Sailing to Byzantium: Insular and Coastal Urban Spaces in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean, Bilkent University, November 9, 2018

The workshop "Sailing to Byzantium: Insular and Coastal Urban Spaces in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean" brings together a group of scholars who have been working on the urban history and archaeology of the Mediterranean. The workshop is organized by the Department of History at Bilkent University in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute, the University of Bologna and the University of Siena.

The workshop will focus on the development of the insular world and coastal realities of the medieval Mediterranean, in the period that witnessed the so-called transition from the Roman Unified Mare Nostrum to a Great Sea divided between different cultures and religions. The constellation of Italian (Enrico Zanini, Salvatore Cosentino and Luca Zavagno), Turkish (Macid Tekinalp),and American (Nathan Liedholm, Matthew Harpster and Scott Kennedy) scholars will offer papers centered on both the strategic role of the insular urban spaces too often labeled as merely peripheral to the political histories of large Mediterranean metropolis and the resilience of coastal and island urban sites regarded as privileged places for cross-cultural encounters, exchanges and trade between different political and cultural realities.