Breaks in the Narrative: The Continuity of the Byzantine Past in Muslim Anatolia, Anna Christidou Memorial Lecture by Armin Bergmeier (Leipzig University), CEU - Vienna and Zoom, March 16, 2023, 5:30–6:46 pm

This talk seeks to challenge enduring, Western notions of cultural continuity and discontinuity by focusing on the display of spolia, reused artifacts from the past, in Anatolia before 1500. Spolia have been at the heart of art historical and archaeological studies for many decades now, but have rarely been discussed in relation to concepts of history and cultural heritage. This talk explores their potential to question traditional epistemologies and to help us understand how history and heritage were constructed differently in the premodern era. Through a critical cultural heritage approach, I will study ideas of ownership of the past expressed through and mirrored in the use of spolia. The reuse of ancient and early Byzantine artifacts in Byzantine, Seljuk, and Ottoman architecture in Anatolia is a thus-far underestimated tool to address these questions and to challenge ideas of cultural belonging, ownership, and historical continuity.

Armin Bergmeier teaches late antique, Byzantine, and Islamic material culture at Leipzig University. He has held a visiting professorship for late antique and Byzantine art history at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich in the fall semester of 2022/23. He has been a Fulbright Fellow at Columbia University in New York, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, and a senior fellow at the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations in Istanbul.

External guests must register in advance (by March 15) to attend the lecture in person.