This article situates an epigram by Michael Choniates on medieval Athens in the broader context of European poetry by examining Michael’s use of the ‘lover as idolater’ and ‘looking for Rome in Rome’ topoi in comparison with treatments of these themes in the Italian and medieval Latin traditions. It then discusses the poem in light of Michael’s engagement with Byzantine romance and liturgical verse. The author attempts to show that this poem, commonly read for its ‘O! tempora, O! mores’ sentiment, is a subtle and rich text that creatively deals with some of the major themes of medieval literature.

Countermarks with the monogram of the Emperor Heraclius (610–41) are found in Syria on Byzantine copper coins. After discussing the typology and the reading of the countermarks we reject the older proposals that the countermarks served as a kind of revaluation in connection with the Heraclian monetary reforms. Statistical analyses of 173 specimens and their provenances, as well as comparisons with contemporary finds, have led us to the conclusion that the countermarks were applied between c. 633 and 636 in Palestine 1. They were presumably produced during the struggles with the invading Arabs. Circulating copper coins (old and new — folles, three-quarter and half folles) became revalued by countermarking because of the serious lack of cash at that time in Syria.

Issues about the manufacture of Byzantine mosaics and the implications of these in wider terms relating to social and economic questions about the art form have been little discussed. This paper brings together evidence about Byzantine glass mosaic tesserae gathered from archaeology, glass technology and glass analysis, and synthesizes these into a discussion of three aspects: distribution; manufacture; trade and price. It looks to examine how these different elements can be used to form a more detailed composite picture about the production and distribution of Byzantine mosaics. It also proposes ways in which glass analysis can be used in a more coherent way to extend our understanding of mosaic glass production.

Vatican cod. gr. 1851 is composed of four bifolia, which contain the partial text of a poem and seven illuminations. The protagonists described in the poem are a Byzantine emperor, his youthful son, his daughter and a young foreign princess to whom the son is betrothed. Comparisons with other examples of imperial dress lead to the conclusion that the illustrations in the manuscript are probably fourteenth-century. I propose that the groom was Andronikos IV, who married, in 1356, aged eight, Maria, the nine-year-old daughter of the tsar of Bulgaria, Ivan Alexander. This marriage raises issues of children’s roles at court and the nature of books made for them.

Investigating church wall paintings in Mani, Greece, the author identified a common theme of the Ainoi, the graphic interpretation of Psalms 148–150. Within this scheme there is often a specific depiction of the ‘Judges of the Earth’ as an Ottoman judge and a Venetian nobleman. This depiction is unique to Mani and is restricted to the mid-eighteenth century and those areas of Mani dominated by the rule of the kapetanoi. The paintings allude to the lack of established legal systems in that period of Mani’s history and refer back to times of stable law under Ottoman and Venetian rule.

The alliance between Isaac II Angelas and Saladin at the time of the Third Crusade has received much attention from Western and Islamic contemporaries, yet the Byzantine sources are oddly silent. This article teases out a negative reaction in Byzantium to the alliance, a reaction found in an oration delivered by Niketas Choniates on 6 January 1190. The article concludes that Choniates opposed the alliance and tactfully urged Isaac II to turn his attention towards redeeming Jerusalem, then under Saladin's control. The conclusion is set within the larger framework set by other scholars, such as Magdalino, Angold, and Hamilton, who see the Holy Land as an important factor in Byzantine policy before 1176.

The aim of this paper is to discuss the literary qualities of Psycharts’s To Tαξίδι μοο, in particular, to analyse specific examples that demonstrate its playful mode of writing. Firstly, it will attempt to place the text in the literary context of its period by discussing its conception and significance for Modern Greek literature. Secondly, it will focus on the element of humour in the text, which can best be described as a playful mode of writing. The playfulness can be explained as raising false expectations in readers in a way that does not become obtrusive or unpleasant, but aims to entertain through the effects of surprise. This mode of writing is created mainly through intertextual allusions, incongruous juxtapositions, and comical, satirical or parodic undertones.

This article focuses on the significance of the Orthodox painters’ manuals, called hermeneiai zographikes, in the development of post-Byzantine iconography and painting technology and techniques in the Balkans during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using a number of unpublished painters’ manuals (Greek and Slavonic) as primary sources for the study of Christian and Ottoman culture in the Balkan peninsula, it is possible to examine perceptions of Europe in the Balkans, in particular the principal routes for the transmission of ideas of the European Enlightenment, as well as the role of artists as mediators in the processes of ‘Europeanization'.

This article focuses on the activities of the Kelly naval mission to Greece between 1919 and 1921, the period when the geographic importance of Greece from the naval perspective and the potential of her navy attracted the interest of Britain. Notwithstanding the fact that plans to institute a pivotal Anglo–Greek naval partnership in the Eastern Mediterranean were frustrated because of the Asia Minor catastrophe, the Kelly naval mission to Greece was largely successful in developing the Greek Navy. During its term in Greece, work was expedited at the Ministry of the Marine, the recruiting law was revised and a significant number of Greek naval officers were admitted to British naval schools. Moreover, the syllabus of Greek naval colleges was updated and the Greek Naval Air Service developed on solid foundations. Financial difficulties and political complications hindered the realization of the more ambitious projects of the mission, i.e. the establishment of a new arsenal at Skaramanga and the procurement of sorely needed naval units. However, maintaining the many old Greek warships in working condition would have been impossible had it not been for the success of the mission in developing the organization and infrastructure of the Salamis arsenal.

George Horton was a man of letters and United States Consul in Greece and Turkey at a time of social and political change. He writes of the re-taking of Smyrna by the Turkish army in September 1922. His account, however, goes beyond the blame and events to a demonization of Muslims, in general, and of Turks, in particular. In several of his novels, written more than two decades before the events of September 1922, he had already identified the Turk as the stock-in-trade villain of Western civilization. In his account of Smyrna, he writes not as historian, but as publicist.

The homosexual undertones of Demetrios Capetanakis’s English writings become evident when the work is seen in the context of the British literary circle that was instrumental in its publication. However, reading Capetanakis’s poems as a ‘coming out’ narrative leads us to assess the mismatching interpretations of gender and sexuality in Greece and the West and the larger complications of identity and identifications. It is suggested that, in Capetanakis’s work written in English, what seems at first a liberating expression of the ‘true self’ through writing can instead be viewed as positing the problem of the idea of a stable, unified and solid identity.