general background · skills development · specialization

The Reception of Byzantium in Modern and Contemporary Literature. Comparative approaches

Postgraduate Programme — Level 7

10 ECTS Credits
3 hrs / week
English Language
Open to Erasmus
None Prerequisites

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Upon completion, students will be able to:

1)

Explain the concept of the Byzantine palimpsest and how the empire has been layered and rewritten across Eastern and Western literary traditions.

2)

Trace the evolution of Byzantine literary tropes and aesthetics, ranging from 19th-century decadent portrayals to 20th-century ascetic and spiritual interpretations.

3)

Analyze how authors use historiographic metafiction to deconstruct historical events, such as the Fourth Crusade and the Fall of 1453.

4)

Examine the reception of Byzantine iconography across media, including cinema, graphic novels, high fashion, and digital platforms.

5)

Evaluate how different regions contest the Byzantine legacy to construct their own national identities and geopolitics.

6)

Synthesize interdisciplinary research to construct evidence-based arguments, challenge modern stereotypes, and address the ethics of historical representation in fiction.

COURSE SYLLABUS

BYZANTIUM AS PALIMPEST

Byzantium is not a fixed historical period, but a dynamic cultural palimpsest—a surface continuously rewritten and reimagined. This framework establishes a thematic arc that navigates the “Byzantine” through its political, spiritual, and aesthetic dimensions, tracing its survival across the media that keep it in constant motion. The approach is explicitly comparative and intermedial, treating Byzantium as it manifests across poetry, the novel, the essay, theater, opera, cinema, graphic narrative, video games, and fashion. Central to this perspective is how modern and contemporary creators utilize historiographic metafiction and related strategies to bridge the gap between historical fact and the persistence of Byzantium as a literary myth, an aesthetic system, and a transmedial cultural construct.

  • The Artifice of Eternity: An exploration of Byzantium as a spiritual sanctuary and the Western “invention” of a static, golden empire. This theme focuses on the Parnassian “hard” aesthetic and the Decadent “jeweled” archetype, tracing the allure of the artificial and the eternal through the works of W.B. Yeats, Théophile Gautier, and Oscar Wilde.
  • The Ironic Empire: An analysis of the “insider” perspective on the aesthetics of decline and the “Greek East.” This theme considers how C.P. Cavafy utilizes irony to reconfigure Hellenism, reclaiming the Byzantine as a peripheral space where private memory and minor histories disrupt the grand narratives of the imperial center.
  • The Greek Synthesis: Byzantium as the tragic, vital link between antiquity and modern Greece. This concept bridges the epic scope of Kostis Palamas’s The King’s Flute, Nikos Kazantzakis’s Constantine Palaeologus and Report to Greco with the use of “Solar” liturgy and hymnography in Odysseus Elytis’s Axion Esti to frame modern resistance.
  • The Balkan Mirror: A study of Byzantium as a shared and contested regional ghost. This theme delves into the atmosphere of mystery and sacrifice in Ismail Kadare’s The Three-Arched Bridge and the lingering tensions between Rome and Byzantium found in Miroslav Krleža’s Essays on the Bogomils, Areteus and Marginalia.
  • The Architecture of the Imagined City: An investigation into the material reconstruction of Constantinople through visual media. This theme treats the comic medium as a “paper museum,” using the graphic worlds of Jacques Martin’s The Adventures of Alix and the contemporary Spyros Theocharis and Chrysa Sakel’s Theophano: A Byzantine Tale to visualize a lost urban reality. It also explores the ghost of Byzantium through atmosphere, ruins, and urban melancholy in Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book and Istanbul: Memories and the City.
  • The Archetypal Court A conceptualization of the Byzantine court as a theatrical space of ritual and power and a closed system of intrigue. This theme explores how historical figures are transformed into permanent archetypes of Western drama, where individual identity is subsumed by ceremony. Key texts include Victorien Sardou’s Théodora, the silent Italian film Theodora (1921), Stella Duffy’s Theodora: Actress, Empress, Whore, Jules Massenet’s Escarmonde, Robert Graves’ Count Belisarius, and Gaetano Donizetti’s Belisario.
  • 1453: Narrating the End: An examination of the “end of history” narrative and culture as a survival mechanism. This thematic comparison looks at historical reconstructions of the Empire’s final days in in Mika Waltari’s The Dark Angel, Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, Ferenc Herczeg’s Byzantium, Laurence Plazenet’s The Last Night, as well as in Faruk Aksoy’s 2012 film Fetih 1453 (The Conquest 1453), and in Nedim Gürsel’s Boğazkesen: Fatih’in Romanı (The Conqueror).
  • Counterfeit Histories: Byzantium approached as a palimpsest of forged relics and myths. This theme focuses on the deconstruction of historical truth through fiction, comparing Gore Vidal’s Julian – which presents a “rediscovered” pagan diary to challenge the state-sanctioned Christian erasure of the 4th century – with the narrative distortions of the Fourth Crusade found in Umberto Eco’s Baudolino. This section further incorporates the “Byzantine Gothic” mysteries of Anne Perry (The Sheen on the Silk) and M.E. Mayer (Death in Byzantium), where the detective’s investigation serves as a literal act of scraping away imperial lies to reveal the hidden “under-text” of a crime.
  • From History to Fantasy: The evolution of the Byzantine myth into the realm of the secondary world, specifically through Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Sarantine Mosaic. This theme explores the ethics and mechanics of “re-skinning” history into high fantasy and the transformation of geography into myth.
  • The Cinematic Icon: A study of Byzantium’s screen presence through “cinematic staticism” and the subversion of Western perspective. This theme compares the ascetic and sensual Byzantine aesthetics found in masterpieces Andrei Rublev and The Color of Pomegrenates by Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Parajanov.
  • The Speculative Fiction: An investigation into the “Space Byzantium” trope. This tracks how Byzantine court ritual, “Greek Fire” technology, and the synthesis of religious/political power (Caesaropapism) manifest in the galactic empires of Frank Herbert’s Dune and the decaying, ritual-heavy atmosphere of Gene Wolfe’s The Book
    of the New Sun, where the “Autarch” serves as a transfigured basileus at the end of time.
  • Byzantium 2.0: The Global Image: The identification of Byzantine references within 21st-century creation. This final theme tracks the emergence of “Digital Neo-Byzantinism” in video games and strategy games such as Assassin’s Creed, Civilization, Crusader Kings, Total War, and Age of Empires. It also tracks the byzantine references in the jewelry creations of Zolotas and Lalaounis as well as the high-fashion Byzantine-inspired collections of Chanel and Dolce & Gabbana, observing the empire’s persistence in the global cultural landscape.

ASSESSMENT

Student Evaluation

20%

Seminar Participation

20%

Primary Source Analysis

20%

Public presentation

40%

Research Essay

Workload — ECTS Distribution

250 Hours Total

Lectures

16

Seminar discussions

13

Primary source workshops

20

Study and analysis of bibliography

26

Student presentations

10

Independent study

90

Essay writing

75

Course Total

250

Recommended Bibliography

Suggested bibliography:

Primary Corpus Bibliography

The Artifice of Eternity

  • Gautier, Théophile. Émaux et Camées. 1852.
  • Wilde, Oscar. The Sphinx. 1894.
  • Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. 1890.
  • Yeats, William Butler. “Sailing to Byzantium” (1926) and “Byzantium” (1930). In The Collected Poems.

The Ironic Empire

  • Cavafy, C.P. Complete poems. Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.

The Greek Synthesis

  • Elytis, Odysseus. The Axion Esti. Translated by Edmund Keeley and George Savidis. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974.
  • Kazantzakis, Nikos. Constantine Palaeologus (Drama). 1951.
  • Kazantzakis, Nikos. Report to Greco. 1961.
  • Palamas, Kostis. The King’s Flute. Translated by Frederic Will. University of Nebraska Press, 1967.

The Balkan Mirror

  • Kadare, Ismail. The Three-Arched Bridge. Translated by John Hodgson. Arcade Publishing, 1997.
  • Krleža, Miroslav. The Selected Works of Miroslav Krleža (Includes Essays on the Bogomils, Areteus, and Marginalia).

The Architecture of the Imagined City

  • Martin, Jacques. Alix: Le spectre de Carthage and selected Byzantine volumes. Casterman.
  • Pamuk, Orhan. The Black Book. Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1994.
  • Pamuk, Orhan. Istanbul: Memories and the City. Knopf, 2005.
  • Theocharis, Spyros (Author) & Sakel, Chrysa (Illustrator). Theophano: A Byzantine Tale. 2020.

The Archetypal Court

  • Donizetti, Gaetano (Composer). Belisario (Opera). 1836.
  • Duffy, Stella. Theodora: Actress, Empress, Whore. Virago, 2010.
  • Graves, Robert. Count Belisarius. Cassell, 1938.
  • Massenet, Jules. Escarmonde (Opera). 1889.
  • Sardou, Victorien. Théodora (Drama). 1884.
  • Theodora (Silent film). 1921.

1453: Narrating the End

  • Aksoy, Faruk (Director). Fetih 1453 (Film). 2012.
  • Doerr, Anthony. Cloud Cuckoo Land. Fourth Estate, 2021.
  • Gürsel, Nedim. Fatih’in Romanı (The Conqueror).
  • Herczeg, Ferenc. Byzantium (Bizánc) (Drama). 1904.
  • Plazenet, Laurence. The Last Night (La Dernière Nuit). Gallimard, 2005.
  • Waltari, Mika. The Dark Angel (Johannes Angelos). Translated by Naomi Walford. Putnam, 1953.

Counterfeit Histories

  • Eco, Umberto. Baudolino. Translated by William Weaver. Secker & Warburg, 2002.
  • Vidal, Gore. Julian. Little, Brown & Company, 1964.
  • Mayer, M.E. Death in Byzantium. Head of Zeus, 2013.
  • Perry, Anne. The Sheen on the Silk. Ballantine Books, 2010.

From History to Fantasy

  • Kay, Guy Gavriel. The Sarantine Mosaic (Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors). Earthlight, 1998-2000.

The Cinematic Icon

  • Parajanov, Sergei (Director). The Color of Pomegranates (Sayat Nova). 1969.
  • Tarkovsky, Andrei (Director). Andrei Rublev. 1966.

The Speculative Fiction

  • Herbert, Frank. Dune. Chilton Books, 1965.
  • Wolfe, Gene. The Book of the New Sun. Simon & Schuster, 1980-1987.

Byzantium 2.0: The Global Image

  • Age of Empires. Microsoft Games Studios (1997-2021).
  • Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. Ubisoft, 2011.
  • Civilization. Microprose, 1991.
  • Crusader Kings. Paradox Interactive, 2004.
  • Chanel. Métiers d’Art: Paris-Byzance Collection. 2010/11.
  • Dolce & Gabbana. Fall/Winter Women’s Collection (Monreale Mosaics). 2013/14.
  • Total War series. Sega/Electronic Arts/Activision, 2000-2023.

Critical Bibliography

  • Agapitos, P.A. “Byzantium in the Poetry of Kostis Palamas and C. P. Cavafy.” Κάμπος: Cambridge Papers in Modern Greek 2 (1994): 1-20.
  • Aftonomos, Anthony T. “The Stream of Time Irresistible: Byzantine Civilization in the Modern Popular Imagination.” PhD thesis, Concordia University, 2005.
  • Angelidi, C., and T. Papamastorakis. The Afterlife of Byzantium in XIXth Century Culture. Athens, 2002.
  • Auerbach, E. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton, 1953.
  • Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin, 1981.
  • Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.
  • Bazin, André. What is Cinema? 2 vols. Translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California, 2004.
  • Betancourt, R. Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages. Princeton, 2020.
  • Bloom, H. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford, 1973.
  • Bull, M. “The Fourth Crusade in History and Fiction.” In The Fourth Crusade: Event, Aftermath, and Perceptions, edited by T.F. Madden. Saint Louis, 2008.
  • Bullen, J. B. Byzantium Rediscovered. London: Phaidon, 2006.
  • Bullen, J. B. “Byzantinism and Modernism 1900–14.” The Burlington Magazine 141:1160 (1999): 665–75.
  • Calotychos, V. Modern Greece: A Cultural Poetics. Berg Publishers, 2004.
  • Cameron, Averil. Byzantine Matters. Princeton University Press, 2014.
  • Cameron, Averil. “The Mandylion and Byzantine Iconoclasm.” In The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, edited by Herb Kessler and Gerhard Wolf, 33-54. Bologna, 1998.
  • Cameron, Averil. “The Use and Abuse of Byzantium: An Essay on Reception.” In Changing Cultures in Early Byzantium. Variorum, 1992.
  • Celik, Zeynep. The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986.
  • Cezar, M. The Ottoman Past in the Balkan Present: Narrative and Memory. London, 2011.
  • Durand, G. The anthropological structures of the imaginary. Brisbane: Boombana Publishing, 1999.
  • Eastmond, Antony. “Between Icon and Idol: The Uncertainty of Imperial Images.” In Icon and Word: The Power of Images in Byzantium, edited by Antony Eastmond and Liz James, 73–86. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.
  • Eco, U. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2025.
  • Eco, U. “The return of the Middle Ages.” In Travels in Hyper-Reality: Essays. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.
  • Entwistle, Christopher. “O. M. Dalton: Ploughing the Byzantine furrow.” In Through the Looking Glass: Byzantium through the British Eyes, edited by Robin Cormack and Elizabeth Jeffreys, 177–83. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000.
  • Fry, Roger. Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on Art. London: Chatto and Windus, 1926.
  • Garland, L. Byzantine Empresses: Women and Power in Byzantium AD 527-1204. London-New York, 1999.
  • Genette, G. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln-London, 1997.
  • Greenberg, Clement. Art and Culture: Critical Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961.
  • Greenblatt, S. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago, 1980.
  • Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
  • Hutcheon, L. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York-London: Routledge, 1988.
  • Hutcheon, L. A Theory of Adaptation. New York-London: Routledge, 2006.
  • Iser, W. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
  • Jameson, F. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
  • Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
  • Jeffares, Norman. “The Byzantine Poems of W.B. Yeats.” The Review of English Studies 22:85 (1946): 44-52.
  • Jeffreys, E. (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies. Oxford, 2008.
  • Kaldellis, A. Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
  • Kaldellis, A. The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome. Harvard University Press, 2015.
  • Lauxtermann, M.D., and M. Whittow (eds.). Byzantium in the Modern Imagination. Oxford, 2017.
  • McAlindon, Thomas. “The Idea of Byzantium in William Morris and W. B. Yeats.” Modern Philology 64:4 (1967): 307-319.
  • Marciniak, P. “And the Oscar goes to… the Emperor!” In Wanted: Byzantium. The Desire for a Lost Empire, edited by I. Nilsson and P. Stephenson, 247-55. Uppsala, 2014.
  • Mendelsohn, D. Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture. New York, 2012.
  • Naylor, Gillian. The Arts and Crafts Movement: A Study of its Sources, Ideals and Influence on Design Theory. London: Trefoil, 1990.
  • Nelson, R.S. Hagia Sophia, 1850-1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument. The University of Chicago Press, 2004.
  • Prato, P. “Byzantium in Contemporary Fashion: From Chanel to Dolce & Gabbana.” Journal of Design History 21 (2018): 114-129.
  • Roessel, D. In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English Muses. Oxford, 2002.
  • Roosevelt, Blanche. Victorien Sardou: Poet, Author, and Member of the Academy of France: A Personal Study. London, 1892.
  • Said, E.W. Orientalism. New York, 1978.
  • Stephenson, P. (ed.). The Byzantine World. London-New York, 2010.
  • Stephenson, P. (ed.). The Reception of Byzantium in European Culture since 1500. London-New York, 2010.
  • Wharton, Annabel. “Icon, Idol, Totem and Fetish.” In Icon and Word: The Power of Images in Byzantium, edited by Antony Eastmond and Liz James, 3-13. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.
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