The Byzantine lead seals of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts number in total 146 pieces, mostly collected in the region of Trebizond. They offer valuable insights into the middle Byzantine society of the Pontos region, which despite its location on the easternmost borders was connected with other, even more remote, regions of the empire. The majority of these seals come from local officials and reflect their local preoccupations, perhaps as a backlash to the dominant culture of the capital. Fifteen selected pieces from the collection are published here and provided with commentary.

For centuries Eastern Churches only employed the semantron, usually an elongated piece of wood that is struck with a hammer, to gather the faithful. Eventually, most adopted bell ringing, even though semantra continue to be used by some Orthodox Churches. In the West bells were rung for the same purpose and the semantron was unknown. As a result, Western pilgrims, diplomats, and other travellers to the eastern Mediterranean were astonished and intrigued when they encountered the instrument. This article looks at their descriptions and discusses how the instrument and its sounds were used to other Oriental Christianity.

The present paper deals with the first Ptochoprodromic poem's treatment of the early patristic tradition. Its focus is on the conjugal life of the Ptochoprodromic couple, whose interaction is compared to the precepts of the Byzantine Fathers on the ideal Christian marital life. Evidently, the poet parodies the tradition to which the said precepts belong, offering a comic image of the ideal Christian couple in which gender roles have been reversed. Moreover, the final scene of the poem, where the husband disguises himself, is linked to the hagiographical tradition of cross-dressing women, as well as of male saints in disguise.

A crucial aspect of the intellectual field shaped by religious relations and conflicts following the Reformation was the domain of historiography, which involved the writing of works that aimed at edification and at the support of the doctrinal stances of opposing ideological factions. This article examines the positioning of early modern Orthodox reflections on the past. The scholars under consideration were the first Greek-speaking writers of early modern times to delve into the uses of historical documentation and raise inquiries concerning the nature and methodology of historical knowledge. The ‘idea of history’ built on the vita activa of key actors of the Orthodox community in the Ottoman Empire, contributing to discussions on identity in a world of competing empires and churches.

This article discusses elite continuity and settlement pattern change in Zagori (NW Greece) from the late fourteenth to the nineteenth century. The peaceful assimilation of the regional and local elites into the Ottoman Empire (1430) led to adaptations in the montane landscape. Imperial and local archival research, ethnography, and landscape archaeology reveal that the Ottoman administration divided large decentralized settlements into smaller villages to accommodate local elites and new timariots. This topography of division (fifteenth to sixteenth centuries) gave way to a topography of adaptation (seventeenth to nineteenth centuries) when local elites influenced settlement patterns in forming the administrative unit the Zagorisian League.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Greek jurists insisted that the Ottoman Empire was legally pluralistic. While one jurist acknowledged the Sultan's ‘political purpose' in respecting the Greeks' privileges, another denied Muslims any agency free from Sharia. The alleged incommensurability between the Christian and Islamic law was their common agenda. Greek historians, on the other hand, saw the privileges as the Turks’ sign of goodwill, and emphasized the civilizational gap between the Catholic West and Ottoman East. Being a normative expression rather than a neutral description, legal pluralism functioned as a method of neglecting the Muslim quest for legal unity.

The article focuses on the most elaborate of Paula Meehan's ‘Greek’ poems, ‘Flight JIK Olympic Airlines 016 to Ikaria, Greece’ (Painting Rain, 2009), inspired by her journey to Ikaria, in the framework of travel writing and ecocriticism. By transforming the matrix of W. H. Auden's ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, and by representing a specific case of ecopoetry, Meehan's text challenges the precepts of footsteps and vertical travel genres. The comparison between the two poems has been contextualized by the Irish poet's environmental, political and artistic concerns, as well as her other poems, essays and travels in Greece.

After unification in 1871 Germany became, for some of Greece's intellectuals, politicians, and journalists, a model for the organization and national integration of their own country. This article examines perceptions of the Second Reich between the accession of Wilhelm II and the start of the First World War. It traces the role played by the German model in public discourse within the Kingdom of Greece in relation to the importance of the monarchy, the dynasty, and the army in the realization of the Megale Idea, and in the choice of the country's political orientation between East and West.

This article approaches the Metapolitefsi as an international event and seeks to historicize the perceptions and concepts that drove Greek and Western policy-making after the fall of the junta. Its main argument is that from 1974 to 1976 and in conjunction with domestic democratization, a parallel process developed when it came to Greece's external relations, which entailed a significant reformulation of Greek foreign policy. The year 1974, then, should be seen as an important turning point not only in Greek domestic politics but in Greece's external relations as well. These two processes were mutually reinforcing and closely interdependent.