Is Byzantium really in the popular imagination? Whilst popular imagination is a catch-all term that the editors propose but isn’t used universally by their authors, this volume is fairly consistent in its answer. One of its main contributions, therefore, is to bring to light a range of works (games, comics, films, novels, etc) which use Byzantium as character or backdrop but which have thus far been relatively unknown either altogether or outside their national audiences. The authors are united in their goal of demonstrating that one can put together a whole book on Byzantine reception which does not have articles devoted to the most obvious or well-known Byzantiums. Umberto Eco’s Baudolino, Julia Kristeva’s Murder in Byzantium, Cavafy, and W.B. Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ get merely a passing mention. Certainly, Byzantium graced more popular imaginations than I expected.
When people thought about Byzantium, though, did they actually know anything concrete about it? Here the volume is more nuanced, the contexts a little more diverse, the access to sources varied. Yet, overwhelmingly, across the chapters, with few exceptions, the answer is that concrete knowledge of Byzantine history or access to Byzantine sources is lacking. On this issue, the authors oscillate between frustration and resignation. In nineteenth-century French architectural thought the notion of ‘the Byzantine’ was a ‘floating concept’ with ‘geographical boundaries with no specific elements to define it’ (Lovino, p. 34). Video-game makers ‘consulted at least some Wikipedia pages about the empire’ (Fasolio, p. 136). Turkish film makers in the Seventies adapted the frontier epic Battalname into a ‘Turkish version of Robin Hood’ set in Istanbul (Bayrı, p. 168). Their Greek contemporaries in the Sixties and Seventies took just as many liberties: a film about the hymnographer Kassiani whose ‘basic premise […] defies historical truth’ and another film technically set in the reign of Basil II whose ‘plot is completely fictional’ (Chryssogelos, pp. 179–80).
Sometimes it seems these liberties seek to emphasize the specificity of Byzantium. Heilo cites how Victorien Serdou defends his decision to have Theodora killed by a eunuch in his play, because despite its historical inaccuracy it was a ‘death more Byzantine than the real one’ (Heilo, p. 227). Sometimes the Byzantium imagined is more Byzantine than the Byzantium of our medieval sources. But at other times, the examples discussed simply reflect a lack of knowledge and interest in Byzantium as an entity rather than a metaphor.
Byzantium’s political value, too, is ‘floating’. In GDR comics it is ‘suitable as a layer’ that can ‘subtly reflect elements of every-day life in the GDR’ (Diamantopoulou, p. 114); in Romania in the 1970s, filmmakers used Byzantium in part as a ‘canvas for ideological messages’ (Leonte, p. 155); in Turkey under Erdoğan, Byzantium and the Byzantines were ‘foils in the political discourse’ standing in for ‘opposition to the government’ and for a ‘Westernized, secular, urban’ class of Istanbulus (Bayrı, p. 171); for the Greek novelist Karagatsis, ‘Byzantium offers the most appropriate stage on which to display the author’s personal views on sexuality and its impact on human relations’ (Liasi, pp .242-3). From socialism, to Romanian civilizational claims, to comments about sexuality, the blank canvas of Byzantium offers plenty of flexibility, even if this flexibility is not always queried: why, for example, is Byzantium a good foil for everyday life in the GDR?
Byzantine reception is still a nascent field of study. This volume, alongside the Pera Museum exhibition of 2021, What Byzantium is this in Istanbul!, and its catalogue, offer some of the first attempts to collect Byzantine receptions and in some instances to plug these receptions into contemporary cultural and political processes (Gargova on architecture at the 1900 Paris World Exhibition and Shliakhtin on the reception of Vladimir of Rus under Vladimir Putin are exemplary in this regard). This is important work, since much of the groundwork for reception studies still remains to be done. We still don’t have a full picture of the size or scope of Byzantine-infused content in popular media, nor a complete grasp of the longue durée patterns in this reception.
Inevitably, then, a volume such as this begs a number of questions of synthesis: three articles, for example, discuss aspects of French Byzantine reception in the nineteenth century, but did the architects of empire have anything to do with the architects of the imperial world exhibition pavilions? Did Turkish and Greek filmmakers engage with their national historiographies or seek to shape them? How insular were these practices of reception, refraction, re-imagining?
And more generally, can we distinguish between the use of Byzantium as a relatively abstract and replaceable backdrop for a contemporary political message, and the use of Byzantium as a specific and concrete metaphor, whose value lies in the empire itself?
When it comes to Byzantium, the stakes are much higher in the states which sit on its historic borders. Reception must reflect this in some way. As this volume attests, outside of France in the nineteenth century, Byzantium’s role in western imaginaries is fairly marginal, incidental even, whereas its place in popular media in Turkey, Greece, Romania is far more central. Are these, then, both part of the same kind of popular imagining or must reception be distinguished by its political stakes?
These important questions can only be answered once we have a better sense of our corpus and the cultural and political trends from which its artefacts emerge. Marciniak and Kulhánková and their contributors offer an important step forward in this burgeoning field, and a must read for anyone interested in Byzantium’s afterlives.
