On Powers, an antiquarian treatise with a political agenda by John Lydus, an erudite and imperial official in the late fifth and early sixth century, has been interpreted as either a panegyric to the emperor or as a work that was critical not only of Justinian’s rule but of monarchy in general. By reexamining it within the broader context of Byzantine political philosophy, this article proposes to see On Powers as a display of a traditional meritorious approach to the emperor, who was judged by measuring his personal and political qualities against the ideal image of the ruler.

This paper addresses why, in legends concerning portraits of Christ and the Virgin painted from life, Saint Luke the Evangelist is named as the artist. The paper focuses on the perceived identity of Luke in early Byzantium, arguing that his status as a Christian, Evangelist and doctor made him the most credible figure as the artist in the story and the person most likely to be accepted into the Church's history as a painter.

The problem of the literary genre of Vita Basilii and, by extension, of the lack of Byzantine examples of purely secular biography is one of the most well known literary controversies of Byzantine studies. With respect to this problem a revision of the usual parameters involved in the definition of literary genres will be suggested, one which will cover not only formal aspects but also contextual and functional ones. This study will propose that the features related to these parameters could be classified as more or less prototypical, thus laying the foundation for an approach to canonical narrative patterns and enabling further progress in our understanding of this unique work.

This article argues that in the last years of his reign Constantine V came to reject the intercession of saints, despite the fact that the Council of Hieria, which he himself had convened only a decade earlier, had explicitly anathematised those who held such a view. Moreover, it makes the case that the emperor participated in a broad religious discourse that began in the sixth century and continued into the ninth century, both among the Chalcedonians of Byzantium and the Levant and among the Nestorians of the East.

This article puts in their context three eleventh-century texts from the famous anthology of poetry in Marcianus Gr. 524. The first is an epigram on the portrait of Monomachos, which was commissioned by the ‘Lombards’. It is suggested here that Argyros Meles is in fact the instigator of the creation of the portrait and its accompanying epigram. The second text is a poem addressed to Michael Keroularios on behalf of the hieromonk Lazaros when he was granted the rank of chartoularios of the Great Church. The meaning of a mysterious reference to ‘Petra’ is discussed in detail. The third text is an epigram on the triklinos of Monomachos at the Mangana complex.

This essay describes the archaeology of the revival in the later tenth- to eleventh-century of the town of Butrint, ancient Buthrotum in south-west Albania. Based on the extensive excavations by the Butrint Foundation, all the elements (fortifications, town-planning, roads, property boundaries, dwellings, churches, wells) of a new urban centre are considered, as is its economy and its wider historical context in the southern Adriatic Sea.

Since its rise in the mid-1990s, ecocriticism, the study of the depiction of the built and natural environments in literature, has been deeply engaged with contemporary political and social issues surrounding anthropogenic ecological degradation and climate change. Such an ideological outlook, however, limits the application of the discourse in the case of medieval literature, which lacks such contemporary resonance. Ecocritical and ecofeminist analyses of the three witches with power over the environment in the Byzantine romances and their western analogues will nevertheless demonstrate the connection between nature control, femininity and patriarchal oppression and, as importantly, offer a theoretical framework for the application of an apolitical ecocriticism to Byzantine (and medieval) literature.

This article deals with a quadrilingual lexicon from a unique manuscript in the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris, which was compiled in 1439 and contains abundant material on Medieval Greek vocabulary and phraseology. The article analyses Oriental loan-words in the Greek part of the lexicon as evidence of Oriental influences on the Greek language during the late Byzantine period.

The story that gave the Osmanlis a distant Comnenian origin emerges in sixteenth-century Italian and Greek histories, inspired by the twelfth-century accounts of the renegade prince John Komnenos, as related by Niketas Choniates Its invention and propagation might have served the legitimacy of Ottoman rule, in which case, it was addressed to gulams and converts rather than to the Christian subjects of the sultans. It can also be interpreted as fitting the ideals and the imaginations of highly positioned converts in the Ottoman service, who previously belonged to the Byzantine and Balkan aristocracies.

This is the first publication of a tale about a journey to the other world from two seventeenth-century manuscripts kept in St.Petersburg. In the IS80s, the soul of a poor miner Nicholas from the Macedonian village of Izvor was mistakenly and prematurely snatched from his body by an angel who accompanied him through the heavens. After Nicholas' return to life, he described his adventures, which, although reminiscent of the famous Byzantine visions of the afterlife, still diverge from them in some important details. The tale not only helps to recreate the social life of the mining area of Siderokausia, but also portrays the infighting among the local Orthodox Christian clergy.

With their insalubrious social connotations, low-brow content and Ottoman musical features, rebetika songs appear unlikely candidates for connection with the revered culture of ancient Greece. Yet this seemingly sacrilegious nexus has repeatedly been contrived by exponents of the genre and by commentators, unlettered and educated alike. It has also exercised the ingenuity of literati, translators, stage directors and graphic artists. The examples surveyed in this article, whether earnest or whimsical, plausible or manifestly deluded, reflect both evolving perceptions of the genre and broader issues of Greek cultural politics. They further exemplify informal mechanisms for disseminating antiquarian knowledge – and misinformation.

Although the Balkan Wars are regarded as a defining moment in modern Greek history that led to the expansion of Greek territory, they also constitute an important chapter in the history of internal Greek politics: the Greek prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos consolidated his position as the country’s most competent politician; the Palace, at the head of the victorious Greek army, regained much of its lost prestige after the unsuccessful Greco-Turkish war of 1897; and most importantly, the old parties began to function as a united front against Venizelos. This reaction was majorly triggered by Venizelos’ handling of the country’s foreign affairs in 1912-13. The anti-Venizelists’ rhetoric against Venizelos diplomacy invested heavily in tradition and the role of the king and was a harbinger of the national schism of 1915-16.

Despite the diversity of Modern Greek poetry available in Polish translation, Cavafy's work has eclipsed the achievements of other poets, just as the shadow of his lifelong translator, Zygmunt Kubiak, has inhibited other attempts only starting to surface in the twenty-first century. While external factors have determined Modern Greek anthologies in Poland, Cavafy translation has been mostly driven by personal passion. Apart from translation, this article reflects on various reasons why the Alexandrian's work should be so attractive to the Polish literary scene. Cavafy's seminal place within Polish literature stimulates further reflection on rewriting Cavafy in Poland.

Vasilaros (1899-1979), a moderately educated Greek shadow-theatre puppeteer, adapted popular melodramas and novels with strong bourgeois morality, such as Oι δύο λοχίοα in 1931, H άγνωστος in 1937, At δύο ορφαναί in 1944, and Οι άθλκη in 1955. The adaptations indicate that by the mid-1930s, the borderline between the traditional oral art of shadow theatre and mainstream culture had become considerably blurred. This article explores the convergence of these two cultures in terms of dramatic structure and ideology.

In 1960, following a bitter struggle, the British colonial power, agreed to concede a (qualified) independence to Cyprus. As the price of such independence, however, the UK government insisted on retaining sovereignty in perpetuity over two sovereign base areas, Dhekelia and Akrotiri, the largest Royal Air Force base outside the United Kingdom. These bases cover three per cent of the land area of the island. Such retention of control over part of a former colonial territory is unique in the history of British decolonization and has manifest consequences for the people of Cyprus.

In the second half of the twentieth century Greece became a subject for travel writers in search of a European ‘Paradise’. But ‘Hell was also to be found in Greece, often in the form of frustrations over allegedly ‘non-European’ standards of living, facilities, and attitudes. A sample of travel narratives published between 2006 and 2014 suggests the extent to which, in the light of the ‘Greek Crisis’, twenty-first-century writers are abandoning these formerly conventional themes. There is now the potential for the realignment of narratives, with Greece becoming the Hell, rather than the Heaven, of Europe.

Historians reconstruct the Byzantine conquest of Crete in 960-961 based largely on the History of Leo the Deacon and two variants of the continuation of the Chronicle of Symeon the Logothete. However, the account in the continuation is modelled closely, in narrative structure, imagery, vocabulary and ideology, on Prokopios’ account of the conquest of North Africa by Belisarios in 533-534. This challenges our knowledge of the campaign but sheds interesting new light on the sophisticated use of classical texts that Byzantine ‘chroniclers’ could make.