ABSTRACT
Nearly 70 years after Alexander Kazhdan's influential article ‘Vizantiyskie goroda v VII-XI vv’, the Byzantine city remains a major focus of investigation. That this remains the case is unsurprising, given the views of Byzantium come mostly from our study of urban-based writers or excavated remains of cities. Much has changed since 1959, the prominent Yugoslavian Byzantinist, George Ostrogorsky wrote ‘Among the fundamental problems of Byzantine history it would be hard to name one that has been studied less than has that of the cities’. Byzantine urban studies may now draw inspiration from a rich medley of ideas through multiple domains of knowledge. Since the road to Byzantium leads through Rome and Athens, discourse has centered on the nature of the late antique polis and its survival through the traumatic events that gripped the populace in the sixth to eighth centuries.
