Koray Durak | Bogazici University (original) (raw)
Papers by Koray Durak
Anatolia in the Byzantine Period, eds. E. Akyürek and K. Durak, Yapı Kredi Publications, Istanbul, 444-451., 2021
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 2014
Examining the treatment of Byzantium in the history textbooks that were used in Turkish secondary... more Examining the treatment of Byzantium in the history textbooks that were used in Turkish secondary education from the foundation of the Turkish republic in 1923 to the present, I argue that the history of this treatment can be divided roughly into four periods, during which the Turkish, Graeco-Roman, and Islamic parts of Anatolian history have been differently emphasized depending on the current ideological concerns. The presentation of Byzantium has diminished progressively since the beginning of the republican period, both in volume and scope, and is currently dwarfed by the extensive and detailed treatment of Turkish and Islamic history. A negative image of Byzantium is produced and disseminated in the textbooks through mechanisms of exclusion, overemphasis, and distortion.
Proceedings of the Plenary Sessions of the 24th International Congress of Byzantine Studies edited by Emiliano Fiori and Michele Trizio, 2022
Building upon the anthropological studies, I would like to put forward a fresh outlook on the na... more Building upon the anthropological studies, I would like to put forward a fresh
outlook on the nature of Byzantium’s foreign exchanges in the example of the ByzantineNear Eastern relations from the 7th to the 11th centuries. Examining the types of objects/ people/information exchanged (i.e. diplomats, merchants, booty, gifts, military technology etc.) and the ways they moved through different modes of exchange (commerce, plunder etc.) critically and comparatively would help every Byzantinist elucidate areas that are less well understood, such as commercial exchanges; it also makes us aware of the fact that the categories presented above are ideal types, and that objects and people had multiple and changing identities while different modes occasionally coalesced.
The Cambridge Companion to Constantinople, 2022
From the fourth century, when the Gothic King Athanaric expressed his astonishment at the bustle... more From the fourth century, when the Gothic King Athanaric
expressed his astonishment at the bustle of ships in
Constantinople’s harbors,1 until its fall to the Ottoman Turks in
1453, Constantinople was the commercial capital of the Byzantine Empire.
In this long period, two major turning points are identifiable: the seventh
century, which saw the end of the capital’s late antique development; and
the Crusader invasion of 1204, which interrupted an economic expansion
that had started in the ninth century and left the city subservient to
European commercial dominance. This chapter examines the commercial
development of Constantinople, concentrating on the city’s commercial
topography, its provisioning, trade networks, merchant class, and manufacturing industries as well as government control over them
De Byzance à Istanbul, Un port pour deux continent (catalogue for the exhibition at Grand Palais in Paris in 2009), eds. Nazan Ölçer and Edhem Eldem, 2009
From Byzantion to Istanbul; 8000 Years of a Capital, ed. Koray Durak, Istanbul, 2010
Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 2022
The city of Melitene in eastern Asia Minor/western Armenia presents a peculiar case in the study ... more The city of Melitene in eastern Asia Minor/western Armenia presents a peculiar case in the study of Byzantine-Islamic commerce in the early Middle Ages, because, unlike Trebizond or Attaleia, its commerce was entirely based on land-route connections, and the available evidence does not identify it as a town deliberately designated as a commercial exchange point by the Byzantine authorities. My purpose is to find an answer to the question of how Byzantine-Islamic trade took place in a location on the eastern land frontier where the coexistence of war and trade was a daily reality. The products and export items as well as the routes of the Melitene zone and its neighboring regions (Cappadocia, Pontos, Armenia) are examined in order to situate Melitene in a larger commercial context. I argue that Melitene prospered commercially in the middle of war zone for centuries and that its commercial fortunes began to improve especially by the beginning of the tenth century, reaching their climax in the eleventh century.
Mediterranean Historical Review, 2021
This article examines the merchant and commodity networks of Trebizond as well as routes at the r... more This article examines the merchant and commodity networks of Trebizond as well as routes at the regional, interregional, and international levels that connected the city to Constantinople, the rest the Black Sea, Armenia, the Near East and the Caucuses in the early Middle Ages. After a brief survey of the commercial history of Trebizond from the late antique period to the eleventh century, the economy of the Pontic region and its commercial exchanges with various regions are investigated in detail. The available evidence shows that the list of commodities exchanged between Pontos and its neighbours were longer, and the networks of merchants and routes were more complex than assumed thus far. Trebizond's advantage as a port town for landlocked territories to its south and east (especially the large Iranian and Iraqi markets at the end of the Silk/Spice Route), as well as its close ties with Constantinople and the rest of the Black Sea, established the Pontic capital as a vital emporium. Benefiting from the increasing economic development in Byzantium and its neighbours, the prosperity of the Pontic region and is main city Trebizond is most visible in the period from the mid-ninth to the mid-eleventh centuries.
Byzantium and the Arab World, Encounter of Civilizations, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessalonica, 141-154., 2013
Province and Periphery in the Age of Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos: From De Cerimoniis to De Administrando Imperio, ed. N. Gaul, V. Menze, and C. Bálint. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden, 168-183, 2018
Journal of Turkish Studies, 2011
Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2010
The present work is a contribution to the Islamic geographical conceptualisation of the medieval ... more The present work is a contribution to the Islamic geographical conceptualisation of the medieval world through the examination of the term Rūm (Roman). Rūm, in medieval Arabic, represented a territory that lay to the north and west of the Islamic Near East and North Africa. However, it is far from clear whether the term represented Europe, the Byzantine Empire or both. Study of Arabic geographical works from the ninth to the eleventh centuries shows that the term Rūm corresponded to the Byzantine Empire in the earlier geographical works, while the writers of later geographies began to use the term to define the Christian north in general, including Byzantium. The rest of the paper is devoted to an account of this transition in the meaning of the term.
Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik, Jan 1, 2009
Identity and the Other in Byzantium: Papers from the Fourth International Sevgi Gönül Byzantine Studies Symposium, Koç University Press, Istanbul, 5-22, 2019
Life Is Short, Art Long: The Art of Healing in Byzantium — New Perspectives, ed. B. Pitarakis, Istanbul Research Institute, Istanbul, 201-225, 2018
Life is Short, Art Long: The Art of Healing in Byzantium, ed. B. Pitarakis, 2015
The Byzantine Court: Source of Power and Culture (Second International Sevgi Gönül Symposium proceedings), eds. Ayla Ödekan and Engin Akyürek, Nevra Necipoğlu, Koç University Press, Istanbul, 157-164, 2013
Medieval and Early Modern Performance in the Eastern Mediterranean, eds. Arzu Öztürkmen, Evelyn Birge Vitz, Brepols, 2014
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 2022
The aim of this article is to present the sources available to the ordinary Turkish citizen for f... more The aim of this article is to present the sources available to the ordinary Turkish citizen for forming an opinion about Byzantium. These sources range from the written (school curricula to newspapers) to the visual (cinema to television), and I categorize them on the basis of a set of criteria such as accessibility, control over the audience, and intellectual depth. I aim to show how non-state actors have been laying the groundwork for a more informed perception of Byzantium. Movies, theatrical productions, and cartoons in humorous magazines satirizing the essentializing view of the Byzantine past through parody, are shown to play a deconstructive role in this process.
Anatolia in the Byzantine Period, eds. E. Akyürek and K. Durak, Yapı Kredi Publications, Istanbul, 444-451., 2021
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 2014
Examining the treatment of Byzantium in the history textbooks that were used in Turkish secondary... more Examining the treatment of Byzantium in the history textbooks that were used in Turkish secondary education from the foundation of the Turkish republic in 1923 to the present, I argue that the history of this treatment can be divided roughly into four periods, during which the Turkish, Graeco-Roman, and Islamic parts of Anatolian history have been differently emphasized depending on the current ideological concerns. The presentation of Byzantium has diminished progressively since the beginning of the republican period, both in volume and scope, and is currently dwarfed by the extensive and detailed treatment of Turkish and Islamic history. A negative image of Byzantium is produced and disseminated in the textbooks through mechanisms of exclusion, overemphasis, and distortion.
Proceedings of the Plenary Sessions of the 24th International Congress of Byzantine Studies edited by Emiliano Fiori and Michele Trizio, 2022
Building upon the anthropological studies, I would like to put forward a fresh outlook on the na... more Building upon the anthropological studies, I would like to put forward a fresh
outlook on the nature of Byzantium’s foreign exchanges in the example of the ByzantineNear Eastern relations from the 7th to the 11th centuries. Examining the types of objects/ people/information exchanged (i.e. diplomats, merchants, booty, gifts, military technology etc.) and the ways they moved through different modes of exchange (commerce, plunder etc.) critically and comparatively would help every Byzantinist elucidate areas that are less well understood, such as commercial exchanges; it also makes us aware of the fact that the categories presented above are ideal types, and that objects and people had multiple and changing identities while different modes occasionally coalesced.
The Cambridge Companion to Constantinople, 2022
From the fourth century, when the Gothic King Athanaric expressed his astonishment at the bustle... more From the fourth century, when the Gothic King Athanaric
expressed his astonishment at the bustle of ships in
Constantinople’s harbors,1 until its fall to the Ottoman Turks in
1453, Constantinople was the commercial capital of the Byzantine Empire.
In this long period, two major turning points are identifiable: the seventh
century, which saw the end of the capital’s late antique development; and
the Crusader invasion of 1204, which interrupted an economic expansion
that had started in the ninth century and left the city subservient to
European commercial dominance. This chapter examines the commercial
development of Constantinople, concentrating on the city’s commercial
topography, its provisioning, trade networks, merchant class, and manufacturing industries as well as government control over them
De Byzance à Istanbul, Un port pour deux continent (catalogue for the exhibition at Grand Palais in Paris in 2009), eds. Nazan Ölçer and Edhem Eldem, 2009
From Byzantion to Istanbul; 8000 Years of a Capital, ed. Koray Durak, Istanbul, 2010
Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 2022
The city of Melitene in eastern Asia Minor/western Armenia presents a peculiar case in the study ... more The city of Melitene in eastern Asia Minor/western Armenia presents a peculiar case in the study of Byzantine-Islamic commerce in the early Middle Ages, because, unlike Trebizond or Attaleia, its commerce was entirely based on land-route connections, and the available evidence does not identify it as a town deliberately designated as a commercial exchange point by the Byzantine authorities. My purpose is to find an answer to the question of how Byzantine-Islamic trade took place in a location on the eastern land frontier where the coexistence of war and trade was a daily reality. The products and export items as well as the routes of the Melitene zone and its neighboring regions (Cappadocia, Pontos, Armenia) are examined in order to situate Melitene in a larger commercial context. I argue that Melitene prospered commercially in the middle of war zone for centuries and that its commercial fortunes began to improve especially by the beginning of the tenth century, reaching their climax in the eleventh century.
Mediterranean Historical Review, 2021
This article examines the merchant and commodity networks of Trebizond as well as routes at the r... more This article examines the merchant and commodity networks of Trebizond as well as routes at the regional, interregional, and international levels that connected the city to Constantinople, the rest the Black Sea, Armenia, the Near East and the Caucuses in the early Middle Ages. After a brief survey of the commercial history of Trebizond from the late antique period to the eleventh century, the economy of the Pontic region and its commercial exchanges with various regions are investigated in detail. The available evidence shows that the list of commodities exchanged between Pontos and its neighbours were longer, and the networks of merchants and routes were more complex than assumed thus far. Trebizond's advantage as a port town for landlocked territories to its south and east (especially the large Iranian and Iraqi markets at the end of the Silk/Spice Route), as well as its close ties with Constantinople and the rest of the Black Sea, established the Pontic capital as a vital emporium. Benefiting from the increasing economic development in Byzantium and its neighbours, the prosperity of the Pontic region and is main city Trebizond is most visible in the period from the mid-ninth to the mid-eleventh centuries.
Byzantium and the Arab World, Encounter of Civilizations, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessalonica, 141-154., 2013
Province and Periphery in the Age of Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos: From De Cerimoniis to De Administrando Imperio, ed. N. Gaul, V. Menze, and C. Bálint. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden, 168-183, 2018
Journal of Turkish Studies, 2011
Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2010
The present work is a contribution to the Islamic geographical conceptualisation of the medieval ... more The present work is a contribution to the Islamic geographical conceptualisation of the medieval world through the examination of the term Rūm (Roman). Rūm, in medieval Arabic, represented a territory that lay to the north and west of the Islamic Near East and North Africa. However, it is far from clear whether the term represented Europe, the Byzantine Empire or both. Study of Arabic geographical works from the ninth to the eleventh centuries shows that the term Rūm corresponded to the Byzantine Empire in the earlier geographical works, while the writers of later geographies began to use the term to define the Christian north in general, including Byzantium. The rest of the paper is devoted to an account of this transition in the meaning of the term.
Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik, Jan 1, 2009
Identity and the Other in Byzantium: Papers from the Fourth International Sevgi Gönül Byzantine Studies Symposium, Koç University Press, Istanbul, 5-22, 2019
Life Is Short, Art Long: The Art of Healing in Byzantium — New Perspectives, ed. B. Pitarakis, Istanbul Research Institute, Istanbul, 201-225, 2018
Life is Short, Art Long: The Art of Healing in Byzantium, ed. B. Pitarakis, 2015
The Byzantine Court: Source of Power and Culture (Second International Sevgi Gönül Symposium proceedings), eds. Ayla Ödekan and Engin Akyürek, Nevra Necipoğlu, Koç University Press, Istanbul, 157-164, 2013
Medieval and Early Modern Performance in the Eastern Mediterranean, eds. Arzu Öztürkmen, Evelyn Birge Vitz, Brepols, 2014
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 2022
The aim of this article is to present the sources available to the ordinary Turkish citizen for f... more The aim of this article is to present the sources available to the ordinary Turkish citizen for forming an opinion about Byzantium. These sources range from the written (school curricula to newspapers) to the visual (cinema to television), and I categorize them on the basis of a set of criteria such as accessibility, control over the audience, and intellectual depth. I aim to show how non-state actors have been laying the groundwork for a more informed perception of Byzantium. Movies, theatrical productions, and cartoons in humorous magazines satirizing the essentializing view of the Byzantine past through parody, are shown to play a deconstructive role in this process.
Library Talks, organized by the ANAMED Library and Tarih Vakfı (the History Foundation) , 2020
The Byzantine Empire, a medieval state with roots in the ancient Mediterranean culture and home t... more The Byzantine Empire, a medieval state with roots in the ancient Mediterranean culture and home to different languages and ethnicities, represents a fertile ground for the study of identity as well as the perceptions and representations of the Other. The trifold model of the Byzantine identity – Greek culture, Christian Religion, and Roman imperial framework – has almost become a cliché in the definitions of Byzantium. Yet, the steady growth of scholarship on the Self and Other in Byzantium calls for fresh critical assessments. Stemming from the Fourth International Sevgi Gönül Byzantine Studies Symposium (ANAMED; 23–25 June 2016), the articles in the book Identity and the Other in Byzantium (Istanbul, 2019) offer new textual, archaeological and, art historical material that is necessary for a fuller understanding of Byzantine construction of the Self and Other in its various dimensions.
Medical History, 2021
In comparison to the history of medicine in medieval Europe and Islamic word, Byzantine medicinea... more In comparison to the history of medicine in medieval Europe and Islamic word, Byzantine medicinea tradition that extends from the late Roman period to the fifteenth centuryis a neglected field, suffering from an absence of primary source editions as well as a lack of extensive analyses of major Byzantine medical writers. Petros Bouras-Vallianatos' monograph on the corpus of the late Byzantine physician/ medical writer John Zacharias Aktouarios is a most welcome enterprise that presents the structure, sources and audience of John Zacharias' three major works-On Urines, Medical Epitome and On Psychic Pneumain a very clear and successful manner. This monograph is, and will likely remain, the most extensive treatment of John Zacharias, especially taking into consideration the partial and disorganized treatments that this early-fourteenth century physician has previously received. The choice of John Zacharias as a subject of a detailed examination is extremely appropriate not only because he was a very popular writer both among his contemporaries and in later centuries, as the number of manuscripts prove, but also because he astutely combined the teachings of his predecessors with his own authentic contributions, and he supported his theoretical views with practical observations. These two sets of dualisms, or rather two concepts dialectically in dialogue with each othertradition versus originality, and theory versus practicehas never stopped guiding modern scholars studying Byzantine medicine, as the title of Owsei Temkin's article from 1962, 'Byzantine Medicine: Tradition and Empiricism', shows. 1 After an introduction that portrays the political, cultural and medical setting in which John Zacharias produced his literary output, Bouras-Vallianatos examines in Chapters 2 and 3 John Zacharias' On Urines, a masterpiece of Byzantine uroscopy that had its match only in the uroscopic treatise of Theophilos, another Byzantine medical writer from the seventh or ninth century. These two chapters are indispensable for anyone interested in the history of uroscopy as well as clinical narratives, thanks to their extensive discussion of John Zacharias' theoretical elaborations together with his clinical observations and in-depth examination of urine vials. Bouras-Vallianatos further provides analysis of case histories that offer the best examples of physician-patient relations in Byzantine history. Bouras-Vallianatos performs at his best in donning the mantle of a cultural historian in his discussion of these eleven case histories. He views these short encounters between John Zacharias and his patients as 'an interaction between the performer and other individuals'. In addition to employing the perspectives offered by performance studies à la Goffman, being conscious of the textual nature of his evidence, Bouras-Vallianatos subjects his material to a narrative analysis in terms of characters, mise en scène, and authorial voice. This section on clinical narrative would impress the reader even more if he employed contributions from the field of oral history and from modern historical works that use trial or inquisitional records such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou or Karen Sullivan's The Interrogation of Joan of Arc. 2 Chapters 4 and 5, most beneficial for readers interested in Byzantine pharmacology, are devoted to John Zacharias' longest but relatively little studied handbook, Medical Epitome. As Bouras-Vallianatos shows, this encyclopaedic work, composed of six books devoted to diagnostics, therapeutics and pharmacology, is the work of a medical writer who effectively and carefully brought together selections from previous works and added his own experience and knowledge. The traditional assumption that Byzantine pharmacological works, especially recipes, were collages of previous texts with outdated
the Scandinavian Journal of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 2017
In its general outline, Olof Heilo's book is a study of the apocalyptic expectations that found f... more In its general outline, Olof Heilo's book is a study of the apocalyptic expectations that found fertile ground in the seventh and eighth centuries, a transition period from the well-established late antique world of the late Romans and Sassanids to the new medieval order of the Byzantine and Abbasid empires. He studies the apocalyptic element in the rise and expansion of Islam in relationship to Jewish and Christian apocalyp-tic readings of the period, and claims that individuals as extraordinary political figures, holy men, and warrior saints came to the fore in this period of open horizons, to be replaced by the hegemony of the majority that took the form of institutions. Focusing on the tension between apocalyptic beliefs and imperial ambitions, as well as between adventurous individuals and institutionalized practices in the early Middle Ages, Heilo attempts, at the same time, to problematize the modern dichotomy between prophecy and history as two explanatory paradigms for the rise of Islam. Refusing to take these two fields of perception as mutually exclusive, he explains how, through the medium of human agency, religious truths are given meaning in the context of social, cultural, and economic realities while past, present, and future events are interpreted continuously in the light of divine messages. Heilo's assessment of the rise of Islam in the late antique context follows a general tendency in the modern scholarship that is in the process of becoming conventional wisdom. He shows the reader that a post-Roman world continued to thrive with decentralizing and segregating tendencies apparent in the Islamic, Byzantine, and western Euro-pean realms; and echoing the works of Andrea Giardina, Peter Brown, Hugh Kennedy, Peter Sarris, and Glen Warren Bowersock, he treats the Umayyad period as part of the "extended" late antiquity. Secondly, in his argument that the Umayyads attempted to create a terrestrial paradise by combining the ideals of political and monotheistic universalism, he follows in the footsteps of Garth Fowden and Almut Höfert.
TÜRKİYE’DE BİZANS ÇALIŞMALARI: YENİ ARAŞTIRMALAR, FARKLI EĞİLİMLER
Byzantine Anatolia / Bizans Döneminde Anadolu , 2021
Identity and the Other in Byzantium, 2019
2 p.m.-2.20 p.m. Welcome and Introduction by Koray Durak and Nevra Necipoğlu 2.20 p.m.-3.40 p.m. ... more 2 p.m.-2.20 p.m. Welcome and Introduction by Koray Durak and Nevra Necipoğlu 2.20 p.m.-3.40 p.m. CONNECTIVITY OF OBJECTS AND PEOPLE Johannes Preiser-Kapeller (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria): The core and the periphery: Byzantium and Islamic polities in the Afro-Eurasian World System, 7 th to 12 th centuries CE Koray Durak (Boğaziçi University, Turkey): Mobility of people in Byzantine-Islamic exchanges 3.40 p.m.-4 p.m. BREAK 4 p.m.-6 p.m. AN INTERNATIONAL MARKET: COINS AND CERAMICS
The new capital of the eternal Roman Empire, Constantinople, was a stage for most impressive impe... more The new capital of the eternal Roman Empire, Constantinople, was a stage for most impressive imperial processions, a site for grandiose religious and imperial buildings, and a home to vast shopping streets and fora. All these activities and places found meaning when large crowds were present, but such large crowds could not reside in cities with poor provisioning capacity. Late antique Constantinople's social and cultural activities, economic life, and the interactions between its residents and the state machinery took place in the background of a provisioning system that made possible the constant movement of commodities and people in and out of the city. 6.10 p.m.-6.20 p.m. BREAK 6.20 p.m.-7.30 p.m. MERCHANTS AND MERCHANDISE Pamela Armstrong (University of Oxford) Amphoras from the Saraçhane excavations as indicators of the provisioning of Constantinople in Late Antiquity Michael J. Decker (University of Florida) Merchants and the provisioning of Constantinople in Late Antiquity 7.30 p.m.-8 p.m. CONCLUDING REMARKS Friday,