The center of the greatest empire in the world, the seat of Christianity, Byzantium is a revered city. Marked by gargantuan monuments to God and peopled by the most royal of princes, and the most affluent citizens, Byzantium cannot possibly ever fall. Now under siege by Islam, the Byzantine Empire must look to Christians from the West for help in winning back Jerusalem, the most hallowed of cities. The Byzantines must prevent the disintegration of their empire while protecting the faith of many, but at what expense?
Mount Athos was the most famous center of Byzantine monasticism and remains the spiritual heart of the Orthodox Church today. Holy Men of Mount Athos presents the Lives of five holy men who lived there at different times, from the ninth century to the last decades of the Byzantine period in the early fifteenth century.
Exhibition spaces are physical places of knowledge production and exchange. Their spatial properties play an important role in contextualizing information. Virtual stagings of exhibitions should therefore retain these properties. The Beyond Matter research project (2019–23) aims to unravel the intertwining of physical and virtual structures and their impact on spatial aspects in art production, curating, and art education, and thus to identify ways to preserve cultural heritage in the digital age. This publication offers a comprehensive overview of the diverse research activities, exhibition and book projects, and symposia that have taken place or emerged in the course of the international Beyond Matter project at the various partner institutions.
In the tenth century, the center of the world is not Rome, but Byzantium--a glorious empire, upon which the sun never sets. Constantinople, the center of this mighty dynasty, is starting to unravel. The great kings and princes, the holy city, the affluence of the empire will be scattered to the winds. Attacked by the Turks on all sides, Byzantium looks to its emperor for deliverance. Leo Ducas, heir to the Byzantine crown, must fight for his inheritance, but he doesn’t truly know who his enemies are. Shunned by the citizens of Constantinople, Leo flees the city and great works are revealed to him. He learns of a realm that falls outside his Christian training, a realm of magic and wisdom...
The present volume comprises the papers delivered at RICAN 6, which was held in Rethymnon, Crete, on May 30-31, 2011. The focus is placed on male and female characters in the ancient novel and related texts, both pagan and Christian; these characters are presented either as holy or as charlatans but in several cases the two categories cannot be easily distinguished from each other. The papers offer a wide and rich range of perspectives.
The National Library of Greece (Ethnike Bibliothike tes Ellados) is one of the richest depositories of Byzantine musical manuscripts and is surpassed by its holdings in Greece only by the multitude of manuscripts found in the monasteries of Mount Athos. In spite of being such a rich archive, the National Library has never published a catalogue of its musical manuscripts - not all of which are Byzantine or Greek. It is the purpose of this catalogue to recover or, in some instances, to present for the first time the repertory of the musical sources of the library. This project has been twelve years in the making for Professor Diane Touliatos, involving the discovery and detailed cataloguing of all 241 Western, Ancient Greek, and Byzantine music manuscripts. Not all of these are from Athens or modern Greece, but also encompass Turkey, the Balkans, Italy, Cyprus, and parts of Western Europe. This variety underlines the importance of the catalogue for identifying composers, music and performance practice of different locales. The catalogue includes a detailed listing of the contents as written in the original language as well as the titles of compositions (and/or incipits) with composers, modal signatures, other attributions and information on performance practice. Each manuscript entry includes a commentary in English indicating important highlights and its significance. There is a substantive English checklist that summarizes the contents of each manuscript for non-Greek readers. A bibliography follows containing pertinent citations where the manuscript has been used in references. There is also a glossary that defines terms for the non-specialist. Examples of some of the manuscripts will be photographically displayed. The catalogue will enlighten musicologists and Byzantinists of the rich and varied holdings of some of the most important musical manuscripts in existence, and stimulate more interest and investigation of these sources. As such, it will fill a major ga
