A means of wealth, power, hierarchy and holiness, an important tool for political diplomacy and the development of trade, “a social symbol in the wardrobe of the elite”, textiles and clothing were among the least studied objects in their multifaceted and significant meaning. a dimension through which we can read the world of Byzantium, ecclesiastical and secular.

Unlike many publications in foreign languages, until now Greek literature has been covered only by monothematic studies, mainly devoted to religious textiles. “The flourishing of his research in Greece in recent years and interdisciplinary research,” the curators note, “suggests an expanded perspective” from which the new volume is born.

The authors (Pashalis Androudis, Konstantinos M. Vafiadis, Nikolaos Vrisidis, Fanny Kalokairinou, Anna Karatsani, Mariel Martiniani-Reber, Christina Meri-Bourbeck, Anna Ballian, Elena Papastavrou, Maria Sardi, Daphne Philou, Warren T. Woodfin) accumulate written sources and fragments of handicrafts, preserved today in the collections of museums and ecclesiastical institutions, Greek and foreign, weave a “diverse and complex scientific canvas” of Byzantine and post-Byzantine fabric from the early Christian centuries to the early modern times.

Fabrics and clothing from which the Byzantine era, ecclesiastical and secular, arises.

Its chapters collect genres, materials, techniques, aesthetics, iconography, semiotics, loans and counter-loans as they have developed over the centuries. Approximately one hundred places are marked on the map of production and turnover of textiles in the West and East. Epicenter, Greek region, crossroads of three continents and Eurasian trade, with major production centers in Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Thebes (the textiles of the Jewish Theban workshops were considered so high quality that a group of their craftsmen was captured by the Normans in 1147 contributed to the spread of silk production in Sicily and Philadelphia in Asia Minor during the Byzantine period, in Bursa, Constantinople and Chios during the Ottoman Empire.

Linen and wool, silks, fabrics of silver and gold, satin and velvet with intricate weaves (damask, taketes, hexamites and stripes) in vestments denoting positions of the imperial and church hierarchy, chitons and draperies (replicas of later European tapestries), embroidered or stamped, they reveal before us a colorful feast and picturesque diversity.

With texts and impressive photographs highlighting fine weaving and elaborate embroidery, we travel to Egypt, where an arid climate has preserved several thousand weavings from the early Christian period (known as Coptic), enriching private collections and museums around the world. We penetrate the imperial courts and listen behind the scenes to the movements and noise that were an element of grandeur and an integral part of the rituals. We enter the imperial workshops, where the most beautiful fabrics of the Macedonian period were created with sophisticated techniques and balanced decoration of elven animals, motifs and lions, a timeless royal symbol.

Outside the palaces, the Church, the field of coexistence of all the plastic arts, keeps evidence of weaving, important for understanding Byzantine and post-Byzantine culture, mainly the art of embroidery: epitaphs (shrouds), veils covering liturgical and funeral veils, bags or armlets, covers of the Holy Gifts or air, knee pads, church vestments with images semantically equivalent to cult images.

Yet the ecclesiastical reliquaries of the West today are the guardians of Byzantine textile art. The reasons are many: the Ottoman conquest, the sack by the crusaders after the capture of Constantinople (1204), gifts from the exchange of rulers, as well as their pious use in sacred relics and the relics of saints, led to the end and is stored in large silks in western shrines. Among them are a number of fabrics from the Latin kingdoms of Greece and Cyprus, such as the embroidered vestment of the Holy Supper from the Middle Ages, the so-called vestment of the Countess of Ettab, which is attributed to the Duchy of Athens and is kept in the Saint Cathedral in France.

The political and economic context, religious concepts, diverse compositions of international cultures that influenced the evolutionary course of textile art could not be absent from the texts.

Rapid development, for example. World trade—the result of triangular cooperation between the Mongols, Latins, and Byzantines in the 13th and 14th centuries—transmitted the aesthetics and textile technology of Asia to the West, especially to Italy. Luxurious Western European textiles with Eastern borrowings and counter-borrowings, symbols of prestige and authority, continued to enrich secular vestments and church material culture both in the late Byzantine period and after the arrival of the Ottomans.

In the Ottoman environment, fabrics and embroideries from different parts of the world found their way to the markets of the Balkans and Asia Minor. New roads opened, new centers flourished. The famous silks of Chios competed with the fabrics of Genoa, Venice, Lyon, Iran and India in the markets of Constantinople and the Black Sea. The unique Chios silk pine (a prayer carpet of 1742), in Greece, is kept in the museum of the New Chios Monastery, a wide variety of works in the collections of the Jewish Museum of Greece testify to the production of luxurious embroidered synagogue fabrics, and Persian and Indian fabrics of the 17th-19th centuries. they are in the sanctuaries of Mount Athos.

Within the institutional framework, the combined use of ecclesiastical and secular fabrics finally determined the dual role of the Orthodox Church. Textiles – one of the official gifts received by the new head of state from the Sultan – together with the ecclesiastical art of embroidery with its numerous symbols dominated for several centuries. Their remains are visible even today in modern Greek dress.

Tom is trying to understand this course. It covers the field of Byzantine and post-Byzantine fabric, but “by no means exhausts it,” the curators specify. However, this scientific manual, open to additions and corrections, is akin to “preparing a loom to weave a finely intricate pattern.” The range of fabrics, as Dr. Mariel Martiniani-Rebert notes, is like a sea with waves and moving currents. Also, “doesn’t that extinguish them?”