The International Congress of Byzantine Studies (French: Congrès international des études Byzantines) is a scholarly conference that promotes the study and preservation of Byzantine history. It has been organized by the International Association of Byzantine Studies since 1948.
History
The first International Congress of Byzantine Studies was held in Bucharest, Romania, in 1924. It was organized by members of the Romanian Academy to promote Byzantine history after the Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The second congress was held in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, under the patronage of King Alexander I in 1929. Subsequent congresses were held in: Athens, Greece, in 1930 & 1932, and Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1934. The sixth congress was supposed to be held in Algiers, then part of French Algeria in October 1939 but was postponed due to the outbreak of World War II.
During World War II, many of the institutions that had organized and contributed to the congress were destroyed or cut off from each other, leading to the creation of several disparate local and regional Byzantine congresses across Europe after the end of the war. In 1948, the French historians Henri Grégoire and Gabriel Millet launched the International Association of Byzantine Studies after they discovered they had each organized a separate International Congress of Byzantine Studies for that year. The sixth congress was held in Paris, France, in July 1948, and all subsequent conferences have been organized by the International Association of Byzantine Studies since then.
In 2020, the twenty fourth congress was postponed and moved from Istanbul to Venice in protest of the Turkish Government's decision to reconvert the Hagia Sofia into a mosque.
List of Congresses
Bucharest, 1924 Belgrade, 1929 Athens, 1930 Athens, 1932 Sofia, 1934 Algiers, 1939 (cancelled) Paris, 1948 Brussels, 1948 Palermo, 1951 Thessaloniki, 1953 Istanbul, 1955 Munich, 1958 Ohrid, 1961 Oxford, 1966 Bucharest, 1971 Athens, 1976 Vienna, 1981 Washington, D.C, 1986 Moscow, 1991 Copenhagen, 1996 Paris, 2001 London, 2006 Sofia, 2011 Belgrade, 2016 Venice, 2022 Vienna, 2026
See also
Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae International Association of Byzantine Studies Byzantine Studies Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies Henri Grégoire
References