1st Edition
Liminal Spaces and Spatial Practices in Byzantium
Liminal Spaces Inside and Beyond the Byzantine World: An Introduction
Myrto Veikou and Buket Kitapçi Bayri
Part I: Natural Space as Liminal
Chapter 1
Encounters in Crocodile Waters: The Nile as a Liminal Riverscape in Monastic Egypt
Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom
Chapter 2
Desert Islands: Aspects of the Byzantine Perception of Liminal Space
Charis Messis
Chapter 3
Liminal Insularity or Islandness? Relational and Comparative Perspectives on Big Islands in the Mediterranean and the Baltic Sea in the Early Middle Ages (Sixth to Twelfth Centuries)
Christoph Kilger, Max Kusserow, and Luca Zavagno
Part II: Social Space as Liminal: Public and Private
Chapter 4
Myths Transformed: Perceptions of Ancient Sculpture in Byzantine Liminal Spaces
Livia Bevilacqua
Chapter 5
Liminal Experiences of Byzantine Fortifications
Nikolas Bakirtzis and Myrto Veikou
Chapter 6
Visiting Late Antique Elite Houses: On Rituals, Routes, and Courtyards Through the Lens of Liminality
Lale Özgenel
Chapter 7
Crossing Private Liminal Spaces: Thresholds and Passageways in the “Urban Mansion” of Sagalassos and Contemporaneous Urban Elite Houses in Late Antique Western Anatolia
Inge Uytterhoeven
Chapter 8
Existential and Spatial Liminality in Byzantine Monasteries: Insights from the Enclosure Wall and Its Gateways
Maréva U
Part III: Liminality through Movement
Chapter 9
Athonite Transhumance Routes Between the Ninth and the Sixteenth Centuries: A Network of Liminal Ecosystems, Spaces, and Interactions
Guillaume Bidaut
Chapter 10
Marking the Limēn: Lighthouses and Beacons as Spiritual Metaphors
Veronica della Dora
Chapter 11
Perceptions of Bridges as Liminal Spaces in Byzantium
Galina Fingarova
Biography
Buket Kitapçı Bayrı is a scholar of late Byzantine and Medieval Islamic History (circa 1200–1500). Her previous publication, Warriors, Martyrs, and Dervishes: Moving Frontiers, Shifting Identities in the Land of Rome (13th–15th Centuries) (2020), examines the late medieval cultural transformation of Asia Minor and the Balkans through Byzantine and Turkish frontier epics and hagiographical texts by applying anthropological and literary theories to perceptions of shared space/shared story-world, place-making processes, and identity formation.
Myrto Veikou is Assistant Professor of Byzantine Archaeology in the Department of History and Archaeology, University of Patras (Greece). Her first PhD thesis in Byzantine Archaeology was published in 2012 (Byzantine Epirus: A Topography of Transformation: Settlements from the 7th to the 12th Centuries in Southern Epirus and Aetoloacarnania, Greece). Her second PhD thesis in Byzantine Philology and Literary Studies was published as Spatial Paths to Holiness—Literary ‘Lived Spaces’ in Eleventh-Century Byzantine Saints’ Lives (2023).
