The sanctuary of Comana Pontica in north-central Anatolia, dedicated to a local Anatolian deity, Ma, was a significant part of the Hellenistic kingdom of the Mithradatids which continued to be of some importance under the Roman emperors. During the Byzantine period, as a result of the introduction of, and adaptation to, Christianity in the region, significant changes in settlement pattern/organization at and in the vicinity of Comana took place. This article illustrates these changes through the architectural and archaeological material discovered during surveys and offers a preliminary interpretation of the settlement patterns around Comana in the Byzantine period.

The organization, functions and governing rules of the singular guild of overseers (bothroi) of the capital’s equestrian trade market are examined. The overseers’ task was to detect and point out animal defects to prospective buyers, serve as appraisers and brokers on request, recover stolen animals, and dispose of unsold animals. The head of the bothroi arbitrated financial disputes and was responsible for the maintenance of the marketplace. Trading in one location had discernible advantages: it forestalled animal diversion and stealthy transactions, provided on-site assistance to traders, prevented market fragmentation, and fostered aggressive bargaining and competitive pricing behaviour.

In this paper, it is argued that The Life of Mary the Younger, an anonymous Byzantine text of the eleventh century, has a conscious intertextual dialogue with the oldest Byzantine Life venerating a holy woman, the Life of Macrina written by her brother, Gregory of Nyssa, between 380 and 383. The intertextual relation between these two female Lives takes the form of parody. Following Linda Hutcheon’s theory of parody, this article shows how the anonymous hagiographer of Mary reworks Gregory’s authoritative text to create a new work, a parody in terms of postmodern literary criticism, whose aim was to criticise old and contemporary customs, conventions and ideologies. In other words, the present article approaches and decodes the literariness, the function and ideology of Mary’s Life in the light of Macrina’s Life.

This article sheds light on a neglected aspect of the Greek paroikia of Odessa, its female component, in the late imperial period. By revisiting the 1897 All-Russian Census, it offers an insight into the demographic and social features of Greek women, and depicts their occupational position. It shows that middle-class and working women formed the majority of the Greek female workforce and suggests that their participation or non-participation in the labour market depended on the ability of the male breadwinner to support his household financially.

How to narrate the experience of the Greeks who lived under European colonial rule? Greek nationalist historiography ignores the colonial dimension and links this experience to the grand narrative of the struggle of unredeemed Greeks against foreign domination. By contrast, revisionist accounts challenge the pervasiveness of ‘national sentiment’ among subjected Greeks and stress the coercive nature of nationalism. Based on micro-analyses of cases drawn from Cyprus under British rule and the Dodecanese under Italian rule in the 1930s, an assessment is made of the practical significance, in the daily lives of these colonial subjects, of the conflicting imperatives of national allegiance and imperial loyalty.

The topic of this article is the historical evolution of Greek foreign policy in the Middle East over the past thirty-five years. It essentially seeks to explain the broad framework of conditions and objectives within which Greek foreign policy has been made towards the Arab Middle East and Israel. It argues that the amount of involvement of Greek foreign policy in the area was relatively little. Though much has changed in Greece’s approach towards the Middle East since the 1990s, there is also a significant continuity of attitude, in the sense that serious attention has not been paid to this part of the world.