5.23 FC – Perceptions and Adaptations of Byzantium from the Late 18th to the 20th Century

This paper examines Istanbul’s Byzantine architectural heritage during Turkey’s Republican era (post-1923) through the congress theme “Byzantium beyond Byzantium,” analyzing the Historical Peninsula as a palimpsest of cultural memory. Emerging from war in 1923, Istanbul faced demographic decline and urban decay, yet excavations revealed enduring Byzantine strata—churches, city walls, spoliated elements—integrated into Ottoman and modern…

This paper examines Celal Nuri [İleri]’s book Rum ve Bizans (1917) from the perspective of the author’s understanding of morality and elaborates on the perception of Byzantine history in late Ottoman historiography. It explores how historiography intersected with discussions of moral decline and how Byzantine history was instrumentalized at this point, by close reading the…

This paper situates Robert Byron and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s travel writing in relation to the modernist discovery of Byzantium in archaeology, literature, art history and museum exhibition. For Byron, who was at the forefront of the Anglophone resurgence, Byzantium represented a marginalised alternative tradition which could be recuperated in the service of modernist formalism. The…

The fall of Constantinople in 1453 did not signify the end of Byzantine cultural identity. Across the Balkans, Byzantine traditions persisted, adapting to new political and social realities. This paper examines the Vodoča necropolis, a key archaeological site in present-day North Macedonia, as a case study for understanding post-Byzantine identity. The monastery complex and burial…