There has been an upsurge of interest recently in the Greek literary revival of the twelfth century that followed upon the Byzantine defeat at Manzikert in 1071, creating by an accident of history a largely Greek-speaking state out of a former ‘universal’ empire. The leading part played in this revival by the court poet Theodore Prodromos who lived from c. 1100 until perhaps the 1170s, and by works attributed to him, has long been recognised, although the dichotomy imposed by nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars between literature in the learned language and literature in the vernacular has obscured the fact that, whether or not the entire ‘Prodromic’ corpus is the work of a single individual, large parts of it are thematically and stylistically unified. Margaret Alexiou’s article in the last volume of BMGS, an in-depth analysis of the fourth of the vernacular Poems of Poor Prodromos, goes a long way towards opening up this area to new methods of inquiry (Alexiou, M. 1986). Much however still remains to be done in establishing the nature and context of these innovative works of the twelfth century. The present paper looks at the literary context for the earliest extant use of the Greek vernacular in twelfth-century ‘begging poetry’, and is intended as ‘prolegomena’ to a forthcoming literary analysis of the four Poems of Poor Prodromos, or Ptochoprodromika.

The study of Digenes Akrites has by now produced a massive secondary literature. Historians have attempted to trace its references to historical personages, events or places; philologists, linguists, codicologists and others have tried to tackle equally tantalising problems. Here, I attempt to take a fresh look at Digenes and to ask entirely different questions of the poem.

The term postmodernism has established itself securely in the discourse on art and literature of the last two decades. The postmodern along with the poststructural and postindustrial are concepts frequently used to designate the art, thought, and condition of our age. They all suggest a break not only in our aesthetic but also in our culture. The prefix ‘post’ seems to be much more final that the word ‘beyond’, in that we are no longer moving beyond modernism but actually find ourselves after it, on the other side looking back nostalgically and reflecting hopefully on what lies ahead. This term has become significant in our attempt to come to grips with recent developments in our culture. It remains, however, a notoriously elusive concept, probably one of the most difficult to appropriate within manageable limits. It is still (and will be for some time) the object of critical debate since the discussions about it are taking place within its still undefined boundaries. While one may propose with relative security an outline of modernism, it is extremely difficult to provide a definition of its successor. One critic’s eclecticism is another’s neoconservative pastiche. Some celebrate it as the dawn of a new and brave episteme while others condemn it for its betrayal of modernism’s experimental and adversary values. Implicit in this debate are issues concerning not just this term but the autonomy of art, its institutional status, and the relationship of high to popular culture.

In Greece, as in several other countries in the period between the two World Wars, one of the serious charges frequently made against Modernism was that it was impossibly bad mannered towards the reader — that it made no effort at all to communicate and that modernist poetry was ‘difficult’ or ‘obscure’. For example, as early as 1931, Kostis Palamas — the poet who had had an enormous impact on Greek literary affairs in the first half of this century — in a charming if not somewhat condescending letter addressed to George Seferis, noted that the poems of Στρoφή were ‘cryptographic’ and stated that he was personally unable to find the ‘key’ that was needed for deciphering such difficult poetry (Palamas 1931). A few years earlier, Seferis himself had noted in his journals that whenever he tried to read Valéry ‘s poems to Palamas and his circle, they had reacted by saying that they did not have time to solve ‘puzzles’ (1975: 62).

It has become common in recent years for Greek Pontians, settled in Greece since 1922/3, and their families to go on coach-tours to visit their family homes in Pontus. They tend to return to Greece with stories of finding local people there with whom they have been able to converse in the Pontic dialect of Greek. Surprisingly, these travellers appear to take this for granted, and, as far as I am aware, no one has made a study of the Greek spoken in Pontus today, other than to include a few random phrases in travelogues. The purpose of this article is to make some preliminary observations on the Pontic Greek spoken by Moslems, particularly those of the Ophis (Of) region.

Ties of ritual kinship have long been the object of interest and intensive study by anthropologists who have shown their ceremonial, social and economic significance but also the great variety which exists cross-culturally. Historians of Renaissance Italy and the mediaeval west have taken up the investigation, discovering spiritual relationships to be valuable indicators of the range and type of social contacts.

The historiography of the Ottoman period (Tourkokratia) in what is now the state of Greece contains many untested propositions about both the nature and the consequences of Turkish rule (Hatzidimitriou 1982). Amongst these is the notion that during the Ottoman occupation the Christian population — or at least a sizeable proportion of it — was driven into the mountains. Our paper sets out to test the hypothesis — for such it is — using readily available published information on the settlements of the Morea (Peloponnisos) dating from c.1700 and c.1830. First, though, we specify the hypothesis and indicate the types of evidence which appear to give it support.

The French connection with the late antique and Byzantine archaeology of the Levant is now more than a century old. Between 1864 and 1877 Melchoir de Vogüé published his great Syrie Centrale:architecture civile et religieuse, a work which revealed for the first time the great richness of the archaeological record for the period. With its superb drawings and elegant plans it remains indispensable, especially since it describes some buildings, like the praetorium at Mismiyya, south of Damascus, which have long since disappeared. In these days when so much worthless nineteenth-century travel literature about the Middle East has been reprinted, it is sad that this masterpiece remains unavailable. The French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon from 1921 onwards gave a great impetus to these studies. Although most attention was given to great classical sites like Palmyra or Crusader ones like Crac des Chevaliers, late antiquity was not neglected and there was a growing interest in the deserted towns of the limestone hills of the north from J. Mattern, À travers les villes mortes de Haute Syre (Beirut 1944) and J. Lassus’ study of the ecclesiastical architecture, Sanctuaires chrétiens de Syrie (1947). This activity culminated in G. Tchalenko’s great work Les villages antiques de la Syrie du Nord (1958) which was based on field work done before 1939.