When my grandmother died, I inherited her large collection of icons. Among my favourites is the icon of St. Phanourios, the patron saint of lost things. My grandmother was a Greek Egyptian, and both of my grandparents were products of the mercantile movement in the Mediterranean during the Ottoman period, their families having originated in Cyprus and perhaps earlier than that, the coast of the Near East. St. Phanourios has become one of my favourite saints for a number of personal reasons—I love his mysterious origins, his connections to Rhodes and Cyprus, the sudden and late rediscovery of his icon (and his story itself) during the Ottoman period, and the movement of his cult throughout the early modern Greek world; his movements parallel my own family history. He is, in himself, a microhistory, one that reflects the complexity of the history of medieval Greece. The layers of the cult of St. Phanourios parallels the complexity of East Roman history and archaeology in medieval Greece, which reflects the same layers of cultural continuity and adaptation to change brought in by new populations. Indeed, perhaps St. Phanourios is looking out for archaeology in Greece, because this archaeology of lost things is really a road map for how we can understand medieval East Roman Greece.

While our understanding of medieval Anatolia remains somewhat limited, Greece offers a more comprehensive view of the longue durée of medieval East Roman culture, both because it remains a living, active heritage and sim-ply because more extensive fieldwork has been carried out there, particularly through survey projects. It is to Greece that we can turn to understand the continuity of use of landscapes during the medieval period in both urban and rural settings. Greece had a mixed population, both from invasions and trade, and this is evident in the archaeological record; longevity was fuelled through constant innovation. However, the physical environment, both built and landscape, also provides a backdrop to use and reuse throughout the medieval period.