzantine history, Georg Ostrogorsky's History of the Byzantine State.

Just a few months after Barbra Streisand (as Katie) and Robert Redford (as Hubbell) featured in The Way We Were, Clive Foss published the first of his many seminal works of the late 1970s and early 1980s. It focused on the transformation experienced by twenty Anatolian cities cited by Constantine Porphyrogenitus in his De Thematibus; the main idea was to prove that urban life, upon which the classical Mediterranean culture had been based, came virtually to an end following the Persian invasion and retrenched to villages and fortresses until the tenth century. ‘These conclusions, of course, apply only to [Anatolia], but … they would prove valid for the whole Byzantine empire [and] they are based almost entirely on the results of archaeology.’

The controversy over the confiscation of church vessels during the reign of Alexios I is referred to as ‘the Komnenian Iconoclasm’. However, its salient feature is the reluctance of both parties to accuse their opponents directly of iconoclasm. Instead, Alexios’ supporters and adversaries mastered the art of periphrasis and allusion so that the shadow of Iconoclasm loomed more dimly over the debate. As long as the disputed word was not pronounced, there remained a chance of reconciliation. In the broader context of cultural memory about Iconoclasm, this debate is a turning point after which accusations of iconoclasm were no longer connected to iconoclastic practices.

This paper discusses the career of Emanuel Asanes Sophianos, a Byzantine refugee who settled in Cornwall in the aftermath of the fall of the despotate of the Morea to the Ottomans. It traces his later career in England and marriage to an English widow. The unusually detailed documentation for Asanes’ later life aside, it is of particular interest on account of his association with one of the most notorious aristocratic law-breakers in the period.

The 1970s saw the rise of two unrelated and yet affine historical concepts: Late Antiquity (Brown 1971) and Post-Modernism (Lyotard 1979). It is almost as if the breakdown of Antiquity in the way it had been traditionally understood, clearly delineated from the Middle Ages and the Byzantine Empire, heralded the dissolution of the Modern Western self-understanding and everything that went with it. For Byzantine studies, it came with a flora of textual rediscoveries; but the gate that had opened onto the spiritual meadows of Late Antiquity could also be used to approach and contextualize Islam in a new way.

This article presents a brief historiographical survey of scholarship on the history of science and history of knowledge in Byzantium since the 1920s and proposes several directions for future research. These include the study of instruments; of the language that Byzantine scientific texts, diagrams, and even instruments employ; the study of the involvement of women and of the knowledge created, transferred, and owned by non-elites. Ultimately, the article argues, a critical historiographical approach enables an understanding of the field of Byzantine studies as an element of the global and multidisciplinary systems of historical knowledge, including the history of science and the history of knowledge.

In a collection of Hatt-ı Hümayuns (Imperial Edicts) at the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul, I located the Ottoman translation of the Greek Declaration of Independence. This article examines the terminology that Ottomans used to interpret the language employed by the revolutionary Greeks. The goal of this study is to examine Ottoman attempts to define the rebels and conceptualize the inner motive behind the revolt of their subjects. This article argues that confiscated documents such as the Greek Declaration of Independence contributed to the familiarization of the imperial authorities with the ideological background to the rebellion and the reasons that triggered it.

In the 1870s, Heinrich Schliemann's excavations in Mycenae brought to light an unknown civilization. His intellectual network exploited the impact of these fascinating discoveries by implementing a double appropriation process. Many foreign intellectuals and members of the upper class sought to engage with the impressive findings. Meanwhile, a Greek intellectual elite played a pivotal role by Hellenizing Mycenaean antiquities to integrate them within a vision of a glorious national past. These processes were brought together with the inauguration of the branch of Mycenaean Archaeology by the Greek king and the establishment of the National Museum.

The medieval Slavs approached Byzantine speculative thought with caution. This essay explores Slavic hesitancy towards Greek theoretical ambition within the writings on visions of the Bulgarian theologian Euthymios of Tarnovo. Whereas the Greek hesychast theologian Gregory Palamas argued that the saints behold God's glory without mediation, Euthymios took a more modest approach, asserting that angels arbitrate between heaven and earth and bestow visions on the saints. Earlier scholars have described Euthymios as a ‘hesychast’, yet his views on visions align more closely with Palamas’ opponents and the Corpus of Pseudo-Dionysios.

This article examines Kazantzakis’ travel writing in his 1926 newspaper series on ‘the Land of Palestine’, which introduces Zionism, and in his posthumously published chapter ‘Jerusalem’ in Journeying (1961). Revisiting the relation between the two, I argue that each is to be seen as a distinct work. While free from the antisemitic sentiment of Venizelist circles, the Greek author's reportage has three important silences – and these are matched by a sweeping lack of scholarly interest in this material. This article hopes to generate renewed interest so that Kazantzakis’ 1926 reportage may help construe a more complex reception of Zionism in interwar Greece.

Among occultists, Hermetic writers, modern Templar groups, and conspiracy theorists, Michael Psellos has been imagined as a guardian of occult Hermetic knowledge, the secret founder of the Knights Templar, and a key figure in global conspiracy narratives. This article traces the development of this alternative reception in the West and explores its adoption by Turkish conspiracy theorists who, despite their anti-Western stance, have integrated it into their narratives about the New World Order. The dramatic reconstruction of Psellos’ scholarly pursuits in this modern underground reception has created a ‘double reality’ that diverges radically from academic interpretations of Psellos.

In 1478 a Byzantine courtier-turned-monk named George Sphrantzes related in a work conventionally called the Chronicon Minus the story of his life and times in the decades before and after the Ottoman conquest of Byzantium. The work's English translator, Marios Philippides, notes in his introduction that ‘students of history, sociology, and literature will find passages of interest in Sphrantzes’ account. In addition to its immense value as a historical testimony, Sphrantzes’ narrative is a linguistic document of great significance to the study of the evolution of the modern Greek language.’ (This latter point refers to Sphrantzes’ fifteenth-century idiom, very different from the classicizing or Atticizing style of pre-conquest Greek historiography.)1 Philippides’ approach reflects typical historiographical praxis in modern scholarship: a source text is strip-mined for those facts for which the empiricist historian is searching, and the rest is ignored or derided as superfluous.

Mehmed Ziya, an Ottoman Muslim educator and intellectual, published an art historical treatise on the Chora Monastery/Kariye Mosque in Istanbul in 1910. This was largely a translation of three articles by the French Byzantinist Charles Diehl previously published in Études byzantines and in Le Journal des savants. Through his book, Mehmed Ziya attempted to acquaint the Ottoman Turks with this Byzantine monument, especially its rich decorations. Two letters appended in the book reveal his efforts to raise awareness among the youth in this respect, and to mobilize the Ottoman authorities regarding the protection and promotion of the Chora monastery more particularly.

Photographs are seldom at the centre of Greek historical research, despite their frequent use as illustrations. Despite this neglect of photography, modern Greek history would seem unimaginable without photographs, highlighting photography's integral role in our thinking about the past. In this article I offer some theoretical reflections on the impact of photography on historical imagination. Thereafter I take a closer look at some examples that do consider photography's role in the practice of Greek history, showing how photographs have been both mistrusted and embraced in historical research.