Based on the basilica of the Theater in Messene the architectural planning and building practices in provincial monuments of the sixth century is examined. In the basilica’s impost capitals, the use of position- ing marks for the correct setting of the colonnades is observed and on the paved floor of the sanctuary auxiliary etchings are visible f…[Read more]

During the older excavation of Messene by Anastasios Orlandos a quite original smaller than life-size marble statue of a Roman emperor wearing a short tunic and holding in his left hand the orb had been located and dated to the 4th c. AD. Further exploration of the area by Petros Themelis in the 1990s unearthed a magnificent Roman urban domus of…[Read more]

While the cosmopolitan turn in political and literary theory encourages us to move beyond national frameworks, the Caucasus remains mired in ethno-national categories from the Soviet past. This essay examines how these categories are being mobilized in the service of a nominally cosmopolitan agenda in the contemporary memorialization of the writer…[Read more]

This paper assesses nine prominent readings of the imperial context/content of Verdi’s ‘Aida’ and offers a new perspective more adequate to basic tensions in the work. Readings have ranged from the literal (imperial Europe here stages an archaeological “ancient Egypt”) to the metaphorical (“Egypt” here is any repressive government). Or–somew…[Read more]

Commentators often express disappointment that the music for the main characters in _Aida_ is not more distinctive, i.e., does not make much use of the exotic styles that mark the work’s ceremonial scenes and ballets. It has also been argued that exotic style-elements here are mostly confined to female, hence powerless, characters. Such…[Read more]

This dissertation proposes a social analysis of the Early Christian basilicas (4th-6th century) of Southern and Central Greece, predominantly those in the Late Roman province of Achaia. After an introduction which places the dissertation in the broader context of the study of Late Antique Greece, the second chapter argues that church construction…[Read more]

The purpose of this study was to examine hockey’s identity, how the game constructs identity, and how the increasing participation of females in hockey in Canada and Turkey is altering identity. Through qualitative research and personal experience it is revealed that in order for hockey and Turkey to modernize, a new male identity needs to e…[Read more]

This study attempts to investigate the salient features of Turkish literary criticism through deconstructing the concepts of language, aesthetics and ideology intersecting the disciplines of sociology and history. It questions the nationality of the self-evident category of “Turkish literature” exploring in what ways the Turkish Literary Criticism…[Read more]

Turkey has a long tradition of involvement of men of letters in political transformation processes. Several important figures of literature appear as key names in the history of Turkey who contributed to daily politics, manipulated and challenged it, sometimes with the fiercest discourses. Focusing on some prominent fiction writers who accessed…[Read more]

From Constantinople to the Frontier: The City and the Cities provides twenty-five articles addressing the concept of centres and peripheries in the late antique and Byzantine worlds, focusing specifically on urban aspects of this paradigm. Spanning from the fourth to thirteenth centuries, and ranging from the later Roman empires to the early…[Read more]