Retracing Connections |

15 Apr Panagia the Mermaid: A partly lost Aegean storyworld

Posted at 10:42h in Into the Storyworlds

Viktoria Tasoula takes us to Panagia the Mermaid, a small, mysterious church built on top of a cliff, at the harbour off Skala Sykamineas (Sykamias) on the island of Lesvos.

A wall painting depicting the Virgin Mary with a mermaid’s tail gave the church its name, and one of the rarest descriptive titles of the Virgin Mary refers to the veneration of certain icons, departing from the Byzantine tradition. Panagia the Mermaid (Παναγιά η Γοργόνα) and her enigmatic story inspired the novelist Stratis Myrivilis, a native of the village of Sykamia, to write his novel of the same name in 1948. According to this tale, the chapel of Panagia the Mermaid, built on a rock called Rachta of Panagia by the elderly, is not as old as some of the gems of Byzantine architecture scattered all over Greece.

Four-squared and solid, it was built less than a century ago by some god-fearing craftsmen and sailors with more reverence than artistic taste. This is how Myrivilis describes Panagia’s first encounter with the seamen of the Aegean: “Together with their contractor, they [the craftsmen] were sailing in a barque on their way to a village in the north of the island, where they had been contracted to build a soap factory. Suddenly a great storm came up and they were caught up in a violent squall. The sailing boat was about to capsize not far from Cape Korakas when they suddenly saw Panagia’s Rachta. ‘Our Panagia, save us,’ the builder vowed, ‘and we will build you a chapel!’ Immediately the storm calmed down. The craftsmen and the crew were relieved to finally reach the small port of Panagia. They moored the boat and hurried to fulfil their vow. That is the reason why this chapel looks like a small olive oil store [the small church was built by humble craftsmen using their worldly skills]”.

Myrivilis then tells the story of Captain Lias, the icon-painter whose life is as strange as his creation: the story of a secular monk of unknown origin, probably from the mysterious Anatolia, who lived in the chapel of Panagia until he left the island, never to return. The icon of Panagia the Mermaid has adorned the wall of the chapel ever since. Here is the description of Panagia the Mermaid in the author’s own words: “…a strange painting which he [Captain Lias] left up on the wall of the little church. It is still there, though faded by the salt sea air, and it depicts a Panagia, the strangest in Greece and in all Christendom. Her head looked as we know it from the icons of Platytera. Olive skin, delicate features, a modest face. She has a rounded chin, almond-shaped eyes and a small mouth. A crimson red maphorion surrounds the upper part of her body, covering her head up to her eyebrows, and a golden halo is placed around her head, as in all the icons. Except for her eyes, which are green and extraordinarily wide. From the waist down, however, she is fish-like with blue scales, holding a boat in her right hand and a trident in her left, just like the one the ancient sea god Poseidon is depicted holding in pictures and schoolbooks. When the fishermen and the villagers first saw the painting, they stood in awe, but it did not seem strange to them at all. The women, who went up to worship her, fell on their knees before her, and they burned incense to her just as they do to all icons. They called her Panagia the Mermaid, as she is still called today, and from then on, she gave her name to both the church and the harbour.

And no one thought that, on that day, [when Captain Lias conceived the idea of a Panagia as a mermaid] a new Greek divinity sprang from the forehead of this secular monk’s forehead, just like from Zeus,’ and settling on this unique sea rock of our Aegean island, miraculously bridged the gap between the past and the present, creating spiritual and meaningful links in our tribe; A tribe that lives and fights with the ghosts and the storms of the world, half on the land and half at sea, with the ploughshare and with the keel, always under the protection of a warlike, female and virginal deity”.

This deity finds a human counterpart in Myrivilis’ protagonist, Smaragdi, a young girl with powers traditionally attributed to mermaids. Her unique beauty, her dynamic and emotional nature, her moral superiority and her exemplary character create challenges and conflicts for independent women in a male-dominated society. She resists patriarchal violence and claims her freedom, sharing her inspiring journey of personal suffering at the hands of fate. The novel incorporates elements of mythology and folklore into the narrative of Smaragdi’s life stories. With melodramatic pathos and ethnographic curiosity, Myrivilis succeeds in revealing the symbolic power and the cultural significance of Panagia the Mermaid. The life of the refugees from Asia Minor in 1922, among them Smaragdi as a baby, who settled in Skala, where Panagia the Mermaid is the main point of reference for these people, a source of help and protection, is told. As the story unfolds, the characters, deeply connected to the sea, are confronted with the poverty, desperation and violence of life there, while the uncertainty of the inter-war period increases. In this period of transition from tradition to technocracy, Panagia the Mermaid becomes a symbol of the cultural synthesis of references and beliefs, rendered timeless by the uninterrupted oral and written narrative, which plays a significant role in the creation and the development of collective memory, as exemplified by Myrivilis’ novel and its characters. Panagia the Mermaid, like its source of inspiration, has a dual nature: it is a folk tale with a lyrical style, and a piece of realist historical fiction.

Mermaids are visual metaphors that embody and represent concrete and traditional metaphysical concepts, a perfect interfusion of human and divine reality. The contemplation of nature as a source of inspiration for creativity remains a valuable aesthetic experience. In Panagia the Mermaid, created by the old hermit, the natural landscape is involved, representing an aesthetic value and a prototype; Panagia’s Rachta looks like the rocks on which the mermaids sit and comb their hair. Sailors are aware of the presence of Panagia, with her shining fishtail, who wanders the Aegean, watching over the ships and occasionally performing miracles, such as holding the boat over the stormy sea and then carefully setting it down in the harbour. Contemplation can thus be understood as an experience of transcendence or mysticism. “Contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is a spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being” (Merton,1972,1-2).

The visual qualities and symbols in Panagia the Mermaid are drawn from other religions and mythologies, but mostly from the iconography of the Orthodox Christian tradition. The unknown artist managed to extract the sacred essence from the religious figure and, despite his unusual perception of Panagia, the faithful villagers exclaimed: ”No other Panagia in the whole of Christendom has such a maphorion!” The link between the material world and the transcendent reality is experienced through the icon. St Maximus the Confessor wrote: “The whole spiritual world is mystically imprinted on the sensible world, while the whole sensible world cognitively subsists in the intelligible world, and their activity and function are one.” In Eastern Orthodox Christianity, miraculous events associated with the icons of Theotokos, have shaped and sustained the faith of the community. There is a rich tradition of the intercession of Theotokos for those who pray before her as a source of continuing devotion expressed through spiritual practices and worship. Icons associated with these apparitions reflect the historical context and tell their visual stories by incorporating elements of popular imagination. Panagia the Mermaid, familiar and strange, does not only embody both human and aquatic realities, but can also be interpreted as a reflection of the mystical and incomprehensible union of humanity and divinity.

Today, Panagia the Mermaid, the most beautiful Panagia of the Aegean, is no longer on the iconographic wall-painting of the chapel of the same name in Skala Sykamias. The circumstances of her disappearance remain unclear.

Douglas, C Youvan. 2024. Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Eastern Orthodox Tradition: A Study of Miraculous Icons and Local Devotions.

Massimo Confessore (R. Cantarella ed.). 1931. La mistagogia ed altri scritti, 122-214. Florence: Testi Cristiani. (Thesaurus Linguae Graecae 2892:049:563).

Merton, Thomas. 1972. New seeds of contemplation. New York: New Directions Paperbook.

Μυριβήλης, Στρατής. 2008. Η Παναγιά η γοργόνα. Αθήνα: ΕΣΤΙΑ. [1948]

English translation: The Mermaid Madonna, 1981. Athens: Efstathiadis Group.

Swedish translation: Den heliga sjöjungfrun, 1958. Stockholm: Alb. Bonniers Boktryckeri.

04 Mar Greek Literature: Revolution, Revision, Reading: Retracing Connections online research dialogue

Posted at 16:23h in Other

The Swedish Institute at Athens and
the Retracing Connections Research Programme,
in collaboration with the Princeton Athens Center for Hellenic Studies,

invite you to the third

Retracing Connections online research dialogue

Join us with

Panagiotis Agapitos (Mainz),
Barbara Graziosi (Princeton),
and David Ricks (London)

and moderator Ingela Nilsson (Uppsala)

for an online discussion on

Greek Literature: Revolution, Revision, Reading

Greek literature is often defined, interpreted, and appreciated – both within and beyond the academic setting – according to the period in which it was written: Classical, Byzantine, modern, and so on. It is (and often for good reasons) rarely simply ‘Greek’. Labelling literary periods is, of course, intended to simplify hermeneutic processes and analytical practices, and may therefore seem indispensable. However, an increasing number of scholars have begun to note the ideological, political, and potentially ossifying effects of a system that imposes beginnings and breaks, sometimes at the expense of aesthetic and creative dimensions of literature that – especially in a language with so long a history – do not always keep within period boundaries. In this discussion, we will focus on the consequences of such labelling and how we can move beyond it in the study of Greek literature.

Tuesday, March 18, 2025
6.00 p.m. to 8.00 p.m.

04 Mar Greek Paleography Course

Posted at 15:44h in Calls

This hybrid, non-credit seminar introduces post-classical Greek book culture (4th–16th c. CE), literary scripts, textual transmission, and textual criticism. Hosted by the Gennadius Library with Dumbarton Oaks‘ support, it provides in-depth training in reading and dating Greek scripts and editing historical texts.

Taught by Dr. Stratis Papaioannou, the course is open to eight graduate students or recent Ph.D. holders and consists of eleven 2-hour and two 3-hour sessions. The first eight sessions run weekly online from November–December 2025, while the final five take place in Greece (January 26–30, 2026), including a visit to the Meteora Monasteries for hands-on manuscript study.

Participants must complete assigned manuscript readings, attend all sessions, deliver a 20-minute presentation on Greek textual transmission, and pass a final take-home exam on script identification, transcription, and text editing.

Graduate students and recent Ph.D. holders (within five years) in relevant fields such as Classics, History, Art History, and Religious Studies, from universities worldwide, are eligible to apply.

The program has no tuition fees, and all participants receive scholarships covering travel, accommodations in Greece, and the Meteora trip; lunches are included, but personal food expenses outside Athens are not covered.

The course does not grant academic credit or grades, but a certificate of successful completion is provided.

Applications must be submitted online by April 15, 2025, including a CV, statements of academic background and future plans, language proficiency, graduate transcripts, and two letters of recommendation.

Find more information and apply here.

03 Feb From Isabella Hammad to Theodore or Edessa: Reading for Recognition and Dialogue in Palestine

Posted at 12:28h in Into the Storyworlds

Reading a story tends to be a solitary act today. Still, engaging in a narrative remains a vital social practice. The aesthetic, affective, didactic, and political are always tightly interwoven in narrative webs. Critical storytelling is built on the idea that if we arrange those strings in the right way, narratives can indeed make us live better together. But the way to do this is not always straightforward or intuitive. I want to reflect on two ways of being social in and through narratives. Recognition and dialogue are ancient ingredients of narratives. They blur the lines between the content and the form of the story. I follow their threads through Byzantine narratives and contemporary literary theory and suggest that being passively exposed to the limits of your knowledge and actions – like when quietly reading a book – can be much more radically social than engaging in a dialogue at any price. The value of this can be appreciated especially by those for whom the right to narrate remains limited or even inaccessible.

What can a story do?

In Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, the 2023 Edward Said memorial lecture, Isabela Hammad traces the motif of recognition. Anagnorisis made its way into literary theory through Aristotle’s reading of Greek tragedy. Aristotle defines it as “a change from ignorance to knowledge”. It is what Oedipus experiences when realizing that he is his wife’s son, his father’s killer, and the cause of the plague that gnaws on the people of Thebes. Hammad notes that anagnorisis can also take a negative form, like in Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Return to Haifa. A Palestinian couple separated from their baby during the 1948 Nakba returns to the city of Haifa after the Six-Day War in 1967. They find that a stranger living in their house has raised their son. He now carries a Hebrew name and their enemies’ uniform. The son feels angry and abandoned. He denies the significance of blood ties and refuses to be recognised.

It is just as startling to recognise that a stranger is your kin, as it is to be exposed to the fact that your kin has been a stranger all along. Hammad holds that it is not the sudden burst of knowledge that gives a punch in the gut to both the characters and the readers exposed to anagnorisis. It is rather the seeing the limits of our knowledge. This is why anagnorisis might not be just another motif in the plot. In this subtle play of who knows what and when, which includes both the characters and the readers, the sharp borders between the story and the way it is told are explicitly blurred. The recognition can affect the laws and relations of the storyworld, including focalization, sequence of events, narrative levels and narrative time. This exposure to our cognitive limitations, Hammad argues, is the best we can get from novels and other narratives. It makes us realize that we are not alone in the world and that the world exists outside of our heads. “To realise you have been wrong about something,” she writes, “is to experience the otherness of the world coming at you.” A fundamental social act.

Between and Against

Hammad is a Palestinian. She regularly witnesses moments when strangers recognise the violent acts of occupation and apartheid in Palestine. Israeli citizens, Hammad notes in her lecture, are much less likely to experience such recognition in comparison to other foreigners. It would mean not only witnessing an inhumane treatment of their neighbours but also recognising Palestinians as being equally human. It could make them question their own humanity, as being complicit in systems of oppression or benefiting from them.

Here lies the crucial difference between recognition and dialogue. Certainly, as a theatre piece, Oedipus the King is almost entirely made of dialogues. So, why does Oedipus not avoid all the bloodshed – including of the people much more innocent than him – by simply engaging in a proper conversation with any of his families, or at least some of his servants? Isn’t dialogue an easier and shorter route from ignorance to knowledge? Recognition comes with a trauma. Would it not be better to avoid it by just having people discuss their opposing positions in face-to-face encounters? For some reason, this question might seem much more naïve and absurd when asked about fiction.

In her book The Past Can’t Heal Us, Lea David analyses the practice of reconciliation dialogues between Israeli and Palestinian civilians. These meetings that started taking place in the 1980s under the auspice of NGOs and educational institutions, were an attempt to bridge the conflict through shared memory culture. David argues that the inter-communal dialogues indeed fostered a sense of solidarity among the participants. But that solidarity easily dissipated once they went back to the entrenched ethnic groups and to the structures of domination and inequality. The dialogical setting was flawed, since “from the very beginning it was not ‘people’ who came to embrace differences among group members, but Jews and Palestinians who came to establish clear ethnic boundaries.”

Similarly to the way in which anagnorisis slides between the content of the narrative and its form, so has the dialogue form served as a basis to interpret narratives beyond their formal characteristics. Soviet narratologist Mikhail Bakhtin wrote about dialogism. He believed that all social and discursive interactions occur not inside humans but in the borderlands between subjects. He started from analysing the form of dialogue in Dostoyevsky’s novels. He ended up concluding that novelistic storytelling is often dialogical beyond its form, since it reflects this intersubjective foundation of our social lives.

Hana Meretoja takes inspiration from Bakhtin to show how storytelling can be ethical and foster emancipation. In her Ethics of Storytelling, she argues for the possibility of non-subsumptive storytelling, that is, telling stories that do not dissolve the individual human characters into general laws or principles of a dominant worldview, that do not swallow and subject them to other humans in the story. Still, the limits of dialogical storytelling become clear in her interpretation of David Grossman’s anti-war novel To the End of the Land. She notices how the conflicted and complex Israeli characters of Grossman’s novel manage to make and unmake each other in a “dialogical space of possibilities.” At the same time and despite their best efforts, the Israeli protagonist and her Palestinian employee remain stuck in “a culturally inherited choreography” and the “narrative unconscious” that keeps them irreconcilably apart.

Not every dialogue is ‘dialogical’. When the topic of a dialogue is the participants’ right to exist and speak for themselves, its oppressive form is revealed. The outcomes of such dialogues are set beforehand and limited. It can only end in the conversion or annihilation of one side.

Unlike the anagnorisis, there seems to be an agonistic element in both the dialogue form and dialogical storytelling. They seem to enforce the boundaries between individuals or communities that precede the interaction. In contrast, despite being potentially traumatic, the recognition allows the boundaries to shift and pass over the characters’ bodies, erasing the established communities and revealing the possibility of a common humanity. The consequences can be both salvific and devastating. There is no community, family or city that Oedipus can go back to. Truly, recognition is not only about knowledge. Aristotle frames it as having emotional, relational, vital, and narrative consequences, since it is “a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love [friendship] or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune”.

Byzantine literature offers plenty of examples of both recognitions and dialogues. On the one hand, we read of tokens of recognition that bring separated families and romantic couples back together in medieval Greek novels.

We meet transmasculine monks and hermits whose female body parts are revealed posthumously in hagiography, making their communities reconsider the boundaries of gender, piety, and sanctity. On the other hand, as noted by Averil Cameron in her Arguing it Out, self-standing dialogues in Byzantium were both very popular and very monological. The ‘opponent’ would be allowed to enter the dialogue, only to be defeated. This, again, is not a contradiction in terms, since ‘dia-’ in ‘dialogue’ does not refer to the number of participants or positions represented but to the fact that the interaction is conducted ‘through’ discourse. Byzantine dialogues can revolve around the purity of Orthodoxy, the ‘faults’ of heretics, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims, or social issues like poverty. Whatever the topic, they are more often framed as being against someone than as being between people. The same is the case with dialogues embedded in larger treatises or narratives.

Conversion, Annihilation, Recognition

The central text of the Retracing Connections programme, the Life of Saint Theodore of Edessa, contains interesting cases of both dialogues and recognition. This text was written by Euthymios the Athonite/Iberian (ca. 955-1028), a former child hostage in Constantinople, a prolific translator, and a Georgian immigrant abbot of a prosperous monastery on Mount Athos. The text was composed as a collage of original passages and chunks of text from Euthymios’ earlier Greek translations. It was translated into Georgian and Arabic soon after its writing, and it became widely popular in its Old Slavonic translation. It is a life story of a fictional Christian monk and abbot called Theodore. Theodore lived in Palestine and Syria, under the sovereignty of Umayyad caliphs, in a mix of seventh- to ninth-century contexts, but without strong attachments to precise chronologies. Theodore spent most of his life as a monk in the Monastery of Saint Sabas, in today’s Bethlehem Governorate in Palestine, and as the bishop of the city of Edessa, near today’s Şanlıurfa in Turkey. Here I want to look at two dialogues and one recognition scene from this hagiography.

Theodore’s beautiful, young, and pious disciple Michael is the protagonist of the first dialogue in the text. Michael came to Jerusalem to sell baskets during the visit of the Persian king Adramelech (Abd al-Malik?). The evil queen Seis tried and failed to seduce Michael, only to accuse him of rape in front of her husband. The king knows the accusation is false. Instead of a trial, he initiates a debate on true faith between Michael, a Jewish intellectual, and himself. The king and the scholar fail to defend Islam and Judaism in words. Michael tells the king that he can either let him go, kill him, or convert to Christianity. The king puts him to torture. Michael miraculously survives standing on hot coals and drinking poison. The Christians at the court are encouraged by the miracles, but the majority of the king’s Muslim subjects furiously request “with shouts to the king, that either the monk dies or all the Christians be slaughtered.” Michael is taken outside of the city walls and beheaded.

The second dialogue takes place at the court of the Saracen Persian king Mauias (Mu’awiya?). Theodore travels to Babylon, with an explicit divine mission of converting the king. He miraculously heals Mauias and preaches the Christian faith to him. The king secretly becomes Christian, while Theodore’s influence grows among the population of Babylon. The leading Jewish intellectual and religious figure is displeased by this. He bribes the main judge, who organizes another tri-religious debate. Believing that the king would be on his side, the unnamed Jewish leader does not even attempt to present an argument. He showers Theodore with “blasphemies and rumors” against Christians. In return, Theodore refuses to defend himself from smears, and used his saintly power to afflict the Jewish speaker with mutism. After being muted and imprisoned for three days, Theodore’s opponent choses to convert to Christianity. His power of speech is restored. In his turn, king Muaias, renamed John at baptism, decides to come out as Christian in front of his Muslim subjects. The enraged Muslim mob tears him and his three Christian servants into pieces in a public square.

Both episodes and their characters abound in stereotypes aimed at fortifying the existing boundaries between religious and ethnic communities. Despite multiple debates incorporated into the story, these positions reflected and produced violent acts over the centuries. Another embedded episode in the story can be interpreted as breaking this pattern by allowing the separation lines between characters to disappear, while making the storyworld big enough to fit their differences. It goes as follows.

Theodore’s spiritual father, the hermit Theodosios, lives on a column close to the city of Edessa. This old man tells Theodore a series of educational and pious tales. One of his stories is about the rich man Ader and his family. Ader abandoned his family and became a monk at the Saint Sabas monastery. His wife felt abandoned and furious at him for neglecting his parental duties. Ader then appeared in two visions: he revealed the future to the hermit Theodosios and he told his wife that he would take his children with him, so she could join a monastery and save her soul, too. He miraculously killed his two older sons and made the youngest fall severely ill. The desperate mother ran around with the dying toddler in her arms asking for help from passersby. The person who stopped to help her was a prostitute. Despite her sins and the lack of faith in herself, she took the child in her arms and uttered a prayer, both humble and defiant. Not asking mercy for herself, she challenged God to show clemency towards her helpless neighbor. The child was miraculously healed. The mother and the merciful woman spent the rest of their lives together in a nearby monastery. The healed child was raised there and went on to become the patriarch of Jerusalem.

This story is complex, and has a clear religious message in its uni-religious setting. Still, there is moment of anagnorisis at the heart of it. The family is dismembered and reassembled, as the father kills two sons and a stranger saves the third one. Transcending the boundaries of piety, respectability, and social class, one marginalized and one helpless character recognize each other’s humanity. They make space for a more livable life on earth through mutual faith and care. At the same time, the hermit watches carefully from his column and goes on to tell the story.

This resonates strongly with Isabel Hammad’s arguments in Recognising the Stranger. When we find ourselves trapped in a triangle of the oppressors, the oppressed, and the bystanders, she invites us to follow Yasmin El-Rifae’s advice. Rather than trying to persuade or convert the oppressor, we should try “breaking into the awareness of other people by talking candidly among ourselves.” We should try to think together, resist together, and support one another openly.

This is not an invitation to create segregated, monological societies or narratives. On the contrary, it is a call to question the dialogues that make us choose between conversion and annihilation. It also an invitation for people who are used to telling stories to quietly listen, lest they miss the chance to recognize the limits of their knowledge and to perceive the stranger in themselves. It is a call to stay attentive to elements of common humanity when faced with foreign narratives and epistemologies. This lies firmly within the domain of storytelling. According to Hannah Arendt, storytelling “reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it” and “brings about the consent and the reconciliation with things as they are.” Such an approach might reveal that “things as they are” may offer a space of non-oppressive coexistence. If not, it can at least inspire us to tell a better story, a story of resistance, and keep telling it until the end of the loveless world.

Milan Vukašinović
Researcher in Greek and Bzyantine Studies, Uppsala University

Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, New York 2024.
Aristotle, Poetics. ed. S. Halliwell Cambridge, Mass 1995.
Lea David, The Past Can’t Heal Us: The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights, Cambridge 2020.
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Austin, Tex 1981.
Hanna Meretoja, The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible, Oxford 2018.
Averil Cameron, Arguing it Out. Discussion in Twelfth-Century Byzantium, Budapest – New York 2016.
Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times, New York – London 1955.

16 Jan Awe and Envy: Byzantine motifs in Scandinavian Saga literature

Posted at 12:24h in Into the Storyworlds

“The cool breeze forced the black prow of the ship forward along the coast, and the armoured ships proudly bore their tackle. The eminent king saw iron-thatched Miklagard before the bow; many fair prowed ships advanced toward the tall arm of the city”- translation of Morkinskinna by Theodore M. Andersson and Kari Ellen Gade.

A great city in the distance approached by armoured ships, a soon to be famous king aboard makes his way to adventure and glory in Byzantium, the first challenge to his own royal character by a civilization greater than he. So begins the adventure of arguably the single most famous Varangian mercenary in history, the Saga of Harald “Hardrada” Sigurdarson. One of the most famous Nordic accounts of Byzantium, his story shows a characteristic view of the Byzantine empire that is prevalent in the Scandinavian 13^th-century sagas. The greatness of the Greek kingdom is contrasted by the great deeds and character of the Norse hero.

Various similar motifs show up in several different sagas from the 13th century. The Morkinskinna, a 13^th-century royal saga authored in the monasteries of Iceland, the Heimskringla, a royal saga authored by the famed Snorri Sturlason, and the manuscript 64b Holmiensis, popularly known as Guta Saga, all paint a vivid picture of how the Northerners viewed the Byzantine empire.

The Varangian-Byzantine relationship in the sagas is one partly based on exoticism, prevalent for lands in the periphery of the known world, and partly on a reverence bordering on envy for the might of the Byzantine Empire. Byzantium’s narrative function thus becomes twofold: to serve as an exotic setting for Norse heroes to prove themselves against dragons and Saracens and the emperor, but also as a narrative contrast to show off the heroic qualities of the protagonists.

Harald Hardrada’s story is emblematic in this respect. In both Heimskringla and Morkinskinna he begins his journey after the battle of Sticklestad, from which point he makes his way to the court of prince Jaroslav and asks to marry his daughter Elizabeth. Jaroslav however will not marry his daughter to a man of no renown, regardless how impressive his lineage is. With a quest at hand and a reputation to earn, the young lord leaves for adventure in Miklagard the golden.

Byzantium was at the time of Haralds arrival ruled by the empress Zoe and her husband Michael. Zoe is contrasted with Harald at once by being given the title “En rika,” the powerful. In a confrontation with the Empress in Morkinskinna, she asks him for a lock of his hair, to which Harald responds with a request for the empress’ pubic hairs. This insult forms the initial antagonism between Harald and the empire.

Harald then enters service in the Varangian guard under the pseudonym Nordbricht and quickly becomes leader of the Varangians after slaying a dragon and helping the Varangian Erlender’s wife through his ingenuity, thus proving his wisdom. The young prince goes on various campaigns with Jarl Gyrgir, a Byzantine admiral whose incompetence is compared to Harald’s spectacular achievements in battle and in wits. During this time, the disagreements about the distribution of loot causes a big conflict between the two men. While Gyrgir was a part of the imperial salaried system, Harald the Scandinavian was used to the system of his homeland where a warrior would keep the loot he earned.

After many such campaigns in which this charade is repeated, Harald is “unfairly” accused of stealing the loot of the empire and of seducing the niece of the emperor. The sense of injustice rings hypocritically here, since the same sagas admit that Harald was guilty of both crimes. Harald is arrested and thrown in the dungeons where he slays another dragon, escapes and ends his adventure by blinding the emperor and kidnapping princess Maria. He later releases Maria with a message to Zoe, challenging the empress by asking if she could have done anything to stop him. Having thus proved his superiority, wisdom and martial might, Harald departs with his reputation and treasure to Norwegian dynastic squabbles and English arrows.

In Morkinskinna, a descendent of Harald and king of Norway, Sigurd the Jerusalem-farer, rides the waves of conquest and glory on his crusade to the holy land, upon the end of which he arrives before the Golden Gate of Constantinople. The majesty of the city is described by the author of Morkinskinna to be on full display for the king’s arrival.

The young king is given great gifts and tests alike as he parties with the emperor Kirjalax (Alexios I Komnenos). The king refuses to keep these gifts himself and instead distributes them among his men, proving his generosity and showing himself equal to the emperor and in no need of his gifts.

The trials included the gifts: by rejecting them and thanking the emperor for his generosity in Greek, Sigurd earns an equal spot next to the emperor at the hippodrome, which is itself praised by the saga author. The empress lays out a trial to test his ingenuity: to make a fire without any wood. Sigurd responds by using walnuts, proving his wisdom a final time. Through the completion of these trials, the king proves his final worthiness as an equal of the Byzantine emperor before going home to Norway. The emperor and the empress function as his final challengers on a long adventure.

On the island of Gotland, the text 64 B Holmiensis popularly called Guta Saga, written as part of a lawbook “Gutalag” told the story of how a third of the Gotlanders left the island to travel through the East to the Byzantine empire. Once they had arrived the Gotlanders asked the emperor to let them stay for the “waxing and waning” of the moon. While the emperor of the Greeks agreed, believing this to mean no longer than a month, what Gotlanders had in mind was “forever and ever”. The empress interjected on behalf of the Gotlanders, settling the dispute in the migrants’ favour. The Gotlanders thus having tricked the greatest Christian king, were rewarded with a home in the kingdom of the Greeks where, according to the author of the text, they stayed to the day into the present day. In this episode, a special emphasis is placed on the role of trickery and riddles: the Gotlanders’ ways to best the emperor, who once again serves as the story’s antagonist.

The role of the empire as antagonist for the Norse heroes is not always a villainous one. In the cases of Harald Hardrada and the Gotlanders, the Empire can be described as the victim of the protagonists’ ambitions. The only crime that the Empire commits in order to deserve this antagonism is simply interpreted incompetence, unfitting for the supposed importance of their status, and the cultural clash resulting from the Norse rejection of Byzantine army centralisation. Gyrgir, Zoe, the blinded emperor, and the emperor of ’64 B Holmiensis’ all take on the role of the ruler defeated by the great Norwegian king and crafty Gotlanders. While Kirjalax and Sigurd have a much more positive relationship, that episode follows the same pattern as the other sagas since Kirjalax gives Sigurd the final trials on his journey – once and for all proving why Sigurd should be the king of Norway. The actions of the Scandinavian heroes in relation to Byzantium reflect a desire to establish legitimacy and status comparable to that enjoyed by the Byzantine Empire.

The view the Norse had of the Byzantine Empire evident in the sagas – from the physical descriptions of Constantinople’s greatness through words as golden, high-walled, iron-thatched, to the Norse heroes’ rejection of gifts that are offered instead of earned, to the antagonism towards the Byzantine state and the exoticism associated with the area – reveal a picture of Byzantium defined by Scandinavian monarchic ideals and the challenge that the existence of an admittedly greater kingdom poses to them. The antagonism with which the Byzantines are portrayed serves an important function, then, to exemplify and contrast the Scandinavian ‘underdog heroes’ as being equals or even superiors to the greatest Christian state they knew.

The sagas, which were composed across a wide geographical area in the Scandinavian cultural region, all share a set of motifs in relation to the Byzantine empire, evident across different episodes and works. The impression the sagas give of this distant land speaks of a great admiration for Byzantium, which paradoxically makes the inhabitants of that state ideal rivals to whom Scandinavian heroes can compare themselves. This relationship can then be said to be based on Scandinavian impressions and ideals clashing with those of a society which they did not entirely understand, yet whose success and even approval they desperately desired to emulate through shows of worthiness and superiority.

Aron Johansson, BA student of history at Stockholm University and intern in Retracing Connections in the winter of 2024-25