Dr Alessandra Ricci - "How did it begin?: The Institutionalization of Byzantine Studies in Turkey"

Abstract: It was probably sometime in 1941 or early 1942 when İzmet İnönü, the second president of the Turkish Republic, summoned the minister of national education, Hasan Ali Yücel who confirmed – as İnönü had suspected – that Byzantine topics were not taught at the university level in the young Turkish Republic. Yücel was asked to immediately remedy the situation and reached Michael Grant, who had just arrived in, at the time, neutral Turkey to serve as the first British Council representative. James Cochran Stevenson Runciman was recommended and on February 24, 1942, Runciman who had just settled Jerusalem left by train towards his new destination: Istanbul University. By 1945, Runciman had moved to Athens, where he became a representative of the British Council.
This presentation reflects on the agency of the first foreign Byzantinist at a Turkish university, on the politics of reciprocal cultural diplomacy at a time of complicated geopolitical relations between Turkey and the United Kingdom; of research interests in Istanbul, the Black Sea and Anatolia which led to a further development of Byzantine studies in Turkey and in several universities in the United Kingdom and Scotland thanks to a beneficial mechanism of reciprocal exchanges.

Bio: Alessandra Ricci is an Associate Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Archaeology at Koç University in Istanbul. An “academic migrant” from Rome to Istanbul via the United States with research interests on the city of Constantinople, its Asiatic and European hinterlands in the Late Antique and Byzantine periods. As a field archaeologist, she has excavated at the monastery of Satyros/Anatellon built by patriarch Ignatios (867-877) in Istanbul; coordinated public archaeology activities together with a site management plan and a conservation program. She works and publishes on the diachronicity of buildings and their relationship with urban and landscape contexts; on the material culture when associated with archaeological areas and architecture. Current projects include documentation of Late Antique physical remains of domestic spaces in Constantinople and its surroundings and the historiography of Byzantine studies in Turkey.