This paper gives a brief report on the 21 Byzantine coins recovered during archaeological fieldwork at Hadrianoupolis in southwestern Paphlagonia between 2005 and 2008. One coin is silver and the rest are all bronze or copper alloy. Chronologically, the latter are divided between the Early and the Middle Byzantine periods. Although the assemblage is small, it provides useful information about the distribution of Byzantine coins from one of the more remote rural areas of northern Asia Minor.

This article examines the two extant military speeches attributed to Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos for their biblical references and allusions. These speeches demonstrate imperial Byzantine exegesis, establish biblical grounds for the ‘chosen’ status of Byzantine Christians, and reveal that the non-soldierly emperor Constantine VII appropriated the role of a mediating priestly figure as a way of claiming authority over his fighting forces. In this, he follows in the footsteps of his father, the emperor Leo VI (r. 886–912). Both speeches are explicitly Christian, and were used to bolster military morale and to reinforce imperial authority.

Gregory of Nazianzus and Theodore Prodromos are two of the most influential poets of Byzantium. And yet, no study has examined the various intertextual correspondences between their poetic works. This article is the first to demonstrate the extensive appropriation of Gregory's work by Prodromos. It is divided into three parts:1 the first discusses poems composed by Prodromos in praise of Gregory; the second part attempts to show which of Gregory's poems Prodromos read and his technique of ‘plundering’ words from Gregory's corpus; the third part concentrates on Prodromos’ creative imitation of Nazianzus’ poetry in terms of wording, genre and sentiments, which eventually enabled him to craft part of his authorial self-portrait.

In this article I attempt to enter the less studied ‘working room’ of the hagiographer and metaphrastes Gregory Palamas by contextualizing and analyzing, both on its own terms and comparatively, Palamas’ literary debut, the Logos on Saint Peter of Athos (BHG 1506). The article shows to what extent the hagiographer used, changed, supplemented, departed from his source—the tenth/eleventh-century Vita of Saint Peter (BHG 1505) written by a certain Athonite monk Nicholas—and refashioned the image of the saint when (re)writing his life.

This article follows the course of the prolonged land dispute within the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem between the Greek religious establishment and the local Arab laity from the late Ottoman period to the end of the British Mandate (1875–1948). The article examines state policies in relation to Church-owned property and assesses how the administration of this property affected the inter-communal relationship. It is argued that both the Ottoman and the British authorities effectively adopted a pro-Greek stance, and that government refusal of the local Arab lay demands was predominantly predicated on regional and global political priorities.

Kambanellis’ Letter to Orestes constitutes Clytemnestra's apologia for the murder of Agamemnon and is addressed to her estranged son Orestes. Until now, research has concentrated mainly on the content, verbal message and metatheatrical dimension of Clytemnestra's letter, laying emphasis upon Kambanellis’ intertextual links with the ancient Greek tragedies revolving around the Atreid myth. This article focuses attention on the dramatic form of the letter, examining it as a physical object with social connotations and as an active agent in the development of the events. It is argued that in emphasizing these aspects of the letter Kambanellis was probably influenced by the function of letters in two of the Greek tragedies which he clearly draws upon in The Supper trilogy: Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia among the Taurians. However, Kambanellis’ intention was not to reproduce his tragic models but rather to exploit the medium of the letter in order to reconsider a staple of his own work: the disconcerting issue of human, and more particularly of familial, communication.

This brief article makes the case that Patriarch Methodios developed a distinctive icon theology. He argued that the saints had infused the colours of their faces with their holy essence and that these colours when separated from the bodies and transferred to images could thus lead to the moral improvement of the onlookers.

The debt crisis in Greece since 2010 has triggered seismic changes in the political attitudes of the society and, above all, the political identity and discourse of the country. The extremely unpopular austerity policies caused a severe internal polarization which quickly translated into anti-German mass hysteria, vitriolic anti-EU rhetoric and sharp anti-austerity populism. This paper will endeavour to identify the origins, course and outcome of this dramatic shift in the political attitudes and identity in Greece and analyse them with the benefit of hindsight – almost six years after the eruption of the crisis.

Robin Anthony Fletcher, who died on 15 January 2016, was born in Godalming on 30 May 1922. He was educated at Marlborough College, as was R. M. Dawkins, who served as Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek at Oxford from 1920 to 1939. As Dawkins had done in the First World War, Robin served in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in the Second World War, during which time he commanded a Greek caique in the Eastern Mediterranean. At the end of the war Robin was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.