Cities as Palimpsests?

The metaphor of the palimpsest has been increasingly invoked to conceptualize cities with deep, living pasts. This volume seeks to think through, and beyond, the logic of the palimpsest, asking whether this fashionable trope slyly forces us to see contradiction where local inhabitants saw (and see) none, to impose distinctions that satisfy our own assumptions about historical periodization and cultural practice, but which bear little relation to the experience of ancient, medieval or early modern persons. Spanning the period from Constantine’s foundation of a New Rome in the fourth century to the contemporary aftermath of the Lebanese civil war, this book integrates perspectives from scholars typically separated by the disciplinary boundaries of late antique, Islamic, medieval, Byzantine, Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern studies, but whose work is united by their study of a region characterized by resilience rather than rupture. The volume includes an introduction and eighteen contributions from historians, archaeologists and art historians who explore the historical and cultural complexity of eastern Mediterranean cities. The authors highlight the effects of the multiple antiquities imagined and experienced by persons and groups who for generations made these cities home, and also by travelers and other observers who passed through them. The independent case studies are bound together by a shared concern to understand the many ways in which the cities’ pasts live on in their presents

Mechanical Miracles: Automata in Ancient Greek Religion

What role did technologies of automation play in the ancient Greek religious experience? In this dissertation, I investigate the use of self-animated machines, known as automata, in their religious contexts. As no thorough examination of the topic has been undertaken to date, the thesis brings together the ancient evidence for the use of large automata in festival processions, as well as smaller gadgets set up in temples. Having gathered together the primary sources attesting to the phenomenon, I insist on the importance of moving beyond viewing these self-animated machines as mere illustrations of ancient mechanics. Instead, I investigate the subtleties behind the interaction of the spheres of mechanical ingenuity and religious spectacle in the ancient Greek world. I look at the ancient evidence in order to understand both the symbolic and aesthetic value of the machines, and how they might have been conceptualised by spectators given a disposition to interpret animation according to a certain framework. The study investigates the place that automata occupied more broadly in the ancient imagination in order to understand the role of mechanical ingenuity when it combines with religious occasion and religious space. We will see, above all, the way in which technologies of animation were used in religious contexts to provoke a particular type of ‘thaumastic’ awe in the ancient Greek viewer. The project’s originality lies in the way in which it intersects with a number of scholarly discourses: It takes part in the reassessment of the use and sophistication of technology in the ancient world, contributes to discussions on human-divine relations and, in particular, it introduces the novel element of human artifice (technē) in shaping ancient Greek religious experience

Cities as Palimpsests?

The metaphor of the palimpsest has been increasingly invoked to conceptualize cities with deep, living pasts. This volume seeks to think through, and beyond, the logic of the palimpsest, asking whether this fashionable trope slyly forces us to see contradiction where local inhabitants saw (and see) none, to impose distinctions that satisfy our own assumptions about historical periodization and cultural practice, but which bear little relation to the experience of ancient, medieval or early modern persons. Spanning the period from Constantine’s foundation of a New Rome in the fourth century to the contemporary aftermath of the Lebanese civil war, this book integrates perspectives from scholars typically separated by the disciplinary boundaries of late antique, Islamic, medieval, Byzantine, Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern studies, but whose work is united by their study of a region characterized by resilience rather than rupture. The volume includes an introduction and eighteen contributions from historians, archaeologists and art historians who explore the historical and cultural complexity of eastern Mediterranean cities. The authors highlight the effects of the multiple antiquities imagined and experienced by persons and groups who for generations made these cities home, and also by travelers and other observers who passed through them. The independent case studies are bound together by a shared concern to understand the many ways in which the cities’ pasts live on in their presents

In Between Dār al-Islām and the ‘Lands of the Christians’: Three Christian Arabic Travel Narratives From the Early Modern/Ottoman Period (Mid-17th-Early 18th Centuries)

This study analyzes closely the Arabic travel narratives of three Christians from the Ottoman Levant and Near East, who travelled to what they called the ‘lands of the Christians’—ie. Europe. Paul of Aleppo (Būluṣ al-Ḥalabī), a deacon of the Orthodox Church, travelled from 1652 to 1659 to Southeastern and Eastern Europe: the Danubian Principalities (modern Romania), the ‘lands of the Cossacks’ (Ukraine), and Muscovite Russia. Paul’s travels were part of an Arab Orthodox ecclesial mission in the company of this father, Patriarch Makarios III ibn al-Zaʿīm of the see of Antioch. He recorded his travel experiences in one of the most extensive Arabic travelogues: the Safrat al-Baṭriark Makāriyūs (‘Travels of Patriarch Makarios’). Elias of Mosul (Ilyās al-Mawṣilī), an East Syriac ‘Uniate’ priest, travelled throughout Western Europe from 1668 to 1675, then sailed from Spain across the Atlantic to the ‘New World’ (Tk. Yenki Dünya). There he toured Spain’s American colonies for another eight years until 1683, penning later the very first Arabic account of the Americas: the Kitāb Siyāḥa (‘Book of Travels’). Ḥannā Diyāb, a young Maronite from a textile merchant family in Aleppo, travelled in Ottoman territory as tarjumān (‘interpreter’) for a French antiquities-collector named Paul Lucas—joining him eventually to Paris between 1709 to 1710. Decades later he wrote the engaging account of his youthful travel adventures, which has only quite recently become known to scholars.None of these Arabic texts are unknown, although they remain understudied. In the case of Paul of Aleppo’s Safra, no complete Arabic edition has been attempted to date; the only existing English translation is an inaccurate and outdated one, published in three volumes between 1829-1836. This study aims therefore to address a lacuna in our understanding of Arabic travel literature from a long period—between the ‘classical’ medieval and the modern—which has suffered in the past from schol-arly neglect due to its characterization as a period of decline, or ‘decadence’ (inḥiṭāṭ). These travelogues written by Ottoman Christian raʿāyā who called dār al-islām home reveal in fact some of the diversity and richness of Arabic literature from this period. The unique travel experiences they record, as Eastern Christians “in between dār al-islām and the ‘lands of the Christians’ (bilād al-masīḥīyīn)”, in many ways defy the conventional dichotomies (eg. East/West, Muslim/Christian) with which we often approach historic travel between the Islamic world and Europe. The modern period famously saw Christian intellectuals in the Arab world take a central role in the region’s cultural Nahḍa. A major contributing factor to this were Eastern Christians’ renewed and deepened contact, beginning in the Ottoman period, with the Christian world of Europe—East and West. This contact had a transformative impact on their identity—one which, more often than not (paradoxically perhaps) consolidated their sense of belonging to their Ottoman homeland. The three travellers in this dissertation were among the growing number of Arabic-speaking Christians who took new opportunities to travel abroad and see the ‘lands of the Christians’ for themselves. Their ac-counts—approached here not as historical primary sources, but as literary works in their own right—tell an important part of this story of transformation

The Politics of the Gate: Byzantine City Walls and the Urban Negotiation of Imperial Authority

The Politics of the Gate: Byzantine City Walls and the Urban Negotiation of Imperial Authority My thesis will argue that Byzantine city walls were political arenas in which rulers and communities contested their allegiances and interests. Modern scholars often assume that fortification walls are inherently divisive, oppressive and detrimental to political liberty, but in the Byzantine Empire – a pre-modern monarchy – the strength of their walls gave beleaguered cities the breathing room to protect their own interests and sometimes even a say in who their ruler might be. Historians have tended to partition amicable and hostile interactions at walls into different historical categories, putting triumphal, ritualized entrances by rulers into the category of ceremonial, political history while placing the violent confrontations of siege warfare into the domain of military history. A more synthetic analysis shows, however, that cities’ hospitable welcomes and defiant rejections to rulers were actually two sides of the same coin. Walls gave communities a basic choice: to open the gates or shut them. The capacity of walls to allow or deny a ruler access to the area she claimed to rule made a community’s allegiance collectively binding in a way that is difficult to comprehend in the modern, unwalled world. The same political dynamic was at play in all engagements at walls: the ruler’s attempt to perform and prove to the community his legitimacy, authority and power. Whether he sought to prove this by rhetoric, ceremony, intimidation, negotiation or simply brute force, both his message and his audience were the same

Religion and Contested Cultural Heritage: The Rotunda and Hagia Sophia as Church, Mosque, and Museum

This project uses the fourth-century Rotunda in Thessaloniki, Greece and the sixth-century Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey as case study sites for exploring conflicts over religious heritage. These two sites have a shared history of repurposing, from pre-Christian sites, to churches, to mosques, to museums, and to hybrid religious/heritage spaces today. These transformations are the outcome of shifting political powers and changing religious priorities over the centuries. As a result of these complex histories, the Rotunda and Hagia Sophia are notable examples of “dissonant heritage” (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996). That is, they are loci of competing narratives and public representations of the past, and thus they are also sites of contestation between different religious, political, and (inter)national groups today.Through its examination of the Rotunda and Hagia Sophia, this project explores three interrelated topics. First, it examines the architectural changes religious sites undergo when they are repurposed for a different religious use, and when they are made into monuments and museums—that is, when they are officially recognized as “heritage.” Second, it identifies how stakeholders negotiate the spatial and conceptual boundaries of religious practices at heritage sites today. Third, it investigates the ways in which the preservation and management of religious heritage presents unique challenges for the heritage industry. Through these three lines of inquiry, this project teases out what is at stake in the (re)conversion and secularization of religious sites for stakeholders, and why these transitions so often lead to conflict. It presents a historical account of the Rotunda and Hagia Sophia, using ancient and modern first-hand accounts, archaeological reports, urban plans, correspondences, and online media posts to craft a narrative of continuity and discontinuity and of preservation and destruction, focusing on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in particular. In uncovering key moments of transition in these palimpsestic, layered histories of the sites, it seeks to contextualize recent conflicts over their ownership and interpretation. It explores how controlling the Rotunda and Hagia Sophia has often meant controlling the societal identity of Thessaloniki and Istanbul more broadly. Though the secularization of religious historic sites is still understood by some stakeholders as an answer to contested heritage, this project demonstrates the ways in which this strategy can fail. It interrogates how the preservation and management of religious sites should account for the different needs embodied in the “religious” and “heritage” uses of historic places, arguing that there needs to be a better sensitivity to the dynamics of and tensions that result from religious and nonreligious engagements, modes, and moods within the same site. Ultimately, this project reveals how heritage sites can become loci for religious revival and for negotiating the role of religion in the modern world. Religious heritage sites, it concludes, ought to be understood as living places, which means giving space to religion and religious practices

Political Landscapes of Capital Cities

"[Political Landscapes of Capital Cities] is a welcome contribution to the study of the spatialization of society and suggests paths that anthropologists can take to analyze political space in urban and non-urban settings alike." —Anthropology Review Database "[O]utstanding contributions of an interdisciplinary group of authors trained in different methodologies. . . . offer[s] both scholarly and popular audiences wide-ranging perspectives in exploring, imagining, perceiving and experiencing capital cities." —Journal of Urban Cultural Studie

Reading councils backwards: Challenging teleological perspectives of Constantinople’s ecclesiastical development from 381 to 451

The period from the First Council of Constantinople (381) to the Council of Chalcedon (451) is considered to be a formative one in the development of Constantinople’s self-identity and confidence as an ecclesiastical authority. Traditional representations of Constantinople during this era portray a see that was experiencing meteoric growth in episcopal authority and was increasingly attempting to assert supremacy over the churches of the east as well as challenge Rome’s authority in the west. However, it is the contention of this thesis that such a view is informed by a highly teleological perspective of Constantinople’s earliest history. Constantinople’s future significance as the centre of eastern Christianity and foil to Rome have seen perceptions of the Constantinopolitan see of the late fourth and early fifth centuries subsumed into the broad and far-reaching narratives that are synonymous with the city and its Byzantine legacy. By re-examining this seventy-year period through a close consideration of the unique theological, political, and demographic characteristics specific to the Constantinople of the time, this thesis will argue that the city’s political importance and imperial symbolism significantly preceded the development of a bishopric with the necessary institutional strengths to cope with the city’s meteoric growth. The intermingling of imperial and episcopal politics, the city’s lack of theological heritage, and the diversity of the city’s mushrooming population would cause the Constantinopolitan bishops of this period immeasurable difficulties. Eschewing the supra-narrative of Constantinople’s rise to global prominence, and repositioning the councils of 381 and 451 and the decades between them within a local Constantinopolitan context, I argue that the pronouncements of both canon 3 of Constantinople I and canon 28 of Chalcedon are not indicative of a see growing in geo-ecclesiastical confidence but were in fact responses to systemic weaknesses internal to a struggling episcopate

Proceedings of the 23rd International Congress of Byzantine Studies : Plenary Papers

Implementing the decision of the General Assembly of the AIE B (Athens 2013), the Organizing Committee of the 23rd International Congress of Byzantine Studies (Belgrade August 2016) has introduced certain changes which seemed necessary with regard to the programme and format of the plenary sessions. The aim of these changes was to find room for discussion during the sessions themselves. Each session now includes three lectures on a common topic and is moderated by a chairperson whose main task will be to facilitate the discussion among the speakers as well as between them and the public. The chosen topics were selected as representative of certain subfields of particular interest within the present state of Byzantine studies. The last session is devoted to the future of Byzantine studies, characterized by a new dynamics in terms both of expansion and of the techniques of research. The present volume contains twenty papers to be given at the plenary sessions, together with the respective introductions and conclusions. In the introduction to each session, the moderators offer their view of the current state of the field, thus providing the necessary scholarly background for the following lectures and the ensuing discussion. The topics selected belong to different subfields: hagiography, the archeology of early Byzantine towns, the study of religious practices and the senses, the inquiry into the political and ideological influence of the idea of Romanitas among the Slavs, the study of Byzantine historical writing. All the papers in this volume focus on the new developments in the field, the recent discoveries and innovative methodological trends. The hope of the Organizing Committee is that the papers reflect the sum of our present capacity to face the challenge of the new approaches, whether they mainly submit traditional ideas to a searching re-examination or, alternatively, concentrate on the opening of new areas for research. The official motto of the 23rd International Congress of Byzantine Studies, Byzantium – a world of changes, acts as a sort of fil rouge to the present volume. By choosing the old dictum of Maximos Planoudes, we wanted to bring into focus both the ever changing nature of the scholarly inquiry into the Byzantine world and the inexhaustible interest of that world itself