Trebizond, that "long-anticipated city of the Komnenians with its soft
and melodious name" to quote Jakob Fallmerayer, has long lured scholars,
attracted by its unique combination of Byzantine familiarity and
Anatolian foreignness. From 1204 to 1461 the city was at the heart of an
empire that proudly proclaimed its inheritance of Byzantine power, but
simultaneously stood apart from it; a "Greek Emirate" surrounded by
Turkish and Caucasian states.
Focusing on the church of Hagia Sophia in Trebizond, with its unusual
architecture, unique sculptural decoration and extraordinary wall
paintings, Byzantium's Other Empire: Trebizond reveals the ways in which
these tensions were expressed in public in the monuments of the empire.
It draws extensively on the photograph and drawing archives of David and
June Winfield, held in the Conway Library at the Courtauld Institute of
Art. The Winfields restored the church from 1959-1963, in a project
masterminded by David Talbot Rice. Here, Talbot Rice's photographs from
1929, as well as those of other early scholars who visited Trabzon,
notably Gabriel Millet in 1893 and Fyodor Uspenskii in 1916-1917 are
presented. These scholars
recorded the city, its palaces, churches and monasteries. They provide
glimpses of a lost empire and of the city of Trebizond which has been
transformed in the decades since their visits. This volume also includes
the first published translation into English of the fourteenth-century
chronicle of Michael Panaretos.
