International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Aphrodita Papayianni
University of London, London, United Kingdom; 
[e-mail]
The Representation of the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 
in High School History Textbooks in Greece, 1850−2010
Since the establishment of the modern Greek state in 1830, the momentous event of the Fall 
of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 is examined in all high school history textbooks.
The aim of this paper is to survey the way it is presented in these textbooks between 1850 and 
2010, focusing on the examination of the causes that contributed or led to the Fall of the city, the 
Byzantine-Ottoman relations in the decades leading to 1453, the Conquest itself and the outcome 
of the Fall of the city for the Greeks.
Anna Linden Weller
Uppsala University, Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala, Sweden; 
[e-mail]
Rhomaioi and Barbaroi in Science Fiction: Byzantine Modes of Writing the Alien
This free communication explores how Byzantine conceptions of identity are useful in reading 
Anglophone science fiction’s current obsession with empire and citizenship. In doing so it opens up 
new venues for the reception history of Byzantium in popular culture.
The study of Classical reception in modern speculative fiction (science fiction and fantasy) is 
an old and broad field, with roots in both the academy and the popular press. However, much as 
Classics is often reluctant to look beyond the temporal borders of the antique world and venture into 
its Medieval Greek imperial successor, the consideration of classical reception in speculative fiction 

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has mostly neglected the significant impact of Byzantium and its literature. However, Byzantine 
conceptions of imperial identity – specifically the problem of defining barbarian and citizen, the 
permeability of frontiers, the creation of an imperial ideology and the survival of that ideology – have 
had deep effects on the development of science fiction and fantasy in the 20
th
and 21
st
centuries.
These themes appear intriguingly in Ann Leckie’s recent Hugo and Nebula-award-winning 
Imperial Radch books, which, while not being specifically identified as Byzantine, can be interpreted 
usefully by being viewed through a Byzantine lens. This free communication will examine some of 
the ways that Byzantine conceptions of identity have emerged in the consciousness of 21
st
-century 
speculative fiction writers, particularly Leckie but also two other recent releases: Jo Walton’s The 
Just City, an exploration of a recreated Platonic Republic, and Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru 
Cormorant, a novel which concerns imperial social engineering. I will then place them in context 
with Byzantine literary modes of writing the ‘alien’ – i.e. the frontier encounter and the representation 
of non-Byzantines in historiography, statecraft manuals, and other forms of ideological propaganda, 
taking into account the most recent debates on the ‘Roman-ness’ of the Byzantines (i.e. Kaldellis and 
Stouratis). In doing so, I will show how some of the same questions of alienness and identity which 
animate moments where Byzantine reception is visible in speculative fiction are also present in the 
historiographic concerns which have recently emerged amongst Byzantinists.