Part travelogue, part exploration of religious images and pilgrimage, J. Richard Smith tells the story of icons and the places where the New Testament story really happened.

For those interested in a deeper appreciation of the Byzantine Empire and its importance to world history, this engaging, richly detailed travelogue introduces a colorful cast of personalities from the region's fascinating history and provides a detailed description of the art and influences of the time. Photos. 2 maps.

A study in Byzantine culture and religious history, focusing on two significant medieval Greek texts.

In the spring of A.D. 587, John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist embarked on a remarkable expedition across the entire Byzantine world, traveling from the shores of Bosphorus to the sand dunes of Egypt. Using Moschos’s writings as his guide and inspiration, the acclaimed travel writer William Dalrymple retraces the footsteps of these two monks, providing along the way a moving elegy to the slowly dying civilization of Eastern Christianity and to the people who are struggling to keep its flame alive. The result is Dalrymple’s unsurpassed masterpiece: a beautifully written travelogue, at once rich and scholarly, moving and courageous, overflowing with vivid characters and hugely topical insights into the history, spirituality and the fractured politics of the Middle East.

The Double Headed Eagle, the symbol of the Late Byzantine Empire, speaks eloquently to the worldview of the Byzantines, whose Empire looked both to the East and to the West, but never wasor isreally part of either. At its apogee, the Byzantine Empire was the highest civilization in Europethe Center. This Double Headed Eagle is cherished by the Balkan Orthodox successors to Byzantium, and versions of it grace the national flags of Serbia, Montenegro, and even Albania. Encroached upon by both the Muslim East and the Catholic West, the Byzantine Eagle succumbed, only to emerge, in a state of arrested development, after several hundred years of Turkish or Western Catholic rule. This stunted progression emerges time and again in the civic culture, architecture, economics, and politics of the region, and has direct relevance on political and economic issues today, including Greeces present financial malaise, and the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Traveling through this Ex-Byzantine zone, Billinis offers history, architecture, personal experiences, and numerous anecdotes to expound on key central themes. First, that the Balkan Orthodox nations form a common culture and virtual commonwealth, while still maintaining ethnic, geographical, and linguistic diversity. Without understanding this common Byzantine base, it is impossible to appreciate and to understand the region. Second, the common experience of Turkish rule, while preserving Byzantine culture and insulating the Orthodox religion from Catholic encroachment, did so by cutting off Byzantine Europe from economic, political, cultural, and civic development in progress in Western Europe. The states that emerged from this condition wereand areill prepared to contribute and to compete in modern Europe, and in a globalized world. Finally, throughout, there is a sense that history, rather than linear, runs in a circular form, and that history once again encroaches on the lands of the Double Headed Eagle.

Compelling, powerful, magnificent' THE TIMES In revealing encounters with monks, nuns, bishops and archbishops, in monasteries ancient and modern Victoria Clark measures the depth and width of the gulf now separating Europe's Orthodox East from the Catholic and Protestant West. Many of the differences in outlook, priorities and even values can be traced back to the 1054 schism between the churches of Rome and Constantinople which created Europe's most durable fault-line. Travelling from Mount Athos to Istanbul and unravelling the tangled history, Victoria Clark demonstrates a rare sympathy with Eastern Orthodox Europe. 'I finished the book wanting to meet this intelligent, warm-hearted writer, and to follow her to some of the places she visited' LITERARY REVIEW 'A masterful synthesis of vivid and often humorous travel writing, a series of probing interviews and a pertinent historical context' THE TIMES 'Exhilarating . . . her book will be immensely helpful to anyone occasionally puzzled by events, especially politics, in Eastern Europe' FINANCIAL TIMES

This latest volume in the SPBS series makes a notable contribution to our understanding both of the evidence for travel, and of the realities and perceptions of communications in the Byzantine world. Four aspects of travel in the Byzantine world, from the 6th to the 15th century, are examined: technicalities of travel on land and sea, purposes of travel, foreign visitors' perceptions of Constantinople, and the representation of the travel experience in images and in written accounts. Sources used to illuminate these aspects include descriptions of journeys, pilot books, bilingual word lists, shipwrecks, monastic documents, but as the opening paper shows the range of such sources can be far wider than generally supposed. The contributors highlight road and travel conditions for horses and humans, types of ships and speed of sea journeys, the nature of trade in the Mediterranean, the continuity of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, attitudes toward travel. Patterns of communication in the Mediterranean are revealed through distribution of ceramic finds, letter collections, and the spread of the plague.

With over 200 color illustrations, Byzantine Silk on the Silk Roads examines in detail the eclectic iconography of the Byzantine period and its impact on design and creativity today. Through an examination of the extraordinary variety of designs in these captivating silks, an international team of experts reveal that Byzantine culture was ever-moving and open to diverse influences across the length of the Silk Road. Commentaries from curators at key collections – including the Museum of Arts, Boston, the Smithsonian (Cooper Hewitt), the V&A and the Vatican – reveal the spread of silk embroidery and designs from East to West, and from West to East, from China to Rome, and from Constantinople to Korea. Drawing on exclusive imagery from worldwide collections within museums, churches and archives as case studies, their analysis of these unique woven silks explores the relationship between color and power, material culture and status, and offers broader insight into Byzantine culture, trade, society and ceremony. Byzantine Silk ... takes us on a journey from the past to the present, too, where Byzantine story-telling and image-making is revisited, through color, imagery and pattern, in contemporary fashion collections. Exploring Byzantine culture through a contemporary filter, the book shows how the Byzantine era still influences textile and fashion designers today in their choices of materials and colors, and their utilization of images and patterns, acting as a unique source of inspiration to designers and creators in the 21st century.

Born to rule Although born to rule, Aidan lives as a scribe in a remote Irish monastery on the far, wild edge of Christendom. Secure in work, contemplation, and dreams of the wider world, a miracle bursts into Aidan's quiet life. He is chosen to accompany a small band of monks on a quest to the farthest eastern reaches of the known world, to the fabled city of Byzantium, where they are to present a beautiful and costly hand-illuminated manuscript, the Book of Kells, to the Emperor of all Christendom. Thus begins an expedition by sea and over land, as Aidan becomes, by turns, a warrior and a sailor, a slave and a spy, a Viking and a Saracen, and finally, a man. He sees more of the world than most men of his time, becoming an ambassador to kings and an intimate of Byzantium's fabled Golden Court. And finally this valiant Irish monk faces the greatest trial that can confront any man in any age: commanding his own Destiny.

The contributions to this volume have been selected from the papers delivered at the 34th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies at Birmingham, in April 2000. Travellers to and in the Byzantine world have long been a subject of interest but travel and communications in the medieval period have more recently attracted scholarly attention. This book is the first to bring together these two lines of enquiry. Four aspects of travel in the Byzantine world, from the sixth to the fifteenth century, are examined here: technicalities of travel on land and sea, purposes of travel, foreign visitors' perceptions of Constantinople, and the representation of the travel experience in images and in written accounts. Sources used to illuminate these four aspects include descriptions of journeys, pilot books, bilingual word lists, shipwrecks, monastic documents, but as the opening paper shows the range of such sources can be far wider than generally supposed. The contributors highlight road and travel conditions for horses and humans, types of ships and speed of sea journeys, the nature of trade in the Mediterranean, the continuity of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, attitudes toward travel. Patterns of communication in the Mediterranean are revealed through distribution of ceramic finds, letter collections, and the spread of the plague. Together, these papers make a notable contribution to our understanding both of the evidence for travel, and of the realities and perceptions of communications in the Byzantine world. Travel in the Byzantine World is volume 10 in the series published by Ashgate/Variorum on behalf of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies.