It has recently been claimed that the Madaba map illustrates notions of law and ownership, and that it was displayed in a hall with secular functions. The present article rejects this claim, asserting that while we have insufficient evidence for determining the building's context, the map speaks in religious language. I argue that the Madaba map conveyed the very same message communicated by both early Christian typological imagery and Palestinian pilgrimage art, suggesting that apart from conceptualizing the topography of Palestine in religious terms and as a sacred space, the map gave expression to the theological notion of Fulfilment.

This article examines the twelfth-century novel Drosilla and Charikles by Niketas Eugenianos from the perspective of cognitive frames. Based on the analysis of two key passages (1.230–57 and 3.341–50), I argue that the hero recognizes himself as part of the novelistic plot. While such metanarrative features of the Komnenian novels have been recognized previously, the cognitive approach offered in this article allows for a better understanding of the narratological complexities at play in Eugenianos’ novel and in the ancient and Byzantine novelistic genre at large.

The Chapters in Political Verse is a collection of one hundred paraenetic chapters focusing on vices and virtues, transmitted in the Par.gr. 2750A and the Vat.gr. 1898 (fourteenth century) and containing fragments of the lost novel Aristandros and Kallithea by Constantine Manasses (twelfth century). This article offers a discussion on the authorship and audience of the Chapters (better known under the title Moral Poem and attributed to Manasses), arguing that it belongs firmly in the Palaiologan period and was not composed by Manasses. It pays particular attention to the way in which the anonymous author worked with the Manassean hypotext.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century the Athenian philosopher Theophilos Korydalleus launched a political programme intended to reinvigorate Hellenic culture and education in South-Eastern Europe as a core element of Greek Orthodox identity. Korydalleus’ ideas on political intervention in the educational affairs of the Orthodox Greeks are recorded in one of his public speeches as well as in his private letters. In these texts it is possible to trace the emergence of a group of loyalists and disciples, who worked together in a political movement: a ‘party of friends’. This article presents and discusses sources which have been overlooked or have received little scholarly attention. It identifies the characteristics and the ideological underpinnings of this movement from a political, religious, and educational perspective and analyses Korydalleus’ views on contemporary political developments.

This article traces Kazantzakis’ attitudes towards America in works from the pre- and post-war periods. In doing so, it reveals his growing interest in visiting the country or even settling there for an extended period. The pretexts for such a journey were diverse and variously described by the writer as a means to ‘renew his vision’, to find a secure place to work, and to launch endeavours intended to ‘save’ Greece from afar. Though Kazantzakis’ antipathy to ‘Americanization’ remained, he was more prepared over time to tolerate these defects, while becoming increasingly sensible to the pull of other demands and attractions.

This paper examines the concept of life in the historiographical work of Spyridon Zambelios. Through a comparative reading with Hegel, it argues that the organicist philosophical background of Zambelios’ national narrative is double-edged: on the one hand, life is linked to infinity in ways that lead to a redefinition of Zambelios’ central notion of national ‘ὁλομέλεια’. On the other, Spirit's immersion in natural life creates complications, which, as in Hegel, place the ‘transition’ from one historical period to the next under the auspices of death, and, in the final analysis, yield a notion, not of infinite, but of a ‘weak’ life which undermines the national narrative from within.

2023 marks the centenary of the Treaty of Lausanne, which ended the state of war between Turkey and the western allies, in particular Greece, and reordered the Near East, settling frontiers and providing for the protection of minorities. This essay reviews the historiography of the period 1915-23 through Greek and British sources in printed books and papers, covering the Greek irredentist claim to western Asia Minor, the Paris peace conference, the occupation of Smyrna, the Greek war against Mustapha Kemal's Turkish nationalists, the collapse of the Greek army, the Lausanne treaty, and the convention on the exchange of Greek and Turkish populations agreed at Lausanne in 1923.