Apologies in advance for the length of this special notification. However, if you are a regular reader of this website, or a prospective contributor or institutional partner, I would be most grateful to have a moment of your time to read it. It marks an important moment in the development of this website and its goals.

Several months have passed since the most recent article was published here. Some of our regular readers have inquired as to what the future might hold for Balkanalysis.com. I am happy to announce that work will commence soon on certain website modifications that will enhance our capacities and allow for a more focused approach to our work.

The current period of economic uncertainty and unprecedented transformations within the media industry is an exciting time. Despite the challenges facing many media bodies at the present moment, it is my belief that there are now greater opportunities than ever before for information providers that even a year ago would not have been able to participate on a level playing field.

Further, the ongoing evolution of media favors those parties whose demonstrated dedication to a topic, region or concept goes beyond the simple economics that have traditionally sustained the media industry.

Can this be assessed in qualitative terms? It will be up to readers and other information consumers to decide. We plan to test the extent to which we can exemplify this hypothesis.

A number of people have asked me throughout the last few months what the new strategy entails. Since this is largely still not available to the public, I cannot disclose much more at this stage than to say that Balkanalysis.com is going to be undergoing a slight ‘renovation’ and refocus of our energies. This is coming as a result not only of the general factors cited above, but also because of specific requests and interest voiced by external parties with interest in the region which we cover.

What does this mean for the reader? And why do I believe that this will mean an improvement in our coverage?

First, you will be seeing less ‘news’ items, less editorial, and more strictly analysis-related pieces published on the website. Second, there will also be, in addition to the usual free content available here, more opportunities to buy specific content through external distribution channels. I anticipate a greater degree of accuracy will be attained with this tightening of focus, as well as a greater depth of detail, which will be competitive with or superior in qualitative terms with other, larger media bodies providing the same service on the same topic.

Further, I intend that this will be accomplished while also retaining the full independence that has characterized the website since being established in 2003.

In order to accomplish these objectives, Balkanalysis.com will be looking to find some additional personnel, for specific in-country operations. First among these will be country editors for each of the countries we cover. Prospective candidates should feel free to communicate with us further regarding opportunities. These will be very limited, exclusive appointments, and candidates should have serious dedication to their work and a strong sense of responsibility.

Other requirements include: fluency in English and the major language of the target country; residence or frequent travel to the target country; knowledge of current affairs in at least two of the categories to be covered (politics & diplomacy, security & intelligence, business & economics, culture & tourism).

Preferred backgrounds include journalism, academia, governmental and non-governmental sector work in the greater Balkan region. There are certain benefits to be found in working with us and potential candidates should feel free to contact me for more information. Or, if you know of people who may fit the profile, please pass this notification on to them.

Finally, Balkanalysis.com will be developing new opportunities for cooperation with institutions and organizations in the region, or with interests in the region. If your organization, or one you know of, may wish to be involved, again please feel free to contact me. The possible opportunities foreseen include, but are not limited to, conferences and other public events, joint publications, research projects and training programs.

I will have more information as it becomes available. In the meantime, please share the current news with those who may be interested. I thank you once again for your attention and interest in our work.

best wishes,

Chris Deliso, Director

www.balkanalysis.com

cdeliso(AT)balkanalysis.com

Best wishes,
Balkanalysis.com

Furthermore, the South Stream project in terms of environmental research lacks any detailed scrutiny, from either state authorities or civil organizations. This lack could be attributed to the fact that the project is still in the early stages of preparation.

The president of the Committee of the Black Sea Regional Energy Center (BSREC) and also director at the Center for Energy Policy & Development in Greece, Prof. Dimitris Mavrakis, holds an optimist view concerning the environmental viability of the project.

According to him, “Laying pipelines in the sea bed, either for developing subsea fields or for natural gas transportation is a common practice in our days.”

Moreover, he explains that “the exploitation of North Sea natural gas reserves has led to the development of a dense network of subsea pipelines, without negative environmental implications, and the same applies for the Mediterranean Sea”.

Mavrakis’s overall final conclusion is that “South Stream does not include any environmental risks, as experience has shown from previous pipelines already deployed’.

The Italian partner in the project, ENI, has already released a press report underlying that the “strictest environmental criteria and the most advanced technologies will be carried out in cooperation with Gazprom”. The Italian branch of Greenpeace, according to the local media, hasn’t rejected the project in terms of its environmental prospects, though no definite report has been made by any Italian environmental organization so far.

On the other hand, there are those who objecting to the above by keeping a critical stance. According to the Moscow paper Kommersant, the press service of the Ukrainian Environmental Ministry has expressed that “the pipeline would require a close study and the conduct of a large-scale ecological assessment”.

For the moment, further information has not been made available by Kiev, though diplomatic sources in Athens confirm that Ukraine will bring up the environmental issue in the future, and that this will certainly exacerbate strains in its relations with Moscow.

Further, the Polish member of the European Parliament, Mrs. Urszula Gacek, has made her country’ss reservations public by drafting a relevant question to the Commission in early 2008, stating that “South Stream [Pipeline] may have negative consequences concerning [the] Black Sea’s ecosystem”. The question was aimed at exploring the probabilities of an EU hand-out for South Stream, a development that hasn’st occurred so far.

In Greece in early September 2008, when the South Stream agreement was voted on by the Parliament, the Left-wing party of Syriza voted against it, citing environmental reasons and more specifically “Physical degradation of the environment in places where the pipeline is going to cross, including the internationally protected “Natura 2000″ zones”.

Already the local authority of the scenic coastal Perdika region in Western Greece has proclaimed in an adamant manner that the construction of the pipeline traversing their territory, in combination with the creation of a natural gas compressor station, will “ruin their natural environment and damage extensively their well-formed tourist infrastructure”.

The members of the municipal board have claimed that the existence of a preparatory report concerning the environmental consequences by a faculty member of the Athens National Technical University, though the authorities of the School were not able to verify such for the time being.

The WWF branch in Greece agrees in principle that “Natural gas should be encouraged as an alternate form of energy in comparison to lignite, oil or stone coal,” but adds the caveat that the construction of the South Stream Pipeline should be “carefully assessed and become part of a public energy debate”.

Bulgarian NGO’s involved in environmental protection have not expressed their view on the project, but there are numerous weblogs, mostly by young university activists, calling against the construction of pipelines in general, citing environmental reasons. Similar resentment has largely come from residents of the port of Burgas, from where both South Stream and the Burgas-Alexandroupoli oil pipeline are projected to pass.

Department of Geography

DePaul University, Chicago

This short paper on Byzantine maps and geographic science was born out of a conversation with Christopher Deliso, director of Balkanalysis.com. We agreed that there is a need to look at southeastern Europe – the Balkans – from a spatial (geographical) analytical perspective. Our understanding of the region’s historic and contemporary nationalisms, its ethnoreligious and ethnolinguistic identities, and the statecraft that defines the region’s geopolitical peculiarities, can be improved by studies of the production of cultural and political spaces (territorial states, homelands, heritage spaces, symbolic landscapes, and pre-modern Empires, to name a few). I would like to start that conversation about Balkan spaces by looking at Byzantine cartography and geographic theory as political, cultural, and scientific products that shaped and continue to shape our perception of the region.

I suggest that the manner in which Byzantines and others conceptualized geographical space in both symbolic and practical terms has much to do with the way territories were scripted and integrated into cosmological, Earth-based, regional, and political worldviews.

More importantly for us today, geographic and cartographic thinking of, and artifacts that date from, antiquity to the modern era have at some times informed about, and at other times attempted to obscure, the ground truth in the service of politics, power, and ideology. My tasks here are to untangle and describe to the reader a set of geographic and cartographic traditions that, although situated in the remote past, constitute root sources for the way the Byzantines looked at the World, generally, and their region in particular.

The question of chronological provenance

Some clarification about terms: A traditional approach to classifying the maps and their provenance chronologically as “Eastern Roman” and subsequently “Byzantine” would be to adopt as a time frame the establishment of Constantine the Great’s reign (324CE) to the fall of Constantinople (1453CE). There are some pitfalls, however, to adopting a rigid chronological frame, and situating these artifacts and theories firmly as byproducts of the societies and polities of those centuries.

To put it simply, one of the most important lessons of studying Byzantine cartography as science, and Byzantine maps, as material objects, is the diachronic character and influence of the source material on which they were based:

For example, Classical, Hellenistic, and imperial Roman geographic knowledge and science need to be understood as a continuous scientific tradition, expressed through the thought and works of Anaximander (610-546 BCE) (figure 1a), Hecateus of Miletus (c. 550-476 BCE), Herodotus (c. 484-425 BCE), Eratosphenes of Cyrene (276-195 BCE), Strabo (c. 63 BCE-24 CE), and Claudius Ptolemy (c. 90-168 CE) to name some of the most important.

Critically important for us, cartographic works and theories of this long-standing scholarly tradition contributed greatly to geographic and cartographic concepts of the Middle Ages in Europe’s West, in the Roman and Byzantine East, and in the Arab World after the 7th century CE.

Standing on the shoulders of pre-Socratic and Classical scholars, Claudius Ptolemy’s work can easily be counted as the most influential. Grounded far more on empiricism than religious symbolism, his Geography dominated regional cartography and scores of derivative portolan (navigation) cartography into the 16th c. Known to Arab scholars and cartographers, the Ptolemaic opus reaches Florence ca. 1400 and revolutionizes cartography in the West (figure 2).

At the other end of the chronological spectrum, the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 may be construed sensu stricto as the end of Byzantine scientific study of geography, and the culmination of Byzantine cartographic production. Yet, it would be an error not to consider and assess the influence of Byzantine émigré scholars, like Gemistus Pletho who lectured in the 1430s in Florence before returning to Mystra in the Peloponessus, and Markos Mousouros and Zacharias Kallergis, who taught in Rome’s Quirinal College in the early 1500s, where publisher and cartographer Nikolaos Sophianos was a student.

These men were representatives of a learned elite with strong intellectual, and at times, political links to the fallen Byzantine State. Many of them settled in centers of learning in Italy-Rome, Venice, and Florence-in the decades after the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438-39) attempted the union of the Western and Eastern Churches into an Oecumenical church.

As far as the transmission of geographical knowledge from Byzantium to Italy is concerned, there are significant examples: For example, the scholar Gemistus Pletho was significantly responsible for re-introducing Strabo to the West through his scientific treatise of Strabo’s Geography. The treatise is preserved in Codex Marcianus graec. 379, in St. Mark’s Library, Venice, which most likely belonged to Pletho’s famous student Basil Bessarion (Diller, 1937: 441-2).

Sophianos’ immensely influential map Totius Graeciae Descriptio, which George Tolias describes as “a visual digest of Greece”, synthesizes two regional maps from Ptolemy’s “Geographia” Tabulae Europae IX and X), contemporary information from portolan (navigation) maps, and narrative and toponymic information from Pausanius’s 2^nd-century “Description of Greece”, as well as earlier geographical information from Herodotus and Thucydides (Tolias, 2006: 163) (figure 3).

The question of geographical provenance

Issues surrounding the geographical rather than simply the chronological provenance of Byzantine maps and geographical theories are equally vexing and require us, again, to think beyond the mere location of a map’s original publication. Moreover, the location where the object map is catalogued and archived may be the furthest removed from where it was created: Edson and Savage Smith study the so-called “Astrologer’s Map”, one of the earliest ancient Greek maps of the world (c. end of the 5th-beginning of the 6th c. CE) that was discovered among Greek astrological texts bound in the midst of an Arabic manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (MS Marsh 42) (Edson and Savage-Smith 2000:7) (figure 4).

In fact, the map’s life-path may have been rather complex. It may have originated in Alexandria, was consulted and – given its symbolic rather than practical nature – used in rituals. And it was possibly owned by a number of patrons across the Mediterranean, until it was collected in an Arab library, and ultimately acquired by an Orientalist scholar who donated it to the Bodleian. Context is frequently critical for determining provenance, although context does not help in the case of the Astrologer’s Map.

Although I would rather not confuse the reader further, I should note that when it comes to the production, distribution, and consumption of Byzantine maps, traditional territorial definitions of the Eastern Roman and Byzantine Empires get in the way. Conventionally, following the Tetrarchy – the Roman Empire under Emperor Diocletian was divided into a Western and an Eastern one. Following the establishment of Constantinian rule, the geographic footprint of the Eastern Empire waxed and waned significantly, assuming its maximal territorial extent under Eastern Roman qua Byzantine rule during the reign of Justinian I (c. 482-565 CE) (figure 5).

Starting with Emperor Heraclius’ reign, the now Hellenized Eastern Empire (575-641 CE) faced increasing territorial challenges from Visigoths and Lombards in the West, Avars and Bulgars in the North, and Saracens and Persians in the East.

Further, the establishment of the Arab Empire in the 7th century initiated a period of great intercourse between Hellenic and Arabic scholarship, inclusive of geography and cartography. After the Arab conquest of Egypt, Syria and Palestine, Ptolemy’s seminal 2nd century CE geographic and cartographic opus becomes the object of systematic study and elaboration by Arab cartographers, astronomers, and mathematicians.

Periodically pushing back successfully against a growing number of geopolitical competitors, as during the reigns of Basil II and John II Komnenos, but more often losing territories to them, by the middle of the 15th c. the territorial extent of the Byzantine state was greatly diminished, comprising essentially the imperial capital city of Constantinople, and a number of fortified exclaves in mainland Greece. Thus, the dynamic movement of political boundaries and frontiers during the eleven centuries of Byzantine political and cultural life, but more importantly, the mobility of scholars and cartographers across political territories in flux, make for unreliable markers of geographic provenance of maps that are generally attributable to Byzantine cartography and geographic science.

Ultimately, the geographies of Byzantine map production, use, and collection point to five contexts: the imperial and Arab administrations in the East, great monastic libraries like those on Mt. Athos and the Monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai, scholarly collections, private collections of maps of essentially antiquarian value, and merchants and transport concerns that used specialist maps (such as navigational ones). Among all these contexts, it is libraries that at times have been best able to fix in time and space these rare and enigmatic maps.

Fortunately, there are times when geographic provenance could not be clearer: when the map is integrated into the structure of a building, it may endure for hundreds of years beyond the people and the state that produced it. There are at least two such Byzantine maps that are worthy of mention. The mosaic floor map in the church of St. Doumetios (a three-aisled basilica dated to c. 550-575 CE) in Epirus, Greece, is an example of cosmological mapping that interweaves elements of ancient Greek and Christian symbolic geographies. The St. Doumetios mosaic map strains our cartographic imagination (figure 6). As creatures of modernity we would not call that beautiful mosaic a map, since we commonly think of maps as two-dimensional scaled representations of the surface of the Earth. It is also very unlikely that a European map collector of the 16th or 17th century would be able to make sense of this mosaic as map.

For these Early Moderns, cartography was already substantially a science of statecraft, war, mercantile capitalism, and a visualization tool of the new physiographic sciences. But for a 6th century Byzantine person, the mosaic would have been easily identifiable as a map – the Christian cosmos as interpreted through Greek cartographic science. Drawing on the ancient tradition of Anaximander and Eratosthenes (figure 1), the artist-cartographer surrounds the “oecoumene” (the inhabited Earth represented as the world of living being-trees and animals), by a stylized rendition of Oceanus (the impassable ocean that circumscribes the inhabited world, as well as lands in the South, either inhabited by non-human creatures, or devoid of life).

The inscription leaves little to doubt: Kitzinger translates it as “The boundless ocean having in its midst the earth” (Kitzinger, 1973: 370). The 6th c. mosaicist thus marries artistic and aesthetic media of the pre-Christian world, with Christian imagery. Kitzinger continues that “the idea of the earth in the midst of the ocean is conveyed by means of the classical device of an emblema (or panel picture) surrounded by an elaborate frame” (ibid). He likens it to a later, highly decorative example of floor map from the Romanesque Church of St. Salvatore, Turin: “a decorator’s paraphrase of a world map” (Ibid).

Another example of monumental cartography can be found in the contemporaneous mosaic representation of Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean, located in the apse of the church of Saint George at Madaba, Jordan. That floor mosaic comes closer to our idea of a map, though geographic accuracy is not the artist-cartographer’s objective. Depicting a substantial region that spanned an area from Lebanon to the Nile Delta in the south, and from the Mediterranean Sea in the west to the Syrian desert, the mosaic maps some 150 biblical cities and towns, labeled in Greek. Sites like Jericho and Bethlehem would have been familiar to Christian pilgrims (figure 7). The monumental map of an important part of the Christian world would have been trodden by worshippers, perhaps as a reminder of the mundane character of the physical earth.

Above the mosaic, the Church of St. George (Kitzinger claims it is dedicated to St. John) would have soared over the heads of the worshippers, representing the higher moral sphere (Donner, 1992: 3-5). I would suggest that the Madaba mosaic map can be linked to a particular Christian exegesis of the universe – one that would have been consistent with the Eastern Syrian and Antiochene view of Christianity that influenced another very important Byzantine map, the Christian Topography of Cosmas, the so-called Indicopleustes (Kominko 2005: 164).

In the case of a vastly different object, manuscript MS 1851 from the Codices Vaticani graeci (Biblioteca Vaticana), dated with confidence to the year 1179, we know with certainty the point of origin and destination. Hilsdale describes it as “a small and intimate book whose simplified vernacular voice, large, clear script, and detailed miniature cycle suggest that it was intended for Agnes’s young eyes alone” (Hilsdale 2005: 477). This extraordinary object that contains stylized, landscape-oriented maps of Constantinople, was intended for the Princess Agnes, daughter of Adèle de Champagne and Louis VII of France who wed Alexios, the purple-born son of Emperor Manuel II Komnenos.

The title of Hilsdale’s work (“Constructing a Byzantine Augusta: A Greek Book for a French Bride”) captures and interprets the complexity of design and discourse that define this manuscript. Intended as a manual on Byzantine imperial etiquette as well as an introduction to the Byzantine “topos” over which she was one day to reign, the book is rich in narrative descriptions, visual storyboards, and stylized illustrations of the capital city (figure 8).

What this little book for the future Augusta did was to create a cognitive map of Byzantine imperial life and space. Although the visual vignettes may not be immediately interpreted as “maps” by a modern person, these landscapes have the same effect of fixing Byzantine geographies (the city, landmark buildings, the spatial organization of the palace, as well as the micro-geographies of body posture and ritual precedence in court ceremonies) in word and image for a foreign princess.

In this case, “topography” becomes “cartography,” and finally becomes a princely education. Her actual arrival on imperial lands was at the city of Thessaloniki, where she was celebrated with an oration by Eustathios, former Master of the Rhetors and Archbishop of that city. The oration has been preserved as Madrid MS Esc. Gr. 265 [Y.II.10] fols 368-372 (Real Biblioteca de El Escorial Vol. 2 [Madrid, 1965] pp. 120-131).

As Hilsdale reports, by all indications, her transformation from Agnes, Princess of France into Anna, Byzantine Augusta was successful. Robert of Clari recounts her encounter with French Crusaders in 1203, to who she refused to identify herself as anything but a Byzantine Empress: Clari reported [ele][sic] “ne voloit parler a aus, ainsi I faisoit parler un latimier, et disoit li latimiers qu’ele ne savoit nient de Franchois” (Lauer, 1924: 54, in Hilsdale, 483).

In sum, then, there is often a compelling mystery that surrounds the study of geographic origin and provenance of Byzantine maps. That mystery has to do with the mobility of these objects from the earliest years of the empire but especially following the Latin conquest of Byzantium (1204-1261). Political and military expediency, the vanity and often greed of collectors abroad, the taste for illuminated Byzantine manuscripts, and the desire of Western scholars to access Greek and Arabic classical knowledge produced a massive outflow vectored West. Stories of commerce and conquest may best explain why there are only a few hundred Greek manuscripts in Istanbul today, while the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the Biblioteca Laurenziana and the Biblioteca Nazionale dei San Marco, among other Western libraries with Byzantine holdings, catalogue more than 5,200 manuscripts (Nelson, 1995: 209).

At times, émigré Greeks, like Nikolaos Sophianos, would travel to Ottoman-occupied Greece to purchase Byzantine-era manuscripts. Based on a letter by G.B. Amalteo to Paolo Manuzio (27 February 1561) we know that Sophianos traveled to monasteries in Thessaly and Mount Athos between February and September 1543, acquiring some 300 manuscripts for a Spanish collector (Diller, 1937 in Tolias 2006: 172). Tolias further informs us that Sophianos’ manuscript hoard included “mathematical and minor geographical treatises, such as Agathemerus’ Diagnosis and Hypotyposis, and the first lines of Dionysius Byzantius’ navigation of the Bosporus” (Tolias 2006: 152). The complexity of the geographies of Byzantine map production, consumption, and collection speak of a Mediterranean world, at least, that was a highly integrated commercial, security and intellectual space, at least until the consolidation of Ottoman power in the east.

Suggesting a Byzantine map taxonomy

We have already noted the challenges of establishing chronological and geographical provenance in Byzantine map connoisseurship. We will bracket these challenges for now, and focus on the basic taxonomy of maps we accept as either putatively or specifically Byzantine: One important taxonomic variable is ‘scale’ – mappae mundi or world maps constituting an important map class. There are cases where maps at a larger geographical scale (depicting regional detail), such as the later Sophianos map of the Greek world, would be based on a section of a mappa mundi.

Although there is high quality scholarship on specific medieval qua Byzantine map objects, especially since the benighted, and orientalist writings of C. Raymond Beazley at the end of the 19th century, there has been little work done on building a sensible and comprehensive taxonomy of this cartographical heritage, that would allow researchers, including social scientists who are not, for example, trained Byzantinists or papyrologists, to use these objects for a deeper analytical understanding of the Byzantine spaces and their relation to the world.

Equally critical variables are the types of use intended for the map: We can visualize a number of binary or spectral classifications that would describe the map’s original versus derivative character, its symbolic versus empirical nature, its organizational structure, its intended and/or actual use or instrumentality, its situational context, and the media in which the map was produced.

Within the context of mappae mundi, and maps which are derivative from them, we can discern a significant map population distribution across a spectrum: maps of a symbolic, ritualistic qua religious, or magical/astronomical character and uses occupy one side of the spectrum, and maps of a non-religious, pseudo-scientific or scientific, and instrumental character (for example, maps in the service of navigation, travel, location of cities and towns, political-administrative divisions) collectively describe the opposite end.

For the sake of our scientific conversation, I list below some possible pillars of a practical taxonomy:

Original-Derivative: Woodward calls ‘transitional’ maps that incorporate elements of older maps into newer editions or into entirely new maps. Milanesi and others prefer the term ‘synthetic’.

Visual/Graphical-Narrative: Early Christian pilgrim travel accounts are built around lists of directions, distances, and landmarks, not unlike the directions one gets with a Mapquest query today. Per Leyerly, who studied the travel narratives of the Bordeaux Pilgrim, of Egeria, and of the Piacenza Pilgrim, these lists of geographical features and landscape queues were used very much like maps, hence my decision to include them in this taxonomy.

Planned Orientation-Landscape Orientation: Planned views of the earth are conventionally considered ‘maps’, though there is significant support among both historians of cartography and geographers that landscape views (or orientation) constitute an important subclass of maps. One would readily agree with this premise if one has ever used the planispheric orientation tool in Google Earth.

Manuscript-Monumental: Byzantine-era manuscripts of all types (in papyrus, vellum, or other useable medium), number in the few thousands, which would make them rather rare. Among them there is a small number of maps and manuscripts that can be generously classified as maps (as in the case of the landscape maps of Constantinople in the Augusta book). Set apart from these portable maps, are maps integrated into buildings as murals or mosaic floors that can be best described as monumental-the Nikopolis and Madraba mosaic maps being good examples of that subtype.

Symbolic/Religious/Magical/Abstract- Empirical/Instrumental/”Realist”: Maps that resemble the Astrologer’s Map, the subclass of symbolic/cosmological maps we call “T-O” maps (the so-called Pseudo-Isidoran Vatican map (figure 9) being a mature and elaborate version of the type), the St. Doumetius mosaic floor map at Nikopolis, and the Cosmas Indicopleustes map, which draws the world as a representation of the table of Moses’ tabernacle, can be collectively described as abstract cartographic illustrations of biblical exegeses of the World.

Their taxonomic ‘antipodes’ are maps conceived and produced by cartographers, and consumed by clients, who had an interest in the mapping the surface of the planet as accurately as possible (scholar-scientists like Claudius Ptolemy, navigators who lived and died by the accuracy of their portolan maps, merchants whose wealth depended on accurate geographic and logistical information, and strategists, politicians, and administrators (including the propertied institutional Christian Churches of the East and West), who managed territories and vast properties, defended boundaries, and distributed privileges and power that were rooted largely on territorial control (figure 10).

Some preliminary conclusions

We do not know very much about Byzantine maps and Byzantine cartographic science in general. The material record is scant, many objects having been lost, destroyed, removed from their proper context (most often, to the West), or discarded when no longer useful, as is probably the case with Byzantine portolans between the second half of the 13th century and the Fall of Constantinople.

Nevertheless, there is a distinct possibility that more Byzantine manuscripts and specifically maps will be uncovered in libraries with significant historical collections, such as the Vatican Library, the Bodleian at Oxford, the National Library of Greece, and the Ataturk Library.

Yet in spite of the paucity of the material record, there is much that we can discern to build a picture of Byzantine cartography. Its connection to the mathematical, astronomical, and geographic vanguard of the Hellenistic period – the opus of Claudius Ptolemy – is unquestionable. Its basis on geographical models of the pre-Socratic philosophers, and the Classical period historians is quite evident at least in zonal and in T-O type maps. Furthermore, its interest in engaging in a biblical exegesis of the world through the medium of cartography can also be strongly supported. The use and study of landscape as spatial visualization speaks to a certain amplitude in how maps were thought of, constructed and used.

Taken as a whole, we can compose a useful, albeit incomplete picture of Byzantine geographic and cartographic science and practice. As some of the related objects traveled to Venice, Genoa, Spain, the Arab world, and beyond, to inform and influence geographic and cartographic sciences and production there, other objects became part of the scientific and artifactual world of the Ottomans and their subject people. It is reasonable to assume that Byzantine cartography, and the cartographies of Venice and Genoa through commerce and the Latin conquest of Byzantium, influenced the manner elites and everyday people visualized cartographically and modeled spatially their power position within the region we sometimes call the Balkans, within the Ottoman Empire, and in the successor states that replaced it.

€¦€¦€¦€¦€¦€¦

Sources
Bagrow, Leo. “The Origin of Ptolemy’s Geographia.” Geografiska Annaler, Vol. 27 (1945), pp. 318-387.
Beazley, C. Raymond. “New Light on Some Mediæval Maps”. The Geographical Journal, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Apr., 1900), pp. 378-389.
________________. “Early Christian Geography.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, New Series, Vol. 10 (1896), pp. 85-109.
Chekin, Leonid S. “Easter Tables and the Pseudo-Isidorean Vatican Map.” Imago Mundi, Vol. 51 (1999), pp. 13-23.
Diller, Aubrey. “A Geographical Treatise by Georgius Gemistus Pletho.” Isis, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Nov., 1937), pp. 441-451.
Edson, Evelyn; Savage-Smith, Emilie. “An Astrologer’s Map: A Relic of Late Antiquity.” Imago Mundi, Vol. 52 (2000), pp. 7-29.
Hilsdale, Cecily J. “Constructing a Byzantine Augusta: A Greek Book for a French Bride.” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 87, No. 3 (Sep., 2005), pp. 458-483.
Kitzinger, Ernst. “World Map and Fortune’s Wheel: A Medieval Mosaic Floor in Turin.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 117, No. 5 (Oct. 25, 1973), pp. 344-373.
Lauer, Philippe, ed. Robert de Clari, la conquète de Constantinople. Paris: E. Champion, 1924, p. 54.
Leyerle, Blake. “Landscape as Cartography in Early Christian Pilgrimage Narratives.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Spring 1996), pp. 119- 143.
Maja Kominko. “The Map of Cosmas, the Albi Map, and the Tradition of Ancient Geography”. Mediterranean Historical Review, Vol. 20, No. 2, (2005), pp. 163-186
Milanesi, Marica. “A Forgotten Ptolemy: Harley Codex 3686 in the British Library.” Imago Mundi, Vol. 48 (1996), pp. 43-64.
Nelson, Robert S. “The Italian Appreciation and Appropriation of Illuminated Byzantine Manuscripts, ca. 1200- 1450.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Vol. 49, Symposium on Byzantium and the Italians, 13th-15th Centuries (1995), pp. 209-235.
Tolias, George. “Nikolaos Sophianos’s ‘Totius Graeciae Descriptio’: the resources, diffusion, and function of a sixteenth-century antiquarian map of Greece,” Imago Mundi, Vol. 58, no. 2 (2006), pp. 150-182.

Appendix: Illustrations

(Note: all graphics supplied courtesy of the author)

Figure 1a

Figure 1a: Anaximander'ss world map

Figure 1b

Figure 1b: Eratosthenes's world map

Figure 2

Figure 2: Ptolemy, 2nd cent. ''Map of the World.'' 1482. John Carter Brown Library, Brown University.

Figure 3

Figure 3: Nikolaos Sophianos,Totius Graeciae Descriptio (Rome, Antonio Blado, 1552). Copperplate. 4 sheets. 74x110 cm, in Tolias, 2006: 161.

Figure 4

Figure 4: The Astrologer'ss map (detail). Oxford, Bodleian Library, Dept. of Oriental Collections, MS Marsh 42, fol. 4r/156. This zonal map which is oriented to the north, reflects Greek scientific understandings of the Earth as a spheroid, with cold, temperate, and €˜torrid's/tropical zones. As Edson and Savage-Smith note, €˜real's places like Persia and the Indian Ocean are juxtaposed with mythical places in the €˜antipodes's, as well as mystico-religious places, like Hades and Hell, that suggest a degree of religious syncretism between the ancient Greco-Roman religions and Christianity.

Figure 4 (translated)

Translated version of the Astrologer's Map.

Figure 5

Figure 5: Core Byzantine Empire (green during Justinian I'ss reign; consolidation of Western holdings and new acquisitions in purple).

Figure 6

Figure 7

Figure 8

By Ljiljana Blagojevic

MIT Press (2003), 300 pp.

Reviewed by Christopher Deliso

Architecture has long commanded public attention in the Balkans. Swedish diplomats lament the low-quality granite used not long ago to create public thoroughfares in Kosovo €“ itself an experiment in building €“ and organized debates are sparked by talk of an enormous Alexander the Great statue in Skopje.

Given the continuing controversy that characterizes much of the dialogue around architecture in the Balkans today, it is a bit refreshing to take a moment out and appreciate the achievements of an earlier time, the controversies surrounding which have long subsided.

As such, readers may turn to Modernism in Serbia: The Elusive Margins of Belgrade Architecture, 1919-1941, an attractively designed tome that’ss a mix between textbook and coffee-table set piece. From the minimalist font (Gotham) cloaking taut prose to the exacting sketches of once-experimental constructions, the book reflects the aesthetic of the early 20th-century structures pictured in the book, many of which have not survived or are in disrepair.

By any standard, this is a remarkable book. Written by Serbian architect and Belgrade University lecturer Ljiljana Blagojevic, Modernism in Serbia: The Elusive Margins of Belgrade Architecture, 1919-1941 is much more than a treatise on old buildings and their structural integrity. Indeed, it has just as much to do with defining the intellectual integrity of those who envisioned, designed and agitated for the building of livable urban artworks which, by virtue of their very existence, reflected specific currents in philosophical thought.

Whether or not one likes the architecture itself, in this era of cheap (though expensive) nationalist kitsch and the apparently unstoppable reflective blue glass that forms the outer shield of so many Balkan urban buildings today, one has to admire the Serbian modernists for at least trying to be guided by loftier thoughts.

To be sure, this is a book that is on the must-read list for students of architecture and Balkan urbanists, though for this reason it will appeal to anyone intrigued by the history of thought and social movements in the modern Balkans. And it makes for an attractive and useful conversation-starter if spread discreetly across one’ss coffee table when, say, trying to impress a first-time date.

The author tells the story of Belgrade Modernist architecture in five carefully composed chapters, beginning with the context of the outside (mainly, French) condescension of local architecture in the period of the Balkan Wars through to the dwindling of Modernism following the ascendancy of Tito and his Communist ethos.

Along the way, Blagojevic documents the works and tells the fascinating personal stories of the major architects, men such as Nikola Dobrovic, Dragisa Brasovan and Milan Zlokovic. She also follows the course of the intellectual movements (such as Zenitism) which captivated such figures and inspired them to rebel against their confines, thus telling an intimate story that has never been told, using images that have never been seen outside of Serbia (in some cases, not at all).

Along with the numerous illustrations, there are extensive tables with population and construction statistics, indicating the author’ss multi-dimensional approach to considering architecture in light of the broader socio-economic development of the Serbian capital. Her text is thus useful to a wider range of social scientists.

In conclusion, this book is a real pleasure to read, or just admire. It is wittier than might be expected, and especially fascinating when quoting the architects and foreigners alike; their observations and interpretations of life in the Balkans, as seen through a common focus on aesthetics, add to the greater historical record and attest to the final era in which humans would prize qualitative, rather than quantitative values highest of all. That said, though Modernism in Serbia: The Elusive Margins of Belgrade Architecture, 1919-1941 is not an inexpensive book, it is one to have and to hold.

Water management is attracting the attention of businessmen in Greece, especially when it is related to the water cycle and energy production. Dams, water transmission pipelines, water depots, and seawater desalination plants are all included in the five-year plan that the Karamanlis administration has relayed recently to the press, as a plan to develop this very lucrative sector.

Greece‘ss national plan was drafted by the Ministry of Public Works, along with the national Directorate of Hydro-management and the Athens National Technical University.

This national program includes both large and small hydro-projects, since Greece has significant hydrodynamic potential, most of which is concentrated in the western and northern sections of the country, where major rivers such as the Acheloos, Arachthos, Aoos, Haliakmon, Stymonas and Nestos flow. At the same time, Greece makes excessive use of electricity, almost 40% more than any of its Balkan neighbors. Greece also imports substantial amounts of electricity per annum, especially from Bulgaria.

Most European countries have reached the highest potential of their hydrodynamic reserves. Greece is an exception; only one-third of the economically exploitable hydrodynamic resources are being exploited. Therefore, the country has significant unused domestic reserves, and can thus create a long-term strategy in this field.

The National Program Management and Protection of Water Resources includes measures for better distribution of water in the 14 designated water departments in the country, which, as announced by Minister George Souflias, include large and small projects for water diversions or transfers and for electricity production. These projects include around 22 large hydroelectric structures and about 300 small hydropower ones.

In order to meet the needs of the more arid regions of the country, a system of small and large dams along the rivers and pipelines transporting water from one water compartment to another will be constructed. For coastal areas and islands, seawater desalination plants have already started to be built, some of them using hybrid technology, meaning they are powered by renewable energy resources such as solar and wind power.

These major projects will be designed so as not to disturb the water balance areas. Yet all the evidence suggests that this is inevitable, as water in the coming years will become a more precious and expensive commodity than oil.

The diversion of the Acheloos River to the Thessaly region has almost been completed, at a cost of over 700 million euros. As a consequence Thessaly’ss farmers will enjoy a significant boost in their production (mostly wheat, corn, potato and cotton), with a 300 MW electricity production facility.

The water department with the largest surplus is West Central Greece, while the deficit is evident in Thessaly. Other departments with water deficit are the Eastern Peloponnese and the Aegean islands.

With Greece’ss current pace of growth, it is calculated that by 2030 the northern Peloponnese, eastern and central Greece, Attica, central Macedonia and Thrace will start facing problems, if the government’ss envisioned plans are not implemented. For the time being, the wet winter of 2008-09 has resulted in a spectacular increase in water reserves to such an extent that there are plans to export water to the Middle East. Last year Greece exported water to Cyprus when the latter faced a drought.

Today, the main issues associated with water management in Greece are:

-unequal distribution of water resources in western Greece due to heavy rainfall in comparison with the eastern parts;

-the uneven seasonal distribution of water resources, winter being the only significant rainy period;

unequal distribution of water demand in the country, with Attica, Thessaloniki and Patras requiring most of the resources during winter, in addition to the most visited tourist islands of the Aegean in the summer;

-leaks in water distribution networks, affecting up to 20% of pipeline networks, pose an additional problem and require new pipeline infrastructure.

Already, Greece has reached scientific and bi-governmental agreements with the EU countries plus Iceland in order to import much needed know-how regarding water management issues.

It is telling that the country is ranked in the last place among 24 European and Mediterranean countries, having at present only 46 large dams. Spain (ranked 1st) has 1196, followed by Turkey with 625, France with 569, and Italy with 524.

The Greek government moreover is now geared to privatize segments of the hydro-infrastructure. The water and sewerage companies in both Athens and Thessaloniki are high on the list next to privatization.

The Ministry of Finance seems to be planning a gradual reduction in the percentage held and in the state companies EYDAP (Athens) and EYATH (Thessaloniki). Currently, the government holds 70% of the share capital of EYDAP (60% government and 10% of the ATE state bank) and over 70% of EYATH. According to all available information those percentages will fall to 40% by next year. The capitalization of the former is around 400 million euros, and of EYATH, around 200 million euros.

Already, French multinational Suez Environment has expressed keen interest to invest in Greek companies. Since both of them hold significant real estate along the two biggest Greek cities, there are ample opportunities for investing in the sewage management sector, the next big thing in the contemporary “Green business” trend. Certainly, the water business is going to become a well known feature in Greece and elsewhere in the Balkans, as major investors start to move into an emerging and very lucrative sector.

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*Frequent Balkanalysis.com contributor Ioannis Michaletos is a Balkan security analyst for the RIEAS Institute in Athens, Greece. He is also Southeastern European Coordinator and Editor for the World Security Network Foundation.