A Byzantine Century

This volume explores what it meant to invoke Byzantium during a century of restless political, cultural, and imperial transformation. From the 1820s to the 1920s, the “Neo-Byzantine” style was more than a matter of architectural taste in an age of eclecticism. It became a language of power and identity, called upon to serve colonial empires such as Britain, France, Russia, and Austria-Hungary, as well as contested regions like the Caucasus, the Balkans, and the Ottoman capital itself, where Byzantium was at once heritage and provocation. Far from being a marginal curiosity, the Neo-Byzantine revival was a crucible in which nations, religions, and empires negotiated their pasts and imagined their futures. Monumental churches, synagogues, and civic buildings across Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia were not simply constructed in a borrowed style: they materialized competing dreams of Byzantium, becoming instruments of political ambition, religious authority, national mythology, and cultural colonization.

Through a series of case studies ranging from Dublin to Istanbul, from Marseille to Tbilisi, and from Prussian churches to diasporic Armenian projects, the contributors move between the macro and the micro, situating the style within broad historical currents while grounding it in the specificity of local histories. Together, they demonstrate how Byzantium was not only reinvented but actively contested — its image refracted through the shifting concerns of a global century.

Introduction

Adrien Palladino
A Mosaic of Byzantiums. Neo-Byzantine Style Across a Century of Dreams and Empires

Articles

Francesco Lovino
How Byzantine Was Romano-Byzantine Architecture?  

Dimitra Kotoula
“A Growth of Thought”. The Arts and Crafts Reconsideration of the Byzantine Building

Giovanni Gasbarri
“A Harmonious Conglomerate of Particles”. Abstraction, Visual Mediation, and the Reception of Byzantine Art in the Age of Modernism

Niamh Bhalla
Thresholds for ‘Byzantinism’ in Architecture. Newman University Church, Dublin, and Early English Architectural Histories

Fani Gargova
Sonic Sacred Spaces. The Adoption of Byzantine Revival Architecture in Central European Reform Synagogues

Dragan Damjanović
Neo-Byzantine Style in the Southern Lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In Search of an Appropriate (National) Style 

Ivana Mance Cipek
South Slavic Confabulation of the “Byzantine Style” in the Writings of Ivan Kukuljević Sakcinski (1816–1889) 

Ivan Foletti & Margarita Khakhanova
The Neo-Byzantine Style, Russia’s Imperial Desires, and the Wars (1855–1920) 

Irene Giviashvili, Anna Mgaloblishvili
“Sailing to Byzantium”. The Georgian Perspective 

Semra Horuz
Foreign Style, Local Heritage. Ottoman Encounters with Byzantium in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul 

Thomas Kaffenberger
A Caucasian Revival between Armenia, Paris and Baghdad. Cross-Arched Vaults, Interwar France, and Architecture for the Diaspora 

Iñigo Salto Santamaría
If Berlin Was Constantinople. Prussian Neo-Byzantine Churches on Both Sides of the Wall