The monumental rock-cut façades of the tenth to eleventh century-mansions – so-called courtyard complexes – in Cappadocia, central Turkey, are rare examples of secular Byzantine architecture. While these symmetrically designed façades adorned with superimposed arches differ from the simpler ones (both carved and built) in the region, they bear striking similarities to others from the broader Mediterranean basin. This article offers new insights into the discussion on the uniqueness of the rock-cut façades of courtyard complexes and reconsiders the raison d’être of this ‘false’ monumentality in the rural setting of Byzantine Cappadocia.

For Byzantines, catanyctic poetry offered a rich source of models for self-representation. In this paper I analyse the poetic strategies and literary motifs through which Nikephoros Ouranos (tenth–eleventh century) shaped the self in his catanyctic alphabet. In particular, I will focus on the intertextual strategies employed by Ouranos in order to model the catanyctic self, such as the identification with scriptural sinners, and the presence of biblical metaphors.

One of the defining features of the Byzantine historiographical tradition is the dominant narrative roles played by emperors and, in the later period, by Ottoman sultans. This article explores this characteristic feature of the tradition through comparative analysis of the structuring roles occupied by such characters in the fifteenth-century History of Doukas and the protagonistic role of the Florentine people in the contemporary History of the Florentine People by Leonardo Bruni. Transhistorical comparison, organized around two case studies, serves to denaturalize the roles played by emperors and sultans in both Byzantine and modern historiography.

The article provides a critical edition of a hitherto unedited post-Byzantine prophecy that may be called the Vaticinium de restitutione Constantinopoleos. The text comes down in two recensions, which are contained in twelve manuscripts. The edition is supplemented with an English translation and a commentary that discusses the title, date of composition, content, main sources, and significance of the text. It is argued that the prophecy was originally composed in the early 1570s in response to the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus. Furthermore, it is shown that the motif of a saviour-emperor, which is central to the prophecy, responds to developments in sixteenth-century Mediterranean apocalypticism.

‘His pockets were always full of treasures. What marvellous things you could find in them! Nails, marbles, pebbles, sponges, twine, maybe a chewed piece of gum, and always that crystal triangle piece from the church chandelier that would shine brilliantly when held up to the sun.’ With these words, Penelope Delta, the famous children's writer and sister of Antonis Benakis, painted a portrait of her brother as a child in her much-loved book Trelantonis (Crazy Antonis). In this book, dedicated to the childhood adventures of the Benaki family siblings, and set in the cosmopolitan yet conservative colonial environment of the upper middle-class Greeks of late nineteenth-century Alexandria, Antonis was always the protagonist. (Fig. 1)

This study explores the identity dynamics of the Arabic-speaking Greek Orthodox community of the Hatay province of Turkey. Citizens of Turkey, members of the Greek Orthodox church and Arabic speakers, members of this small but historic community stood at the crossroads of three nationalisms: Greek, Syrian and Turkish. Following the urbanization waves that swept through the Turkish countryside since the 1950s, thousands of Hatay Greek Orthodox moved to Istanbul and were given the chance to integrate with the Greek minority there. The case of the Hatay Greek Orthodox community points to the resilience of millet-based identities, more than a century after the demise of the Ottoman Empire.

Ancient Greek poets such as Alcaeus and Sappho, and later Crinagoras, took on through Elytis’ poetry a new literary significance, thanks to his personal reconstruction of fragments and the epigram respectively.

The technique of reconstruction from fragments or restoring epigrams is not unconnected with the type of so-called ‘prismatic expression’ used by Elytis in the creation of his own poetry: a prism's polyhedral and crystalline form allows for the coexistence of facets significant in themselves, but which, when arranged in a new composition, create a new and harmonious entity.