Word: byzantium
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...Batuta was certainly a most amazing person. The full account of his travels across an immense geography from Tangier to the Crimea, from Byzantium to Delhi and Calicut and the Maldives, perhaps to China, but also to East and West Africa, fill many engrossing volumes. He has provided an account of peoples and societies with the eye of a learned and interested observer at a moment in history that would be the envy of any travel writer to-day. If the film does nothing but intrigue the viewers to become more acquainted with this astonishing story, it will have served...
...what has been called the crowning achievement of her scholarly career, Laiou edited and wrote eight of the chapters of a three-volume collection on the economic history of Byzantium...
...poems about Byzantium, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats seemed drawn to the city's stylized art because it provided a release from the restraints of his own frailties. Yeats longed to exchange the "fury and mire of human veins" for the "changeless metal" of the city's mechanical golden birds, whose beauty he felt to be permanent. There is historical evidence that the Byzantines, too, revered artifice while denigrating the human flesh: self-castration was a popular means of purification, and mutilation a prevalent form of punishment - one Emperor even wore a gold nose as a result...
...this era of shifting global power, it is impossible to visit "Byzantium 330-1453" and not ponder how empires expand and recede across centuries, leaving future generations to pick through their remains. There will come a time, no doubt, when people will stare in puzzled wonder at the silicon chip or the desktop icon. The Byzantines' efforts to hide their own fragility ultimately remind us never to forget...
...Click here for a photo essay on the Byzantium exhibit...