ABSTRACT
Theorizing the Byzantine city is quite a challenging call for two main reasons. The first is that one reasonably expects the ideas of the city and urbanity to have changed meaning many times in pace with social transformation, during the empire's eleven centuries of existence. The second reason is the lack of Byzantine definitions of a city. Byzantine texts are often vague around such a definition, as if taking it for granted, and they can also be confusing, when different terms are often used alternatively for urban settlements and even for the same settlement during the same period of time. The city and the idea of urbanity, as an intangible socio-cultural quality evoked by city life, are quite old. Definition interrelates with available theory and personal perspective. In urban studies, while paradigm shifts have been abounding from structuralist to cultural turns and from political economy to phenomenology, the concept – or the idea – of urbanity is still contested.
