Retracing Connections |

25 Jun Pernilla Myrne wins 2026 Rettig Prize

Posted at 11:09h in Into the Storyworlds

Pernilla Myrne, Associate Professor of Arabic at the University of Gothenburg and a friend of our programme has been awarded 2026 Rettig prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities (Vitterhetsakademin) for her outstanding research in Arabic language and literary studies, particularly regarding women’s perspectives in medieval Arabic literature. The prize has been awarded annually since 1956 to outstanding or promising researchers within the Academy’s field of activity, with current monetary prize of 250,000 SEK. Myrne’s research addresses women’s position in Arab tradition, from eloquence to sexuality, and her international and national collaborations are of great significance, among other things, for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural medieval studies in Sweden. To mark this joyous occasion, Ingela Nilsson conducted a short interview with Pernilla.

I. N.: Congratulations on the prize! We’re so pleased that the work of a scholar who works on medieval Arabic is awarded. How does it feel, as sports journalists always say?

P. M.: Winning the award was absolutely amazing! I was completely taken by surprise, but once I had had a chance to let it sink in, I was really happy. It’s not often that your research gets recognized outside your own circle.

I. N.: Why should anyone but Vitterhetsakademin care about medieval women in the Arabic world?

P. M.: All history is, of course, worthy of attention, but perhaps especially that which has been somewhat overlooked. Women were not taught to read and write to the same extent as men and were therefore often excluded from the contexts most commonly depicted in literature. At the same time, women played an important role in oral culture and contributed to society’s cultural development in ways that do not really find a place in written history.

I. N.: What are you working on right now?

P. M.: I have started writing a book on medieval Islamic manuals on sexuality; there are actually several of them. I believe they can tell us a great deal about the view of sexuality in the societies in which they were written and read. They show that opposing attitudes could exist in parallel. Some, for example, are tolerant of or even positive towards homosexual relationships, whilst others condemn all sexual activity outside marriage.

I. N.: The question we all think but don’t dare to ask: what will you do with the money?

P. M.: This money really feels like a bonus, and I don’t want it to go to just anything. It’s going to support my research in some way, but I haven’t decided exactly how yet. Ideally, it would be something enjoyable, like a research trip. But I might need to take a few months’ leave of absence to finish writing my book; now I have the opportunity to do so.

Images: Vitterhetsakademin; Photo: Erik Cronberg

08 Jun Gynaecological Knowledge in Translation: Interview with Micaela Brembilla and Larisa Ficulle Santini

Posted at 12:44h in Into the Storyworlds

This spring, we have had the honor of hosting Larisa Ficulle Santini from the Austrian Academy of Sciences as a Retracing Connections guest researcher at Uppsala University. Larisa has been looking into translational aspects of her ongoing project “Fertility Control in Byzantium: Women’s Reproductive Agency in the Eastern Roman Empire”. She has had a chance to collaborate with the UU recent doctoral graduate in Latin, Micaela Brembilla. We have also co-organized a seminar with the Uppsala University Centre for Medical Humanities, where Larisa’s and Micaela’s work has been commented by contemporary medical and phytopharmacological researchers and practitioners, Matts Olovsson and Sonny Larsson. Ingela Nilsson has asked Larisa and Micaela to introduce the connections between their topics and their relevance for today’s audiences.

I. N: You both work on texts that are in some sense medical, even if they sometimes transfer knowledge that is not scientific in the traditional sense. Do you think that texts like these were transmitted and translated in ways that are different from narrative texts of antiquity and the Middle Ages? If so, in what way?

M. B: I think that the practical and technical manuals of Late Antiquity have a particular transmission history due to their didactical nature. I can bring as an example the text I know best, Mustio’s Gynaecia, which is a practical handbook for the education of sixth century North African midwives. The most educational sections – like those on delivery featuring explicative drawings – on the one hand present a variety of additional material from one manuscript to the other, as if people using it wanted to complete the information with their own knowledge. On the other hand, they have often been separated from the Gynaecia, and integrated in other gynaecological texts during the Middle Ages, with no reference whatsoever to the author Mustio. Even though this is not what usually happens with the transmission of more prestigious authors – or, at least, this is what we believe – I think that transmission and use of narrative cores and themes is not that different from what we see in this type of texts.

L. F. S: Micaela is certainly right in emphasising the didactical and practical scope of these texts as the element to take into account in their transmission and translation. Another case in point is that of the Byzantine/eastern Roman physician Paul of Aegina (seventh century). Paul’s Pragmateia, a medical compendium written in Greek, contained several sections on gynaecology and obstetrics and enjoyed considerable success in both Syriac and Arabic medical traditions (especially from the nineth century onwards.) His gynaecological and obstetrical expertise was especially praised – up to the point that he was known in Arabic as “Paul the obstetrician”. What emerges from the translation process is far from being a literal translation, as we would say now, but more an adaptation. Certain sections are translated, others omitted, new information integrated. In other words, medical texts, in light of their practical nature, would be considered as more porous and prone to be integrated and modified, sometimes with other sources, sometimes with first-hand knowledge, within the translation process, depending on what the person who was translating would consider right, relevant, worthy of being transmitted, and what not. For those who are interested, the place to start for the fascinating subject of the Oriental tradition of Paul of Aegina is P. E. Pormann’s monograph (The Oriental Tradition of Paul of Aegina’s Pragmateia, Leiden–Boston 2004).

I. N: The division between (male) medicine and (female) practice seems to be present both in the past and the present. Why is that? What could one do to change it?

L. F. S: For me, this is above all a question of authoritative knowledge, a concept developed by the anthropologist of birth and reproduction Brigitte Jordan and that is helping me a lot thinking about my own work. By this I mean: who holds the knowledge that counts socially and institutionally – not necessarily as the most accurate or correct, but the one that is recognised as legitimate. In patriarchal societies, men have historically held more authority than women, and in that sense, the issue is not simply a division between “male medicine” and “female practice”, but between different kinds of knowledge and unequal access to authority. In the past, this was of course closely tied to education. Literacy and advanced study were largely reserved for men, especially elite men, while women were mostly excluded from formal scholarly training. Today, at least in much of the Western world, the situation has changed significantly, and women are present in medicine in ways that would have been unimaginable in antiquity. Yet we face another problem: for a long time, the body that medicine studied and treated as the norm was overwhelmingly male – more specifically, male, white and able-bodied. This is one of the reasons why gender medicine has become so important. It reminds us that what counts as medical knowledge is never neutral.

M. B: I am not sure that the point is to eliminate such division. I think that the problem is that this division, in the past but also when it is detected in our times, is often rigid and judged qualitatively by society, with male, scientific and standardised knowledge recognised as more important and valid than the female, practical and oral one.

The concept of authoritative knowledge underlined by Larisa helps us address the question from a more refined angle than just the dichotomy of male and female. What these medical manuals do, in their process of defining the fundamental expertise for their contemporary midwives, is to crystallise the knowledge that they considered correct, raising themselves and their text as the authorities in the field. The process is very explicit in those passages where Mustio, in the Gynaecia for example, openly refuses and condemns other popular practices, saying that we don’t do this anymore, and presenting his own treatment and interpretation as the correct one. Among these practices, one can also identify things that women were doing, and that are now disregarded as old, ignorant and superstitious.

I. N: What does it mean to be a midwife? Are there similarities between the historical situations you study and the way we see the profession today?

M. B: I don’t think I am knowledgeable enough to answer this question from a contemporary perspective. What I would like to underline is that it is clear from Antiquity and beyond that the role of midwives is a unique and special one. They are present at one of the most traumatic experiences of life, both for the mother and the baby, and they engage with life and death. The process of childbirth is ultimately transcendental and therefore midwives’ role in it remains mysterious. Brigitte Jordan, the anthropologist already mentioned by Larisa, analyses the dichotomy “modern obstetrics vs traditional obstetrics”, i.e. a scientific and hospitalised approach vs a traditional and home-based one; she argues how this dichotomy is present in various degrees in our societies, and how does it affect the perception of childbirth and delivery.

Western civilisation has the tendency to consider traditional obstetrics as something obsolete in need to be integrated and ultimately surpassed. In a way, we can say that we see the same tendency in action in the special environment of 6th century Africa Romana, as we witness the attempt of male physicians to standardise and normalise the scientific knowledge of midwifery and gynaecology. In doing so, they for sure want to give better access to education to contemporary midwives, but they also contribute in distancing these women, and themselves, from the traditional practices transmitted outside the scientific literature.

L. F. S: I am not a midwife myself – I guess it would be better to ask them directly! My impression is that what it means to be a midwife depends very much on where one is a midwife. For example, when it comes to childbirth, we know that it can be organised in very different ways, depending especially on how medicalised birth is. Even within Europe today, the role of the midwife varies considerably. In some contexts, the birthing person depends primarily on an obstetrician; in others – especially where home-births are a common practice – the midwife is the central figure.

As a historian working on reproduction and fertility in Byzantium, I have the impression that the history of midwifery in Byzantium is still largely unwritten. We have a handful of studies, and many relevant sources still remain to be identified and analysed. For the moment, the most striking similarity I can see between past and present concerns the midwife’s position in relation to the male physician. I am thinking above all to the work of Aetius of Amida. In Book 16 of his medical compendium, when midwives appear, they are the ones who engage directly with the woman’s body through internal manual interventions. The male physician, by contrast, more often observes, diagnoses, and interprets. He is also the one associated with surgical procedures, whereas the midwife is usually not. I find this distinction – and its echoes in some contemporary situations – particularly revealing. It suggests not only a division of labour, but also a division in the access to the female body.

At the same time, sources such as Byzantine prayer books, the euchologia, show that the midwife remained present at important moments in the lives of both mother and child even after birth: for example, at naming rituals or the churching of the infant. It is also striking that the midwife, like the woman who has given birth, can appear as the recipient of prayers of purification after childbirth. By virtue of her close involvement in birth, she too was considered to have crossed a threshold that required ritual reintegration. That closeness matters. I imagine that something comparable may still be found in contexts where childbirth is less heavily medicalised and where midwives continue to play a central role.

I. N: Last but not least: why should we study these issues and their traditions?

L. F. S: This is perhaps the hardest question: the risk of giving an obvious or banal answer is around the corner. Rather than trying to offer a universal response, I can only give a personal one. As someone with a womb, working on the history of reproduction has felt like a call – perhaps even a responsibility, though a welcome one. For centuries, the history that was written and studied was overwhelmingly the history of elite men: kings, wars, political institutions. Later, social history broadened that perspective, and feminist scholarship pushed us to ask different questions and to look at different experiences. The history of reproduction – and also of non-reproduction – is part of that shift.

Even though most of our surviving sources were written by men, studying these materials allows us to come closer to the realities of historical women: women who struggled with infertility, women who became pregnant, who died in childbirth. Women who tried not to conceive or sought to terminate a pregnancy; women who lived with menstrual pain or irregularity. In other words, people whose lives were profoundly shaped by the presence of a uterus and by the biological and social meanings attached to it. For me, trying to recover these histories means recognising how deeply questions of reproduction have shaped human lives across time, even in periods when the room for agency, choice, and control was, generally speaking, more limited than it is today.

M. B: I would like to try and answer this question from a more specific point of view. Why should we study the issue of male and female division of knowledge? Traditional obstetrics, to adopt Jordan’s terminology, does not seem to be in relationship anymore with modern obstetrics, but our society seems to still apply a qualitative judgement to the dichotomy “male doctor vs female midwife”, even if midwives in our Western civilisation have access to high level education at universities and do not usually practice traditional obstetrics.

It is fundamental to try to understand the history and the origin of the bias towards female knowledge, and towards knowledgeable females, in order to approach it and fight it in our society. However, It is difficult to trace female agency and presence in such a male dominated area as ancient medicine. The traditional structure of these disciplines was shaped by male physicians mostly writing and talking to other males, and the analysis of sources can give us very little results if one is looking for female traces. Gynaecology and midwifery, however, for their very nature, may offer little cracks in the male facade of medicine, and give us the opportunity to detect also the female side of this discipline.

Micaela Brembilla graduated in Latin Linguistics at Università Statale di Milano in 2020, under the supervision of Paola Francesca Moretti. She defended her PhD thesis, entitled Prolegomena to a New Critical Edition of Mustio’s Gynaecia at Uppsala University in December 2025. She is currently working on the production of the critical edition, while deepening her research on female participation in Late Antique medical environment, women’s medical education and midwives’ folkloric and practical knowledge.

Larisa Ficulle Santini is a postdoctoral researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Principal Investigator of the FWF-ESPRIT Project “Fertility Control in Byzantium: Women’s Reproductive Agency in the Eastern Roman Empire”.

17 Dec Love at the Borders: An Interview with Cameron Cross

Posted at 11:16h in Into the Storyworlds

This autumn semester at UU, we have the honour and pleasure to host the Associate Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Michigan, Cameron Cross, who works on the comparative study of narrative in the Middle East during the Middle Ages, primarily in Persian but also in Arabic, Greek, Georgian and the languages of Western Europe. Cameron, who is currently focusing on epic poetry and romance narratives, presented his ongoing work under the working title “Love at the Limits: Exploring Early Persian Romances on the ‘Borders’ with Greek, Arabic, Indic and Old French Texts” in the RC seminar on 25 September.

I was very impressed with his approach to the Persian versified love-stories of the early 11th century, particularly the ones that are translated and adapted from Greek and Arabic sources. Cameron believes that one source of motivation for this rewriting and reperforming of the old stories in Persian can be traced to the concept of the ‘border’. This concept is essential for texts produced in borderlands and can serve as a heuristic device to identify selfhood and subjectivity as well as to discuss gender roles and social relations that are conveyed in the rise of the New Persian Literature. I seized the opportunity to ask him a few questions about cross-cultural and spatial aspects of intertextuality as seen through the Persian rewriting of the ancient Greek novel Metiochus and Parthenope and the Arabic tale of ‘Urwa b. Hizam.

V. T. How do universal themes (like love) get expressed differently and interpreted differently across diverse cultures? How does intertextuality in the Persian romances of the early 11th century mediate this?

C. C. Not to overgeneralize, but one of the things that first got me started on this line of inquiry was precisely how similar were the descriptions of love, beauty, heroism, virtue, and so on, across linguistic, geographical, and confessional lines. Just look at scenes of love at first sight, dissertations on the nature and effects of love (entering through the eyes, destabilizing the humours, etc.), or descriptions of a beautiful person as a graceful cypress with a moonlike face, arched bows for eyebrows, and a rosebud mouth, and you’ll see what I mean. It really belied any notion of an East-West divide that has been such a ubiquitous, and in my view misleading trope in modern discourse. Carolina Cupane puts it well, I think, when she posits a “common narrative koine” running across much of southwestern Eurasia and its adjacent regions.

Some of my earliest published work sought to explore this similarity — and the fine-grain differences that emerge from the comparison — on a purely thematic and literary level, such as the concept of divine providence between episodes in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, or the many ‘kinds’ or ‘colours’ of love between Dante’s Divine Comedy and Nezami’s Haft Paykar.

For a long time, I was content to keep my attention focused on these thematic and literary similarities: in fact, I preferred this, as I was not so interested in falling into the rabbit hole of source research, attempting to delineate lines of influence (a problematic term from many angles) or anything of that nature. Instead, I attributed these connections to large-scale and overlapping matrices of meaning-making, which I sometimes described as a kind of grammar or series of networks (“spiderwebs”) that held these literary cultures together in some loose and decentred way. This scenario would speak very well to the notion of intertextuality as theorized by Kristeva and Barthes: we’re not looking for text-to-text relationships like allusion or translation, but for how every text emerges out of a textual ‘sea,’ assembling fragments and pieces from a nearly infinite reservoir of prior significations. My first book, Love at a Crux, sought to situate the early Persian romance Vis and Ramin within this larger body, using it to show how it brings various narrative, thematic, and conceptual components together in ways that anticipate and help to establish a set of features that we moderns have come to ‘recognize’ or associate with the romance, broadly conceived. These features include re-thinkings of the code of chastity, particularly by female characters (cf. Kallirhoe or Cligès), investigations into the limits and paradoxes of masculine authority (cf. figures like Arthur or Lancelot), fragmentations and ‘doublings’ of the self (cf. the “hall of statues” in the Tristan cycle or the “twin” effect of Floire et Blancheflor), and tensions between lyrical and novelistic representations of love (cf. Aucassin et Nicolette). All this can be found in Vis and Ramin and other Persian texts.

V. T. Your take on the concept of the ‘border’ offers an interesting perspective that I would like to learn more about. What is the relationship between the Persian romances, particularly those that are translations and adaptations from Greek and Arabic sources and their geo-political context? What narrative techniques are used in these romances to make sense of the complexities of living in a borderland?

C. C. You’ve put your finger on the core questions underlying my current project, and I wish I had more developed answers to give you! My tentative idea going into this is that romances play an interesting and perhaps overlooked role in modelling encounters with difference — with the Other — that are not predicated on violence, nor necessarily destined to eradicate or domesticate that difference through the processes of marriage or conversion. For example, the Persian adaptation of Metiokhos and Parthenope seems to portray “pagan” Greek life in terms that are neither alien nor inimical to Islam; reviving this story in an environment of close contact between Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus may have promoted a kind of triangular engagement, mediated by Islamic attitudes towards ancient Greek culture. And, just as Ghaznavid coins expressed their religious commitment in both Abrahamic and Hindu cosmological language, the wide range of sources that went into this nascent literature seems to construct a kind a ‘layered’ narrative culture in which people from multiple perspectives and backgrounds might have been able to see themselves. Onsori’s versification of the local story of the Buddhas of Bamiyan suggests such a hypothesis. These stories may also play some role in the formation of historical memory, suturing various images of the past into the present: the era of antediluvian wisdom, the life of Alexander, and the career of the Prophet all come together in interesting ways in these texts. From this angle, they may be placed in productive conversation with other genres of writing such as praise poetry, anthropology, and travel literature, genres that frequently make use of the ‘border’ as part of their core conceptual apparatus. In staging these conversations, I hope to challenge myself to probe the generic ‘borders’ of romance itself with these other discursive fields. I have every expectation that those borders will prove to be far more porous and unstable than they might appear from a distant ‘literary systems’ approach.

V. T. How did the Persian adaptations of the Greek novel Metiochus and Parthenope and the tale of ‘Urwa b. Hizam incorporate existing Persian literary and cultural traditions? Were there attempts to make these stories more relevant to Persian audiences?

C. C. The wonderful advantage with these particular texts — and here I should specify that I’m speaking about Onsori’s Vameq and Azra and Ayyuqi’s Varqa and Golshah — is that we have the evidence available to conduct text-to-text comparisons. In the case of Vameq and Azra, for example, one of the story’s most fascinating moments is at a symposium in which the host (in a manner quite reminiscent of Plato) invites a debate on the nature of love. One speaker, the male hero Vameq, offers an account of Eros as a young archer that Hägg and Utas have described as “completely Greek in its imagery.” But then Vameq’s lover, Azra, counters this presentation by insisting that Eros is best understood as a concept, not as a figure with a body: this strikes me as a kind of ‘teachable moment’ in which the author stages a diegetic ‘correction’ to the text in a way that maintains the Hellenistic understanding of love in its broad contours, while steering the participants in the symposium away from polytheistic models — a concept that would seem particularly relevant in a borderscape like medieval Afghanistan.

The differences between Varqa and Golshah and its Arabic antecedents are quite striking: while the core episodes of the Arabic versions are maintained, they are padded out, both front and back, with extensive scenes of warfare. These scenes are not as action-oriented as they might sound: they really act as platforms on which the characters take turns vaunting about how manly they are and then perform their manliness in hand-to-hand combat. Through these dialogues, a rich constellation of masculine virtues emerges: physical strength, honourable comportment, endurance and fortitude, control over one’s emotions, and zeal in defending the ‘right’ side. And the most manly of them all, it turns out, is Golshah, who first slays her abductor and then his son for good measure. These virtues resonate strongly with the persona of the ghazi warrior adopted by Mahmud of Ghazna (who drew inspiration from the tales of the early Islamic conquests, generically called Maghazi) and then by the Seljuqs in Anatolia, or with Greek stories of ‘bordermen’ like Digenis Akrites, and of ‘border-women’ too, like those found in the Arabic epic of Fatima Dhat al-Himma (Remke Kruk has a great book about this called The Warrior Women of Islam). It is through these resonances that I think very interesting conversations can be held between texts written in multiple languages (Greek, Arabic, Persian, Georgian, Armenian, and Turkish among others) that all investigate the ‘border’ from various angles.

V. T. I have been fascinated by your book Love at a Crux on the narrative poem Vis and Ramin and the emergence of the versified love story as a genre of New Persian Literature. Could you explain how the book positions the Persian poem in relation to the development of romance in other medieval cultures, such as Greek, Arabic, and Western European literature?

C. C. I alluded to some of this above, but to articulate my basic idea behind the book, I saw the New Persian literature — a literary language that was only starting to emerge in earnest by the tenth century — as sitting at a convergence of multiple lines of storytelling, best represented by textual traditions in Greek, Arabic, and Middle Persian (the latter only scantily accessible as literary witnesses, but abundantly available via translations and material culture); it would gather and combine these discourses in novel ways over the eleventh century, and then, with the aid of the Seljuq-propelled spread of New Persian across southwestern Asia and the hugely prestigious work of Nezami (fl. 1160–1209), disseminate this tradition across a wide geographic expanse in the twelfth century, perpetuating ever-new moments of contact and exchange with the extraordinarily diverse literary cultures of the eastern Mediterranean region. It was thinking about this X-shape of convergence and divergence that led me to the metaphor of the crux, and the Greek novel was an absolutely essential piece of the puzzle in assembling this account. Perhaps in retrospect I let it overdetermine my use of the term ‘genre,’ since it is after all only five texts that are quite internally different from each other, but still, in terms of setting up some simple baselines of ethos and mythos, going back to the similarities you first asked me about, it was an important body of work to become familiar with. I really think that without that starting base of comparanda, specialists in any literary tradition risk missing part of the broader context in which their areas of study occur, and I can at least personally attest to how useful it has been to read scholarship in fields adjacent to my own.

V. T. I would love to learn more about your ongoing research. Could you share what projects you’ll be working on and how your work connects with RC? Do you enjoy your experience at UU? What are you hoping to achieve during your visit?

C. C. Much of my time here has been devoted to thinking, reading, and discussion: I’m trying to absorb new bodies of literature and new ways of doing scholarship, to reflect on what I’ve done so far and to think ahead as to what I might do differently in the future, and to lay the groundwork for what I hope will become another book project. This includes producing a new edition and English translation of Varqa and Golshah, which has been a sheer delight: nothing generates closer intimacy with a text than translating it. It has been an incredible pleasure to have these regular meetings with the RC team, through whom I’ve been exposed to whole new vistas of texts and methods; their expertise in Greek and Arabic literature of late antiquity and the medieval periods has been especially impactful and appreciated. It has also been nice to change my internal focus from “output” to one of “input,” which I think can easily get unbalanced in academia, and yet is ultimately the key for sustained and productive research. Many seeds have been planted during my stay at UU, and the traces of Retracing Connections will be visible in my scholarship for years to come.

V. T. Which is your favourite love story among this rich corpus of epic and romance that you are looking for at your project?

C. C. Great question! Let me offer a couple suggestions, depending on your tastes and interests. Anyone who likes the Greek novel would definitely enjoy reading Tomas Hägg and Bo Utas’s book The Lover and the Virgin, which includes side-by-side translations and editions of the Greek fragments of Metiochos and Parthenope and the Persian fragments of Vameq and Azra; I can’t say exactly why, but I am reminded of Longos’s Daphnis and Chloe when I read it. For a complete text that “rhymes” extremely well with the conventions of the Greek novel — particularly Kallirhoe — I think Vis and Ramin is wonderful read, particularly in Dick Davis’s verse translation. Rereading Hysmine and Hysminias this semester reminded me of Nizami’s Layli and Majnun, which has also recently been translated by Davis, in the way both texts felt highly dialogic and conceptual: love becomes a threshold for plumbing the infinite mysteries of the self. If your jam is love and adventure, such as what we see in the Palaiologan romances, check out Samak the Ayyar, a popular medieval tale recently translated by Freydoon Rasouli and Jordan Mechner (of Prince of Persia fame): it dialogues tremendously well with Shota Rustaveli’s Man in the Panther Skin. Perhaps the work that brings these facets together — the romance and adventure, the philosophy and cosmology, the highs and lows of love in all its forms — is Nizami’s Haft Paykar (Seven Figures), translated by Julie Scott Meisami. It is something of a snow-globe of Persian romance, in all its richness and complexity.

Viktoria Tasoula and Retracing Connections thank Cameron for his contribution and wishes him best of luck. We all look forward to reading the next stage of his investigation into the development and function of the early Persian Romances.

18 Aug From nonsense towards a meaningful story? The winding path of a Byzantine coin

Posted at 11:05h in Into the Storyworlds

Mysterious markings on an old coin take Ingela Nilsson on a journey into a storyworld full of unexpected turns.

Coins were never part of my undergraduate or even graduate studies. I was trained as a philologist and I guess coins were not considered relevant. It was Roger Scott who first taught me that coins tell stories, which – as he well knew – was an efficient way of catching my interest. A couple of years after Roger with great enthusiasm had showed me the coin collection at the British Museum, I met Cécile Morrisson, who could really tell the stories of coins, and since then I have been able to much better understand and appreciate the Uppsala University coin cabinet, directed by numismatist Ragnar Hedlund.

When the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, in collaboration with Koç University and GABAM (Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for Late Antique and Byzantine Studies), created the online exhibition Nordic Tales, Byzantine Paths, coins had a given place as important artefacts travelling between Byzantium and the North – both as money and as money turned into jewelry.

It was because of this exhibition and my involvement in it that Ivan Marić contacted me about a year ago, in July 2024. Ivan works with the coin collection at Dumbarton Oaks and we had met in early 2024, when I spent two months at DO as invited scholar. Ivan had now come across a histamenon of Michael VII “with runic graffiti on both sides.” The coin was not at DO, but had been bought by a private collector from New York for whom Ivan was curating a collection of ancient and Byzantine coins. He had then come to think of me and the Nordic Tales exhibition: could this coin perhaps be something to consider as an addition, in order to complement the famous graffiti in Hagia Sophia?

Runes on a Byzantine coin did sound perfect for the exhibition but since I don’t know runes, I needed help and began to contact suitable colleagues. This turned out to be the beginning of a long and winding path towards possible interpretations of what first looked like a straightforward indication of Byzantine-Nordic connections.

I started with Magnus Källström, whom I know from our work with Byzantium and the Viking World and who now works at the Swedish National Heritage Board.

Magnus was helpful as always, but in this case his reply was a little disappointing because he couldn’t really find any runes: “Actually, it’s only the three characters at the top of the photo on the left that resemble the Viking Age S rune, and the last character in the photo on the right that corresponds in form to an L rune. Since the rest of the characters are not runes, I think one should rather assume a corruption of a character from some other alphabet.”

This corresponded to what one of Ivan’s colleagues had already observed: that the characters might be a combination of several alphabets, including Greek and Church Slavonic. And the other colleagues I asked very much agreed. Two rune experts – Eric T. Lander and Henrik Williams – confirmed that these, with the exception of what “could formally be an S rune from the younger futhark”, were not runes. Since Greek and Slavonic had been suggested, I also asked my colleague Alexander I. Pereswetoff-Morath, expert in Old Slavonic. He too came back with a negative reply: no Cyrillic letters, at least nothing that could be “phonotactically possible”.

But I don’t give up easily and I’m lucky enough to have many knowledgeable colleagues, so I mentioned the writing to Neil Price at the Centre for the World in the Viking Age, VIWA. Neil took at quick look and then – as often – came up with a creative suggestion: could it be a case of “nonsense runes”? He also told me I had an expert within reach at my own faculty: Marco Bianchi.

Marco offered a swift reponse to my question, now finally with an interpretation of the graffito as “a script imitation”, with “elements of runes and Latin script, but also pure fantasy characters”. It turned out that Marco had studied a group of such runic inscriptions and named them krumelurinskrifter: “they look like runestones, but the inscription contains nothing that resembles known script”.

Marco also offered references to a book written by Martin Hannes Graf, terming the phenomenon parascript, and to a summery article available open access. In addition to this important information, Fedir Androschchuk – another colleague and friend from the Byzantium in the Viking World period, former director of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in Kyiv and currently a member of the VIWA team, too – told me that the graffiti reminded him of examples he had seen in different part of Eastern Europe, sixteenth- to seventeenth-century ‘fake runes.’

With this, I could get back to Ivan with a summary of the information I had received: fake runes, possibly mixed with fake letters from other alphabets, and perhaps rather late. We agreed that the negative result – in the sense that we didn’t have a rune inscription that could actually mean something – was not necessarily disappointing. We might have to dismiss the idea of a Northener inscribing a Byzantine coin he had gained in Constantinople with runes proper, but there might still be some kind of Nordic connection in the resemblance of runes – some kind of mixture of ‘letters’ by someone who could not read or write in any alphabet? In either case, as Ivan put it, we were still dealing with “a fascinating story embedded in an object of material culture”. I thought it would make for a nice little blog essay here on our website. I expected the quest to be over and put ‘Write up blog piece on coin’ on my to-do list.

However, it turned out the story had not come to an end just yet. In March this year (2025) I went to a conference at the École Franҫaise in Rome, “Translation and Transmission of Arabo-Byzantine Texts”, and met, among others, our advisory board members André Binggeli and Maria Mavroudi. There were many fruitful discussions about cultural transfer and multilingualism, giving me ideas for seminars and workshops to come, but the best thing was to meet people I didn’t already know. For instance, I met Gerasimos Merianos, who works on alchemy – such a fascinating topic – and we started talking about coins as artifacts and the stories they can tell. I mentioned the coin with the fake runes (the blog post still being on my to-do list), and Gerasimos said something like: “The presence of the graffiti alone does not necessarily prove a magical-religious use, but it could suggest an apotropaic or talismanic function.”

And suddenly it dawned on me: the amulets and papyri I had seen, here and there, with magical functions and the use of various strange characters. Why had I not thought of this before? Gerasimos reminded me of the article by Henry Maguire titled “Magic and Money in the Early Middle Ages”, which examines many aspects linking magico-religious beliefs with coinage and contains rich iconographic material, and also sent me in the direction of magical objects at the Met.

The timing was perfect, because after the conference in Rome I went straight to Athens for a few meetings and events, and had the privilege of visiting the Benaki Museum together with Anastasia Drandaki. Anastasia – whom I had met at DO in early 2024, when I had also met Ivan – agreed with what Gerasimos had told me and showed me a number of objects in the Benaki collections with similar magico-religious letters and functions. Such objects really complicate the idea of ‘writing’ in ways that I hadn’t really thought about before: when do letters go from mere ‘signs’ or decorations to intelligable messages? And doesn’t writing sometimes have a kind of magical dimension, even when it simply states the name of an object’s owner?

In a later email discussion with Gerasimos, it turned out that he had discussed the coin with his numismatist friend Yiannis Stoyas, and their thoughts had turned in a direction similar to the one that my Swedish colleagues and I had been toying with a bit aimlessly – could we be dealing with Pseudo-Greek or Greek scribblings and accordingly imagine a slightly different scenario? “Perhaps a member of the Varangian Guard could have reproduced a form of ‘writing’ he had seen in Constantinople.” A speculation, of course, but one as good as any, given that we have no information but the coin itself.

Gerasimos also noted a curious detail: that there is another histamenon of Michael VII Doukas, at CoinArchives.com, labelled with the note “graffito in Greek and Arabic(?) on reverse edge”. In contrast to the description of ‘Ivan’s coin’ on the same site, which offers an imaginative little story involving a Varangian guard, there is no explanation of this graffito and the image is rather blurry. In light of the numerous Byzantine coins with graffiti on them, it is perhaps not that strange to have to of the same kind carrying curious ‘scripts.’ However, it does place our ‘runes’ in a context where coins are used for purposes that go beyond their monetary value, in combination with ‘letters’ used with no linguistic content, which is an interesting issue in itself.

This in turn made me think of the pseudo-Byzantine coins made in Scandinavia between the tenth and twelfth centuries, imitating Byzantine coins but with incorrect legends that make no sense. Such coins were obviously modeled on Byzantine coinage: the written message was lost in translation but another meaning was clearly maintained. When Rebecca Darley visited Uppsala in May this year, she reminded us that such imitations were also made in the East in the Ummayad period – much earlier than the Scandinavians discovery of Byzantine iconography.

I could go on, but I’m sure you’re wondering if there’s a point to this story? Well, there are several, but none of them is to offer an interpretation of the ‘runic graffito’ in question – I was never the right person to do that anyhow. But the little quest that I set out on, after having been asked by Ivan to see if the runes could be read, reminded me of a few important things. First, that coins indeed tell many more stories than we might think at first glance, as do the many grafitti and scribbling that have been passed down through history. Second, that ‘scripts’ and ‘texts’ are not always what they seem – sometimes they have a rather different story to tell than any actual content. Moreover, a message doesn’t necessarily exclude a little bit of magic. Third, and perhaps most importantly, that communication across disciplinary boundaries is not only crucial in order to find answers to tricky questions, but also one of the most rewarding aspects of being a scholar. The curiosity, engagement, and cheerfulness that I came across was absolutely stunning. So even if this perhaps took me nowhere as a philologist, it took me far as an academic and as a person.

With this, ‘Write up blog piece on coin’ is no longer on my to-do list, so I will end here with a heartfelt thanks to my wonderful colleagues and with an advice. When you cannot answer a question, ask a colleague, or ask many – it might take you on an unexpected path.

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.