Professor Shukurov’s current research project attempts to problematize and analyze the nature of the permeability of borders between Byzantine Christian and Anatolian Muslim cultural spaces. His hypothesis is that the significant physical and culturally active presence of Christians (both Orthodox and Heterodox) in Muslim Anatolia constituted a firm common ground for heterogeneous Anatolian cultural space. In The Byzantine Turks, 1204–1461 Rustam Shukurov studies the fate of the Turkic minority in Late Byzantium including the Nicaean, Palaiologan, and Grand Komnenian empires. How the Byzantines identified “Turks” as a nation different from their own, the demographic and social consequences of the Turkic presence within the borders of the Byzantine World, the legal and cultural aspects of socialization and naturalization of the Turkic newcomers in Byzantine society, the mental effects of demographic and social changes caused by the Turkic penetration are discussed in detail. His study concludes with an etymological lexicon of Oriental names and words in Byzantine Greek.

-The talk will be in English.