Ontological Presentation of East-Christian Iconographical Art Domain

In the recent years the East-Christian iconographical art works have been digitized providing a large volume of data. The need for effective classification, indexing and retrieval of iconography repositories was the motivation of the design and development of a systemized ontological structure for description of iconographical art objects. This paper presents the ontology of the East-Christian iconographical art, developed to provide content annotation in the Virtual encyclopedia of Bulgarian iconography multimedia digital library. The ontology’s main classes, relations, facts, rules, and problems appearing during the design and development are described. The paper also presents an application of the ontology for learning analysis on an iconography domain implemented during the SINUS project “Semantic Technologies for Web Services and Technology Enhanced Learning”.* This work is partly funded by the Bulgarian NSF under the project D-002-189 SINUS “Semantic Technologies for Web Services and Technology Enhanced Learning”

The Relational Spiritual Geopolitics of Constantinople, the Capital of the Byzantine Empire

Strategically located on a peninsula on the European side of the narrow Bosphorus strait that connects the Mediterranean and the Black Seas (by way also of the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles), Constantinople; the capital city of the medieval Roman Empire that we know as the Byzantine Empire (324-1453), was the largest and most thriving urban center in the Old World.1 The city was founded by the first Roman Emperor who embraced Christianity, Constantine I (d. 337), as the eponymous capital outside historically dominant urban centers and as the alternative to the city of Rome. This chapter outlines the physical production of the geopolitical landscape of Constantinople. By highlighting the critical elements of Constantinopolitan spatial configuration this essay questions how the geopolitical landscape of Constantinople was then emulated at alternative sites of authority, in related capital cities of emerging medieval states that adopted Byzantine cultural values and its Orthodox version of Christianity in medieval Bulgaria, Rus and Serbia

Dei Genitrix: A Generative Grammar for Traditional Litanies

The object of the present paper is a study of two traditional litanies, Litany of the Saints and Litany of Loreto, in their most ancient attested form. We will design a narrative grammar to show how their litanic structures can be generated. We propose the notion of n-selection, a narrative rule which can\u27t be reduced to syntax or semantics: it depends on culture. We will test the grammar on the Litany to the Divine Mercy, written by Saint Faustina Kowalska in the XXth century. Our purpose is to identify the rules of the genre which allow its reproduction in more recent versions

The Standing Stones of Medieval Bosnia: Heresy, Dualism and Symbols in Pre-Ottoman Balkans

The aim of this dissertation is to interpret the enigmatic imagery of the steak, the roughly 60,000 monumental, monolithic standing stones found on the territories of modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina and its neighbouring regions. Around 30% of the stones are adorned with low reliefs depicting a variety of symbols such as crosses, crescents, rings and rosettes, as well as more complex figural compositions involving orants, circle dances and stag hunts. The rare and terse inscriptions found on the stones allow us to date their production between the 13th and 15th centuries and to link their creation to the medieval Bosnian state and its indigenous religious organization known as the Bosnian Church. My thesis is that the Bosnian Church adhered to what is known as a moderately dualistic theology. In order to justify this interpretation, I firstly analyze the terms heresy and dualism in their historical context(s). Secondly, I provide a re-reading of the primary documents linked to the Bosnian Church, arguing that it was related to other medieval dualist movements such as the Paulicians of eastern Anatolia, the Bogomils of Bulgaria and the Patarens/Cathars of Western Europe. Finally, I interpret the steak imagery in accordance with this view, demonstrating that it can be understood as a symbolic language with several layers of meaning. The dissertation encompasses historical, theological, iconographic and anthropological questions, shedding new light on the nature of medieval heresy/dualist Christianity, the history of medieval Bosnia, and the symbolism of a neglected aspect of European material culture

With the Bohoroditsa and Her Pokrov to Liberation: A Continuing Marian Presence in the History and Devotion of the Ukrainian Catholic Diaspora

The objective of this dissertation is to document a continuing Marian presence in the history of Ukraine, as expressed by the Ukrainian Catholic diaspora, by making original use of the material in the Ukrainian Marian Collection of the Marian Library

The Cross and the Sword: Political Myth-Making, Hegemony, and Intericonicity in the Christianization of the Iberian Peninsula and Britain

The myth-making (mythopoeia) of El Cid and King Arthur as hegemonic devices flows through a diachronical shapeshifting process with religious and political functionality linked to the Christianization of Spain and Britain. These myths interlock with the hegemonic rhetoric of Christian Reconquest to shape national identities and their procedural correlates, i.e., the monarchical Castilianization of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain) and the formation of the English monarchy (Britain). Consequently, there occurs a gradual imposition of a monolingual politico-epistemological model over the plurilingual and multi-ethnic cultural mosaic. Mythical heroes and saint-warriors substitute real figures to create fictional iconosystems and redesign collective memory and cultural identity. In this context, El Cid and King Arthur as mythemes/iconemes develop in functional correspondence with the Christianization of Britain and Spain and the establishment of national monarchies. El Cid and King Arthur are myth-synthesis since in them a variety of worldviews and textual-iconographical traditions crystallizes to create new transmedia narratives with symbolico-allegorical character. This functional relationship takes place through complex intericonic and intertextual processes in the social and cultural imaginary of medieval Spain and Britain. Special heed is paid to the impact of Byzantium’s religious, military, and literary paradigms upon the formation of Arthurian and Cidian iconosystems and narratives. Aiming to understand and describe the functionality of El Cid and King Arthur as hegemonic myths, we apply a comparative methodology intertwined with a cross-cultural perspective according to which myths, as complex devices gathered together from iconic and textual discourses, bear a concrete functionality. This functionality appears linked to the human calling to ontological self-interpretation, world-understanding, and socio-political legitimation. Furthermore, there is a continuity of these mythemes linked to contemporary cybercultural multi- and transmedia storytelling. In other words, the mythopoeia of El Cid and King Arthur takes place today via transmedia adaptations within the framework of cyberculture and digital technologies. Special forms in which these mythemes appear today are digital cinema, video games, and online educational resources. This transmedia shape-shifting process shows that traditional myths still hold a significant capacity of impact on individual and collective imaginaries. This continuity also indicates that the mythopoeia of King Arthur and El Cid is still expanding to further stages in new social and technological environments. Additionally, this process occurs in an iconological field largely determined by bio-digital categories of cyberbeing. These two conditions transform the traditional formal, diegetic, and ideothematic fashion of these mythemes according to new transmedia possibilities

Dimensions of social meaning in post-classical Greek towards an integrated approach

Especially in the first half of the twentieth century, language was viewed as a vehicle for the transmission of facts and ideas. Later on, scholars working in linguistic frameworks such as Functional and Cognitive Linguistics, (Historical) Sociolinguistics and Functional Sociolinguistics, have emphasized the social relevance of language, focusing, for example, on linguistic concepts such as deixis, modality, or honorific language, or embedding larger linguistic patterns in their social contexts, through notions such as register, sociolect, genre, etc. The main aim of this article is to systematize these observations, through an investigation of how the central, though ill-understood notion of “social meaning” can be captured. The starting point for the discussion is the work that has been done in the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. This framework distinguishes “social” (“interpersonal”) meaning from two other types of meaning, and offers a typology of different types of contexts with which these different meanings resonate. In order to achieve a more satisfactory account of social meaning, however, I argue that we need to connect to a theory of how signs convey meaning. The discussion is relevant for Ancient Greek in its entirety, but focuses specifically on Post-classical Greek: as a case study, I discuss five private letters from the so-called Theophanes archive