How understanding, caring, and loving were the Byzantines towards their children? Was childhood in Byzantium an autonomous period of life or just a passage to the world of adults? The answer is not simple. Texts from the Apocryphal Gospels as well as from hagiographical narrative reveal that Byzantine writers distinguished children into good and bad, those ‘worthy of God’s grace’ and those who demonstrated ‘evil’ qualities. The level of children’s proximity to the code of adult behaviour determined the views of adults towards their descendants accordingly, and defined children’s relations to other social groups.

This paper examines the Cadaster of Thebes, an eleventh-century Byzantine fiscal document, to see what light it sheds on both the intention and ability of the Byzantine bureaucracy to maintain a formal taxation system based on land registration. While the document attests to efforts at maintaining such a system, the quality of record keeping in the Cadaster of Thebes is insufficient for the document to play the role formally accorded to it within that system. It is suggested that Byzantine cadasters aided taxation by creating the impression of a pervasive imperial government and ceremonially connecting every household to the emperor through his interceding administrators.

Following A. Cutler and G. Prinzing, this paper maintains that two works of art, Basil’s psalter portrait and the imperial silk in Bamberg Cathedral (Gunthertuch), cannot be associated with Basil II’s victory over the Bulgarians in 1018. A third work, a series of portraits known only from a late twelfth-century epigram, is adduced as evidence for the importance of Basil to the imperial image cultivated by the Komnenoi and Angeloi. The conclusions of an earlier investigation are, therefore, slightly modified and verified: the legend of Basil the Bulgar-slayer was the product, in general, of the military ethos cultivated at the Komnenian court, and, in particular, of Isaak Angelos’ reaction to the rebellion by Peter and Asen in 1185.

The paper presents some aspects of the juridical terminology in the Second Bulgarian Empire: the appellations of the titles of the hierarchical system and those of the administrative services. The use of the statistical methods offers some impressive results in regard to the correlation between the terms of Byzantine origin (translated or transliterated from Greek) and those that derive from Bulgar language, either purely Slavonic terms or ones of other derivation. About three quarters of the terminology derives from the juridical language of the Eastern Roman Empire! These results might be supported by the observations on the fiscal terms, the appellations of the territorial units and so on. Needless to say that these results are not unexpected — they confirm again the affiliation of the mediaeval Bulgaria to the East Roman or byzantine civilisation.

In this paper I explore the conversions of minors as they were presented in the registrations of the şeriat court (sicil). Two types of records shed light on the conversion process: the summaries of lawsuits and the sporadic registrations of converts’ names. As the mental capacity of a child was regarded as of crucial importance when considering the child’s conversion, the kadi classified the children into three different age-groups. Special attention was given to children of seven to ten years: their conversion was approved after an examination of their mental capacity. We can assume that these cases concealed some forms of pressure as well. The conversion of adolescents should be regarded as part of a wider phenomenon — the conversion of rural migrants to Salonica.

This paper examines a distinctive example of literary criticism in verse: Palamas’ poem ‘Oi πατέρες’ from the collection Βωμοί (1915). The poem is shown to be, contrary to its recent critical reception, a concise literary history in verse and a highly authoritative poetic and ideological canon which distils pithily the literary views of the demoticist Palamas of the second decade of the twentieth century. The paper also examines the dialogue of the poem with Alexandras Soutsos’ similar poetic effort in Έπιστολή προς τον βασιλέα της Ελλάδος Όθωνα’ (1833), as well as the reception of ‘Oi πατέρες’ by one of Palamas’ most important poetic heirs, Yorgos Seferis.

Seferis’s only completed novel makes few concessions to the realist tradition. He was, however, fascinated by the genre and made five attempts to write a novel. Six Nights is a hybrid, transgressive text, which draws on an uncanonical tradition of fiction, from the Odyssey and The Arabian Nights to Gide and Proust. Six Nights can be read as diary-novel, pastiche or parody following Gide, symbolist novel, Bildungsroman, and roman à clef. Close readings under each of these headings reveal the complexity and the experimental nature of Six Nights, and help to situate it within Seferis’ developing oeuvre.

This article attempts to enhance the interpretation of Μυθιστόρημα 6 by exploiting more fully the wide range of verse, music and extra-textual data that can be connected with it. This entails a reassessment of several aspects of the poem, including the role of Maurice Ravel, the identity of the garden with the fountains, the connotations of the dark glass, and the significance of the rain. The poem emerges as a demonstration of the fragility of human culture which sets the contest of competing Hellenisms underlying Μυθιστόρημα in a sobering context.

‘The King of Asine’, one of George Seferis’s best-known poems, is the subject of the present article, which falls into two parts. The first part follows the standard interpretation, but with an emphasis on aspects that have not (at least sufficiently) been commented on hitherto. The second part pursues a new approach and concludes by proposing another, parallel, reading whereby ‘The King of Asine’ is also seen as exploring the poetic experience.

Perhaps no other term/name in the Byzantine Empire ever linked so closely a military term with a family surname, as that of the hikanatoii/Hikanatoi, from the early ninth century onwards, until well within the later Byzantine period. In that sense, while the first part of the term’s history is mostly studied by military historians, its eventual evolution into a family surname (most probably from the first part of the eleventh century) is the work of the prosopographer/genealogist.