This issue of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies is special for two reasons: it celebrates forty years of our journal's publication, and it is the first issue to be produced by our new publisher, Cambridge University Press. The issue is dedicated to Anthony Bryer, who was appointed to teach Byzantine History at Birmingham in 1964. Bryer was one of the leading figures in the creation of the journal and has been a member of the editorial board ever since the first issue appeared in 1975; he also served as the Business Editor from 1984 to 1994.

This paper gives a brief report on the 21 Byzantine coins recovered during archaeological fieldwork at Hadrianoupolis in southwestern Paphlagonia between 2005 and 2008. One coin is silver and the rest are all bronze or copper alloy. Chronologically, the latter are divided between the Early and the Middle Byzantine periods. Although the assemblage is small, it provides useful information about the distribution of Byzantine coins from one of the more remote rural areas of northern Asia Minor.

This article examines the two extant military speeches attributed to Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos for their biblical references and allusions. These speeches demonstrate imperial Byzantine exegesis, establish biblical grounds for the ‘chosen’ status of Byzantine Christians, and reveal that the non-soldierly emperor Constantine VII appropriated the role of a mediating priestly figure as a way of claiming authority over his fighting forces. In this, he follows in the footsteps of his father, the emperor Leo VI (r. 886–912). Both speeches are explicitly Christian, and were used to bolster military morale and to reinforce imperial authority.

It is a great pleasure and an honour to be writing for the fortieth anniversary volume of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. As editor of the journal for some twenty years, from 1984 until 2004, I have watched the journal grow in stature and in esteem over that period, and I am delighted to see it continuing to do so in the hands of its current editors. In the first issue I edited, I also contributed an article that attempted to reconcile some very different approaches to the history of Byzantine society and culture, or at least, to show that such different approaches were not necessarily mutually exclusive. If now rather out-of-date in its content, that article remains a useful baseline for discussing the relationship between empirical research and writing and theoretical reflection. ‘“Jargon” vs. “the facts”‘? was a comment about the confrontation that at the time appeared to exist between, very broadly speaking, those who were interested in questioning the theoretical assumptions underlying and informing their research, and those who were not interested in such debates, preferring to see them either as irrelevant or as inaccessible. In my concluding remarks, I suggested that Byzantine Studies in the mid-1980s was in the process of what T. S. Kuhn would have called a ‘paradigm shift‘, that is to say, a process through which a traditional set (or sets) of assumptions and priorities, as well as theories and approaches, is replaced by different sets of ideas. While the changes in the nature of the subject that have occurred since then have not been particularly marked, there have nevertheless been some interesting and important developments that have altered the framework within which some ways of looking at the medieval eastern Roman world are carried on. The so-called ‘linguistic turn‘, for example, pushed Byzantinists, in particular, scholars of Byzantine literature and visual culture, to grapple with various aspects of what might very broadly be termed post-modernist and post-structuralist theory. This is evident in some of the writing and publishing of the later 1980s and 1990s in particular, and in some respects has now been incorporated into our ‘ways of seeing’ the Byzantine world.2 In particular issues of intertextuality, of authorial intention, of reception, and of the relativizing of cultural interpretive possibilities (in respect of our own perspective) have become part and parcel of scholarly discourse, thus greatly enriching our discipline.3 Represented by more recent work in literary studies and art history especially, I believe this shift also facilitated a much greater degree of cross-disciplinary reading, comparative thinking, and in respect of historical context and setting, a generally more open approach to the medieval west and the Islamic world in terms of both material and method.4

Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies was launched in the middle of a decade that saw many landmark events in Byzantine scholarship. I remember them well, because this was the decade when I became a Byzantinist, and attended my first two international congresses of Byzantine Studies, the 14th in Ceauşescu's Bucharest (1971), and the 15th, in post-Junta Athens (1976). Apart from the acts of these congresses, the 1970s produced many memorable publications that shaped our field. It would take too long to list them all, and it would be invidious to make, and justify, a small selection. I have chosen to focus my retrospective look on one small monograph of 1975 that makes a comprehensive statement about Byzantium and is therefore a representative illustration of where Byzantine studies were forty years ago and how far they have come, or not come, since then. My book of the decade is L’idéologie politique de l’Empire byzantin by Hélène Ahrweiler (Paris 1975).

Gregory of Nazianzus and Theodore Prodromos are two of the most influential poets of Byzantium. And yet, no study has examined the various intertextual correspondences between their poetic works. This article is the first to demonstrate the extensive appropriation of Gregory's work by Prodromos. It is divided into three parts:1 the first discusses poems composed by Prodromos in praise of Gregory; the second part attempts to show which of Gregory's poems Prodromos read and his technique of ‘plundering’ words from Gregory's corpus; the third part concentrates on Prodromos’ creative imitation of Nazianzus’ poetry in terms of wording, genre and sentiments, which eventually enabled him to craft part of his authorial self-portrait.

In this article I attempt to enter the less studied ‘working room’ of the hagiographer and metaphrastes Gregory Palamas by contextualizing and analyzing, both on its own terms and comparatively, Palamas’ literary debut, the Logos on Saint Peter of Athos (BHG 1506). The article shows to what extent the hagiographer used, changed, supplemented, departed from his source—the tenth/eleventh-century Vita of Saint Peter (BHG 1505) written by a certain Athonite monk Nicholas—and refashioned the image of the saint when (re)writing his life.

1975 seems light years away. In parts of the field of Byzantine studies, at any rate, the world has shifted, and perhaps most of all in that contested territory of early Byzantium, otherwise known as late antiquity. The first issue of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies was published only four years after Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity,1 and before the ‘explosion’ of late antiquity.2 This was also the start of another explosion: the emergence of late antique archaeology as a discipline, leading to its vast expansion and the enormous and ever-growing amount of material available today. For the first time, John Hayes's Late Roman Pottery (1972) enabled reliable dating criteria for the ceramic evidence that became the foundation of a new understanding of trade and economic life.3 The UNESCO Save Carthage campaign, a landmark in the reliable recording of excavations of the late antique period, began in the following year, and since then the growth in data has been exponential.

This article follows the course of the prolonged land dispute within the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem between the Greek religious establishment and the local Arab laity from the late Ottoman period to the end of the British Mandate (1875–1948). The article examines state policies in relation to Church-owned property and assesses how the administration of this property affected the inter-communal relationship. It is argued that both the Ottoman and the British authorities effectively adopted a pro-Greek stance, and that government refusal of the local Arab lay demands was predominantly predicated on regional and global political priorities.

In 1964, when Anthony Bryer and I both started teaching at Birmingham University, Syriac studies were generally considered to be little more than an appendage to Biblical Studies, and any idea of a journal or a conference specifically focused on them was unthinkable. Fifty years later the situation has changed dramatically for the better, although the number of universities (at least in Britain) where Syriac is taught has lamentably decreased.

Kambanellis’ Letter to Orestes constitutes Clytemnestra's apologia for the murder of Agamemnon and is addressed to her estranged son Orestes. Until now, research has concentrated mainly on the content, verbal message and metatheatrical dimension of Clytemnestra's letter, laying emphasis upon Kambanellis’ intertextual links with the ancient Greek tragedies revolving around the Atreid myth. This article focuses attention on the dramatic form of the letter, examining it as a physical object with social connotations and as an active agent in the development of the events. It is argued that in emphasizing these aspects of the letter Kambanellis was probably influenced by the function of letters in two of the Greek tragedies which he clearly draws upon in The Supper trilogy: Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia among the Taurians. However, Kambanellis’ intention was not to reproduce his tragic models but rather to exploit the medium of the letter in order to reconsider a staple of his own work: the disconcerting issue of human, and more particularly of familial, communication.

Forty years ago, I contributed my first independent article to Volume 1 of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, ‘The lament of the Virgin in Byzantine literature and modern Greek folksong’. For this fortieth anniversary issue, dedicated to A. A. M. Bryer, I have, as in the closing words of Theodore Prodromos’ seventh letter to Aristenos (Πεϱὶ Γλώττης), nothing to offer but μικϱαῖς ἀντιδεξιοῦσα σταγόσι, καὶ ταύταις θολεϱαῖς (‘meagre and murky drops’),1 further sullied with speculation on possible meanings of a single rare word: skordapsos. Does it mean ‘gut-knot’ or ‘eyesore’? Is it a vulgar form of chordapsos, an affliction of the intestines (attested in early medical texts)? Or is it a later vernacular term for ‘eye disease’, for which garlic (skordo) was, and remains, a known curative? And does it matter?

This brief article makes the case that Patriarch Methodios developed a distinctive icon theology. He argued that the saints had infused the colours of their faces with their holy essence and that these colours when separated from the bodies and transferred to images could thus lead to the moral improvement of the onlookers.

I am guessing, but I suspect that Bryer's first introduction to Nicholas Mesarites was like mine through a very short article by A. A. Vasiliev, entitled ‘Mesarites as a source’,1 which was a footnote to his much more substantial ‘The foundation of the Empire of Trebizond’,2 which dominated the field for years. Vasiliev was responding to a criticism by Franz Dölger, who suggested that Vasiliev might have benefited from a perusal of the works of Nicholas Mesarites, which had been edited by his old master August Heisenberg.3 Vasiliev was adamant Nicholas Mesarites had little to contribute to the early history of the Empire of Trebizond. In his opinion, the Seljuq inscription from the walls of Sinope, which Heisenberg included in his commentary, was far more valuable than anything that could be gleaned from Mesarites’ writings. This rather explains why they remained a neglected source.

The debt crisis in Greece since 2010 has triggered seismic changes in the political attitudes of the society and, above all, the political identity and discourse of the country. The extremely unpopular austerity policies caused a severe internal polarization which quickly translated into anti-German mass hysteria, vitriolic anti-EU rhetoric and sharp anti-austerity populism. This paper will endeavour to identify the origins, course and outcome of this dramatic shift in the political attitudes and identity in Greece and analyse them with the benefit of hindsight – almost six years after the eruption of the crisis.

It is with great pleasure that we join in saluting BMGS on the fortieth anniversary of its inception: it is a stalwart, valued presence in the international academic arena. Long may it continue!

Robin Anthony Fletcher, who died on 15 January 2016, was born in Godalming on 30 May 1922. He was educated at Marlborough College, as was R. M. Dawkins, who served as Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek at Oxford from 1920 to 1939. As Dawkins had done in the First World War, Robin served in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in the Second World War, during which time he commanded a Greek caique in the Eastern Mediterranean. At the end of the war Robin was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

My subject is the relatively small body of literary texts written on the islands of Crete and Cyprus, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, under the influence of the Italian Renaissance. As a matter of fact, the two articles I published in BMGS during the first ten years of its existence had nothing to do with Renaissance literature. My delayed appearance in my chosen field offers me a personal angle to comment on one of the ways the subject has changed since the mid-1970s.

Ottoman Studies, in particular what we might call ‘hard-core’ or ‘archive-based’ Ottoman Studies with its considerable emphasis on Ottoman palaeography, Ottoman diplomatics and/or the cataloguing and editing of archival holdings (not necessarily as an end in itself but a first step towards advancing document-based studies on Ottoman history and culture) is a field that has come under considerable strain in recent years across (most of) Europe. This prompts the following question: Will the subject as we have known it still be able to reproduce itself in future?