Through comparison with Dante’s Divine Comedy and with Late Antique allegorical interpretations of the Bible this article makes the case that Byzantine hagiographers encoded an allegorical dimension into their texts and that they did so in order to make value judgements that complement explicit evaluations of the behaviour of saints.

This essay reviews the archaeology of a mid-Byzantine administrative central place – an aristocratic oikos – in the old Roman suburb of Butrint, Albania. Apart from illustrating the many aspects of the excavated evidence, consideration is given to Paul Magdalino’s ground-breaking essay on the nature of the Byzantine aristocratic oikos.

Throughout the ninth and tenth centuries, the Byzantine Empire successfully expanded in the east. This culminated in the late tenth century with the great soldier emperors Nikephoros Phokas (963–969) and John Tzimiskes (969–976), who both achieved spectacular victories in the east at the expense of the empire’s Arab enemies. Modern scholarship always links these emperors together as following a consistent strategy. This article argues that, despite similarities, Nikephoros and John actually had different approaches to the eastern wars, in geography, level of focus, operational style and ultimate objective, underpinned by different strategic visions of the Empire’s position. This continuity is therefore illusory.

The Histories of Kantakouzenos is the main source for the civil war between Andronikos II and Andronikos III which was fought intermittently from 1321 until 1328. This article examines how Kantakouzenos remodelled and fabricated events, conversations and deliberations in order to depict Andronikos II as an incompetent military leader. By criticizing Andronikos II’s military abilities and by blaming him for the military failures of the period, Kantakouzenos diverts suspicion of his personal responsibility and Andronikos III’s mistakes that led to the advance of Byzantium’s enemies and demonstrates that the elder Andronikos was not worthy of being on the throne.

In September 1438 John Eugenikos decided to quit the council of Ferrara and sail back to Constantinople. Off Italy’s Adriatic coast his vessel experienced a terrible shipwreck, whereby many of John’s fellow-passengers perished. John decided then to retell his almost deadly experience in a thanks-giving logos, allegedly compiled on the basis of notes written down soon after the shipwreck. The logos stands out as a unique document in the landscape of Byzantine travel literature. This paper offers the first comprehensive literary analysis of Eugenikos’ account, shedding new light on the narrative patterns chosen by the author to recount his own experience and stage his public persona.

For their account of Ioannes Tzimiskes’ Balkan campaign of 971 AD against the Rus, Leon the Deacon and Ioannes Skylitzes independently used a common source that was written soon after the emperor’s triumph in Constantinople. This source classicized the emperor and his actions, drawing upon figures from the Roman Republic and including speeches and geographical digressions. This source accounts for the bulk of what we know of Tzimiskes’ reign.

Two issues are addressed here: the status of Byzantine autobiography and the state of Byzantine literary culture in its last years. Autobiographical information was mostly a device used at all levels of Byzantine literature for immediacy, emphasis and to suggest personal involvement. It continued to function in this way in the last years of Byzantium, but there was also a degree of experimentation, as it extended its range into satire and comedy and, in the hands of Theodore Agallianos evolved from the rhetoric of apologia into fully-fledged autobiography.

Ephoreia, one of the principal forms of monastic trusteeship in the Byzantine empire, appears for the first time in texts around the year 1000. Despite its prevalence, like many post-Justinianic legal developments, ephoreia is not mentioned in the normative legal codes of the Middle Byzantine period, including the Basilika. A previously overlooked passage from the eleventh-century casebook known as the Peira, which was compiled by an anonymous redactor from the verdicts and legal treatises of the jurist Eustathios Rhomaios, mentions ephoreia in the context of how much time must elapse before a possessor of property acquires ownership. This mention of ephoreia in the Peira is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, appearance of the term as describing monastic trusteeship. The reference is an important example of a contemporary legal development without a basis in Roman law which was accommodated within the contemporary legal regime.

Michael Marullus, fifteenth-century Greek, soldier and Latin poet, lived almost all his life in exile. In his earliest poetry revanchist thoughts directed at his country’s Ottoman conquerors are hardly present, and superhuman powers are held responsible for the catastrophe. Later, Byzantine reliance on foreign forces is blamed. With time however and political developments in central and western Europe, a crusade or Türkenzug seemed to become more likely, and Marullus turned to the Habsburg Maximilian I and Charles VIII of France as possible liberators. This paper attempts to describe the poet’s developing treatment of the themes of defeat and exile and his response in the last decade of the fifteenth century to the possibility of military action against the Ottomans.

A unique document of 1451 written in political verse gives an account by an anonymous-Greek of his encounters with Byzantine and Venetian justice as the result of a small incident at the Nauplion fair of Agios Demetrios of 1449. Petitions from Argos and Nauplion to Venice in 1451 recount a similar incident at his same fair, and give a broader perspective of both events. Together the three documents produce a remarkable view of Nauplion and Argos intra-city hostilities and competition, social classes, and economics, and with the relationship of both with the Despotate of the Morea.

During the 1960s and 1970s many Turkish films dealing with Byzantium were produced. The protagonists of these films were usually semi-historical/semi-legendary characters such as Battal Gazi, an eighth/ninth-century Arab frontier warrior. This paper proposes a cross-examination of the Battal Gazi films with the Battalname, a medieval prose work on the deeds of the same frontier warrior, in order to find out what Byzantium represented for the audience of these films in Turkey. This representation is important because the films played a crucial role in shaping the contemporary perception of Byzantium in Turkey.

This paper traces the emergence of the Standard Modern Greek perfect έχω + infinitive in the Early Modern Greek period. It shows that the construction appears in written sources towards the very end of the seventeenth century. Special attention is given to ‘phantom’ perfects, which can be found in editions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary and non-literary texts as well as in the bibliography and which distort the picture of its emergence.

This article begins with a comparison between the anonymous Roman d’un inverti (1894/5) and Cavafy’s poem ‘Na μείνει’, and then proceeds to read Cavafy’s private notes and key erotic poems in the context of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourses about non-normative sexuality. During that period, and in a discursive domain dominated by sexological case studies, the deviant sexual life story was published in order to titillate, check, control and medicalize. In Cavafy’s texts we see, instead, a network of homosexual life stories proposed as a platform for the conceptualization of novel sexual, aesthetic and social technologies, as well as a new ethics of contact.

There has been some controversy recently over the identity of the first mayor of Nicosia during British rule. This paper seeks to clarify the issue by putting it into context. What was Nicosia like between 1878 and 1882? What exactly do we mean by the words ‘mayor’ and ‘municipal council’? How was the town administered then and how and to what extent did municipal procedures change in the subsequent years? The material researched suggests that the unusual circumstances of the occupation created a prolonged period of transition during which basic municipal functions were essentially directed by British officials. It was not until 1882 that a substantial shift from an Ottoman to a more British colonial form of administration took place. The resulting reforms provided the islanders with a judiciary independent of the executive, and a partially elected legislature. Nicosia was, on the whole, slower than the coastal towns to make the most of the opportunity for municipal self-government that the new legislation also offered.

‘Peasantist nationalism’ was a new radical nationalist discourse in the twentieth century. The crisis in agriculture in the 1920s, urbanism and the perceived overpopulation of the cities were important social factors that instigated the intellectual construction of the ‘peasantist nation’. Peasantist nationalism was by and large constructed by agronomists, a new stratum of technocrats who used nationalism as a vehicle for social mobility and their entry into the strata of the organic intellectuals of the bourgeoisie. Peasantist nationalist ideas, set forth earlier by the agronomists, were adopted by Metaxas’ quasi-fascist regime and upgraded to the level of the state’s hegemonic ideology.

This article presents an overview of SEKE and the KKE’s views on the language question between 1918 and 1936. By examining unpublished sources, shifts in the party’s views become discernible which cannot be attributed solely to changes in the language debates. The article introduces two innovations: it argues that there is a correlation between political changes within the KKE and transformations in its views on language, and analyses these with reference to ideas on language in the USSR. Studying these views augments our knowledge of a relatively neglected dimension of the language question. Moreover, as the influence of Marxism on some Greek intellectuals increased in this period, its findings can be used to elucidate aspects of literary production.

This article consists of two parts. The first part provides general information on the language and its speakers: I describe the language, land, and livelihood of the Greek-speaking people of Beşköy in Trabzon province. In this respect it is indispensable to mention migration, which is one of the most serious threats the Greek-speaking community and their language faces today; statistical data show that Beşköy lost half of its population over the past fifty years. Despite these adverse conditions, the language has proved to be resilient enough to remain a preferred means of communication when Greek-speakers come together. In the last subsection, on language and identity, I present testimonies by native people which illustrate that positive attitudes towards both the Greek language and Turkish citizenship or Islamic identity are easily compatible.