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There was once a time when Russian nationalists envisioned themselves celebrating the first Orthodox Liturgy in the Hagia Sophia in almost five hundred years.The man who made such grand plans, Fyodor Uspensky (1845Uspensky ( -1928, was not only one of the most energetic Byzantinists of his time and an important pioneer in Russia in the study of the Byzantine Empire, but also a dreamer with passions ranging from pan-Slavism to pan-Orthodoxy. Furthermore, Uspensky spent twenty years heading the Russian Archaeological Institute in the very heart of the old Byzantine capital, and when he envisioned the reconversion of the Hagia Sophia into a church, it was in the middle of a war in which Russia seemed closer than ever to its century-long dream of wresting the capital from the Ottomans.Pınar Üre's study of the Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinoplefounded shortly before the accession of Tsar Nicholas II in 1894 and closed upon the outbreak of hostilities in 1914operates exactly at this intersection of politics and scholarship and shows how intimately intertwined they were for nineteenth-century imperialists. It is a book that nicely illustrates how science, religion, economic interests and territorial claims all worked in the service of retrieving, examining and preserving Byzantine heritage in Ottoman territories.In the nineteenth century, European powers were beginning to establish archaeological institutes around the Mediterranean, mainly for the purpose of classical studies, although later periods were also taken into consideration. Such institutes simultaneously staked out geographical and historical claims by showcasing the patron countries' physical presence in, and ideological identification with, the lands of the ancient Mediterranean.Constantinople or Istanbul was not the obvious spot to choose when proposals were made to found a Russian archeological institute by the Mediterranean; some argued that Athens would be a more practical location. Several factors tilted the decision in favour of the Ottoman capital, and it was probably not so much a particular Russian identification with Byzantine history and heritage (which, as Üre shows, was far less developed and articulated than is often assumed) as a mixture of political and religious interests that settled the matter. As events leading up to the Crimean War (1853-6) had already

The 'special relationship' between Sweden and the Turkic world is often noted for its political entanglements with the Russian-Ottoman rivalry in the early modern period, but it is no less manifest in centuries of Nordic scholarship on Central Asia and the Middle East. The current volume brings together seventeen different perspectives on the study of 'Oriental languages' at Uppsala university from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.The 'Orient' was always an elastic term. European geographers and travelers in the early Modern period defined it in different ways: for some, it began somewhere along the Ottoman frontier on the upper Danube, for others, east of where the historical impact of Latin language and literature and the Roman church ended; a definition that was further complicated by Protestantism and the articulation of a north/south cultural divide within Europe itself.At Uppsala, a chair of Hebrew and Greek was installed in 1605. As Gunilla Gren-Eklund shows in the first chapter, focus gradually expanded from 'Oriental' languages that were considered essential for the understanding of Biblical history and texts, to those that were relevant to contemporary affairs -especially the growing diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire. After a while, the Carolina Rediviva collections were expanded with donations and acquisitions by travelers such as Ravius (1613-77), Rålamb (1622-98) and Sparwenfeld (1655-1727). Per Cullhed gives an overview of how the collections grew in scope and focus thanks to the eighteenth-century travelers, and of the nineteenth-century scholarship that went into their cataloguing. The chapter also provides a background to the Swedish political ambitions that sometimes directed the early efforts to collect materials from near and afar, not least the promotion of the alleged 'Gothic' origins of Sweden itself.In the period that followed, it was not only diplomatic relations with the Ottomans that motivated an increased study of Turcic languages and cultures. As Lars Johanson stresses in his chapter, Swedish prisoners of war in Russia after the defeat at Poltava in 1709 established contacts with Turcic peoples in Siberia and made groundbreaking contributions to the study of Central Asia. Strahlenberg (1676-1747) used his eleven years of captivity in Tobolsk to draw a defining map of Siberia, and a few years after his return to Sweden he published a study of "Tatar dialects" -a milestone in the emergence of Ural-Altaic studies.The fascinating career of Christian Ravius and his role as professor at Uppsala (1650-56, 1659-69) are the subject of a chapter by Josef Eskhult, whereas Hans Helander, after discussing negative views of Turks in modern Latin literature, focuses on a 1674 speech by Ravius's disciple Gustaf Peringer (1651-1710), in which the later professor of Oriental languages voiced his opinion on why the field was so important and worthy of study. Éva Ágnes Czató further examines Peringer's interest in Karaim Jews; both chapters show Peringer as a key figure at a historica...

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