Byzantium and the Modern Greek Identity

David Ricks, Paul Magdalino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351953689
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Perhaps because of the fact that modern Greece is, through the Orthodox Church, inextricably linked with the Byzantine heritage, the precise meaning of this heritage, in its various aspects, has hitherto been surprisingly little discussed by scholars. This collection of specially commissioned essays aims to present an overview of some of the different, and often conflicting, tendencies manifested by modern Greek attitudes to Byzantium since the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The aim is to show just how formative views of Byzantium have been for modern Greek life and letters: for historiography and imaginative literature, on the one hand, and on the other, for language, law, and the definition of a culture. All Greek has been translated, and the volume is aimed at Byzantinists and Neohellenists alike.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editors’ preface
• 1. From Christian Roman emperors to the glorious Greek ancestors
• 2. Aspects of modern Greek historiography of Byzantium
• 3. On the intellectual content of Greek nationalism: Paparrigopoulos, Byzantium and the Great Idea
• 4. Byzantine law as practice and as history in the nineteenth century
• 5. Byzantium and the Greek Language Question in the nineteenth century
• 6. Metamorphoseon permulti libri: Byzantine literature translated into modern Greek
• 7. ‘As Byzantine then as it is today’: Pope Joan and Roïdis’s Greece
• 8. Papadiamantis, ecumenism and the theft of Byzantium
• 9. Two cheers for Byzantium: equivocal attitudes in the poetry of Palamas and Cavafy
• 10. Byzantium and the novel in the twentieth century: from Penelope Delta to Maro Douka
• 11. ‘Our glorious Byzantinism’: Papatzonis, Seferis, and the rehabilitation of Byzantium in postwar Greek poetry
• 12. Byzantium in contemporary Greece: the Neo-Orthodox current of ideas
• 13. The restoration of Thessaloniki’s Byzantine monuments and their place in the modern city
• 14. ‘Thessaloniki and Life’
• Index