Word: byzantium
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...this Eurasian heartland came Aryans to populate the West, and across its pink sands marched generations of world conquerors. In 329 B.C. Alexander the Great sacked Samarkand ("Place of Sugars"), a city already centuries old. Rebuilt, Samarkand became one of the central depots on the great Silk Road from Byzantium to China, and flourished as a brilliant seat of Arab civilization, only to be destroyed again by Genghis Khan. Near the end of the 13th century, Marco Polo reported it once more a "very great and eminent city," and 100 years later Tamerlane made it the capital of his empire...
...perfection, do much to bring the Byzantine marvels of St. Mark's Cathedral down from the shadowy vaulted ceilings into the reader's lap. Many a tourist has stopped in Venice and visited its cathedral without ever dreaming that he stood at the heart of one of Byzantium's finest offshoots. This book should send him back once more...
...York Graphic Society; $18), establish the medieval stronghold city of Novgorod, southeast of Leningrad, as one of the great centers of icon making. A Constantinople-trained Greek named Theophanes-called by a contemporary the "very excellent book illuminator and painter"-was the artist who brought the secrets of Byzantium's golden age to the cold north in the late 14th century, sparked Novgorod's greatest period...
Cyprus has been ruled in turn by Rome, Byzantium, Richard the Lion-Hearted, the French Lusignans, Venice, Ottoman Turkey and Britain. Though they have lived side by side since 1571, the island's Greek majority and Turkish minority have never blended, and when the Greek Cypriots in 1955 took the fateful decision to impose union with Greece by violence, it was perhaps inevitable that the Turkish Cypriots in turn would defend their position by the same means...
Inside, the room is small and well-lit by scattered oriental lanterns of paper mache. Mirrors face each other on the walls, cut and concluding in pointed spires like sagging Byzantium domes...