On Monday, 22 August 2022, Pawel will present his paper titled “Keeping One’s Identity in the City of Many Cultures: The Evidence of Constantinopolitan Epitaphs” at the 24th International Congress of Byzantine Studies Byzantium – Bridge Between Worlds Venice and Padua, 22-27 August 2022.

Abstract: The special status, wealth, and architectural marvels of Constantinople were accompanied by a unique richness of cultures. Within her population, there developed a number of communities that sought to stress at least some chosen aspects of their particular identity: religious, civic, ethnic, linguistic, etc. The diversity of these ‘settled strangers’ was augmented by the mass of casual travellers who visited the city for business, religious, and other reasons, or just made a stop on the journey. Evidence for their communal sense of selfhood is often provided by epitaphs. Until the mid-1990s, the research on Constantinopolitan epitaphs had been hindered by the fact that the funerary epigraphy of the city was still a poorly explored field, mainly due to the scatter of the evidence. This deplorable situation was, however, changed by checklists in two papers, published almost simultaneously: Anna Avramea’s ‘Mort la loin de la patrie. L’apport des inscriptions paléochrétiennes’ (1995) and Denis Feissel’s ‘Aspects de l’immigration a Constantinople d’apres les epitaphes protobyzantnies’ (1995). Later, the problem of Constantinopolitan subcommunities was expanded by Błażej Cecota’s ‘Nie tylko Grecy. Obcy we wczesnobizantyńskim Konstantynopolu [Not just the Greeks. Strangers in early Byzantine Constantinople]’ (2011) which also utilized literary sources alongside the inscriptions. These works were, however, focused on building a general image of the communities of ‘strangers’ in Constantinople, tracing the mobility of their members, and identifying their places of origin. In my talk, I will put emphasis on the techniques of expressing one’s identity in the epitaphs, a feature often depending on the views of the family or friends of the deceased, responsible for the burial. Among them one finds a variety of methods which call for a detailed study: from mere recording of the ethnics or home towns via the choice of language to explicit reference to a distinguished group.

The paper is part of the session “The Epigraphies of Constantinople: The Inscriptional Habits of the City from Antiquity to the Ottoman Period. Part I: From Ancient Byzantion to the Middle Byzantine Period”, organized by Andreas Rhoby and Ida Toth.

List of papers in this panel:

• Mustafa H. Sayar, “The Epigraphy of Byzantion and Early Byzantine Constantinople: Old Habits and New Finds”
• Anna Marie Sitz, “Epigraphic Plasticity: Anonymizing and Re-Identifying Ancient Statues in Constantinople”
• Paweł Nowakowski, “Keeping One’s Identity in the City of Many Cultures: The Evidence of Constantinopolitan Epitaphs”
• Andrey Vinogradov, “‘Justinianic’ Brick Inscription From Hagia Sophia in the Light of New Findings”
• Ida Toth, “Imperial Epigraphies in Constantinople’s Dark Ages”
• Nicholas Melvani, “Protecting the City: Monumental Epigraphic Apotropeia”