Word: byzantium
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...expanding beyond all geographical expectations; it is also drawing back talent from the past. The Harvard Gilbert and Sullivan Players will be putting on "Yeomen of the Guard" under the direction of Jim Burt and with conductor Gerald Moshell, both old Harvard and Gilbert and Sullivan grads. And the Byzantium Russian Liturgical Choir, says Weezy, "were all here as students together, and now they're all doctors or something and still singing together...
What, then, are the right words? Easy to ask; impossible to answer. Should people who are against large organizations be called "minis"? They would not like that. Or should we try for neutral terms, like those of the Blue and Green factions that troubled Byzantium, or like Whig and Tory, whose original connotations have been lost to all but dedicated etymologists...
...known. The reason for this unfortunate but understandable ignorance of Modern Greece is partly to be found in its anomalies and enigmatic position between East and West. Although Greece's ancient past provided a large part of the philosophical frame-work of the Western world its spiritual source is Byzantium that inscrutable synthesis of Rome, Christianity, and the East, with its center in Constantinople. It is the search for a national identity from a confused and tortuous past that has been a major problem in Greece since its independence...
...Lenin Mausoleum, to plan the city's reconstruction, a program that has resulted in the restoration of many churches, including the lovely 14th century Church of the Savior of the Transfiguration. In its dome can be seen the divergence of the Russian from the Byzantine model. Finding Byzantium's semispherical dome ill-suited to the heavy snow of the north, the church's original architect replaced it with a bulbous cupola, which eventually developed into the characteristic onion shape. Russian architecture was on its way to finding its own style...
...particular charm and excitement of Russian architecture is its unity in diversity. The strangest flower of Byzantium, it represents a triumph of adaptation in bending an enormously sophisticated style to the harsh honesty of ordinary wood or the rugged realities of stone. It is unique. The outsider can be happy that the Soviet Union has finally come to treasure its Russian past...