The letters of Grigor Magistros Pahlavuni demonstrate the multivalent methods by which Grigor negotiated being an Armenian aristocrat in service to the foreign power of Byzantium. While they display a Hellenic aesthetic and make use of the norms of Byzantine letter-writing culture, they nonetheless show that Grigor Magistros maintained a strong Armenian cultural identity even when holding a Byzantine title.

The paper provides for the first time a full-fledged analysis of the structure and compositional principles sustaining John Tzetzes’ Chiliades or Historiai. The article is divided into three sections. The first focuses on the developments of commentary literature in late twelfth-century Byzantium, showing how exegesis is used to textualize the authorial self and create autobiographical narratives. The second delves into the purpose of the work and its audience. The final section, focusing on the first part of the work, explores the role of memory in the Historiai and in particular, the interplay between cultural memories and experience in Tzetzes’ self-presentation.

This article will attempt to offer the first literary analysis of the Dialogue with a Persian of Manuel II Palaiologos. Despite its rich theological and literary material, this work has largely been neglected by scholars. However, the Dialogue deserves to be studied for its literary merit and not merely as a historical source. After a brief overview of the contents and background of the Dialogue, this study will focus on its literary features, especially on the vivid character portrayal of the Ottomans and the emperor himself.

This article examines the tombstone of Meletios II, a native of Tenedos, who was briefly Ecumenical Patriarch in 1768–9. It also offers an account of his troubled patriarchate and sketches events in the rest of his ecclesiastical career. This hitherto unknown tombstone has rested for an indeterminate number of years in the garden of North Bank, a large Victorian mansion in Pages Lane in the North London suburb of Muswell Hill. It appears to have been in the grounds of North Bank before the house became an annexe of Muswell Hill Methodist Church. It is not known where in the Ottoman Empire Meletios' grave was originally situated, nor has it been possible to establish the circumstances in which the tombstone came to North Bank. On the basis of the inscription on the tombstone it is possible to establish Meletios' previously unknown date of death, 5 January 1780. It appears to be one of the earliest known tombstones of an Ecumenical Patriarch during the period of the Tourkokratia.

The well-known fortified Troupakis-Mourtzinos complex includes a building that has not yet received proper attention. It is a rectangular, vaulted hall measuring 6.22 by 4.04 m., without any special features. However, one may observe a row of quadrilateral holes that pierce the outside of the walls at their mid-height, slightly below the base of the vault. On the basis of this particular detail, the building is identified as a gunpowder storeroom, while its function is examined in the context of the period when it was constructed; finally it is compared to other similar buildings within or outside the confines of Messenia.

This article presents the letters sent by the late nineteenth-century English writer Elizabeth Mayhew Edmonds to the Greek folklorist Nikolaos G. Politis. While a preoccupation with folklore and ethnology predisposed the Victorian public to take a narrow view of Greek society, Edmonds's interest in both vernacular culture and the literary, social and political life of modern Greece enriched the complex cultural exchange that developed between European (Neo)Hellenists and Greek scholars. This European-wide discourse promoted modern Greece as an autonomous subject of study, worthy of intellectual pursuit.

The Greek economic crisis has triggered a self-reflexive process and prompted a re-examination of political and cultural trends in Greece since 1974 in an attempt to rethink earlier cultural approaches and practices. This article argues that a cultural perspective on the crisis can be productive insofar as it revisits key concepts and dominant models of analysis and charts cultural change in Greece from the fall of the military junta in 1974 to the beginning of the crisis in 2009. Just as the fall of the junta encouraged a re-examination of the post-civil-war period, so the current economic crisis has prompted a rethink of the metapolitefsi era. Exploring the cultural developments that have taken place during this period, this article focuses on competing notions of culture and engages with the two dreams of the post-junta period: modernization and consumerism. The aim is not to reaffirm oppositions or reverse hierarchies but to rethink cultural dualisms and explore hybrid tensions within a broader political and cultural context.

Two gospel lectionaries, Gregory-Aland l 367 and l 46, were probably commissioned circa 965–985 by Basil the Parakoimomenos: the former as a gift for the St Basil Monastery that he founded, the latter for his personal use.