Ronchey, S. “Nostalgia for Byzantium: How and Why We Continue To Sail.” Proceedings of the 22nd International Congress of Byzantine Studies. Sofia, 22-27 August 2011. Sofia: Bulgarian Historical Heritage Foundation, 2011. 107-29.

Nostalgia for Byzantium precedes its fall in 1453.  It is born right after the Fourth Crusade and combines nostalgia for a now lost political status, inherited directly from the Roman Empire, with the affirmation of a more strictly cultural status: direct heir to Hellenistic literature and philosophy. With the waning of Byzantium’s role as political and military superpower, the Greek legacy and the preservation and maintenance of the Greek classics become characteristics of the identity of the Palaiologan age for its duration. Just when Byzantine culture had come to know and better appreciate the classical model, intellectuals are forced to recognise its inability to understand and order surrounding reality; or rather, after the blow delivered by the Latins, they note the practical inadequacy of Byzantium’s civil and political reality in perpetuating those classical values in which they and the state saw themselves.

After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Sehnsucht for Byzantium passes to that last Byzantine renaissance which was, in many ways, the Renaissance, and here it acts as a proactive, innovative force. Its most important artistic innovation – perspective – is permeated with nostalgia for Byzantium, finding its major exponent in Piero della Francesca. Such nostalgia is aimed precisely at proposing again - in the years immediately preceding the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople - a Byzantine past producing the effect of suddenly projecting forward the present that integrates that past. A driving mechanism that is also a kind of visual reproduction of the very innovative capacity that looking back at the Byzantine millennium inspires in Westerners, in addition to the Byzantines themselves.

After the failure of the “Save Byzantium in the West” project promoted by Pius II and Bessarion, the marriage between Sophia Palaiologina and Ivan III Vasilyevich marks the birth of the Third Rome in Moscow. Again, it is from nostalgia for Byzantium – this time in its purest “Roman” meaning – or, if we prefer, from an unabashed as much as prudent post-Byzantine use of Byzantium, that Ivan IV asserts the ideology that, snuffing out the power of the boyars, reorganizes the imperial administration along the principles of the Byzantine centralized state, and gives rise to modern Russia. An ideological use, applied to an autocratic form, which is not necessarily progressive, but certainly innovative with respect to the feudal formula which Rus’ had remained tied to up to that point.  An innovation taken from the past that would condition the cultural and political history of Europe through the 20th century and beyond.

In the 15^th and 16^th centuries, the Polis prospers under the Ottomans, which in part integrate and perpetuate its traditions and geopolitical role, and becomes the destination of highly nostalgic pilgrimage by learned Western travellers, who mark its archaeological and topographical rediscovery.  In absolutist France, the realisation of the basileia of divine right and the figure of the sun-king in the monarchy of Louis XIV marks the birth of Byzantine studies and the creation of a Byzantine aesthetic, which see their concrete projection and symbolic staging in the court at Versailles.

In the Germanic area, the Byzantine ideal inspires the 18^th century architectural projects of Karl of Prussia and in the 19^th century the reactionary-literary project of Ludwig II of Bavaria.  From decade to decade throughout the 19^th century, the sacredness of autocracy and its sumptuous rituals was emptied of its true significance, becoming a theatrical backdrop.  The literary evaluation of Byzantine political life would coincide increasingly with the stereotypical image of a decadent, aestheticized court, the exclusive kingdom of female or effeminate intrigue, i.e. vacuous and senseless. With the rise of democracies, Byzantine power will be definitively emasculated.  Not surprisingly, the prudish moralizing of popular literature will transfer the male sovereignty of the sun-king to the corrupt, immoral figure of woman, and the symbol of Byzantium will be Theodora, the prostitute-empress.  Through the literary digressions starring her as protagonist, the political myth of autocracy will arrive in the Short Century completely overturned and discredited in bourgeois culture, mass popular literature, and Western European cinema.

A scenario that does not apply, however, to the Oriental quadrant, where the legacy of Byzantium is concrete and vital, independent of the strictly political judgment we might give the forms of state it has generated. The Byzantine concept and aesthetic of power will perpetuate itself via the Tsarist empire up until Stalin’s soviet empire and will find its most complete re-elaboration in Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan The Terrible, part I and Ivan The Terrible, part II: The Boyars’ Plot, two films produced, especially the latter, at the price of intolerant censorship of an autocratic power so akin to their essence as to be represented en travesti.

Active and innovative nostalgia is what today re-defines in literature and scholarship the Byzantine millennium as an example for the resolution of postcolonial conflicts, and Constantinople itself, in its topography, as a symbol of mediation between civilisations, whose clash some consider now to be inevitable. Byzantine studies are now more than ever part of the Zeitgeist.  Reactivating the memory of the peoples who today have entered and continue to enter the Europe which Byzantium contributed so much to create, reviving the common past through research on the Byzantine common denominator can and must now be the strong point of Byzantine studies.