ABSTRACT
The discovery of a Byzantine-style artistic heritage in the South-Eastern European border regions between ʻOrient' and ʻOccident' started in the 1850s. Frameworks for its discussion were influenced by a canonized understanding of the ‘Byzantine style’ in the work of Western scholars who, since the 1830s, had defined the style in relation to the art of places like Constantinople, Mount Athos, Venice and Sicily. From the beginning, authors dealing with regions such as Wallachia, Bucovina and Moldavia evaluated their findings in relation to this normative image. In many cases, this research was sponsored by imperial Vienna, exploiting the heritage of the empire’s peripheries and neighbouring regions as a reservoir for regional identities under an overarching Habsburgian universalism. The planning of a prominent Byzantine Revival structure – the Romanian Orthodox Cathedral of Sibiu in Transylvania (1902–6) accompanied by a handbook written by Elie Miron Cristea – shows the struggles of appropriating such stylistic concepts for nationalistic purposes in the heterogeneous societies of what were considered the borderlands between ʻOrient' and ʻOccident'. This chapter investigates how schemes of spatial perception and concepts of periodization related to the heritage of South-Eastern Europe shaped the reception of Byzantine art, and explores how the two were interrelated.
