Friday Quick Hits and Varia

Some quicker quick hits:

• Cyril Mango's lecture, "Imaging Constantinople", here in Athens was very well-attended.  Cotsen Hall was packed!  He imagined Middle Byzantine Constantinople to be much less monumental than the Constantinople of Justinian's time.  Sounds like discontinuity...
• The symposium celebrating Mango's 80th birthday picked up on some of these themes particularly Anne McCabe's discussion of the Byzantine remains from the Athenian Agora.  Of particular notes was Erkki Sironen's discussion of verse inscriptions from the Late Antique and Early Byzantine period in Athens.  His volume of Inscriptiones Graecae is to appear by the end of this year and will supercede his presently invaluable Helsinki dissertation: The late Roman and early Byzantine inscriptions of Athens and Attica.
• An interesting preview of the new Acropolis Museum done on the BBC.  Word on the street here is that none of the considerable remains of the Christian Parthenon will be displayed inside the new museum including the considerable and important fragments of the church's ambo.  This seems hard to believe as it represents such an important piece in any argument for the continuity of Greek culture from antiquity through Christian times.  It is particularly surprising since there is so much interest at present in Hellenism in Byzantium (e.g. see "A Heretical (Orthodox) History of the Parthenon" as a preview of Kaldellis forthcoming book: The Christian Parthenon: Classicism and Pilgrimage in Byzantine Athens (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)., also Writing off the Wall: Transcription as Resistance).
• IV International Cyprological Congress was two weeks ago in Nicosia.  I forgot the blog about it!  I did not attend, but everyone who did has reported that is was both well-organized and intellectually productive.  Here's a link to the program and abstracts.

Two random links:

• I am looking forward to reading newly released The Programming Historian by William J. Turkel & Alan MacEachern.
• And I enjoyed Natalie Zemon Davis's reading of Michel de Certeau in the New York Review of books, "The Quest of Michel de Certeau".