Byzantine News

"Intelligible Beauty" recent research on Byzantine jewellery. Edited by Chris Entwistle and Noël Adams Click here to read

The Harbour of Eleutherios (Greek: λιμήν Ἐλευθερίου), later known as the Harbour of Theodosius (Greek: λιμήν Θεοδοσίου, Latin: Portus Theodosiacus) was one of the ports of ancient Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, located beneath the modern Yenikapi neighbourhood of Istanbul, Turkey. The harbour was located on the south side of the peninsula where the city is built, facing towards the Sea of Marmara. The other harbours of the city were the Harbour of Julian and the small harbour of the Boukoleon Palace, likewise on the southern shore, and the harbours of Neorion and Prosphorion on the northern side. The harbour was built in the late 4th century during the reign of Theodosius I, and was the city's major point of trade in Late Antiquity. The area was later transformed for agricultural use due to the effects of erosion and silting. In Ottoman times, the area was built over. Here is a video about the harbour:

Audio lecture by Sharon Gerstel: Witnessing Byzantium: The Greek Perspective

Here is a list: 0645 JUSTINUS MARTYR Apol.   1389 HARPOCRATION Gramm.   1595 PHILODEMUS Phil.   2042 ORIGENES Theol.   2130 ARETHAS Scr. Eccl. et Philol.   2642 <ASTRAMPSYCHUS Magus> Onir.   2702 Michael PSELLUS Epist., Polyhist., Phil., Hagiogr. et Theol.   2721 Theodorus PRODROMUS Poeta et Polyhist.   2738 CHRONOGRAPHIAE ANONYMAE Chronogr.   2772 ACTA TIMOTHEI Hagiogr., Apocryph. et Acta   2933 GERMANUS I Scr. Eccl.   3010 Theodorus BALSAMON Scr. Eccl.   3024 Constantinus STILBES Poeta et Rhet.   3036 EUTHYMIUS Scr. Eccl.   3053 JOANNES II Scr. Eccl.   3054 JOANNES IV (vel V) Oxeïtes Scr. Eccl.   3059 JOANNES X CAMATERUS Scr. Eccl.   3073 Euthymius MALACES Scr. Eccl., Rhet. et Theol.   3077 MICHAEL I CERULARIUS Theol. et Scr. Eccl.   3078 MICHAEL III Epist., Theol. et Rhet.   3085 NEOPHYTUS INCL...

A recipe of delicious Byzantine vegan food from a manuscript at the British Library: One of our Byzantine Greek service books, a collection of lessons for the Saturdays and Sundays of Lent, contains a very special recipe: not only is it completely vegan, it is said to have been received directly from Heaven. The short note is preserved in a lection for the first Saturday of the Great Lent which records the miraculous revelation of the new recipe as follows.  “Koliva is wheat kernels boiled soft and sweetened with honey, sesame seeds, almonds, ground walnuts, cinnamon, pomegranate seeds, raisins and anise.' When the archbishop inquired who is the provider of the new recipe , his visitor simply answered, 'I am Theodore the Martyr of Christ whom he has now sent to you to reveal this and provide new food for his people.' Read here the whole story

From the editors: A distinctive feature of Christian culture in early Islamic Syria and Palestine was a renewed interest in literature on martyrs, which represented a potential reaction among some Christian communities to the rise of Islam in the region. The adaption of this early Christian genre to the new circumstances of political domination during the early Middle Ages offers a revealing, yet until now largely unexplored, window onto how Christians responded culturally to Islamic imperialism. This bilingual edition of three martyrdoms provides a new opportunity to understand this historical phenomenon. These writings, composed at the Mar Saba monastery in the Judean Desert and attributed to famous members of that community, share a common high literary style, although each portrays Christian martyrdom at the hands of the Muslims very differently. This parallel-text edition offers the only English translations available of these important works, making it an invaluable resou...

Author: A. Beihammer The arrival of the Seljuk Turks in Anatolia forms an indispensable part of modern Turkish discourse on national identity, but Western scholars, by contrast, have rarely included the Anatolian Turks in their discussions about the formation of European nations or the transformation of the Near East. The Turkish penetration of Byzantine Asia Minor is primarily conceived of as a conflict between empires, sedentary and nomadic groups, or religious and ethnic entities. This book proposes a new narrative, which begins with the waning influence of Constantinople and Cairo over large parts of Anatolia and the Byzantine-Muslim borderlands, as well as the failure of the nascent Seljuk sultanate to supplant them as a leading supra-regional force. In both Byzantine Anatolia and regions of the Muslim heartlands, local elites and regional powers came to the fore as holders of political authority and rivals in incessant power struggles. Turkish warrior groups q...

From NY Times: All images of public-domain artworks in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection — about 375,000 — are now free for anyone to use however they may please.The museum announced on Tuesday that it had changed its open access policy to allow free, unrestricted use of any images of artworks in the public domain, using the license designation Creative Commons Zero, known as CC0. Click here to access the collection

Last February, archaeologists unearthed a unique rock-carved underground church in Nevsehir, in the central Turkish region of Cappadocia. The church was decorated with never before seen frescoes depicting Jesus’ Ascension, the Final Judgement, Jesus feeding the multitudes, and portraits of saints and prophets.The discovery, made during excavations and cleaning operations in an underground city recently uncovered as part of an urban project in Nevsehir, is located within a castle that might date back to the fifth century. Authorities expect it will make Cappadocia an even more important pilgrimage center for Orthodox Christians. Semih İstanbulluoğlu, the archaeologist who heads the works for both the underground city and the church, explained that the walls of the church collapsed because of snow and rain, but that they will be fixed as part of the restoration project. Frescoed sections will have to be collected one by one and pieced together. See more DON'T FORGET T...

N. Wilson: Symeon Metaphrastes’ revision of the hagiographic corpus, undertaken with the encouragement of the emperor, was a remarkable enterprise which required substantial resources and organisational skills. Michael Psellus in his encomium of Symeon gives a famous description of Symeon and his team at work See more here

Translations by: Greenfield, Richard P. H.Talbot, Alice-MaryMcGrath, StamatinaAlexakis, Alexander. From the publisher : Often simply called the Holy Mountain, Mount Athos was the most famous center of Byzantine monasticism and remains the spiritual heart of the Orthodox Church today. This volume presents the Lives of Euthymios the Younger, Athanasios of Athos, Maximos the Hutburner, Niphon of Athos, and Philotheos . These five holy men lived on Mount Athos at different times from its early years as a monastic locale in the ninth century to the last decades of the Byzantine period in the early fifteenth century. All five were celebrated for asceticism, clairvoyance, and, in most cases, the ability to perform miracles; Euthymios and Athanasios were also famed as founders of monasteries. Holy Men of Mount Athos illuminates both the history and the varieties of monastic practice on Athos, individually by hermits as well as communally in large monasteries. The Lives also demons...

Another historical church has been unearthed in the Cappadocia region of Central Anatolia and experts are excited about its frescoes, which depict scenes hitherto unseen. Archeologist: "It is reported that some of the frescoes here are unique. There are exciting depictions like fish falling from the hand of Jesus Christ, him rising up into the sky, and the bad souls being killed. When the church is completely revealed, Cappadocia could become an even bigger pilgrimage center of Orthodoxy" Click here for more .

From Oxford University Press: Among medieval Christian societies, Byzantium is unique in preserving an ecclesiastical ritual of adelphopoiesis, which pronounces two men, not related by birth, as brothers for life. It has its origin as a spiritual blessing in the monastic world of late antiquity, and it becomes a popular social networking strategy among lay people from the ninth century onwards, even finding application in recent times. Located at the intersection of religion and society, brother-making exemplifies how social practice can become ritualized and subsequently subjected to attempts of ecclesiastical and legal control.Controversially, adelphopoiesis was at the center of a modern debate about the existence of same-sex unions in medieval Europe. This book, the first ever comprehensive history of this unique feature of Byzantine life, argues persuasively that the ecclesiastical ritual to bless a relationship between two men bears no resemblance to marriage. Wide-ranging ...

From Gorgias Press: This work is concerned with investigating a corpus of several thousand lines of poetry, selected from the oeuvre of Eleazar be-rabbi Qillir, a liturgical poet (payyetan) whose period of activity dates to the early seventh century CE. The first portion of the work is a grammar devoted mainly to morphology and syntax. The aim of this portion is (1) to provide a structural description of the most salient/individuating features of the Qillirian dialect, and (2) to compare the morphological and syntactic data thus gathered with analogous phenomena in Biblical, Dead Sea Scrolls, and Mishnaic Hebrew, thereby establishing the position of the Qillirian dialect within the developmental trajectory of Hebrew in Roman/Byzantine Palestine. The second portion of the work is an investigation of the poetic norms, as well as rhetorical techniques employed by Qillir, together with an assessment of their impact on the grammar (e.g., the influence of rhyme on morphology). This porti...

I was born in a family of peasants in Macedonia, but my family became a most glorious one. The other emperor Michael III had to die. I had a biography written, you'll find all the reasons for my actions there (Emperor Basil I, 9th century).

Byzantine Era from Steficon Film on Vimeo . A short but dynamic movie on the Byzantine Era in Greece

Reconstruction of the Hagia Sophia Sanctuary

Dumbarton Oaks and the HILL MUSEUM & MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY (HMML) announce a new four-week intensive introduction to Syriac language and paleography, July 10 to August 6, 2016. The program, sponsored and funded by Dumbarton Oaks, will be hosted at HMML, located on the campus of Saint John's University, Collegeville, Minnesota. The summer school will include a long weekend in Washington, DC, to visit Dumbarton Oaks and other institutions in the area to learn more about their resources for Byzantine and Eastern Christian studies. Approximately ten places will be available to doctoral students and recent PhDs, including including early-career faculty members, who can demonstrate the value of Syriac for their teaching and research. All costs apart from travel to and from Saint John's University (nearest airport: Minneapolis-St Paul) will be covered by Dumbarton Oaks, including the weekend in Washington, DC. Mornings will be devoted to Syriac language instruction by Prof. Sc...

Divine Presence in the Eucharistic Theology of Nicholas Cabasilas, a doctoral dissertation, available online: This study focuses on the Eucharistic theology of the Byzantine theologian Nicholas Cabasilas (d. c. 1390). It examines the presence of the divine and its transmission in the Divine Liturgy. The results of the study indicate that, according to Cabasilas, man is able to partake in God in the liturgy, and thus to subjectively receive and participate in his presence to the world. In Cabasilas’ thought the presence of God is manifested in the liturgy on two major levels. There is, firstly, the level of divine presence which permeates the entire liturgy. It is based on the omnipresence of God, which is pre-eminently manifested in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Great events of the divine economy are to be contemplated and participated in throughout the Eucharistic liturgy in the outward forms and symbols of the rite. Secondly, the presence of God is given a concrete manifestat...

An Exciting New Project Mapping Monasteries of Egypt and Sudan