The Byzantine Institute of America is an organization founded for the preservation of Byzantine art and architecture.
Working with the Turkish government and President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, its greatest notable success is the preservation of the mosaics in Hagia Sophia starting in June 1931. The institute is located in the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, in Washington, D.C. The institute's founder was the scholar and archaeologist Thomas Whittemore.
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Hagia Sophia, officially the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque, is a mosque in Istanbul, Turkey.
Dumbarton Oaks is a historic estate in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It was the residence and garden of wealthy U.S. diplomat Robert Woods Bliss (1875–1962) and his wife Mildred Barnes Bliss (1879–1969).
Hagia Sophia is a formerly Greek Orthodox church which was converted into a mosque in 1584, and located in Trabzon, in the north-eastern part of Turkey. It was converted into a museum in 1964 and back into a mosque in 2013. It dates back to the thirteenth century when Trabzon was the capital of the Empire of Trebizond. It is located near the seashore and two miles west of the medieval town's limits. It is one of a few dozen Byzantine sites extant in the area. It has been described as being "regarded as one of the finest examples of Byzantine architecture."
Hero of Byzantium is a name used to refer to the anonymous Byzantine author of two treatises, commonly known as Parangelmata Poliorcetica and Geodesia, composed in the mid-10th century and found in an 11th-century manuscript in the Vatican Library. The first is a poliorketikon, an illustrated manual of siegecraft; the second is a work in practical geometry and ballistics, which makes use of locations around Constantinople to illustrate its points. The manuscript consists of 58 folios and 38 colored illustrations.
Margaret Elizabeth Mullett (OBE ) (1946-) is Professor Emerita of Byzantine Studies at Queen's University Belfast. She is a former director of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C., the foremost centre for the study of Byzantium in North America. Mullett is a leading proponent of a more theoretical approach to Byzantine studies and Byzantine texts.
Cyril Alexander Mango was a British scholar of the history, art, and architecture of the Byzantine Empire and celebrated as one of the leading Byzantinists of the 20th century. He was Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King's College London, the University of Oxford Bywater and Sotheby Professor Emeritus of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature and emeritus professorial fellow of Exeter College, Oxford.
Little Hagia Sophia Mosque (church), formerly the Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, is a former Greek Eastern Orthodox church dedicated to Saints Sergius and Bacchus in Constantinople, built between 532 and 536, and converted into a mosque during the Ottoman Empire.
The Pammakaristos Church, also known as the Church of Theotokos Pammakaristos, is one of the most famous Byzantine churches in Istanbul, Turkey, and was the last pre-Ottoman building to house the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Converted in 1591 into the Fethiye Mosque, it is today partly a museum housed in a side chapel or parekklesion. One of the most important examples of Constantinople's Palaiologan architecture, the church contains the largest quantity of Byzantine mosaics in Istanbul after the Hagia Sophia and Chora Church.
Euchaita was a Byzantine city and diocese in Helenopontus, the Armeniac Theme, and an important stop on the Ancyra-Amasea Roman road. In Ottoman times, Euchaita was mostly depopulated, but there was a remnant village known as Avhat or Avkat. Today the Turkish village Beyözü, in the Anatolian province of Çorum, partly lies on the ruins.
Maria was the Empress consort of Leo III the Isaurian of the Byzantine Empire.
Byzantine studies is an interdisciplinary branch of the humanities that addresses the history, culture, demography, dress, religion/theology, art, literature/epigraphy, music, science, economy, coinage and politics of the Eastern Roman Empire. The discipline's founder in Germany is considered to be the philologist Hieronymus Wolf (1516–1580), a Renaissance Humanist. He gave the name "Byzantine" to the Eastern Roman Empire that continued after the Western Roman Empire collapsed in 476 AD. About 100 years after the final conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans, Wolf began to collect, edit, and translate the writings of Byzantine philosophers. Other 16th-century humanists introduced Byzantine studies to Holland and Italy. The subject may also be called Byzantinology or Byzantology, although these terms are usually found in English translations of original non-English sources. A scholar of Byzantine studies is called a Byzantinist.
Thomas Whittemore was an American scholar and archaeologist who founded the Byzantine Institute of America. His close personal relationship with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder and the first president of the Turkish Republic, enabled him to gain permission from the Turkish government to start the preservation of the Hagia Sophia mosaics in 1931.
The Church of St. Polyeuctus was an ancient Byzantine church in Constantinople built by the noblewoman Anicia Juliana and dedicated to Saint Polyeuctus. Intended as an assertion of Juliana's own imperial lineage, it was a lavishly decorated building, and the largest church of the city before the construction of the Hagia Sophia. It introduced the large-scale use of Sassanid Persian decorative elements, and may have inaugurated the new architectural type of domed basilica, perfected in the later Hagia Sophia.
Robert Woods Bliss was an American diplomat, art collector, philanthropist, and one of the cofounders of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C.
Angeliki Laiou was a Greek-American Byzantinist and politician. She taught at the University of Louisiana, Harvard University, Brandeis University, and Rutgers University. She was Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine Studies at Harvard from 1981 until her death. From 2000 to 2002, she was also a member of the Hellenic Parliament for the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK): she served as Deputy Secretary of Foreign Affairs for six months in 2000.
Arthur Hubert Stanley "Peter" Megaw, was an architectural historian and archaeologist. He specialised in Byzantine churches. He served as Director of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus between 1935 and 1960 and as Director of the British School at Athens from 1962 to 1968.
The Matzouka was a geographical area and administrative subdivision (bandon) of the medieval Empire of Trebizond (1204–1461) in northeastern Anatolia. Its administrative capital was at Dikaisimon. The area resisted for a while after the Ottoman conquest of Trebizond in 1461, but eventually submitted and became a nahiye of the Ottoman Empire.
Carroll F. Wales was an art restorer and conservator of paintings, icons, frescoes, and murals. He specialized in the conservation of early Christian Byzantine art and worked on restoration projects in the Middle East, Europe and the United States. A fine arts major at Harvard College, he received an art conservation degree from the Fogg Art Museum. Wales graduated in 1949 and went on to restore important mosaics and frescoes at prominent museums and religious sites around the world. In addition to these projects, he became co-proprietor with Constantine Tsaousis of Oliver Brothers, an art restoration firm in Boston, Massachusetts.
Alice-Mary Talbot is Director of Byzantine Studies Emerita, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Her particular expertise is the social context of Byzantine religious practices, including hagiography, monasticism and gender studies. Much of her work has focused on the edition and translation of Byzantine texts.
David Crampton Winfield MBE was a British conservator and Byzantinist who specialised in wall paintings. The first part of his career was spent abroad, mainly in Turkey and Cyprus, and he was awarded an MBE in 1974 for his conservation work in Cyprus. In his obituary in The Times, David Winfield was described as “an investigative archaeological explorer cast in the mould of the great 19th-century scholar-travellers”.
