Jubilees are good to think with, obviously. They provide a fitting opportunity to look back, to take stock, and to offer some thoughts about the future. As a scholar working on Byzantine history (and only slightly older than BMGS at that) I recognize that the state of the field has changed immensely in the last fifty years. First, there was a major expansion in departments and programmes dedicated to Byzantine studies, followed more recently by a contraction. And yet, even while Byzantine studies are offered in fewer academic institutions, there is an immense proliferation of academic research and publications on the Byzantine Empire – trend accelerating. Exact numbers may be hard to come by, but a quick search on WorldCat for books published in 2023 with the word ‘Byzantine’ in the title brought forth almost two hundred books – in English alone. If we add journal articles (there are over twenty major journals devoted solely to Byzantine studies), chapters in edited volumes, and, especially publications in languages other than English, we would probably reach the low thousands, all in one year. To survey, much less to read with care and absorb all this new knowledge, has become impossible. How handy would it be if someone else took over this task for us – processing research and synthesizing it in a clear, concise and readable volume. It is highly doubtful that such a book could be produced today, but there is a work that fulfilled these functions for a very long time, one of the most cited and recommended textbooks in Byzantine history, Georg Ostrogorsky's History of the Byzantine State.

Just a few months after Barbra Streisand (as Katie) and Robert Redford (as Hubbell) featured in The Way We Were, Clive Foss published the first of his many seminal works of the late 1970s and early 1980s. It focused on the transformation experienced by twenty Anatolian cities cited by Constantine Porphyrogenitus in his De Thematibus; the main idea was to prove that urban life, upon which the classical Mediterranean culture had been based, came virtually to an end following the Persian invasion and retrenched to villages and fortresses until the tenth century. ‘These conclusions, of course, apply only to [Anatolia], but … they would prove valid for the whole Byzantine empire [and] they are based almost entirely on the results of archaeology.’

The 1970s saw the rise of two unrelated and yet affine historical concepts: Late Antiquity (Brown 1971) and Post-Modernism (Lyotard 1979). It is almost as if the breakdown of Antiquity in the way it had been traditionally understood, clearly delineated from the Middle Ages and the Byzantine Empire, heralded the dissolution of the Modern Western self-understanding and everything that went with it. For Byzantine studies, it came with a flora of textual rediscoveries; but the gate that had opened onto the spiritual meadows of Late Antiquity could also be used to approach and contextualize Islam in a new way.

This article presents a brief historiographical survey of scholarship on the history of science and history of knowledge in Byzantium since the 1920s and proposes several directions for future research. These include the study of instruments; of the language that Byzantine scientific texts, diagrams, and even instruments employ; the study of the involvement of women and of the knowledge created, transferred, and owned by non-elites. Ultimately, the article argues, a critical historiographical approach enables an understanding of the field of Byzantine studies as an element of the global and multidisciplinary systems of historical knowledge, including the history of science and the history of knowledge.

The medieval Slavs approached Byzantine speculative thought with caution. This essay explores Slavic hesitancy towards Greek theoretical ambition within the writings on visions of the Bulgarian theologian Euthymios of Tarnovo. Whereas the Greek hesychast theologian Gregory Palamas argued that the saints behold God's glory without mediation, Euthymios took a more modest approach, asserting that angels arbitrate between heaven and earth and bestow visions on the saints. Earlier scholars have described Euthymios as a ‘hesychast’, yet his views on visions align more closely with Palamas’ opponents and the Corpus of Pseudo-Dionysios.

In 1478 a Byzantine courtier-turned-monk named George Sphrantzes related in a work conventionally called the Chronicon Minus the story of his life and times in the decades before and after the Ottoman conquest of Byzantium. The work's English translator, Marios Philippides, notes in his introduction that ‘students of history, sociology, and literature will find passages of interest in Sphrantzes’ account. In addition to its immense value as a historical testimony, Sphrantzes’ narrative is a linguistic document of great significance to the study of the evolution of the modern Greek language.’ (This latter point refers to Sphrantzes’ fifteenth-century idiom, very different from the classicizing or Atticizing style of pre-conquest Greek historiography.)1 Philippides’ approach reflects typical historiographical praxis in modern scholarship: a source text is strip-mined for those facts for which the empiricist historian is searching, and the rest is ignored or derided as superfluous.

Mehmed Ziya, an Ottoman Muslim educator and intellectual, published an art historical treatise on the Chora Monastery/Kariye Mosque in Istanbul in 1910. This was largely a translation of three articles by the French Byzantinist Charles Diehl previously published in Études byzantines and in Le Journal des savants. Through his book, Mehmed Ziya attempted to acquaint the Ottoman Turks with this Byzantine monument, especially its rich decorations. Two letters appended in the book reveal his efforts to raise awareness among the youth in this respect, and to mobilize the Ottoman authorities regarding the protection and promotion of the Chora monastery more particularly.

Photographs are seldom at the centre of Greek historical research, despite their frequent use as illustrations. Despite this neglect of photography, modern Greek history would seem unimaginable without photographs, highlighting photography's integral role in our thinking about the past. In this article I offer some theoretical reflections on the impact of photography on historical imagination. Thereafter I take a closer look at some examples that do consider photography's role in the practice of Greek history, showing how photographs have been both mistrusted and embraced in historical research.

This article investigates indigenous light as an element in the conceptualization of photography as a ‘Greek’ art from the mid-nineteenth to the first decades of the twentieth century. Key moments linking photography, writing through light, with the light of Greece will be discussed: from the mid-nineteenth-century debate about the alleged ‘Greek’ origins of photography to the thematization of light and gazing at the Greek landscape in the writings of Periklis Yannopoulos and, eventually, to interwar photographic projects bringing together contemporary scenery with antique material relics.

Archaeological excavations conducted during the construction of the Museum of the Acropolis in Athens exposed an urban neighbourhood dated from the classical to the Byzantine periods. This discovery induced a modification of the original architectural plan: museum and excavation were combined into a unique exhibition ensemble. Its visitors further created another, peculiar and makeshift, spatial innovation in the excavation quarters. This study focuses upon multiple enacted receptions of historical spaces on the site, diachronically. Byzantine dwellers perceived and used the ancient site; the Museum creators integrated the Byzantine neighbourhood; contemporary visitors spontaneously signified the entire complex with new symbolic meaning.

This article revisits Odysseus Elytis’ poem Alvaniada, first presented on the Greek National Radio Foundation (EIR) in 1956. I approach the Alvaniada as a radio poem, highlighting its role in the development of Elytis’ intermedial poetics, which aims at inventing, in his own words, ‘new fixed forms that facilitate the poem's transition from the domain of the book to the domain of the theatre or to music and song’. The case of the Alvaniada directs attention to the 1950s as a critical, yet understudied, decade for Elytis’ acquisition of canonical status: it was then that his works became widely disseminated via national cultural institutions such as the state theatre and radio.

This paper seeks to synthesize fifty years of academic historical publishing since 1974. It argues that the advent of democracy in Greece anticipated three waves of historiographic production: one immediately following the Junta's collapse in 1974 up to the 1990s; a second from the late 1990s to the 2010s; and one since then until the present.

This paper explores the Onassis Foundation's transformative impact on C.P. Cavafy's legacy by bridging traditional literary heritage with contemporary digital culture. Through strategic digitization, global events, and social media campaigns, the Foundation has expanded Cavafy's reach, reframing him as both a cultural asset and a networked figure for contemporary audiences. This study examines how an institutional approach shapes perceptions of Cavafy's work, balancing authenticity with celebrity-making, and considers the implications for Modern Greek literature's visibility on the global stage.

In this overview of the dynamic field of MG sociolinguistics in the last four decades, we show the decisive move of the field, in the spirit of sociolinguistics in general, toward permeable boundaries with other areas of linguistics that set out to investigate language-as-action and language-in-context, as well as toward synergies with other disciplines invested in the study of society and culture. The studies we discuss show how researchers have been documenting a changing, diverse society, considering different resources and environments where language is used, and with a growing focus on digital media. These studies also reflect a shift towards sociolinguistic research that addresses social justice issues and recent socio-political crises in Greek society.