The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East
- Date & time
- –
- Speaker
- Othon Anastasakis (St Antony's College, Oxford), Sean Matthews (Author and journalist)
- Host
- European Studies Centre (St Antony's)
- Series
- Julie Adams
- Location
- St Antony's College - North Site, European Studies Centre - Seminar Room, Seminar Room St Antony's College - North Site, European Studies Centre 70 Woodstock Road Oxford Oxfordshire OX2 6HR United Kingdom
- Organisation
- Oxford
Topics
About this talk
Caught between wars raging in both Eastern Europe and the Middle East, Greece is an island of relative stability. Popularly considered the cradle of Western civilisation, this is a Christian Orthodox state on the edge of the Islamic world. And, after a half-century of integration into NATO and the EU, Greece is now reabsorbing into the Near East, as the West fractures and new Middle Eastern powers rise. The country’s importance as a cultural and geopolitical hybrid is growing. Travelling through the region, Sean Mathews explores at ground level the tectonic shifts reshaping Europe and the Middle East. He meets the last Greek merchants in Cairo, and hears from Istanbul’s remaining Greeks about Turkey’s break with the West. In Jerusalem, he discovers a budding alliance between Greece and Israel; and in a faded Ottoman port, he encounters football hooligans loyal to a Russian oligarch. This bold reappraisal of Greece as a Near Eastern nation uncovers its Byzantine and Ottoman past as a key to survival in today’s chaotic, shrinking world.
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