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.

The various groups of fortifications that were in use in Messenia during the period of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries are examined. Five categories are distinguished based on their position, size and defensive features. It is concluded that the fortifications were directly linked to the new social and political reality that prevailed in the area between the dismantlement of the Byzantine empire in 1204 and the Ottoman conquest in the second half of the fifteenth century.

The Aragonese Hospitaller Juan Fernández de Heredia, Master of Rhodes from 1377 to 1396, was an outstanding patron of historical compilations, all of them translated into Aragonese. He promoted the earliest translations into any western language of Plutarch’s Lives, of parts of Thucydides and of Zonaras’ Epitome of Byzantine history; he also produced a version of the Chronicle of the Morea with an entirely original section which covered much of the fourteenth century. These and other sources in his corpus formed the basis for a unique initiative, a continuous history of Greece.

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.

In Ottoman Cyprus (1571–1878), social organization was based above all on the ownership and exploitation of agricultural land. The social relations, economic processes and daily practices of landowning elites and peasant farmers alike were structured by their relationship with the land. In this article, historical and archaeological data are integrated in order to investigate the development of social organization by focusing on landholding and landscape. In particular, it examines the role, identity and material culture of the new Cypriot/Ottoman elite, the commercialization of agriculture as expressed in the economy and the landscape, and the daily routine experiences of communities in the landscape.

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.

Women in Ottoman Greece were present in a number of different courts of law, one being the so-called communal courts. These courts became increasingly important towards the end of the Ottoman period, especially in areas where there was little if any Muslim population, and they dealt with a great variety of cases ranging from property disputes to rape and crimes of morality. Women were very active in such courts, both as accusers and as accused, showing remarkable knowledge of the manner in which such courts functioned. They frequently chose to pursue cases in them, in part because communal courts were supportive of individuals in difficult circumstances such as widows, who form the bulk of the female petitioners. This was an outcome of the nature of these courts which were composed of the same individuals who exercised executive powers over their communities and who thus wanted to ensure tranquillity and the prosperity of their people. For that reason notables appear almost unconcerned with the stipulations of customary law in several of their judgments, seeking instead to achieve compromises, or what we could term the greater social good. Being local, easily accessible, and familiar to the members of each community, communal courts were attractive to women and men in the years leading to the emergence of the modern Greek state, forming one tier of the complex Ottoman ‘system’ of conflict resolution.

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.

St Sebastian entered the thematic repertoire of post-Byzantine mural painting from the West in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Two main iconographic types are encountered in post-Byzantine wall-paintings, both of them popular in Western art: The Ordeal of the Arrows and St Sebastian after the Martyrdom. The influences of Italian models on the iconography are obvious. Nonetheless, the loans from Western iconography and Renaissance art concern a limited number of scenes and subjects, because the post-Byzantine painters tried to renew painting within the framework of Orthodox tradition and its doctrinal content.

The ‘doubling of the self’ is a phenomenon that appears in entries of private diaries and consists in the division of the diarist’s self into two: the self that acts and the self that observes and writes. This phenomenon can be found in Dragoumis’ Φύλλα ημερολογίου, Seferis’ Μέρες and Theotokas’ Τετράδια ημερολογίου. There are entries where the doubling of the self occurs in practice and entries where it is described, discussed or analysed. All these reveal the three Greek diarists’ contradictory feelings about the doubling of the self, but also the latter’s significance for the private diary.