“We Had a Life, and That Life Was True”: The Use of Nostalgia as a Rhetorical Tool in the Texts of Gennadios Scholarios

Nostalgia, as a social emotion, was employed as a rhetorical tool to provoke a specific emotional response in the audience and to encourage their identification with the writer. In this paper, we aim to explore the use of nostalgia in the texts of Gennadios Scholarios written after the Fall of Constantinople. In these texts, Scholarios deliberately evokes memories of a better life before the fall of the Byzantine capital, contrasting that “golden age” with the dark and difficult circumstances of the present. Furthermore, he closely links his own fate with that of the fallen City. This intimate association underscores the link between nostalgia and identity, extending beyond mere longing for a lost homeland to encompass a broader social dimension, thereby eliciting a shared emotional response from his audience. Through this connection, the audience becomes actively engaged in his rhetoric, transitioning from passive listeners to participants in his narrative. Thus, nostalgia functions not only as an emotion of discontinuity and comparison but also as an emotion of identification.