How to talk to your kids about Byzantium

 

Alexander Billinis
We often talk about history around the table. The date of 29 May, when heroic Constantinople finally fell to the Turks, always merits a discussion. Dinner table historical conversations are a Greek pastime. Gus Portokalos in Big Fat Greek Wedding made a point of talking about “the history of our people,” at the dinner table, to the neighbours, and to the “lucky” future son-in-law getting baptised into the Greek Orthodox Church, whose “ancestors were singing in trees while Greeks were writing philosophy.”
Add in the Greek Orthodox Church, the costumes, parades, Greek School (if you indulged in this), and you had a sort of timeline. The Parthenon, Alexander the Great, perhaps a word on the New Testament being written in Greek and the Apostle Paul’s travels in Greece, and then … an intermission.
This hiatus in historiography and instruction lasts almost 1800 years, until suddenly the poems, the dances, and the rebellions began again, and this nation extinguished for about two millennia arose again, as if in suspended animation for all this time.
Never mind that one must also suspend belief to make this jump; our dinner table talk, and historiography in general, seems to oblige a two-millennium fast forward.
Obviously, I am exaggerating for effect, but ask yourself. Did the Portokaloses talk about Byzantium at all? We know that the yiayia hated the Turks, but do most Greek viewers know how the Turks got there, or what was there before? How often did you talk about the Byzantine Empire and its one thousand-year history in Greek school or Sunday School?
If you went to school before Western Civilisation courses got axed out due to political correctness, you may have talked about the Ancient Greeks, and then moved West to Rome and never “back East” again, even though East Rome—Byzantium, survived for another 1000 years. Unless you majored in East European Studies, you might never have heard of Byzantium at all…
Read more: neoskosmos.com/en/137867/how-to-talk-to-your-kids-about-byzantium