East of Byzantium Lecture Series
Political Rituals and Urban Communities in Cilician Armenia
Gohar Grigoryan, University of Fribourg
Tuesday, February 27, 2024 | 12:00 PM (EST, UTC -5) | Zoom
The Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture and the Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University are pleased to announce the next lecture in the 2023–2024 East of Byzantium lecture series.
Outdoor rituals were among those rare occasions when medieval rulers and ruling aristocracies could be seen in person and inspected publicly. As in many medieval societies, so also in the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia (1198–1375), these public ceremonies were almost always performed in front of urban communities. While the political and propagandistic concerns of these aesthetic enactments come as little surprise, the present lecture will address the question from the point of view of those city inhabitants who were to contemplate—and in some cases, to partake in—the carefully organized and well-pondered rituals of the men of power.
Gohar Grigoryan is a senior researcher at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, Department of Art History and Archaeology. She received her PhD from the same university in 2017 for her dissertation on royal images in Cilician Armenia. She is the author of many essays on medieval Armenian art and history and co-editor of three books, including, most recently, Staging the Ruler’s Body in Medieval Cultures, published by Brepols/Harvey Miller (2023).
Advance registration required. Register: https://eastofbyzantium.org/upcoming-events/political-rituals-and-urban-communities-in-cilician-armenia/
Contact Brandie Ratliff (mjcbac@hchc.edu), Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture with any questions.
An East of Byzantium lecture. EAST OF BYZANTIUM is a partnership between the Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University and the Mary Jaharis Center that explores the cultures of the eastern frontier of the Byzantine empire in the late antique and medieval periods.