Pınar Üre, Reclaiming Byzantium: Russia, Turkey and the Archaeological Claim to the Middle East in the 19th Century. London: I B Tauris 2020. Pp. 212

Abstract

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