"From 'Byzantine Intrigues' to Civil Byzantium" with Koray Durak

Join the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program for "From 'Byzantine Intrigues' to Civil Byzantium: The Making of Byzantium in Contemporary Turkey" with Koray Durak, Boğaziçi University, on Monday, April 20 at 12:30pm in Kresge Hall, Room 1515.

“Byzantium” is imagined, circulated, and contested in contemporary Turkey through the interaction of state-managed memory politics, popular culture, and civil and academic initiatives. Approaching Byzantium as a cultural object—whose meanings are constantly produced and reproduced in public discourse, from school textbooks and political rhetoric to museums, exhibitions, the cultural industries (film and television), and digital media—reveals a field of diverse and often competing representations. These representations are shaped by unequal access to cultural authority, shifting ideological agendas, and logics of the media through which Byzantium is represented, in a country that is heir to Constantinople/Istanbul, the former imperial capital.

Combining discourse analysis with an institutional history of Byzantine studies in Turkey, and using the state/civil society divide as a heuristic tool, I argue that modern state ideology has alternately constrained, instrumentalized, or ignoredByzantium, while more plural academic and civic environments have enabled alternative interpretations and new communities of interest to emerge. In this sense, the perception of Byzantium in modern Turkey is not merely a matter of historical knowledge; it is also a mirror of Turkey’s own political and social transformations.

KORAY DURAK is an associate professor in the Department of History at Boğaziçi University (Istanbul) and also the vice-director of the Byzantine Studies Research Center at the same institution. He has been teaching courses on the history of the medieval Mediterranean region, Byzantine history, and Byzantine medicine since 2008. His main areas of research interest include Byzantine-Islamic relations (with a particular focus on their economic dimensions), the commercial history of Byzantine Constantinople, and Byzantine pharmacology. His publications in these fields include “The Commercial History of Trebizond and the Region of Pontos from the Seventh to the Eleventh Centuries: An International Emporium,” (Mediterranean Historical Review, 2021), and “Commercial Constantinople,” in Cambridge Companion to Constantinople (Cambridge University Press, 2022). He has also co-edited several collected volumes, including Mobility and Materiality in Byzantine-Islamic Relations, 7th-12th Centuries (Routledge).

In addition to these research areas, Durak has developed a sustained and widely recognized scholarly engagement with the history of Byzantine studies in modern Turkey, publishing on both the institutional formation of the field and Byzantium’s changing place in public discourse and popular culture. He curated the exhibition “Odyssey of Byzantine Studies in Turkey” at ANAMED (Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations) in Istanbul in 2024, accompanied by the homonymous book he authored. He also co-organized the workshop Rethinking Byzantine Studies in Turkey: Concepts, Terms, and Methods I, held at the Pera Museum in Istanbul in December 2024.

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Host or Publisher Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program