This chapter examines, against the backdrop of Turkey’s turbulent post-World War II political experience, the evolution towards a more conservative and Islamic understanding of Turkish history. Mid-twentieth-century Turkish historiography undertook to mend the precarious thread running directly from the pre-Islamic Turks to the Kemalist Republic by incorporating the Ottomans as the bridging link and Ottoman history as the crux. This trend culminated in the 1980s in the so-called Turkish-Islamic synthesis. In this cultural-political context the representations of Byzantium, its history and relations to Turkish history, as well as attitudes to the Byzantine cultural heritage, are discussed.