Before and after the fall of the Byzantine capital in 1453, Orthodox Slavic rulers imagined Constantinople as an ideal imperial capital and an icon of Orthodox empire. While the physical city was dramatically declining in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it remained iconic. An imperial ideal was materialized in the ensemble of two architectural monuments – Hagia Sophia and the horseman. Hagia Sophia and the horseman were the interconnected memory sites of Constantinople. Their gigantic size and physical proximity united them as breathtaking manifestations of a sacralized Orthodox capital of a bygone age. Though this image was promoted by Palaiologan fundraising campaigns of the fourteenth century, it continued to flourish in Slavic lands long after Byzantium ceased to exist. By analyzing the illustrated history created for Ivan Alexander of Bulgaria in the mid-fourteenth century, the narratives of Russian pilgrims and church officials, and the Slavic version of the Narrative on the Construction of Hagia Sophia, I demonstrate how Slavic Orthodox rulers constructed an image of a timeless, sacred city. While for Ivan Alexander Constantinople was a political, historical place, for Russian observers Constantinople became a timeless, sacral entity.

In this chapter we discuss the vertebral column, ribs, and sternum from a developmental perspective. The axial skeleton of newborn hominoids (apes and humans) is discussed based on the literature, followed by accounts of osteology in a newly described sample of newborn tarsiers, Old World monkeys, New World monkeys, and strepsirrhines (lemurs and lorises). The neonatal vertebral column is fragmented in skeletonized specimens, because in most vertebrae, actively growing synchondroses connect the right and left neural arches and connect the centrum to the arches. Transverse processes, portions of the articular facets, and the ventral arch of C1 are also cartilaginous in most primates. However, tarsiers and most monkeys have an ossified C1 ventral arch. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of the early postnatal trajectory of axial skeleton ossification in selected primate species based on a comparison of species at different stages (neonatal and older infant), including some at similar known ages.