11 Sep

Posted at 14:19h in Other

Join us at the Swedish Institute at Athens for a session of the
Athens Greek Religion Seminar series with Dr Daria Resh (SIA).  

What is in the Bath? Space and Ritual in the Byzantine Legends of St. Barbara

The subject of this seminar sits at the crossroads of the history of storytelling – within the conventions of the hagiographical genre – and cultic practices directed towards saints, and brings into focus the early Byzantine Passions of St Barbara. A considerable part of Barbara’s story unfolds in a Roman bath, where the martyr first experienced her own conversion to Christianity and then converted the bath into a Christian site. Even though the story suggests that Barbara’s bath was an early pilgrimage destination and a center of a healing cult, and while Barbara’s cult was attested in Rome and Constantinople already in the seventh century, the site of the bath has never been identified and thus may be studied only as a literary, even if plausibly conceived, space. The paper untangles the literary representation of this space in two directions. On the one hand, it retraces the imaginary contours of the bath converted for Christian use and related ritual practices within their cultural and historical context. On the other hand, it questions how, by preserving its spatial focus, the story defies the antagonistic dichotomy of fiction and truth, thus gaining credibility in the eyes of its recipients.

The seminar takes place Tuesday, September 15, 2026, 17.00 (Athens) in a
hybrid format with live presence at the Swedish Institute at Athens and online via Zoom.

To attend, please register here.

11 Sep

Posted at 10:37h in Other, Uncategorized

We are happy to announce the publications of the Retracing Connections core research results – the critical edition and introduction to the Life of Saint Theodore of Edessa by Stratis Papaioannou and Charis Messis. This two-volume work offers a thorough re-evaluation of Theodore of Edessa, a groundbreaking yet little-known Byzantine Greek literary gem. The work, preserved in numerous manuscripts and translations into other medieval languages, is an extensive, two-part composition: the Life of Theodore and a hundred Chapters, supposedly composed by the protagonist saint of the hagiographical tale. Circulating under the pseudonyms of Basil of Emesa (the Life) and Theodore (the Chapters), the work is here firmly attributed to the renowned Georgian abbot Euthymios the Iberian (c. 955–1028), co-founder of the Iviron Monastery on Mt Athos and the author of the more widely diffused Barlaam and Ioasaph, chiefly acclaimed for his massive corpus of translations from Greek into Georgian.

Volume I: Introduction provides a comprehensive socio-historical and literary study of the text and its author. First, it reconstructs Euthymios’s career, mapping his networks across Constantinople and Syro-Palestine, while also establishing a new chronology of his entire literary production in both Greek and Georgian, including a re-dating of Barlaam and Ioasaph. Next, it dissects Euthymios’s compositional techniques—which included translation from Georgian, silent appropriation of earlier texts, and rewriting—placing them within their wider literary-historical context and analyzing them in relation to Barlaam and Ioasaph. Furthermore, it examines the literary world created by Theodore of Edessa and its potential audiences. Finally, the volume traces the reception of Theodore’s Life and Chapters across the Greek, Georgian, Arabic, and Slavic worlds.

Volume II: Theodore’s Life offers the first critical edition of the Life’s two Greek versions alongside a lightly annotated facing-page translation of version β. An introduction details their manuscript transmission, distinguishing between the widely diffused version α and the author’s later, revised paraphrase, version β.

Both volumes are available open access through the links in the above. You can also use the same links to preorder the hardcover version of the books with special discount until September 25, 2026. 

We would like to invite to the presentation of the books, at the Swedish Institute at Athens and online. See the details below and register here.  

11 May

Posted at 12:35h in Other

The Swedish Institute at Athens & the Retracing Connections Research Programme, invite you to the sixth Retracing Connections online research dialogue.
Join us with Aileen Das (University of Michigan), N. İpek Hüner (Boğaziçi University) and Ingela Nilsson (Uppsala University) for an online discussion about
Classical, Medieval, Oriental: Disciplinary Ideologies.

The Di­a­logue takes place on­line via Zoom on Tues­day, May 19, 2026, at 18.00 (Athens).
Sign up here!

Despite the ever-increasing focus on interdisciplinarity, there are certain boundaries that seem more than difficult than others to cross. Classical philologist may turn to postclassical texts, but they often do it from the same classicist position, without taking the later context fully into account. Arabic-Greek relations are discussed from whatever position the scholar in question take: as reception/translation of one or the other, but rarely as a relational situation of equal importance for both fields. Medieval Studies tend to indicate the European West – rarely the so-called Orient, and most often not even Byzantium. What does this situation mean for the understanding of the material we study? And what does it do to us as scholars?

 

09 Feb

Posted at 11:45h in Other

Sankt Ignatios College in Stockholm and the Retracing Connections Progarmme are co-organizing a one-day workshop on the Poetics of Eastern Christianity. The workshop will take place on February 11, 2026 at Sankt Ignatios College, Nygatan 2, Södertälje. 

29 Aug

Posted at 11:58h in Other

Retracing Connections begins a new semester with two exiting seminars on storytelling across languages in the medieval and early modern world at Uppsala University.

On September 9, 2025, at 15.15 İpek Hüner (Istanbul) will share her reserach on early Ottoman stories and their translation into French, titled “Talking to Oneself, to God, or to Act: Shifts in Speech Patterns Across Versions and Translations of the Same Story”.
On September 25, 2025, at 15.15, our guest researcher Cameron Cross (Michigan) will trace the itineraries of medieval romances in “Love at the Limits: Exploring Early Persian Romances on the ‘Borders’ with Greek, Arabic, Indic, and Old French Texts”. 
Both events take place at Uppsala University’s Engelska Parken, room 9-3042. 

This talk focuses on the dialogues and monologues in the versions and translations of an early modern Ottoman story. Two different variants of the version known as the Evḥad Çelebi story and the Yaḥyā Çelebi story, as well as two of the latter’s French translations, will be used for these purposes.

 

In my talk, I will focus on the protagonists’ dialogues and monologues and how they are utilized as a storytelling tool. My aim is twofold: First, I want to discuss the changing gendered representations among versions as they are made visible by the direct and indirect speeches; second, I want to question the frequent use of inner monologues in Ottoman versions, a feature commonly attributed to the late 19th century and to Western influence.

In this presentation, I will outline the contours of what I have in mind as a book-length project, the second stage of my investigation into the development and function of independent versified love-stories (or “romances”) as they became established in New Persian literature in the early eleventh century CE.  Intriguingly, two of the earliest texts in this corpus are translations and adaptations from Greek and Arabic sources – the novel Metiochus and Parthenope, and the tale of ‘Urwa b. Hizam – and in both cases, part of the motivation behind their recasting into Persian seems to be connected with their geo-political context, as texts produced in borderlands trying to make sense of and grapple with Otherness, in both direct and indirect ways.  Through a few brief case studies, I hope to consider with you how the concept of the “border” might be a useful heuristic in unpacking the dynamics of entanglement, exchange, tension, and yes, love as well, that are conveyed in this emergent literary tradition.