Byzantine literature and culture

The course is divided into two sections:
1. Byzantine literature and culture from their origins to the year 1100:
- transgression from Antiquity to Byzantine times; political and economic circumstances in the Early Byzantine period; Byzantium and Arabs; Byzantium and the Slavs; the sunset and the iconoclastic period; the church and religious life; political-religious conflicts and the schism
- Early Byzantine literature; historiography and political thought, philosophical and theological literature, poetry of the early Byzantine period, the origination of the accentual verse
- Photios and the Byzantine humanism
- the most important characteristics and achievements of the Byzantine art

2. Byzantine literature and culture from the year 1100 up to 1453
- political and economic system of Greece in the High Middle Ages; Byzantium and Western Europe in the Middle Ages; Byzantium and the Crusade wars
- the Byzantine educational system, rhetoric and philology
- literature in the vernacular; high literature and the revival of Atticism in the High Middle Ages
- Byzantium, Turkish invasion and Islam; the fall of Constantinople and the fall of the Byzantine Empire
- status and significance of the Byzantine culture in European history