This study explores the language of the Histories of Agathias Scholasticus, the sixth-century poet and historian. Through two case studies – the syntagm πλὴν ἀλλά and the optative future – and their synchronic and diachronic contexts, it argues that Agathias’ classicizing prose should not be seen as a flawed version of Classical Greek. Rather, his usage reveals a stylistic negotiation between inherited literary models and contemporary linguistic developments. Agathias’ case demonstrates how the choices of individual authors – often hidden behind modern labels like ‘linguistic classicism’ or ‘highbrow literature’ – illustrate the evolution of high-register Byzantine Greek and challenge previous assumptions about its rigidity.

This article presents the first sustained narratological analysis of the embedded stories in Nikephoros Bryennios’ Material for History. It argues that pleasure in storytelling was a valued feature of Byzantine historiography and that Bryennios’ anecdotes derive their appeal from four interrelated features: eventfulness, tellability, narrativity, and immersion. The article further contends that, by mimicking oral storytelling through rhetorical questions, direct speech, and vivid sensory detail, Bryennios crafts narratives suited to performative settings while preserving a sense of authenticity. It concludes by proposing narratological criteria for identifying and analysing anecdotes across Byzantine historiography and reassessing the role of pleasure in historical writing.

In the early seventeenth century, the Greek Jesuit Hermodorus Rhegius (1579–1655) compiled a collection of Greek proverbs which constitutes important evidence for early modern Greek language and culture. Little is known about Hermodorus aside from his pastoral and educational work across the Aegean islands, primarily on Chios. For over two centuries, his proverbs were known mainly through the work of Charles Du Cange, who cited twenty-seven of them. The early twentieth century, however, saw three additional proverbs uncovered in a manuscript in the National Library of France (Français 9467), and a recent discovery in the Médiathèque d’Orléans (MS 0422) has added ninety more. This article revisits Hermodorus’ legacy in light of this new evidence and presents an edition of all 120 proverbs attributed to his collection, thereby enlarging the corpus fourfold. Tracing the collection’s textual history for the first time, this study also reveals a small network of scholars in early modern France with a keen interest in Greek proverbs.

This article offers the first detailed study of a manuscript preserving notes from the Modern Greek course held in 1801-2 by Jean-Baptiste-Gaspard d'Ansse de Villoison in Paris. The notebook was kept by Karl Benedikt Hase, later Professor of Modern Greek at the French École de langues orientales vivantes, during his attendance of Villoison's course as a student. The article sketches first the historical context of the notebook, before an analysis of its contents, and finally a comparison with Hase's later published work on the primary text at its core, Amiras’ Greek translation of Costin's History of Moldavia.

Analysing the imageries prevalent among the citizens of the young Turkish Republic in the post-Catastrophe Smyrna/Izmir, this article aims to shed light on the reflections of the destruction, forced migration, and economic provincialization of the ethnically-cleansed city. Aside from regular newspaper reports, travelogues and other popular literature accounts produced by local Muslims also recounted the haunting character of the ravaged region. The common word ‘loss’ in these post-Catastrophe narratives indicates what is apprehended by the imagery and discourse of mourning, trauma, sadness, and nostalgia from the victors’ perspective.

This paper will explore the relationship between Theophilos and the generation of the 1930s on the basis of two parameters. On the one hand, an attempt will be made to reconfigure the image of Theophilos as a ‘spontaneous’ bearer of an immaculate and uninterrupted national tradition; on the other, the paper will address the reasons that determined this interest in the ‘illiterate’ (even ‘lunatic’) painter from Lesbos. It will be argued that what impressed the young intellectuals of the 1930s generation was not only Theophilos’ ‘primitive’ visual idiom but his idiomatic modernist idiom, precisely because it found an echo in their own contradictions as bearers of European modernity.

‘The Generation of the Thirties’ is a term that has been widely applied to Greek artists active in the interwar years and their artistic production. This article argues that the term is misleading due to its conceptual ambiguity. By focusing on Greek artists in Paris during the 1920s, it contends that the concept of the network, describing a dynamic cluster of historical actors sharing common ideologies, aesthetic ideas and interests, elucidates the formation and evolution of artists’ styles, aesthetic ideas, professional interests and cultural identities in a more meaningful way.

This paper reconsiders the term ‘Generation of the Thirties’ in modern Greek art, arguing that the artists retrospectively grouped under this label emerged mainly after the Second World War and were united by a time-specific pursuit of ‘Greekness’. It examines how their synthesis of local tradition and European modernism reflected post-war quests for national identity and was shaped by Cold War cultural politics and mass media stereotypes. It traces the history of the term ‘Generation of the Thirties’ in art, explores its academic and curatorial consolidation in the late 1970s, and examines why it became attractive during the Metapolitefsi era.