The meaning of the word Greek-Byzantine in the Russian language dictionary Lopatina. Spread of Greek-Byzantine spiritual traditions in Rus'

GREECO-BYZANTINE

Greek-Byzantine

Lopatin. Dictionary of the Russian language Lopatin. 2012

1. A country called Byzantium never existed

If the Byzantines of the 6th, 10th or 14th centuries had heard from us that they were Byzantines, and their country was called Byzantium, the vast majority of them simply would not have understood us. And those who did understand would have decided that we wanted to flatter them by calling them residents of the capital, and even in an outdated language, which is used only by scientists trying to make their speech as refined as possible.

Part of Justinian's consular diptych. Constantinople, 521 Diptychs were presented to consuls in honor of their assumption of office. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

There never was a country that its inhabitants would call Byzantium; the word “Byzantines” was never the self-name of the inhabitants of any state. The word "Byzantines" was sometimes used to refer to the inhabitants of Constantinople - after the name of the ancient city of Byzantium (Βυζάντιον), which was refounded in 330 by Emperor Constantine under the name Constantinople. They were called that only in texts written in a conventional literary language, stylized as ancient Greek, which no one had spoken for a long time. No one knew the other Byzantines, and even these existed only in texts accessible to a narrow circle of the educated elite who wrote in this archaic Greek language and understood it.

The self-name of the Eastern Roman Empire, starting from the 3rd-4th centuries (and after the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453), had several stable and understandable phrases and words: state of the Romans, or Romans, (βασιλεία τῶν Ρωμαίων), Romagna (Ρωμανία), Romaida (Ρωμαΐς ).

The residents themselves called themselves Romans- the Romans (Ρωμαίοι), they were ruled by the Roman emperor - basileus(Βασιλεύς τῶν Ρωμαίων), and their capital was New Rome(Νέα Ρώμη) - this is what the city founded by Constantine was usually called.

Where did the word “Byzantium” come from and with it the idea of the Byzantine Empire as a state that arose after the fall of the Roman Empire on the territory of its eastern provinces? The fact is that in the 15th century, along with statehood, the Eastern Roman Empire (as Byzantium is often called in modern historical works, and this is much closer to the self-awareness of the Byzantines themselves), essentially lost a voice heard beyond its borders: the Eastern Roman tradition of self-description found itself isolated within the Greek-speaking lands that belonged to Ottoman Empire; What was important now was only what Western European scientists thought and wrote about Byzantium.

Hieronymus Wolf. Engraving by Dominicus Custos. 1580 Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum Braunschweig

In the Western European tradition, the state of Byzantium was actually created by Hieronymus Wolf, a German humanist and historian, who in 1577 published the “Corpus of Byzantine History” - a small anthology of works by historians of the Eastern Empire with a Latin translation. It was from the “Corpus” that the concept of “Byzantine” entered Western European scientific circulation.

Wolf's work formed the basis of another collection of Byzantine historians, also called the “Corpus of Byzantine History,” but much larger - it was published in 37 volumes with the assistance of King Louis XIV of France. Finally, the Venetian reprint of the second “Corpus” was used by the English historian of the 18th century Edward Gibbon when he wrote his “History of the Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire” - perhaps no book had such a huge and at the same time destructive influence on the creation and popularization of the modern image of Byzantium.

The Romans, with their historical and cultural tradition, were thus deprived not only of their voice, but also of the right to self-name and self-awareness.

2. The Byzantines didn’t know they weren’t Romans

Autumn. Coptic panel. IV century Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester, UK / Bridgeman Images / Fotodom

For the Byzantines, who themselves called themselves Romans, the history of the great empire never ended. The very idea would seem absurd to them. Romulus and Remus, Numa, Augustus Octavian, Constantine I, Justinian, Phocas, Michael the Great Comnenus - all of them in the same way from time immemorial stood at the head of the Roman people.

Before the fall of Constantinople (and even after it), the Byzantines considered themselves residents of the Roman Empire. Social institutions, laws, statehood - all this was preserved in Byzantium since the time of the first Roman emperors. The adoption of Christianity had almost no impact on the legal, economic and administrative structure of the Roman Empire. If the Byzantines saw the origins of the Christian church in the Old Testament, then the beginning of their own political history, like the ancient Romans, was attributed to the Trojan Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s poem fundamental to Roman identity.

The social order of the Roman Empire and the sense of belonging to the great Roman patria were combined in the Byzantine world with Greek science and written culture: the Byzantines considered classical ancient Greek literature to be theirs. For example, in the 11th century, the monk and scientist Michael Psellus seriously discussed in one treatise who writes poetry better - the Athenian tragedian Euripides or the Byzantine poet of the 7th century George Pisis, the author of a panegyric about the Avar-Slavic siege of Constantinople in 626 and the theological poem “The Six Days” "about the divine creation of the world. In this poem, subsequently translated into Slavic, George paraphrases the ancient authors Plato, Plutarch, Ovid and Pliny the Elder.

At the same time, at the ideological level, Byzantine culture often contrasted itself with classical antiquity. Christian apologists noticed that all of Greek antiquity - poetry, theater, sports, sculpture - was permeated with religious cults of pagan deities. Hellenic values (material and physical beauty, the pursuit of pleasure, human glory and honor, military and athletic victories, eroticism, rational philosophical thinking) were condemned as unworthy of Christians. Basil the Great, in his famous conversation “To young men on how to use pagan writings,” sees the main danger for Christian youth in the attractive way of life that is offered to the reader in Hellenic writings. He advises selecting for yourself only stories that are morally useful. The paradox is that Vasily, like many other Fathers of the Church, himself received an excellent Hellenic education and wrote his works in a classical literary style, using the techniques of ancient rhetorical art and a language that by his time had already fallen out of use and sounded archaic.

In practice, ideological incompatibility with Hellenism did not prevent the Byzantines from treating the ancient cultural heritage with care. Ancient texts were not destroyed, but copied, while the scribes tried to maintain accuracy, except that in rare cases they could throw out a too frank erotic passage. Hellenic literature continued to be the basis of the school curriculum in Byzantium. An educated person had to read and know the epic of Homer, the tragedies of Euripides, the speeches of Demos-phenes and use the Hellenic cultural code in his own writings, for example, calling the Arabs Persians, and Rus' - Hyperborea. Many elements of ancient culture in Byzantium were preserved, although they changed beyond recognition and acquired new religious content: for example, rhetoric became homiletics (the science of church preaching), philosophy became theology, and the ancient love story influenced the hagiographic genres.

3. Byzantium was born when Antiquity adopted Christianity

When does Byzantium begin? Probably when the history of the Roman Empire ends - that’s what we used to think. Much of this thought seems natural to us, thanks to the enormous influence of Edward Gibbon's monumental History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Written in the 18th century, this book still provides both historians and non-specialists with a view of the period from the 3rd to the 7th centuries (now increasingly called late Antiquity) as a time of decline of the former greatness of the Roman Empire under the influence of two main factors - the Germanic invasions tribes and the ever-growing social role of Christianity, which became the dominant religion in the 4th century. Byzantium, which exists in the popular consciousness primarily as a Christian empire, is depicted in this perspective as the natural heir to the cultural decline that occurred in late Antiquity due to mass Christianization: a center of religious fanaticism and obscurantism, stagnation stretching for a whole millennium.

Amulet that protects from the evil eye. Byzantium, V–VI centuries

On one side there is an eye, which is targeted by arrows and attacked by a lion, snake, scorpion and stork.

Hematite amulet. Byzantine Egypt, 6th–7th centuries

The inscriptions identify him as “the woman who suffered from hemorrhage” (Luke 8:43–48). Hematite was believed to help stop bleeding and was very popular in amulets related to women's health and the menstrual cycle.

Thus, if you look at history through the eyes of Gibbon, late Antiquity turns into a tragic and irreversible end of Antiquity. But was it only a time of destruction of beautiful antiquity? Historical science has been confident for more than half a century that this is not so.

Particularly simplified is the idea of the supposedly fatal role of Christianization in the destruction of the culture of the Roman Empire. The culture of late Antiquity in reality was hardly built on the opposition of “pagan” (Roman) and “Christian” (Byzantine). The way Late Antique culture was structured for its creators and users was much more complex: Christians of that era would have found the very question of the conflict between the Roman and the religious strange. In the 4th century, Roman Christians could easily place images of pagan deities, made in the ancient style, on household items: for example, on one casket given to newlyweds, a naked Venus is adjacent to the pious call “Seconds and Projecta, live in Christ.”

On the territory of the future Byzantium, a fusion of pagan and Christian elements, equally unproblematic for contemporaries, took place. artistic techniques: in the 6th century, images of Christ and saints were made using the technique of traditional Egyptian funerary portraits, the most famous type of which is the so-called Fayum portrait Fayum portrait- a type of funeral portraits common in Hellenized Egypt in the 1st-3rd centuries AD. e. The image was applied with hot paints onto a heated wax layer.. Christian visuality in late Antiquity did not necessarily strive to oppose itself to the pagan, Roman tradition: very often it deliberately (or perhaps, on the contrary, naturally and naturally) adhered to it. The same fusion of pagan and Christian is visible in the literature of late Antiquity. The poet Arator in the 6th century recites in the Roman cathedral a hexametric poem about the acts of the apostles, written in the stylistic traditions of Virgil. In Christianized Egypt in the mid-5th century (by this time, various forms of monasticism had existed here for about a century and a half), the poet Nonnus from the city of Panopolis (modern Akmim) wrote a paraphrase of the Gospel of John in the language of Homer, preserving not only the meter and style, but also consciously borrowing entire verbal formulas and figurative layers from his epic Gospel of John, 1:1-6 (Japanese translation):
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. It was in the beginning with God. Everything came into being through Him, and without Him nothing came into being that came into being. In Him was life, and life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it. There was a man sent from God; his name is John.

Nonnus from Panopolis. Paraphrase of the Gospel of John, canto 1 (translated by Yu. A. Golubets, D. A. Pospelova, A. V. Markova):
Logos, Child of God, Light born from Light,
He is inseparable from the Father on the infinite throne!
Heavenly God, Logos, because You were the original
Shone together with the Eternal, the Creator of the world,
O Ancient One of the Universe! Everything was accomplished through Him,
What is breathless and in spirit! Outside of Speech, which does a lot,
Is it revealed that it remains? And exists in Him from eternity
Life, which is inherent in everything, the light of short-lived people...<…>
In the bee-feeding thicket
The wanderer of the mountains appeared, inhabitant of the desert slopes,
He is the herald of the cornerstone baptism, the name is
Man of God, John, counselor. .

Portrait of a young girl. 2nd century© Google Cultural Institute

Funeral portrait of a man. III century© Google Cultural Institute

Christ Pantocrator. Icon from the Monastery of St. Catherine. Sinai, mid-6th century Wikimedia Commons

St. Peter. Icon from the Monastery of St. Catherine. Sinai, 7th century© campus.belmont.edu

The dynamic changes that took place in different layers of the culture of the Roman Empire in late Antiquity are difficult to directly connect with Christianization, since the Christians of that time themselves were such hunters of classical forms and in fine arts, and in literature (as in many other areas of life). The future Byzantium was born in an era in which the relationship between religion, artistic language, its audience, and the sociology of historical shifts were complex and indirect. They carried within themselves the potential for the complexity and versatility that later unfolded over the centuries of Byzantine history.

4. In Byzantium they spoke one language and wrote in another

The linguistic picture of Byzantium is paradoxical. The Empire, which not only claimed succession to the Roman Empire and inherited its institutions, but also from the point of view of its political ideology was the former Roman Empire, never spoke Latin. It was spoken in the western provinces and the Balkans, until the 6th century it remained the official language of jurisprudence (the last legislative code in Latin was the Code of Justinian, promulgated in 529 - after which laws were issued in Greek), it enriched Greek with many borrowings (formerly only in the military and administrative spheres), early Byzantine Constantinople attracted Latin grammarians with career opportunities. But still, Latin was not the real language of even early Byzantium. Even though the Latin-language poets Corippus and Priscian lived in Constantinople, we will not find these names on the pages of a textbook on the history of Byzantine literature.

We cannot say at what exact moment a Roman emperor becomes a Byzantine emperor: the formal identity of institutions does not allow us to draw a clear boundary. In search of an answer to this question, it is necessary to turn to informal cultural differences. The Roman Empire differs from the Byzantine Empire in that the latter merged Roman institutions, Greek culture and Christianity and carried out this synthesis on the basis of the Greek language. Therefore, one of the criteria that we could rely on is the language: the Byzantine emperor, unlike his Roman counterpart, is easier to express himself in Greek than in Latin.

But what is this Greek? The alternative offered to us by bookstore shelves and programs of philological departments is misleading: we can find either ancient or modern Greek in them. No other reference point is provided. Because of this, we are forced to proceed from the fact that the Greek of Byzantium is either a distorted ancient Greek (almost the dialogues of Plato, but not quite) or Proto-Greek (almost the negotiations of Tsipras with the IMF, but not quite yet). The history of 24 centuries of continuous development of the language is straightened out and simplified: it is either the inevitable decline and degradation of the ancient Greek (this is what the Western European classical philologists thought before the establishment of Byzantine studies as an independent scientific discipline), or the inevitable germination of the modern Greek (this is how the Greek scientists thought at the time of the formation of the Greek nation in the 19th century) .

Indeed, Byzantine Greek is elusive. Its development cannot be considered as a series of progressive, consistent changes, since every step forward in language development I had to take a step back. The reason for this is the attitude towards the language of the Byzantines themselves. Was socially prestigious language norm Homer and the classics of Attic prose. To write well meant to write history indistinguishable from Xenophon or Thucydides (the last historian who decided to introduce into his text Old Attic elements that seemed archaic already in classical era, is a witness to the fall of Constantinople, Laonicus Chalkokondylus), and the epic is indistinguishable from Homer. Throughout the history of the empire, educated Byzantines were literally required to speak one (changed) language and write in another (frozen in classical immutability) language. Bifurcation of linguistic consciousness - the most important feature Byzantine culture.

Ostracon with a fragment of the Iliad in Coptic. Byzantine Egypt, 580–640

Ostracons - shards of clay vessels - were used to record biblical verses, legal documents, bills, school assignments and prayers when papyrus was unavailable or too expensive.

Ostracon with the troparion to the Virgin Mary in Coptic. Byzantine Egypt, 580–640© The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The situation was aggravated by the fact that since the times of classical antiquity, certain dialectal characteristics were assigned to certain genres: epic poems were written in the language of Homer, and medical treatises were compiled in the Ionian dialect in imitation of Hippocrates. We see a similar picture in Byzantium. In the ancient Greek language, vowels were divided into long and short, and their orderly alternation formed the basis of ancient Greek poetic meters. In the Hellenistic era, the contrast of vowels by length disappeared from the Greek language, but nevertheless, even after a thousand years, heroic poems and epitaphs were written as if the phonetic system had remained unchanged since the time of Homer. Differences permeated other levels of language: it was necessary to construct a phrase like Homer, select words like Homer, and inflect and conjugate them in accordance with a paradigm that had died out in living speech thousands of years ago.

However, not everyone was able to write with ancient vivacity and simplicity; Often, in an attempt to achieve the Attic ideal, Byzantine authors lost their sense of proportion, trying to write more correctly than their idols. Thus, we know that the dative case, which existed in ancient Greek, almost completely disappeared in modern Greek. It would be logical to assume that with each century it will appear in literature less and less often, until it gradually disappears altogether. However, recent studies have shown that in Byzantine high literature dative used much more often than in the literature of classical antiquity. But it is precisely this increase in frequency that indicates a loosening of the norm! Obsession in using one form or another will say no less about your inability to use it correctly than its complete absence in your speech.

At the same time, the living linguistic element took its toll. We learn about how the spoken language changed thanks to the mistakes of manuscript copyists, non-literary inscriptions and the so-called vernacular literature. The term “vernacular” is not accidental: it describes the phenomenon of interest to us much better than the more familiar “folk”, since elements of simple urban colloquial speech were often used in monuments created in the circles of the Constantinople elite. This became a real literary fashion in the 12th century, when the same authors could work in several registers, today offering the reader exquisite prose, almost indistinguishable from Attic, and tomorrow - almost vulgar verses.

Diglossia, or bilingualism, gave rise to another typically Byzantine phenomenon - metaphrasing, that is, transposition, retelling in half with translation, presentation of the content of the source in new words with a decrease or increase in the stylistic register. Moreover, the shift could go both along the line of complication (pretentious syntax, sophisticated figures of speech, ancient allusions and quotations) and along the line of simplifying the language. Not a single work was considered inviolable, even the language of sacred texts in Byzantium did not have sacred status: the Gospel could be rewritten in a different stylistic key (as, for example, the already mentioned Nonnus of Panopolitanus did) - and this would not bring down anathema on the author’s head. It was necessary to wait until 1901, when the translation of the Gospels into colloquial Modern Greek (essentially the same metaphrase) brought opponents and defenders of linguistic renewal into the streets and led to dozens of victims. In this sense, the indignant crowds who defended the “language of the ancestors” and demanded reprisals against the translator Alexandros Pallis were much further from Byzantine culture not only than they would have liked, but also than Pallis himself.

5. There were iconoclasts in Byzantium - and this is a terrible mystery

Iconoclasts John the Grammar and Bishop Anthony of Silea. Khludov Psalter. Byzantium, approximately 850 Miniature for Psalm 68, verse 2: “And they gave me gall for food, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” The actions of the iconoclasts, covering the icon of Christ with lime, are compared with the crucifixion on Golgotha. The warrior on the right brings Christ a sponge with vinegar. At the foot of the mountain are John the Grammar and Bishop Anthony of Silea. rijksmuseumamsterdam.blogspot.ru

Iconoclasm is the most famous period in the history of Byzantium for a wide audience and the most mysterious even for specialists. The depth of the mark that he left in the cultural memory of Europe is evidenced by the possibility, for example, in English language use the word iconoclast (“iconoclast”) outside historical context, in the timeless meaning of “rebel, subverter of foundations.”

The event outline is as follows. By the turn of the 7th and 8th centuries, the theory of worship of religious images was hopelessly behind practice. The Arab conquests of the mid-7th century led the empire to a deep cultural crisis, which, in turn, gave rise to the growth of apocalyptic sentiments, the multiplication of superstitions and a surge in disordered forms of icon veneration, sometimes indistinguishable from magical practices. According to the collections of miracles of saints, drinking wax from a melted seal with the face of St. Artemy healed a hernia, and Saints Cosmas and Damian healed the sufferer by ordering her to drink, mixed with water, plaster from a fresco with their image.

Such veneration of icons, which did not receive philosophical and theological justification, caused rejection among some clergy who saw in it signs of paganism. Emperor Leo III the Isaurian (717-741), finding himself in a difficult political situation, used this discontent to create a new consolidating ideology. The first iconoclastic steps date back to the years 726-730, but both the theological justification of the iconoclastic dogma and full-fledged repressions against dissidents occurred during the reign of the most odious Byzantine emperor - Constantine V Copronymus (the Eminent) (741-775).

The iconoclastic council of 754, which claimed ecumenical status, took the dispute to a new level: from now on it was not about the fight against superstitions and the implementation of the Old Testament prohibition “Thou shalt not make for yourself an idol,” but about the hypostasis of Christ. Can He be considered imageable if His divine nature is “indescribable”? The “Christological dilemma” was this: icon worshipers are guilty of either depicting on icons only the flesh of Christ without His deity (Nestorianism), or of limiting the deity of Christ through the description of His depicted flesh (Monophysitism).

However, already in 787, Empress Irene held a new council in Nicaea, the participants of which formulated the dogma of icon veneration as a response to the dogma of iconoclasm, thereby offering a full-fledged theological basis for previously unregulated practices. An intellectual breakthrough was, firstly, the separation of “service” and “relative” worship: the first can only be given to God, while in the second “the honor given to the image goes back to the prototype” (the words of Basil the Great, which became the real motto of icon worshipers). Secondly, the theory of homonymy, that is, the same name, was proposed, which removed the problem of portrait similarity between the image and the depicted: the icon of Christ was recognized as such not due to the similarity of features, but due to the writing of the name - the act of naming.

In 815, Emperor Leo V the Armenian again turned to iconoclastic policies, thus hoping to build a line of succession with Constantine V, the most successful and most beloved ruler among the troops in the last century. The so-called second iconoclasm accounts for both a new round of repression and a new rise in theological thought. The iconoclastic era ends in 843, when iconoclasm is finally condemned as a heresy. But his ghost haunted the Byzantines until 1453: for centuries, participants in any church disputes, using the most sophisticated rhetoric, accused each other of hidden iconoclasm, and this accusation was more serious than the accusation of any other heresy.

It would seem that everything is quite simple and clear. But as soon as we try to somehow clarify this general scheme, our constructions turn out to be very shaky.

The main difficulty is the state of the sources. The texts through which we know about the first iconoclasm were written much later, and by icon worshipers. In the 40s of the 9th century, a full-fledged program was carried out to write the history of iconoclasm from an icon-worshipping perspective. As a result, the history of the dispute was completely distorted: the works of the iconoclasts are available only in biased samples, and textual analysis shows that the works of the iconoclasts, seemingly created to refute the teachings of Constantine V, could not have been written before the very end of the 8th century. The task of the icon-worshipping authors was to turn the history we have described inside out, to create the illusion of tradition: to show that the veneration of icons (and not spontaneous, but meaningful!) has been present in the church since apostolic times, and iconoclasm is just an innovation (the word καινοτομία is “innovation” in in Greek is the most hated word for any Byzantine), and deliberately anti-Christian. The iconoclasts were presented not as fighters for the purification of Christianity from paganism, but as “Christian accusers” - this word came to mean specifically and exclusively iconoclasts. The parties to the iconoclastic dispute were not Christians, who interpreted the same teaching differently, but Christians and some external force hostile to them.

The arsenal of polemical techniques that were used in these texts to denigrate the enemy was very large. Legends were created about the iconoclasts’ hatred of education, for example, about the burning of the university in Constantinople by Leo III, and Constantine V was credited with participation in pagan rites and human sacrifices, hatred of the Mother of God and doubts about the divine nature of Christ. While such myths seem simple and have long been debunked, others remain at the center of scientific discussions to this day. For example, only very recently it was possible to establish that the brutal reprisal inflicted on Stephen the New, glorified among the martyrs in 766, was connected not so much with his uncompromising icon-worshipping position, as life states, but with his closeness to the conspiracy of political opponents of Constantine V. They do not stop debates about key questions: what is the role of Islamic influence in the genesis of iconoclasm? What was the true attitude of the iconoclasts to the cult of saints and their relics?

Even the language in which we speak about iconoclasm is the language of the victors. The word “iconoclast” is not a self-designation, but an offensive polemical label that their opponents invented and implemented. No “iconoclast” would ever agree with such a name, simply because the Greek word εἰκών has much more meaning than the Russian “icon”. This is any image, including an immaterial one, which means to call someone an iconoclast is to declare that he is fighting both the idea of God the Son as the image of God the Father, and man as the image of God, and the events of the Old Testament as prototypes of the events of the New etc. Moreover, the iconoclasts themselves claimed that they were defending the true image of Christ - the Eucharistic gifts, while what their opponents call an image is in fact not such, but is just an image.

Had their teaching been defeated in the end, it would now be called Orthodox, and we would contemptuously call the teaching of their opponents icon-worship and would talk not about the iconoclastic, but about the icon-worshipping period in Byzantium. However, if this had happened, the entire subsequent history and visual aesthetics of Eastern Christianity would have been different.

6. The West never liked Byzantium

Although trade, religious and diplomatic contacts between Byzantium and the states of Western Europe continued throughout the Middle Ages, it is difficult to talk about real cooperation or understanding between them. At the end of the 5th century, the Western Roman Empire fell apart into barbarian states and the tradition of “Romanity” was interrupted in the West, but preserved in the East. Within a few centuries, the new Western dynasties of Germany wanted to restore the continuity of their power with the Roman Empire and, for this purpose, entered into dynastic marriages with Byzantine princesses. The court of Charlemagne competed with Byzantium - this can be seen in architecture and art. However, Charles's imperial claims rather strengthened the misunderstanding between East and West: the culture of the Carolingian Renaissance wanted to see itself as the only legitimate heir of Rome.

The Crusaders attack Constantinople. Miniature from the chronicle “The Conquest of Constantinople” by Geoffroy de Villehardouin. Around 1330, Villehardouin was one of the leaders of the campaign. Bibliothèque nationale de France

By the 10th century, the routes from Constantinople to Northern Italy overland through the Balkans and along the Danube were blocked by barbarian tribes. The only route left was by sea, which reduced communication opportunities and hampered cultural exchange. The division between East and West has become a physical reality. The ideological divide between West and East, fueled by theological disputes throughout the Middle Ages, deepened during the Crusades. Organizer of the Fourth crusade, which ended with the capture of Constantinople in 1204, Pope Innocent III openly declared the primacy of the Roman Church over all others, citing divine institution.

As a result, it turned out that the Byzantines and the inhabitants of Europe knew little about each other, but were unfriendly towards each other. In the 14th century, the West criticized the corruption of the Byzantine clergy and explained the success of Islam by it. For example, Dante believed that Sultan Saladin could have converted to Christianity (and even placed him in limbo, a special place for virtuous non-Christians, in his Divine Comedy), but did not do so due to the unattractiveness of Byzantine Christianity. In Western countries, by the time of Dante, almost no one knew Greek. At the same time, Byzantine intellectuals studied Latin only to translate Thomas Aquinas, and did not hear anything about Dante. The situation changed in the 15th century after the Turkish invasion and the fall of Constantinople, when Byzantine culture began to penetrate into Europe along with Byzantine scholars who fled from the Turks. The Greeks brought with them many manuscripts of ancient works, and humanists were able to study Greek antiquity from the originals, and not from Roman literature and the few Latin translations known in the West.

But Renaissance scholars and intellectuals were interested in classical antiquity, not the society that preserved it. In addition, it was mainly intellectuals who fled to the West who were negatively disposed towards the ideas of monasticism and Orthodox theology of that time and who sympathized with the Roman Church; their opponents, supporters of Gregory Palamas, on the contrary, believed that it was better to try to come to an agreement with the Turks than to seek help from the pope. Therefore, Byzantine civilization continued to be perceived in a negative light. If the ancient Greeks and Romans were “theirs,” then the image of Byzantium was entrenched in European culture as oriental and exotic, sometimes attractive, but more often hostile and alien to the European ideals of reason and progress.

The century of European enlightenment completely branded Byzantium. The French enlighteners Montesquieu and Voltaire associated it with despotism, luxury, magnificent ceremonies, superstition, moral decay, civilizational decline and cultural sterility. According to Voltaire, the history of Byzantium is “an unworthy collection of pompous phrases and descriptions of miracles” that disgraces the human mind. Montesquieu sees the main reason for the fall of Constantinople in the pernicious and pervasive influence of religion on society and government. He speaks especially aggressively about Byzantine monasticism and clergy, about the veneration of icons, as well as about theological polemics:

“The Greeks - great talkers, great debaters, sophists by nature - constantly entered into religious disputes. Since the monks enjoyed great influence at the court, which weakened as it became corrupted, it turned out that the monks and the court mutually corrupted each other and that evil infected both. As a result, all the attention of the emperors was absorbed in either calming or arousing theological disputes, regarding which it was noticed that they became the more heated, the more insignificant the reason that caused them.

Thus, Byzantium became part of the image of the barbaric dark East, which paradoxically also included the main enemies of the Byzantine Empire - Muslims. In the Orientalist model, Byzantium was contrasted with a liberal and rational European society built on the ideals Ancient Greece and Rome. This model underlies, for example, the descriptions of the Byzantine court in Gustave Flaubert's drama The Temptation of Saint Anthony:

“The king wipes fragrances from his face with his sleeve. He eats from sacred vessels, then breaks them; and mentally he counts his ships, his troops, his peoples. Now, out of a whim, he will take and burn his palace with all the guests. He thinks to restore the Tower of Babel and overthrow the Almighty from the throne. Antony reads from a distance on his forehead all his thoughts. They take possession of him and he becomes Nebuchadnezzar."

The mythological view of Byzantium has not yet been completely overcome in historical science. Of course, there could be no talk of any moral example from Byzantine history for the education of youth. School curricula were based on the models of classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, and Byzantine culture was excluded from them. In Russia, science and education followed Western models. In the 19th century, a dispute about the role of Byzantium in Russian history broke out between Westerners and Slavophiles. Peter Chaadaev, following the tradition of European enlightenment, bitterly complained about the Byzantine heritage of Rus':

“By the will of fate, we turned for moral teaching, which was supposed to educate us, to the corrupted Byzantium, to the object of deep contempt of these peoples.”

Ideologist of Byzantinism Konstantin Leontyev Konstantin Leontyev(1831-1891) - diplomat, writer, philosopher. In 1875, his work “Byzantism and the Slavs” was published, in which he argued that “Byzantism” is a civilization or culture, the “general idea” of which is made up of several components: autocracy, Christianity (different from Western, “from heresies and schisms”), disappointment in everything earthly, the absence of “an extremely exaggerated concept of the earthly human personality,” rejection of hope for the general well-being of peoples, the totality of some aesthetic ideas, and so on. Since Vseslavism is not a civilization or culture at all, and European civilization is coming to an end, Russia - which inherited almost everything from Byzantium - needs Byzantism to flourish. pointed to the stereotypical idea of Byzantium that had developed due to schooling and the lack of independence of Russian science:

“Byzantium seems to be something dry, boring, priestly, and not only boring, but even something pitiful and vile.”

7. In 1453, Constantinople fell - but Byzantium did not die

Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror. Miniature from the Topkapi Palace collection. Istanbul, late 15th century Wikimedia Commons

In 1935, the Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga’s book “Byzantium after Byzantium” was published - and its name became established as a designation for the life of Byzantine culture after the fall of the empire in 1453. Byzantine life and institutions did not disappear overnight. They were preserved thanks to Byzantine emigrants who fled to Western Europe, in Constantinople itself, even under the rule of the Turks, as well as in the countries of the “Byzantine commonwealth,” as the British historian Dmitry Obolensky called the Eastern European medieval cultures that were directly influenced by Byzantium - the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Rus'. The participants in this supernational unity preserved the legacy of Byzantium in religion, the norms of Roman law, and standards of literature and art.

In the last hundred years of the empire's existence, two factors - the cultural revival of the Palaiologans and the Palamite disputes - contributed, on the one hand, to the renewal of ties between Orthodox peoples and Byzantium, and on the other, to a new surge in the spread of Byzantine culture, primarily through liturgical texts and monastic literature. In the 14th century, Byzantine ideas, texts and even their authors entered the Slavic world through the city of Tarnovo, the capital of the Bulgarian Empire; in particular, the number of Byzantine works available in Rus' doubled thanks to Bulgarian translations.

In addition, the Ottoman Empire officially recognized the Patriarch of Constantinople: as the head of the Orthodox millet (or community), he continued to govern the church, under whose jurisdiction both Rus' and the Orthodox Balkan peoples remained. Finally, the rulers of the Danube principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, even becoming subjects of the Sultan, retained Christian statehood and considered themselves cultural and political heirs of the Byzantine Empire. They continued the traditions of royal court ceremonial, Greek learning and theology, and supported the Constantinople Greek elite, the Phanariots Phanariots- literally “residents of Phanar,” the quarter of Constantinople in which the residence of the Greek patriarch was located. The Greek elite of the Ottoman Empire were called Phanariotes because they lived primarily in this quarter..

Greek uprising of 1821. Illustration from A History of All Nations from the Earliest Times by John Henry Wright. 1905 The Internet Archive

Iorga believes that Byzantium after Byzantium died during the unsuccessful uprising against the Turks in 1821, which was organized by the Phanariot Alexander Ypsilanti. On one side of the Ypsilanti banner there was the inscription “By this victory” and the image of Emperor Constantine the Great, with whose name the beginning of Byzantine history is associated, and on the other there was a phoenix reborn from the flame, a symbol of the revival of the Byzantine Empire. The uprising was crushed, the Patriarch of Constantinople was executed, and the ideology of the Byzantine Empire subsequently dissolved in Greek nationalism.

One of the oldest languages in the world. Even today, Greek is spoken by 10 million residents of Greece, the majority of the population of Cyprus and, of course, the Greek diaspora scattered throughout the world. Of course, we can say that this is not so much. But it would be extremely strange to evaluate the Greek language on the basis of how many people speak it today.

What is most interesting about this language is its amazing history: after all, the Greek language stands at the origins of everything that shaped Western thought - philosophy, literature, the Christian Church ... And therefore, in almost any European language, you can find a huge number of words with Greek roots: space, telephone, grammar, lamp, astronomy and many others. So it's safe to say that we all speak a little Greek!

A little history

Of course, modern Greek differs in many ways from the language spoken by the greatest thinkers of antiquity, such as Plato or Aristotle. Over the many centuries of its existence, the language has changed a lot, so the phrase "Greek" often requires clarification. The following names are used for the different stages of its development:

Ancient Greek language- the language of ancient Greece, including as part of the Roman Empire (until the 5th century AD).
Byzantine (or Central Greek)- the language of the Greek and Hellenized population of the Byzantine Empire (VI-XV centuries). However, many neo-Hellenistic scholars oppose this term and propose to talk about the coexistence of early modern Greek and ancient Greek: this is explained by the fact that the Greek language of that period was extremely heterogeneous.
Modern Greek language has existed since approximately the 15th century as the language of the Greek and Hellenized populations of late Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire. Today it is official language Greece and Cyprus.

The 19th and 20th centuries in Greece were marked by the presence of a special linguistic situation - diglossia(this is the name given to the simultaneous existence of two language variants). However, in 1976 the official language became dimotika(δημοτική), and from Cafarevus(καθαρεύουσα) - a language variant oriented towards the Greek literary tradition and following ancient Greek writing standards, but with modern pronunciation - only certain elements have been preserved.

About Greek dialects

Most Greek regions have their own local dialects. For example, there are Cypriot, Cretan, Tsakonian, southern Italian and northern Greek languages. Dialects are exclusively spoken and are not used in writing (with the exception of literary works, where the characters can speak one dialect or another). In each region there are also pronunciation features that are noticeable to a foreigner to varying degrees.

The biggest differences are between the Cypriot dialect of Greek and what is called classical Greek. It must be said that the Cypriot dialect as a whole is characterized by the presence of the sounds “sh” and “ch”, which are not present in modern Greek, as well as long vowels and duplication of consonant sounds or their “swallowing”, which is also not typical for the modern Greek language. These phonetic differences are also recorded in writing:

Μούττη - μύτη - nose

(mutti - miti)

Όι - όχι - no

Μυάλος - μεγάλος - big

(mYalos - megAlos)

As you can see, the difference is quite significant, not to mention the fact that there are words that are completely different from their Greek “brothers”:

Καρκόλα - κρεβάτι - bed

(karkOla - kravAti)

Ιντυχάνω - μιλώ - talk

(indiHano - miO)

Φκάλλω - βγάζω - take out, pull out

(fkAllo - vgAzo)

But there is no need to be afraid of these differences: no matter where you are in Greece or Cyprus, if you speak classical Modern Greek (which is spoken in mainland Greece - Athens and Thessaloniki), you will be understood everywhere without any problems!

How and where to start learning Greek

Start with the alphabet and clearly work out the pronunciation of sounds, since in Greek, along with the correct stress, it is pronunciation that plays a decisive role: in Greek there are many seemingly similar sounds, the substitution of which can lead to funny and sometimes sad consequences. This is especially true for those sounds that do not exist in the Russian language.

The next step - and in this case it does not matter whether you study Greek on your own or under the guidance of a teacher - will be to master the grammatical basis of the Greek language. Many people note the similarity of Greek grammar with Russian grammar. This is partly true: both in Greek and in Russian, nouns change according to gender (there are three of them, as in Russian - masculine, feminine and neuter), numbers, cases (here it’s even easier for Russian speakers, since in Greek there are only cases four - nominative, accusative, genitive and vocative), and verbs have categories of conjugation, mood...

Since Modern Greek is a simplified version of Ancient Greek, there are not many rules compared to Russian, but there are quite a few exceptions. But this is precisely what makes it even more similar to the Russian language, and until you start learning Greek, you can’t even guess how many similarities there are between these languages!

That is why it will not work to start learning Greek, like English, by memorizing a certain number of words: without becoming familiar with the grammatical structure of the Greek language, you will not be able to compose even the most simple sentences. So, be patient and spend due time on Greek grammar.

And learning words may well turn into a game. Take, for example, the word άνθρωπος (Anphropos) - man. What kind of science in our country deals with the study of man? Anthropology! Or τραπέζι (trapEsi) - table. What do we do at the table? We have a meal, that is, we eat. And similar examples can be given endlessly.

Learning Greek may seem difficult at first glance. However, everything is in your hands, and success depends on the regularity and intensity of classes - preferably, of course, under the guidance of an experienced teacher - and subsequent language practice.

The official and spoken language of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, especially its capital, Constantinople; a transitional stage between the Ancient Greek language of antiquity and the modern Modern Greek language of Greece and Cyprus.

Chronology

Chronologically, the Middle Greek stage covers almost the entire Middle Ages from the final division of the Roman Empire to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The following periods are distinguished in the history of the Byzantine language:

prehistory - up to the 6th century; 1) from VII to century; 2) from before the fall of Constantinople.

Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages

First (Early Byzantine) period

In conditions of almost universal illiteracy, incomprehensibility and inaccessibility of education in an archaic literary language, dilution ethnic composition empire due to Slavic migrations to the Balkans and constant foreign intervention after 1204, many Greek peasants were better able to foreign languages than your own literary language. In the late Byzantine period, the role of lingua franca of the coast was played by French and Italian. IN mountain regions The Albanian language, many South Slavic languages and dialects, the Aromanian language, and even the Romani language are also used. As a result of constant interethnic communication in the Greek language during the Byzantine period, a number of features were developed in common with other Balkan languages (see Balkan Language Union). After the Turkish capture of Adrianople (Edirne) in 1365, Byzantine dialects came under increasing influence Turkish language; many Greeks (Asia Minor, Thrace, Macedonia) finally switched to the non-Indo-European Turkish language and converted to Islam.

In the late Byzantine period, the folk language, expelled from literary circulation, was left to natural development in popular use and was preserved in a few monuments of folk literature. How great the difference was between the artificially maintained pure literary language and the one used by the people can be judged by the numerous versions or translations into a generally understandable language by the most famous historical writers.

Patterns of development of the Central Greek language

The chronological and genetic development of the Byzantine language from ancient Greek and its gradual transition into the current modern Greek language are different, for example, from the history of the Latin language. The latter, after the formation of the Romance languages (Old French, etc.), ceased to be a living and developing organism. Greek, on the other hand, basically retains the unity and graduality of development until modern times, although a detailed analysis of the series shows that this unity is largely imaginary.

The Byzantine language shows tendencies towards divergent development. A characteristic feature of the Byzantine period is the gap between the literary-written and spoken language, developed diglossia: mastery of both the literary language (among the upper strata) and spoken dialects. The end to this process was put only in the modern Greek period (in the 20th century) after the Greek-Turkish population exchange and the gradual Turkification of native speakers outside independent Greece.

The organizing principle in the development of new formations (neologisms) of the Greek language was folk dialects and provincialisms, as well as the individual traits of writers. The influence of folk dialects (vernacular), expressed in differences in the pronunciation of sounds, in the structure of sentences (syntax), in the decomposition of grammatical forms and in the formation of new words according to the law of analogy, is detected even in the pre-Christian era.

The Greeks themselves, aware of the difference between the literary and the language used in ordinary conversation and popular circulation, called this latter γλώσσα δημώδης, άπλή καθωμιλημένη (glossa dimodis), finally, ρωμαϊκή (romayka) in contrast to the first - καθαρεύουσα, κοινή διαλεκτος (kafarevus- literally "purified" koine). Earlier traces of grammatical and lexical features are also observed on Egyptian papyri and in inscriptions. In the Christian era, the literary and popular language are separated even further and deeper, since the features of the folk language have found application in the Holy Scriptures and in church practice, that is, in chants and teachings. One would expect that the folk language, which has already moved significantly away from the literary one, would gradually find application in various types of literature and enrich it with new forms and word formations. But in fact, due to the extreme purism of Dimotika, the spoken language continued to oppose Kafarevusa (written literary language) until the reform of 1976, when the two variants were brought closer together, with Dimotika predominant.

Such a state as Byzantium no longer exists today. However, it was she who, perhaps, had the greatest influence on cultural and spiritual life Ancient Rus'. What was it?

Relations between Rus' and Byzantium

By the 10th century, Byzantium, formed in 395 after the division of the Roman Empire, was a powerful power. It included Asia Minor, the southern part of the Balkans and southern Italy, islands in the Aegean Sea, as well as part of Crimea and Chersonesos. The Russians called Byzantium the “Greek Kingdom” because Hellenized culture predominated there and the official language was Greek.

Contacts between Kievan Rus and Byzantium, which bordered each other across the Black Sea, began in the 9th century. At first, the two powers were at odds with each other. The Russians repeatedly raided their neighbors.

But gradually Rus' and Byzantium stopped fighting: it turned out to be more profitable for them to be “friends.” Moreover, the Russians managed to destroy the Khazar Khaganate, which threatened Constantinople. Both powers began to establish diplomacy and trade ties.

Dynastic marriages also began to be practiced. So, one of the wives of the Russian prince Vladimir Svyatoslavich was Anna, the sister of the Byzantine emperor Vasily II. The mother of Vladimir Monomakh was Mary, daughter of Emperor Constantine IX Monomakh. And Moscow Prince Ivan III was married to Sophia Paleolog, niece last emperor Byzantium of Constantine XI.

Religion

The main thing that Byzantium gave to Rus' is the Christian religion. Back in the 9th century, the first Orthodox church was built in Kyiv, and Princess Olga of Kiev became supposedly the first Russian ruler to be baptized. Her grandson, Prince Vladimir, as we know, became famous as the baptist of Rus'. Under him, all pagan idols were demolished in Kyiv and Orthodox churches were built.

Together with the tenets of Orthodoxy, the Russians adopted the Byzantine canons of worship, including its beauty and solemnity.

This, by the way, became the main argument in favor of choosing a religion - the ambassadors of Prince Vladimir, who visited the service in Sophia of Constantinople, reported: “We came to the Greek land, and brought us to where they serve their God, and did not know - in heaven or we are on earth, for there is no such sight and beauty on earth, and we do not know how to tell about it - we only know that God dwells there with people, and their service is better than in all other countries. We cannot forget that beauty, for every person, if he tastes the sweet, will not then take the bitter, so we cannot stay here anymore.

The features of church singing, icon painting, as well as Orthodox asceticism were also inherited from the Byzantines. From 988 to 1448, the Russian Orthodox Church was the metropolitanate of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Most of the Kyiv metropolitans at that time were of Greek origin: they were elected and confirmed in Constantinople.

In the 12th century, one of the greatest Christian shrines was brought to Rus' from Byzantium - the ancient icon of the Mother of God, which became known to us as the Vladimir icon.

Economy

Economic and trade ties between Russia and Byzantium were established even before the baptism of Rus'. After Russia adopted Christianity, they only grew stronger. Byzantine traders brought fabrics, wines, and spices to Rus'. In exchange, they took away furs, fish, and caviar.

Culture

“Cultural exchange” also developed. Thus, the famous icon painter of the second half of the 14th - early 15th centuries, Theophanes the Greek, painted icons in Novgorod and Moscow churches. No less famous is the writer and translator Maxim the Greek, who died in 1556 in the Trinity-Sergius Monastery.

Byzantine influence is also visible in Russian architecture of that time. Thanks to him, the construction of stone buildings began for the first time in Rus'. Take, for example, the St. Sophia Cathedrals in Kyiv and Novgorod.

Russian architects learned from Byzantine masters both the principles of construction and the principles of decorating churches with mosaics and frescoes. True, the techniques of traditional Byzantine architecture are combined here with the “Russian style”: hence the many domes.

Language

From the Greek language, Russians borrowed words such as “notebook” or “lamp”. At baptism, Russians were given Greek names - Peter, George, Alexander, Andrey, Irina, Sophia, Galina.

Literature

The first books in Rus' were brought from Byzantium. Subsequently, many of them began to be translated into Russian - for example, the lives of saints. There were also works of not only spiritual, but also artistic content, for example, the story of the adventures of the brave warrior Digenis Akrit (in the Russian retelling - Devgenia).

Education

Creation Slavic writing Based on the Greek charter letter, we are indebted to the outstanding figures of Byzantine culture, Cyril and Methodius. After the adoption of Christianity, schools built on the Byzantine model began to open in Kyiv, Novgorod and other Russian cities.

In 1685, brothers Ioannikiy and Sophrony Likhud, immigrants from Byzantium, at the request of Patriarch Joachim, opened the Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy in Moscow (at the Zaikonospassky Monastery), which became the first higher educational institution in the Russian capital.

Despite the fact that the Byzantine Empire ceased to exist in 1453 after the Ottomans captured Constantinople, it was not forgotten in Russia. In the second half of the 19th century, a course in Byzantine studies was introduced at Russian universities, in which Byzantine history and literature were studied. In all educational institutions the Greek language was included in the curriculum, especially since most of the sacred texts were in ancient Greek.

“For almost a thousand years, the consciousness of spiritual involvement in the culture of Byzantium was organic for the Orthodox subjects of the Russian state,” writes G. Litavrin in the book “Byzantium and Rus'.” “It is natural, therefore, that the study of the history, art and culture of the homeland of Orthodoxy was an important and prestigious area of humanitarian knowledge in Russia.”