Word: byzantium
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Perhaps most startling to the unaccustomed Western eye is the extraordinary wooden architecture of the north. It is a land of forests, and its builders developed an unexcelled skill in fashioning wood. Confronted by the domes and cupolas imported from Byzantium, they adapted these masonry-based forms to an idiom of carpentry that produced a unique style, unmatchable and now un-copyable because it depends on a craftsmanship that no longer exists...
...just a conversational pleasantry. Or is it? Who can ever be sure with Nabokov? Perhaps he has something more in mind. Devout Nabokov watchers might find clues in those references to Julius Caesar and Pope Gregory. They might see implications of the fall of Rome, the rise of Byzantium, and a consequent gap between East and West that makes comparisons impossible between Anglo-Saxon writers (Shakespeare) and Slavic writers (Nabokov...
...custom that will not devalue the cachet that Washington society has always attached to invitations embossed with the lion and unicorn of Britain. As a man who professes to enjoy most of all "lurking round the edges of politics," Ambassador Freeman is bound to find plenty of entertainment in Byzantium-on-the-Potomac...
...First Crusade was launched by Pope Urban II, a French aristocrat who had donned a monk's cassock. Urban's purposes were to help Byzantium resist the Turkish onslaught, heal the schism between the Churches of Rome and Constantinople, and harness the anarchic violence of the feudal soldiery in the service of a righteous cause-the reconquest of the Holy Sepulcher from the Moslem infidel...
Fleshing Out Saints. Until the late 8th century, Western art lay largely under the influence of Byzantium, whose hovering saints were stripped of flesh, transcendentally vaporous, symbols of life beyond death. So otherworldly was Byzantine art that by the time Charlemagne was crowned, images of the sacred figures had been banned for 74 years. Eastern iconoclasm had emphatically blotted out the Greco-Roman exaltation of living man. The new Carolingian Emperor personally set about to change the art of his times...