ИСТИНА

Thanks to the contribution of many generations of scholars, Byzantium is now considered as one of the major pivots of Western Medieval civilization. Yet, Archaic and Classical Antiquity, as well as the Hellenistic and Roman eras absorbed a great deal of “Asian” traditions, which established an indissoluble bond between Byzantium and the Perso-Semitic East and Scythian North. The Byzantines accumulated in themselves much of the “Asian” in modern sense of the term. My aim in this paper is to outline and to reappraise those multifaceted connections that link Medieval Hellenism with the Persian, Arabic, and Turkic East. Keywords: Byzantium, Asia, Byzantine identity, cultural memory, Persian, Arabic, Turkish