Emeritus Professor Emil Constantinescu, President of the Scientific Council of The Institute for Advanced Studies in Levant Culture and Civilization, President of Romania 1996-2000:
Byzantium has the merit of having kept alive the memory of Antiquity, through the lengthy and laborious process of copying down the works of the ancient sages, and by honouring and appropriating them as an essential part of Byzantium’s own historical and intellectual identity. Indeed, I believe that one of the reasons the Byzantine Empire endured for so long was precisely because of its memory of past events, preserved and maintained over the centuries by historians, scholars and copyists alike. In 1453, with the fall of the Empire, Byzantium did not die; it was in that fateful moment that the discipline of ‘Byzantine studies’ was born. On that momentous occasion, the present became the past, a past that itself became an object of study, a badge of honour, and an intrinsic part of the European identity. The fact that the field of Byzantine studies is still flourishing today is primarily owed to the consistent cultivation of this memory, now in a contemporary consumerist world that has little respect for the past, for history, or for the people who still deign to study it.
Distinguished professors, researchers and students,
Honoured audience,
It is my great pleasure to welcome you, albeit online, to the Institute for Advanced Studies in Levant Culture and Civilization. We find ourselves at the opening session of the 5th Edition of the Annual School of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies, organized in collaboration with the ‘Aristotle’ University of Thessaloniki, which is beginning to become a tradition. The topic chosen for this year’s proceedings was “Memory and oblivion in Byzantium.”
It has been only a few days since I inaugurated another Annual School organized by our Institute, that being the Annual Interdisciplinary School of Ancient Greek, Egyptology and Oriental Languages that had “Time and Space in Antiquity” as its topic. The two themes are closely intertwined, since memory can be defined as a temporal dimension of our psyche across all three facets of temporality – past, present and future.
‘Memory’ implies a remembrance of the past; in a way, it also means bringing it into the present. Conversely, ‘oblivion,’ or, ‘forgetfulness’ implies the erasure and annihilation of events that have once taken place. More than being a mere process by which information is encoded, stored and retrieved, memory is also a signifier of our personal and collective identities, which function on the basis of the complex and continuous phenomena of selecting, processing, connecting and compiling information. Oblivion, the antithesis of memory, is itself selective: it can aid us in regulating our emotions and in reinterpreting the past, in order to craft ourselves the future we desire.
In ancient societies, where learning was exclusively mnemonic, human memory had not only the capacity to learn, but also the capacity to adapt to its environment, using information and patterns from the past to anticipate those forthcoming in the future.
In this regard, Byzantium has the merit of having kept alive the memory of Antiquity, through the lengthy and laborious process of copying down the works of the ancient sages, and by honouring and appropriating them as an essential part of Byzantium’s own historical and intellectual identity. Indeed, I believe that one of the reasons the Byzantine Empire endured for so long was precisely because of its memory of past events, preserved and maintained over the centuries by historians, scholars and copyists alike.
In 1453, with the fall of the Empire, Byzantium did not die; it was in that fateful moment that the discipline of ‘Byzantine studies’ was born. On that momentous occasion, the present became the past, a past that itself became an object of study, a badge of honour, and an intrinsic part of the European identity. The fact that the field of Byzantine studies is still flourishing today is primarily owed to the consistent cultivation of this memory, now in a contemporary consumerist world that has little respect for the past, for history, or for the people who still deign to study it.
The project of an Annual School of Byzantine Studies was crafted around questions that young people ask themselves, questions to which scholars and researchers trained in the 20th century are still trying to find answers. It is a great source of pride for our institute to have the opportunity host this intergenerational dialogue at the confluence of two centuries.
During my younger years, the postmodern American poet Charles Olson, who styled himself “an archaeologist of the morning,” once claimed that “the chain of memory is resurrection.” With regard to entire civilisations, such ‘resurrection’ comes to mean a ‘rebirth’, a continuous return to a cherished and recognised cultural treasure.
Situated in a region squarely set in the path of history’s great population migrations, the Byzantine Empire ultimately could not revive the “Pax Romana,” that had ended with the collapse of Rome's administrative and economic military supremacy, in the East; and, after surviving for an entire further millennium, it, too, was consigned to history.
However, Byzantium's unique endurance stems from the fact that when it saw could no longer integrate its enemies into its empire, it instead chose to integrate them into its civilization. In its twilight, this fascinating civilization would go on to redeem the crimes, the compromises, the corruption and the slow decay of the very morals that had ensured its dominion over vast swathes of territory in the hearts, minds and collective imagination of subsequent generations.
Therefore, it is owing to Byzantine literature, science, art, architecture and music that we, today, can feel that in reading Classical and Byzantine authors, we honour our roots, we expand our knowledge, and we are able to discover something of ourselves in their joys and in their fears. In remembering them, we, in turn, express our gratitude for the world they bequeathed us; in ignoring them, we ultimately ignore ourselves, and miss out on the opportunity to uncover our true identity. And in forgetting them, we deny their existence; and when we, in turn, are forgotten, we too will cease to exist in that most enduring of memories – the history of culture.
On the final day of this Fifth Edition of the Annual School of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies, there will be a lecture by Czech professor Waldemar Deluga from the University of Ostrava on “The protection of monuments in Ukraine: past and present”. It is difficult to discuss the vestiges of an ancient past, while at the same time avoiding the current tragic context where people’s lives, their homes, but also their historical and artistic monuments are subject to destruction from an external aggression whose declared aim is to eradicate the collective linguistic and cultural memory that underpins the national identity of the Ukrainian people.
Our Institute for Advanced Studies in Levant Culture and Civilization, predicated upon the model pioneered at Princeton, aims to research the past in order to better understand the present and anticipate the future. The management of both memory and oblivion, the subject of this year’s International School, also played an important role three decades ago, when the system of Communist dictatorships throughout Eastern Europe – some of the most murderous regimes of all time – collapsed not from any outside intervention, but from within in a series of peaceful revolutions – singular in world history – that drew a Cold War, which for four decades had divided the world, to a close.
This collapse from within came about on the initiative of intellectuals throughout the former Soviet Union who established a foundation called “Pamyat” – ‘Memory’, dedicated to rediscovering the cultural, linguistic and religious identities that had been forcibly replaced by a unitary Communist ideology aimed at creating the ‘new communist man’. Their rediscovery determined a massive number of people to fight and even to die for the ideals of freedom, truth and justice – in the face of which, the repressive system collapsed.
After the fall of their Communist regimes, the countries of Eastern Europe found themselves in the unenviably difficult situation of having to again contend with age-old national and ethnic conflicts, inherited from a long history that was marked by Graeco- Roman Antiquity as much as by the Byzantine, Ottoman, Russian and Austrian Empires; conflicts that had not been resolved, but merely frozen under the Communist diktat.
Fate has given gave me the opportunity to be part of the family of the first democratic presidents of Eastern Europe in the last decade of the 20th century, who all came from the intellectual elite: university rectors, writers, philosophers, musicians that had been chosen by the peoples liberated from dictatorship to undergo the transition to full democracies; leaders such as Václav Havel (Czech Republic), Arpad Göncz (Hungary), Jeliu Jelev (Bulgaria), Tadeusz Mazowiecki and Bronisław Geremek (Poland), Michál Kovac (Slovakia), Vitautas Langbergis (Lithuania), Lennart Meri (Estonia), Vaira Freiberga (Latvia), Vojislav Koštunica and Zoran Đinđić (Serbia). These leaders had the power to persuade their citizens to focus on that which they held in common and could unite them, rather than on that which had divided and aggrieved them – both domestically and regionally – with the aim of fostering solidarity among the countries of Eastern Europe as a necessary precondition to later integration into a European Union in which all ethnic and national identities would be protected. The moral price that had to be paid for this was the extension of amnesty to the former dictators, to the political apparatus and to the state intelligence and repression services for their countless abuses of human rights throughout the decades.
The poster of the Fifth Edition of the Annual School of Byzantine Studies, created by Raluca Orza at the suggestion of Ana Maria Răducan and Maxim Onofrei, reproduces a mosaic from the rotunda of Galerius, wherein my young collaborators saw the damaged part as ‘oblivion,’ and the preserved part as ‘memory’. For years on end, during my visits to the monument in Thessaloniki (studied in-depth by Professor Semoglou who will present it in the first lecture of this School), I gazed upon the Dome where the proportion between the preserved and damaged part is caused by weathering and vandalism in roughly equal measure.
In life, the relationship between memory and oblivion is the result of a personal act of conscience. Consequently, the difficulty of understanding this relationship at the level of a constantly changing collective consciousness is, simply put, enormous. This, because it concerns not only the past, nor only the present, but, above, all the future; in truth, the real problem that destiny poses for nations, as it does for each individual, is that of the necessity of choice.
In Romania, the choice between vengeance and forgiveness was made more complicated because events strayed from the established path taken by all other Central and Eastern European countries, owing to the decision taken by the dictator Ceausescu to bloodily suppress the peaceful demonstrations of December 1989.
In 1996, when the victims of Communist terror were democratically elected to high offices of state, their reconciliation with their former torturers was the result of a pedagogy of suffering. Forgiveness operated in the institutional legal register owing to the moral prestige of former political prisoners and civic associations, which did not seek revenge.
Even so, their forgiveness did not also imply forgetting. The memory of their suffering functioned as a form of moral justice, to be recovered in history by future generations.
At the other end of the spectrum lies what Tzvetan Todorov called “the abuse of memory,” which motivates a revenge in the present for suffering past and which, in that very same period, underpinned the bloody conflagrations in the Western Balkans against the backdrop of a national Communist ideology.
In a book entitled Epistemological Ethics in which she analysed the traumas of political prisoners in the communist dictatorship, Cornelia Gășpărel, a researcher at the Iași branch of the Romanian Academy, saw them as a complicated relationship between memory and truth, between forgetting and forgiveness, between anguish and perfection as a measure of freedom. Following this idea, I believe that the relationship between memory and oblivion is the one that can determine the state of anguish or perfection of man, marking his personal destiny, but that projected at the social level can mark the national destiny.
I believe that at this turning point in history, when the Cold War has been reignited at a global level and we find ourselves in the presence of a murderous war in our very region, to return to the forefront of our memory of recent history the solidarity that coalesced around the ideals of freedom, truth and justice which illuminated the last decade of the 20th century would be greatly welcomed. It is on this foundation that we can build a European future rich in the Culture of Peace through Education that our Institute is committed to promoting through the Levant Initiative for Global Peace.
This year, as ever, I am gladdened to recall the history of this beautiful project launched by our Institute, and would like to express my gratitude to the ‘Aristotle’ University of Thessaloniki, represented by the Annual School’s Scientific Director, Athanassios Semoglou, as well as to all those who have contributed to the School’s prior editions, to the university professors who every year continue to accept to share their knowledge, their passion, and their love: Professor Alexandros Alexakis (University of Ioannina), Professor Stratis Papaionanou (University of Crete), Professor Pablo Argárate (University of Graz), Professor Waldemar Deluga (University of Ostrava), Professor Istvan Perczel (Central European University, Vienna), Professor Anca Dan (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique de Paris), Dr Marianna Bodnaruk (Al-Quds Bard College), Associate Professor Manuela Dobre (University of Bucharest), Dr Antonio Pio di Cosmo (Catholic University of Cuyo, Bucharest Institute for Advanced Studies in Levant Culture and Civilization), Dr Andrei Prohin (National Museum of Ethnography and Natural History in Chisinau), Dr Anna Adanshinkaia (Russian Academy of Sciences), and Dr Andra Jugănaru (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki). I also extend my gratitude to the School’s participants, so eager to receive their knowledge and to offer their curiosity and enthusiasm in exchange. Lastly, I would like to thank Dr Ana-Maria Răducan, the School’s initiator and principal organiser, as well as all my colleagues at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Levant Culture and Civilization that have been involved in the School’s organisation over the past five years.
It is my heartfelt wish that you enjoy these days to come, and may you make important discoveries that will help each of you in your academic and scholarly becoming.
Thank you.
Athanasios Semoglou, The scientific director of the fifth edition of the Summer School, Professor of Archaeology and Byzantine Art, Department of History and Archaeology, "Aristotle" University of Thessaloniki:
This year, which I hope will be the last year at distance, the School is dedicated to memory and oblivion in the Byzantine and post-Byzantine world. Topics such as rituals, identities, commemorations and sacred spaces are closely related to the mechanisms of memory and efforts to protect them from oblivion. At the same time, the practices of effacing memory and condemning people and their deeds to eternal oblivion - damnationes memoriae - only serve to valorise memory as one of the greatest conquests, hence the familiar expression ad perpetuam memoriam. The conferences held by colleagues, historians, archaeologists, philologists, art historians, Byzantinists who agreed to participate and to whom I express my full gratitude, will endeavour to elucidate complex issues concerning the management of memory as a fundamental political and historical tool.
It is a great pleasure for me to welcome you for the third time as the scientific supervisor of the fifth edition of this summer school, which has become a recognized and edifying institution for young researchers of Byzantine culture and civilization.
I would like to thank the president of the Institute of Advanced Studies for the Levant Culture and Civilization, Emil Constantinescu, for his constant trust in me and for his important efforts to support Byzantine studies, especially during a rather strange and extremely difficult time. I also thank him for his continued support, without which this event would not have been possible.
The fifth edition of the School is constantly under the auspices of the "Aristotle" University of Thessaloniki. Its rector, Nikos Papaioannou, who understood the importance and role of Byzantium, accepted and supported this initiative. I thank him again today.
This year, which I hope will be the last year at distance, the School is dedicated to memory and oblivion in the Byzantine and post-Byzantine world. Topics such as rituals, identities, commemorations and sacred spaces are closely related to the mechanisms of memory and efforts to protect them from oblivion. At the same time, the practices of effacing memory and condemning people and their deeds to eternal oblivion - damnationes memoriae - only serve to valorise memory as one of the greatest conquests, hence the familiar expression ad perpetuam memoriam. The conferences held by colleagues, historians, archaeologists, philologists, art historians, Byzantinists who agreed to participate and to whom I express my full gratitude, will endeavour to elucidate complex issues concerning the management of memory as a fundamental political and historical tool.
I would also like to thank Dr. Ana-Maria Răducan, the person in charge of the project and the soul of these summer schools. Without her, the school would have remained only on paper.
Finally, many thanks to you, the participants, students and researchers, who take part in our school. I hope that your participation will bring you new knowledge, new topics and open new research perspectives.
I wish you, therefore, a fruitful school.
My best wishes of health and success.
Thank you.
