This paper discusses the career of Emanuel Asanes Sophianos, a Byzantine refugee who settled in Cornwall in the aftermath of the fall of the despotate of the Morea to the Ottomans. It traces his later career in England and marriage to an English widow. The unusually detailed documentation for Asanes’ later life aside, it is of particular interest on account of his association with one of the most notorious aristocratic law-breakers in the period.

This article offers the first detailed study of a manuscript preserving notes from the Modern Greek course held in 1801-2 by Jean-Baptiste-Gaspard d'Ansse de Villoison in Paris. The notebook was kept by Karl Benedikt Hase, later Professor of Modern Greek at the French École de langues orientales vivantes, during his attendance of Villoison's course as a student. The article sketches first the historical context of the notebook, before an analysis of its contents, and finally a comparison with Hase's later published work on the primary text at its core, Amiras’ Greek translation of Costin's History of Moldavia.

This article examines Kazantzakis’ travel writing in his 1926 newspaper series on ‘the Land of Palestine’, which introduces Zionism, and in his posthumously published chapter ‘Jerusalem’ in Journeying (1961). Revisiting the relation between the two, I argue that each is to be seen as a distinct work. While free from the antisemitic sentiment of Venizelist circles, the Greek author's reportage has three important silences – and these are matched by a sweeping lack of scholarly interest in this material. This article hopes to generate renewed interest so that Kazantzakis’ 1926 reportage may help construe a more complex reception of Zionism in interwar Greece.

In a collection of Hatt-ı Hümayuns (Imperial Edicts) at the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul, I located the Ottoman translation of the Greek Declaration of Independence. This article examines the terminology that Ottomans used to interpret the language employed by the revolutionary Greeks. The goal of this study is to examine Ottoman attempts to define the rebels and conceptualize the inner motive behind the revolt of their subjects. This article argues that confiscated documents such as the Greek Declaration of Independence contributed to the familiarization of the imperial authorities with the ideological background to the rebellion and the reasons that triggered it.

In 1478 a Byzantine courtier-turned-monk named George Sphrantzes related in a work conventionally called the Chronicon Minus the story of his life and times in the decades before and after the Ottoman conquest of Byzantium. The work's English translator, Marios Philippides, notes in his introduction that ‘students of history, sociology, and literature will find passages of interest in Sphrantzes’ account. In addition to its immense value as a historical testimony, Sphrantzes’ narrative is a linguistic document of great significance to the study of the evolution of the modern Greek language.’ (This latter point refers to Sphrantzes’ fifteenth-century idiom, very different from the classicizing or Atticizing style of pre-conquest Greek historiography.)1 Philippides’ approach reflects typical historiographical praxis in modern scholarship: a source text is strip-mined for those facts for which the empiricist historian is searching, and the rest is ignored or derided as superfluous.

Graffiti are often seen as providing a window into the emotions of ancient peoples. However, Byzantine graffiti has been viewed as an exception, with the formulaic Greek texts written between 300 and 1500 taken as evidence of communal identity, rather than individual expressiveness. However, variations in these texts can reveal much about an individual author and their personal experiences. In particular, certain formula suggest the dangerous situation an author survived, including incarceration and sea travel. This paper focuses on Corinth, Syros, and Tinos where individuals experienced danger, and how their fears and needs were manifested in the graffiti they left behind.