In 1860 the chairman of the Select Committee on the British Museum, questioning Sir Anthony Panizzi, the museum’s principal librarian,...

Breakfast around the Middle East is usually a washout. Two places I’ve enjoyed it have been the Hotel Baron in Aleppo and over the border...

Despite Turks being associated with kebab culture in Europe – and much of the world thanks to the antics of Salt Bae (AKA Nusret Gokce)...

Jews Byzantine relations with the Jews have always been complex, not least because the former effectively stole the latter’s ideological...

Bogomils Gnostics to the bone, the Bogomils seem to have snowballed in their Macedonian-Bulgarian heartland after John I transferred...

“One finds me Scythian among Scythians, Latin among Latins… And also to Persians I speak in Persian… To Alans I say in their tongue:...

In the late third century Diocletian sent his colleague Maximian to Gaul to subdue the “country folk and bandits whom the inhabitants...

Whenever the eunuch is invoked, it’s almost always in the sense that he is a distortion or perversion of nature that only a people as...

Reading a church can be a daunting prospect. Weird Latinate or Greek-based terms are deployed to outline liturgical functions with even...

Have you ever noticed that even though Orthodox icons are bathed in golden light, none of the figures represented ever has a shadow? Far...