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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    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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    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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    Payitaht Yeniçerileri. Padişahın “Asi” Kulları 1700-1826
    ( 2022-08) Yıldız, Aysel ; Spyropoulos, Yannis ; Sunar, M. Mert
    Janissaries have a special place in the history of Istanbul. For centuries they represented an important element of the imperial capital, shaping the latter's politics and economy, establishing deep ties with its inhabitants and enriching its culture. As they evolved into a large decentralized army present in most fortresses of the Ottoman empire —especially from the 17th century onward, their rapidly increasing numbers in the imperial urban space deepened and complicated their relations with the population of the cities where they were located. This was also the case with Istanbul where the Janissaries grew into an essential component of its economic, social, and cultural life. This book attempts at studying the Janissaries from the perspective of their involvement into the 18th- and early 19th-century Istanbul's socioeconomic and political history, while avoiding to engage into the elitist, centralist, and reductionist discourse which —under the influence of the decline paradigm— has associated them with the image of a conservative reactionary group responsible for the empire's downfall. Instead, the contributors of this volume treat the members and affiliates of the corps as everyday people forming social relations and networks, and as political and economic actors who were in constant interaction with the society they lived in, changing it as much as they changed themselves in the process. This collective volume has been published in the framework of the ERC-funded project “JANET: Janissaries in Ottoman Port Cities: Muslim Financial and Political Networks in the Early Modern Mediterranean,” a project dedicated to examining the functioning of Janissary networks in the Ottoman Empire, conceiving of them as inextricably connected to Muslim political and economic networks across a large part of the Mediterranean.
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    Pious Russian Soldiers, Devout Cretan Donors and the Church
    (Muzeul Naţional al Unirii Alba Iulia, 2022) Katopi, Sofia
    Cet article se propose d’étudier, dans leur contexte, différents accessoires ecclésiastiques russes, tels que des épitaphes, des vêtements de prêtres et des objets eucharistiques, qui se trouvent dans les églises et dans les monastères de la préfecture de Réthymnon - district passé sous le contrôle russe entre 1897 et 1909 - et qui datent de l’époque de l’Autonomie Crétoise (1898-1913). A la lumière des relations entre la Russie et les institutions socio-politiques crétoises; en tenant compte du fait que la Russie n’entretenait pas, avec cette île, des liens commerciaux aussi développés qu’avec les autres secteurs de la Grèce, l’auteure s’intéresse aux mécanismes de transfert et d’acquisition d’objets liturgiques russes, ainsi qu’à la reconstitution d’une cartographie. Aussi, les découvertes sont-elles étudiées dans le contexte des stratégies politiques - clés du soi-disant « soft power » déployé par la Russie impériale pour asseoir son pouvoir dans la région - employées afin de préserver et soutenir l’orthodoxie contre la propagande catholique et protestante.