The subject of the Byzantine garden is primarily to be tackled from texts, and is very much a subject of its texts. My research on the Byzantine garden began from an art historian’s point of view, I wanted to examine the possibilities of interpreting the garden as an example of visual culture. How was the garden represented? What did the garden look like? But the information demanded by such questions proved to be thin.

In the face of a supposed dearth of recorded responses to icons, historians of Byzantine art commonly infer these either from characteristics that they suppose to inhere in works of art themselves, or transfer to the personal and practical realm such theoretical attitudes as are proclaimed in the proceedings of church councils and similar documents. These methods of argumentation give rise to assumptions that (i) aesthetic reactions to images were unimportant or at least subordinate to attitudes born of piety, and (ii) artists used older works as models and the value of their artefacts was understood to be directly proportional to the fidelity of their copies to the ‘prototype’. Views of this sort can indeed be supported by texts that set out a variety of orthodox positions ranging from bodies of legal opinion to anecdotal accounts of devotion to icons. But to suppose that such readings represent immutable standards is to take part of the picture for the whole. The study of what seem at first sight to be aberrant attitudes can lend a new perspective on behaviour that is often treated as normative. Artists’ ‘deviations’, and highly emotive and even criminal reactions to their work, are still marginal to our perceptions of Byzantium formed by texts that present one or another official position, even while we are aware that styles of painting (as of writing) varied from one individual to another and that private passions and crimes flourished in this society as in any other.

On the occasion of the Byzantine Symposium at Cambridge in March 1990, an exhibition of manuscripts of Byzantine interest recovered from the Cairo Genizah was mounted in the University Library. Although these manuscripts have been in Cambridge for nearly a century, they are still not as well known as they deserve to be, and the exhibition provoked a good deal of interest among participants. It therefore seemed useful to provide this more permanent record. I have taken the opportunity to add one or two items which, for various reasons, could not be exhibited. I have also introduced references to publications in English or other western languages; it should be remembered, however, that there is a growing quantity of Genizah publication now in Hebrew. It should also be borne in mind that, although most of the Genizah manuscripts are in Cambridge, other smaller collections are to be found in many other libraries, notably (so far as Byzantine material is concerned) in St Petersburg, New York and Oxford.

In the second half of the 1950s, Greek foreign policy was dominated by the Cyprus question, while in the Middle East the same period was marked by a series of crises. The developments in the Middle East were important to the Greek government partly because Cyprus’s fate depended primarily on British decisions — and these decisions were connected to Britain’s position in the Middle East. Simultaneously, the turbulence in the region endangered the Greek communities in it, mainly the large community in Egypt. Yet, it may be said that Athens was rather slow in making an approach to the Arabs, on whose votes the United Nations debates on Cyprus largely depended: such approach took place only in Spring 1956, after the British had deported the Greek Cypriot leader, Archbishop Makarios, and after the new government of Constantinos Karamanlis had scored its first electoral victory.

Much has been written on Greek diglossia and the language struggle (between katharevousa and dhimotiki). Defenders of katharevousa have emphasized the importance of the language’s roots in ancient Greek, opponents of katharevousa have emphasized the idea that the Greek language should be first and foremost ‘the language of the people’.

Between the two great obelisks of Istanbul’s Atmeidan, rests the battered and truncated remains of one of western civilization’s most intriguing and important artifacts: the Serpent Column of Delphi. With its two companions, the ancient bronze pillar marks the spina of the Byzantine hippodrome around which the chariots of the Empire once raced. Today only tour buses make the circuit. The Serpent Column is all the more extraordinary simply by its continued existence. On public display for over 2300 years, it somehow escaped the fires, earthquakes, and lootings which destroyed almost all other Hellenic bronze masterpieces. As one author at the turn of the twentieth century noted, ‘Nothing in Constantinople, perhaps in the world, has such a history.’ It is not, however, the purpose of this study to present that history, but rather to examine new evidence and make new arguments concerning crucial points in it. More specifically, this article will concentrate on the column’s physical state, as well as some local folklore surrounding it, from its removal to Constantinople in the fourth century until its truncation in 1700.

The subject of the XXIV Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies was Byzantine Diplomacy and many of the papers dealt with high-level contacts between Byzantium and other medieval states. But although Byzantines often made use of churchmen and monks as ambassadors and although there was usually a religious dimension to Byzantine diplomacy, it is worth noting that powerful monastic figures and influential houses often engaged in diplomacy on their own account.

Despite growing interest among both Byzantinists and Ottoman scholars in the respective long-distance commercial ventures of Byzantine Greek and Ottoman Muslim merchants, studies focusing on the trade relations between these two groups have not yet been undertaken. This article, which examines some sources that document the presence and economic activities of Ottoman Turks in Constantinople during the first half of the fifteenth century, is intended to serve as a contribution to this neglected field of study. Moreover, by means of an examination of commercial relations, the article aims to shed further light on the daily, informal contacts between the Byzantines and the Ottomans which remains a relatively unexplored aspect of Byzantine-Ottoman relations.

*‘Catacalon Cecaumenus’ is no longer a well-known name. In 1924 he was the subject of a study by N. Bänescu, and some years later Georgina Buckler proposed that he was the author of the so-called Strategicon, whose author’s surname was Cecaumenus. But the latter view no longer enjoys much support from scholars, and less attention has been paid recently to Catacalon. A symptom of his new-found obscurity is the fact that in the index of the 1973 edition of John Scylitzes’ Synopsis Historion he is cut into two persons, both called Catacalon Cecaumenus. One of these persons is represented as being slain at the battle of Diacene in 1049, while the other figures exclusively during the reign of Michael VI. In fact, the index errs. The two sets of references denote one and the same man.

Art history, like many disciplines in the so-called humanities, has engaged in a bout of re-definition over the past decade. Studies of the art of Byzantium have not been immune to this wave of revision and re-assessment. Though it must be said that Byzantine has been affected less than Roman or, especially, nineteenth-century art history, the discipline is nonetheless in a state of transition, and this fact deserves greater recognition than it has received.

A welcome and necessary aspect of the renewal of studies of the Byzantine economy has been the analysis, sometimes in both the technical and the broader organisational aspects, of the production and redistribution of particular goods.