International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Francesco Lovino
Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Art History, Prague, Czech Republic; 
[e-mail] 
How to Publish a Scholarly Byzantine Journal in 1920s and 1930s: 
The Case of 
Seminarium Kondakovianum
Fled from Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian art historian Nikodim Kondakov 
reached Prague in the spring 1923, after two years of exile in Istanbul and Sofia. At the invitation of Jiří 
Polívka and Lubor Niederle, two of the prominent Czech art historians at that time, Kondakov joined 
the Charles University, that appointed him professor of Byzantine and East Slavonic art in 1924.
In Prague, Kondakov drew around him a community of Russian émigrés scholars that, 
shortly after his death in February 1925, founded a seminar bearing his name, Seminarium 
Kondakovianum. The purpose of the new-born seminar was to published the complete writings 
of Kondakov. In addition, the community organized series of interesting lectures, and above all 
ideated a periodical devoted to Byzantine culture, whose first issue appeared in 1927. Named simply 
Seminarium Kondakovianum, in its eleven issues the journal published articles about an uncommon 
heterogeneity of topics, covering an extensive chronology from prehistory to post-Byzantine epoch, 
because – as Michail Rostovtzeff wrote in 1922 – “the history of modern Europe should begin in the 
protohistoric and classic period”.
Leaving aside the articles published on Seminarium Kondakovianum, the communication 
aims to explore the every-day life of a scientific journal in the interwar period, considering in 
particular the network of scholars involved in the publication of the journal and the financial aids 
that supported the activity of the institute. Examining the materials still conserved in the archives of 
the Kondakov Institute, merged during the 1950s in the Institute of Art History of the Academy of 
Sciences of the Czechoslovakia, it is possible to reconstruct the network of scholars and institutions 
that supported the activities and the publications of the seminar. Thanks to the great respect Nikodim 

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Kondakov gained during his career, the editors of Seminarium Kondakovianum could in fact easily 
involve outstanding byzantinists of the time, like Charles Diehl, Franz Dölger, Paul Perdrizet, 
Gabriel Millet and Kurt Weitzmann. On the other side, Seminarium Kondakovianum stood out 
among the large community of Russian émigré scholars, that in the 1920s fled Russia to Europe 
and United States: I would only mention André Grabar, Michail Rostovtzeff, George Vernadsky and 
George Ostrogorsky, who later during the Second World War was appointed director the Kondakov 
Institute, exiled in Belgrade.
Seminarium Kondakovianum took also benefit from the generous financial aids of the American 
businessman and politician Charles Richard Crane and of the President of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš 
Garrigue Masaryk, plus a great number of subscribers paying twenty-five dollars every year to receive 
the fascicule. By examining the financial balances of the Institute and the correspondence of the 
editorial boards with libraries and subscribers all over the world – as for example Bernard Berenson, 
who convinced the widow of the banker Otto Kahn to support Seminarium Kondakovianum with 
a two-hundred-fifty dollars donation – the final purpose of the communication is to describe how a 
Byzantine international journal could be printed in the 1920s and 1930s Prague.