Browsing by Title

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    A Tale of Two Cities: Jābarṣā/Jābalqā and Their Metamorphoses
    (De Gruyter, 2024) Marinos Sariyannis
    Although the twin cities at the west and east edges of the world, Jābarṣā (Jābarṣ, Jābalṣā, Jāburṣā) and Jābalqā (Jābalq, Jābarqā), are somehow commonplace in Islamicate cosmographies throughout the medieval period, surprisingly little research exists on them. The main lines of the legend, as formulated by the medieval traditionalists and cosmographers, are as follows: there are two cities at the uttermost east and west parts of the inhabited world, where the sun rises and sets. The inhabitants suffer from the extreme heat and the noise made by the sun in its rising and setting; they have to hide in caves and make their own noise to be protected. In the various versions of the story, some elements lack or differ; the cities are often connected with other legends related to the edge of the world, such as Dhū l-Qarnayn, the Gog and Magog/Yājūj and Mājūj, Muḥammad’s night journey, the remnants of the ʿĀd tribe, and so forth. The paper traces the origins of the legend, its formation and various formulations during the Islamic Middle Ages, the significant change it underwent in the late medieval Illuminationist (ishrāqī) philosophy, and finally its survival and fading away to a status of folktale utopia in Ottoman literature and scholarship.
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    Aca’ib: Occasional Papers on the Ottoman Perceptions of the Supernatural - Volume 1 (2020)
    (Institute for Mediterranean Studies/FORTH, 2020-01) Sariyannis, Marinos
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    Aca’ib: Occasional Papers on the Ottoman Perceptions of the Supernatural - Volume 2 (2021)
    (Institute for Mediterranean Studies/FORTH, 2021-12) Sariyannis, Marinos
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    Aca’ib: Occasional Papers on the Ottoman Perceptions of the Supernatural - Volume 3 (2022)
    (Institute for Mediterranean Studies/FORTH, 2022-02) Sariyannis, Marinos
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    Aca’ib: Occasional Papers on the Ottoman Perceptions of the Supernatural - Volume 4 (2023/2024)
    (Isntitute for Mediterranean Studies/FORTH, 2024-06) Sariyannis, Marinos
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    Art byzantin et peintres français au XIXe siècle sur le Mont Athos
    (Université de Poitiers, 2023) Seraïdari, Katerina
    The article examines the interest, which arose around Byzantine art in France around the 1840s and which led to the discovery of Panselinos’ work on Mount Athos, but also of a tradition favoring a collective way of doing – this artistic tradition being already threatened by Russian influence. Two French painters are at the center of the article: Alexandre Bida, who painted the Refectory of Greek monks on Mount Athos but who, apparently, never visited this place; and Dominique Papety, who stayed there for a little more than a week during the summer of 1846 but who made a great number of drawings during his visit. The work of these painters shows Mount Athos as a place of artistic production, conservation and transmission. It also places this monastic peninsula and its inhabitants, deliberately staying at the margins of society, in the center of artistic debates in France.
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    Bibliographies curated for the research project GHOST
    ( 2020) Sariyannis, Marinos
    Bibliographies collected for the research project The archive (.zip,.rar) contains bibliographic references as seperate BibTex files (.bib) seperated into the following categories 1. Magic and occultism in non-Islamic cultures 2. Magic and occultism in Islamicate societies 3. Magic and occultism in Ottoman culture 4. Nature, the preternatural and the supernatural in Islam 5. History of Ottoman science
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    From Petersburg to Shipka via Mount Athos: Slavic Saints on the Shipka Iconostasis
    (Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, 2024-10-31) Gergova, Ivanka
    The article explores the images of Slavic saints on the iconostasis of the Russian Memorial Church in the town of Shipka in Bulgaria, which were completed in 1899–1901 at the Russian Saint Panteleimon Monastery on Mount Athos. Its main objective is to analyze the iconostasis’s conceptual framework, the meanings behind the selection of the saints, as well as the main iconographical models utilized. The Committee for the Construction of the Memorial Church and its chairperson Count Nikolay Ignatyev conceived of one tier of images of saints depicting the heroes of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, while a number small icons would feature local Bulgarian and Slavic saints that were to be selected by the monks themselves. The icon painting monks mainly relied on Archbishop Philaret of Chernigov’s book The Saints of the Southern Slavs with engravings by academician Fedor Solntsev as the main source and model for their depictions of saints.
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    'From the Orthodox Megalopolis of Moscovy of Great Russia': Russian heirlooms from the monastery of Tatarna, Sixteenth-Seventeenth Centuries
    (Ιερά Μητρόπολις Σταγών και Μετεώρων, Ακαδημία Θεολογικών και Ιστορικών Μελετών Αγίων Μετεώρων, 2022) Boycheva, Yuliana ; Resh, Daria
    This article examines Russian artifacts donated to the Monastery of the Virgin of Tatarna (Evrytania, Central Greece) by Archbishop Arsenios of Elassona (1550-1625) and clergymen from his entourage. A monastic site since the Byzantine period, Tatarna emerged as an important religious center in the late sixteenth century because of its special status as a patriarchal monastery (stavropegion), granted to it almost immediately after its foundation by monks from Thessaly. The donation of a large number of Russian artifacts includes a manuscript, icons, and a pectoral panagiarion-encolpion, some of which are associated directly with Arsenios through inscriptions, while others are attributable to the clerics carrying the artifacts to the monastery. Overall, this is one of the very interesting ensembles of Russian ecclesiastical art to have survived in its original context in Greece. It is distinguished not only by the excellent craftsmanship of the objects comprising it, but also by the questions it raises as a historical source.
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    Historical Research meets Semantic Interoperability: The Documentation System SYNTHESIS and its Application in Art History Research
    (The University of Tokyo, 2022) Fafalios, Pavlos
    We present the SYNTHESIS documentation system and its use in the context of a large European research project of Art History, called RICONTRANS. SYNTHESIS is Web-based, multilingual, and configurable for use in other digital humanities fields. It focuses on semantic interoperability and achieves this by making use of standards for data modelling (CIDOC-CRM). The aim is the production of data with high value, longevity and long-term validity.
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    Icoane ruseşti, ţărani răsculaţi şi politică protecţionistă în Imperiul Habsburgic la 1784-1785
    (Karl A. Romstorfer, Suceava, 2024) Dumitran, Ana
    In the days immediately following the start of Horea's Uprising, three Russian icon merchants were arrested in the Aiud fair, suspected of being among those who had incited the peasants to revolt. Some of the icons that might have been sold at the time are in the collection of the Alba Iulia Museum. Their research followed rumours that merchants were distributing their wares with the announcement of an imminent Russian attack and that anyone who could not show such icons to prove they were a true Christian would be killed. The inquiry ordered by Emperor Joseph II after the suppression of the rebellion confirmed the clever marketing of the Russian merchants, who were banned from entering the Empire from 28 July 1785. In the following years, glass painting - a craft that was just taking off in the central provinces of the Habsburg Empire - would conquer the eyes of every Transylvanian Romanian, while cheap Russian icons would invade the Romanian village world outside the Carpathians.
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    Icon Goldsmiths, Pious Widows, and Holy Maidens
    (Muzeul Naţional al Unirii Alba Iulia, 2022) Kostopoulos, Tasos
    L’article explore un aspect peu étudié de la réception de l’art religieux russe par les communautés orthodoxes balkaniques du xixe siècle : l’image de la Russie et de ses peuples, que les moines collectant les aumônes (zeteia) avaient relayée, à leur retour, dans leurs monastères d’origine et/ou aux communautés environnantes. L’objectif principal des voyages entrepris par ces moines était de convertir une partie considérable de dons et bénéfices collectés en une variété d’objets ecclésiastiques précieux et/ou revêtements d’icônes. La présente étude analyse trois récits différents de deux de ces voyages, effectués dans les années 1860 et au début des années 1890 par des moines athonites. Elle explore également deux approches dans cette collecte d’aumônes (traditionnelle vs entrepreneuriale) et la manière dont le regard porté par les voyageurs en question sur la société russe, ses institutions religieuses, ses mœurs et ses habitudes, a pu en être affecté.
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    Icons as Marketable Objects
    (Muzeul Naţional al Unirii Alba Iulia, 2020-04-04) Seraïdari, Katerina
    L’étude examine les raisons pour lesquelles les icônes russes, ou imitant un style russe, sont devenues des objets à la mode, commercialisés en Grèce du milieu du XIXe au début du XXe siècle. Elle met ainsi en lumière un phénomène social : la diffusion et la popularité des icônes russes dans ce pays, mais aussi au Mont Athos – une région considérée comme étant le ‘gardien’ de la tradition orthodoxe et de l’authenticité qui faisait encore partie de l’Empire O1oman pendant l’époque en question. Les conséquences de ce1e circulation sont également analysées. Ce phénomène culturel a mené à une banalisation du commerce des icônes et à une confusion croissante entre le domaine de la spiritualité et celui des transactions économiques. La production d’icônes émerge donc comme une arène d’intérêts concurrents; ce qui révèle l’asymétrie de l’influence que la Grèce (un état récemment fondé et économiquement instable) et l’Empire russe exerçaient dans le monde orthodoxe.
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    Insights into Janissary Networks, 1700-1826
    (Izmir Katip Celebi University, 2022-07-01) Spyropoulos, Yannis
    This special issue comprises a collection of essays exploring the history of the Janissaries, serving as the first installment in a planned series of publications examining the processes that established the Janissary Corps as a formidable political and socioeconomic force both in the Ottoman center and the provinces. The articles featured here originated as presentations at a workshop held at İzmir Kâtip Çelebi University in September 2021, organized as part of the ERC-funded project “JaNeT: Janissaries in Ottoman Port-Cities: Muslim Financial and Political Networks in the Early Modern Mediterranean.” This project investigates the operations of Janissary networks within the Ottoman Empire, framing them as integral components of broader Muslim political and economic networks spanning much of the Mediterranean region.
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    Itinerant Suspicions: Russian Icon Traders in the Macedonian Hinterland Through the Eyes of Greek Consuls and Agents
    (Departamentul de Istorie, Arheologie și Muzeologie, Universitatea „1 Decembrie 1918” din Alba Iulia, 2021-12-15) Kostopoulos, Tasos
    Itinerant Russian icon traders, colloquially known as afenya, one of the main channels through which various objects of Russian religious art found their way to the Ottoman-dominated Balkans, were seen by Greek nationalists during the late 19th century as the spearhead of a Panslavist thrust designed to hit Hellenism’s soft religious underbelly. Two sets of documents from Greek diplomats and their agents in the Macedonian hinterland, dealing with two emblematic incidents involving such Russian traders, shed light on this trade, its features and its reception by local communities at the era of Balkan national revivals
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    La carrière patrimoniale d’une mosaïque portative byzantine
    (Actes Sud, 2022) Seraïdari, Katerina
    This article tells two parallel stories: one about a 14th century Athonite icon that was in the collection of a Russian diplomat in 1894 before it was acquired by the Dumbarton Oaks Museum, and the other is the emergence of a new object of study in the field of Byzantine Art starting at the end of the 19th century, precisely when these pieces (that were being studied systematically for the first time) were increasingly sought after by collectors. Thus, this article examines how a type of object (small portable mosaics) was identified and named at the end of the 19th century. Efforts to define this type of object were signified by the production of lists of byzantine miniatures that had survived the passage of time. Inventories revealed the great rarity of these pieces that were already highly desirable amongst Italian collectors during the Renaissance. This article follows the trajectory of one such mosaic, which after having been kept in place in the treasury of the Vatopedi Monastery, was moved around a number of times. Its change of status (from object of devotion to a museum work), the conditions of its displacements and the different forms of exchange in which it was involved (gifts but also sales) reveal a correlation with the development of archeological studies on such portable mosaics. The articulation between these two stories shows that the process of organizing knowledge on certain topics can directly affect the art and antiquities market.
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    Museographic Objects, Saints, and Sacred Places
    (Muzeul Naţional al Unirii Alba Iulia, 2022) Seraïdari, Katerina
    L’article nous présente la manière dont trois histoires, avec des finalités très différentes, s’avèrent en réalité interconnectées. La première histoire est celle de saint Antoine Petchersky (xe-xie siècle), père du monachisme russe et fondateur de la Laure des Grottes de Kyïv; la deuxième concerne un monastère du Mont Athos, où ce saint aurait vécu pendant un certain temps au xie siècle; la troisième nous parle d’un objet qu’il aurait porté. La présente étude permet d’explorer la rivalité entre Grecs et Russes au Mont Athos dans la seconde moitié du xixe siècle. Elle permet également d’interroger la question des ‘faux’ objets et la pertinence culturelle de ces derniers.
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    «Nous étions tous stupéfaits et effrayés» : Émotions ottomanes face au surnaturel.
    (Peeters, 2022) Marinos Sariyannis
    Ottoman literature, from descriptions of the earth and from biographies of the great Sufi sheikhs to Evliya Çelebi’s narrative and from realistic novels to first-person narratives, is full of supernatural apparitions: ghosts and jinn, but mostly emissaries from the invisible world or ghayb appear often not only in fiction, but also in accounts purportedly relating faithfully real facts. Based on a sample of texts covering a large time span, this paper proposes a classification of the emotions described by Ottoman authors vis-à-vis the supernatural experience and suggests some hypotheses on what we can deduce regarding Ottoman attitudes toward the world and the Hereafter.
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