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ABF: I'm Anna Bonnell-Freidin and I have the pleasure of interviewing at Pembroke College, Oxford, emeritus professor – emeritus Calouste Gulbenkian Professor of Armenian Studies – Robert Thomson on August 1, 2009. So, let me begin by asking you about your first impressions at Dumbarton Oaks in 1960–61 when you became a Junior Fellow.
RWT: Well, that was my introduction to the United States and a very interesting year it was. My first impression – well, I hope that a fuller picture will emerge as we go along. The year was very influential for me. It certainly focused my career in Armenia much more than I had been focused on Armenia before, and in fact it led indirectly to a position at Harvard, where I was the first Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies, and then of course I went back twenty-odd years later as Director. I think I'm the first Director, perhaps still the only Director who was actually a Junior Fellow there and that, of course, actually colored my views of the institution as such when I went back later. Anyway, let's begin at the beginning. Now in those days the young, unmarried – well not necessarily young – the unmarried persons normally resided in the Fellows Building, which is no longer used for that purpose. Those who were married were given an apartment, usually up on Wisconsin Avenue. There were about half a dozen of us living in the building at the time, and we were treated very nicely. We were given full board, except on Sunday nights we had to go out and find our own dinners. And we had the advantage, of course, of visitors coming who were staying just for a few days and that way we met quite a lot of interesting scholars who came and went. The Fellows, the resident staff – there were a good number, half a dozen or more, I can remember many of them now – the resident staff came in for lunch every day, at least every weekday, one or two others would appear at the weekends occasionally, so we really got to know them pretty well, and there was a good deal of give and take and so forth. What's his name, Ernst Kitzinger, was the Director of Studies then in the Byzantine field and the Byzantine field was very much stronger relative to the other fields of studies in those days, so I really didn't come across the people who were interested in Pre-Columbian Studies or Landscape Architecture at that time; it wasn't really yet a fully fledged program like it was later.
ABF: So, did it feel like a Byzantine –?
RWT: It felt very much like a Byzantine institution, and the building was used pretty much entirely for the Byzantine program. The Junior Fellows, of which I was one, had a large desk up in the main room overlooking the front, which was acres of space; it was very spacious. Later on it became very much too crowded. Gradually the Byzantine program became more famous, more people applied, things got more crowded and, of course, that led to various expansions of the physical building. It was a pretty relaxed place. It was quite enjoyable socially. There were the, of course, the concerts, a regular feature, for which one had to dress up. We had to wear dinner jackets, and Junior Fellows had to sit in the back row, but that's wasn't a hardship. The Blisses were still alive and around. I didn't see very much of Mr. Bliss, though once a year towards the end of the year they gave a big lunch party in their house; they lived a few blocks away. Mrs. Bliss was there much more frequently in the garden, usually, but they had a room at the end of the Orangery, I mean at the end that looks over the Orangery, which was called the Founders Room, and that was where they went. Now, these famous teas that were mentioned – I don't remember it. There was tea served every day, but that's not what you had in mind. There were these special occasions. I don't really remember those. What I remember was that after the gardens had closed, then we were allowed – there was cheese served, and we went out into the Orangery. What should I say? Amongst the staff there, there were particular – the person who was the most influential in my personal career was Sirarpie Der Nersessian, a famous Armenian scholar, Armenian Byzantinist art historian. I had come to finish writing a thesis that I was doing for Cambridge University which was on Syriac and Armenian versions of the Greek, some of the Greek works of St. Athanasios of Alexandria, so I worked away at that, but Sirarpie Der Nersessian, knowing my interest in Armenia, got me working on other various non-related Armenian themes, which in the long run led me to concentrate on Armenian. The others, the other Senior Fellows, we met from time to time. Some of them were a bit more gregarious, as is natural in any group, some of them were more gregarious than others. Ihor Ševčenko, for example, always used to come out in the evenings with the Junior Fellows after the concerts, and we would go down and have a beer in one of the pubs down in Georgetown. Romilly Jenkins, who had arrived that year, wasn't living in the building, but he always appeared, and we went for long walks on Sunday morning in the better weather. So, one did get to know people, but I would say most of my social life, by good chance, was without, was with people outside Dumbarton Oaks. Now, you won't know the building of course, the old Fellows Building, but downstairs, and you went in the front door, you went straight into a very large sitting room, probably as big as this room we're sitting in now, and on the right was the dining room and the kitchen beyond. Now, there was a very old radio or some such there, and we told Ernst Kitzinger that we, the Fellows, needed – the Junior Fellows needed something a bit more up to date, and we got a good stereo system. I went out and I bought some extra-long wires, so we were able to use this stereo system in the lounge, put the wires under the carpets into the dining room where we could have dancing in the evenings. Now, I met in my earlier travels in Turkey, I met someone, I met several people at the British embassy, and he happened to be posted to Washington when I was there with his family. Now he had young children at the time, and he had an au pair girl, a Danish girl, and through her I met a large number of people my own age, and so we had a number of very pleasant evenings in the Fellows Building.
ABF: And you were about twenty-six years old?
RWT: Let me see, well, sixty years. That was a very good guess on your part, exactly. I'd spent a lot of time before going there, I must admit, after I finished my undergraduate degree in Classics. I wanted to go to Greece, and I applied for a traveling scholarship, and I couldn't get the traveling scholarship. It was given to someone who'd been to Greece before, which I thought was a bit unfair – never mind. It was much more influential, I was offered a chance to go to a Greek college in Istanbul, which was then flourishing, later, of course, the Turks closed it.
ABF: Was this the Halki?
RWT: Halki, yes, Halki Theological College. It's not just theology. They had a large number of orthodox who weren't necessarily Greek from all over the world, and many of the students did not intend to become priests or anything, but a number of them did. Anyway, I spent a year and there was able to travel very extensively in Turkey, going to the east. And I returned several summers later, I mean consecutively for several summers. I went to Trebizond and helped with the cleaning of the frescoes there at Saint Sophia in Trebizond, for example. I happened to know Talbot Rice because I lived in Edinburgh and he was professor of art at Edinburgh, so I got to know him, and also other people who, including Michael Gough, who later became the director of the British School there, in Ankara in Turkey.
ABF: Did you have any contact with Paul Underwood when you were there?
RWT: No. I knew Paul Underwood later on, when I became a Junior Fellow. I did have some contact with the Byzantine people who were working there, but that was rather by the way. I wasn't at all involved with it, but by good chance I did meet one young chap who was involved at Hagia Sophia, a young Russian, I've forgotten his name now, and he was able to me get up right onto the roof. And we got into Hagia Sophia, right up to the top, 'round that terrifying passageway under the dome, out onto the roof. I was young at the time. I've been up on the top of Hagia Sophia – very impressive place. So, I got sort of – I didn't know much about Byzantium before going there – so it got me greatly interested, and of course in the eastern part of the country I was introduced to the Armenian patriarch and various other people, so that sort of sets a scene. Later, when I was back in Cambridge, I was encouraged to study Armenian. I got my first lessons in Vienna, on my way back to Istanbul a couple of years later, so all this was, what should I say, not distracting, it was all very interesting but it meant that my years after being an undergraduate extended a little bit more than the usual three. So, when I got to Dumbarton Oaks, Sirarpie Der Nersessian knew of my interests in Armenian, but of course, I had already been studying it. I started in 1958 in Vienna, I took lessons with the lecturer in Armenian in London, there was already one position in this country then, and so I was able to work with the texts reasonably well. I also polished up a few other skills – well polished, not up, but polished a few other skills while I was at Dumbarton Oaks. Irfan Shahîd, whom you may have met, was there, and he, I believe he wasn't married then, so he wasn't living in the building, but he spent a lot of time there. He helped me with my Arabic, because I assisted him reading Syriac texts, so that helped. Anyway, I finished my basic work for the thesis and just had to put the finishing touches on when I went back to Cambridge. That would have been in the summer of '61, and so Sirarpie Der Nersessian encouraged me to go, to take a trip up to Harvard. I obviously was looking for possibilities of further research or perhaps an appointment or something in the field with my background of Classics, Syriac, and Armenian, and totally unbeknownst to me, there had been, for the last two or three years, an effort at Harvard to establish a position in Armenian Studies, basically founded and funded by an organization of the Armenian community there. Now, I didn't know anything about that.
ABF: The Armenian community in Cambridge?
RWT: In Cambridge and the larger Boston area, yes. So, they had already appointed a junior, a junior position, someone by the name of Avedis Sanjian, who later went to UCLA as a professor there. Now, when I went up to Harvard, it was a very interesting three or four days. I had some friends there from Cambridge and I should also explain that the director of studies that I'd had as a doctoral student was Robert Casey, and American Harvard product of the 1920s who died during the time that I was a graduate student, and he died in 1958. So, when I – he had many acquaintances, of course, and old friends back at Harvard – so when I went to Harvard I sort of followed these up, and met a large number of interesting people, and what was interesting was, since I didn't know anything about this Armenian position, first of all, I went to the Classics Department, and then, the then chairman of Classics Department said "Oh, this is all very interesting, but I don't know that we can help you. On the other hand, don't worry, you can get a good living teaching Latin and Greek in one of the good schools around here and you can continue your interests in Armenian on the side." That wasn't quite what I was looking for. Then I saw Robert Walsh in history. I went to the Middle East Center and I saw all sorts of other people, including Richard Frye, who is still alive, and he put me onto the Near Eastern Languages Department, and I went 'round there and I discovered that they were quite interested in Armenian, and at first the chairman thought I wanted to study Armenian. Well, I mean I wasn't averse to that, but then he realized that I was about to get my doctorate, so he said, "It would be interesting if you could do some post-graduate study with Professor Garitte in the University of Louvain, Belgium." They tried to get Garitte to come to Harvard and he wasn't having any of it, nor did Sirarpie Der Nersessian want to take up a position there. In fact, all of the senior people that they'd approached turned it down, so they packed me off and that was very nice. So, I had a year in Louvain, where I got a licence in doing the three Christian Oriental languages, Armenian, Arabic, now I was going to offer Syriac. But the man in charge of Syriac, whom I met before, was an old friend of my deceased supervisor. He said, "No, don't be silly, you've already done Syriac. You must do Georgian." So, I did, you had to offer three languages, so I offered those three, which was quite influential. And then I was – at the end of that – I was offered an instructorship back at Harvard, so there was a year's gap, but I got married then, and Judith and I came over to Harvard in '63. So, my time at Dumbarton Oaks was very productive, especially in guiding my interests into Armenian and, of course, making this connection with Harvard. So, I was appointed for a three-year instructorship. Well, somehow it dragged out to thirty – well, never mind!
ABF: So, can you tell me a bit more about how your intellectual relationship with people like Sirarpie Der Nersessian and Ernst Kitzinger influenced your growth in those years after first coming to Dumbarton Oaks?
RWT: Well, obviously, at that stage, pretty much a neophyte in Armenian, Sirarpie was very helpful – guided me. I mean, she wasn't a teacher in any way, but she guided me in various directions which one has to use one's own, what should I say, one's own mind. Ernst Kitzinger was, I mean, he didn't have any direct impact. He wasn't interested in the topic that I was doing for my thesis. In fact, some of the topics I discussed with visitors like André Grabar, who was visiting, and there were things that arose out of this particular text that I had, this very curious collection of Syriac translations that he was helpful with. And various other people that one talked about this or that problem, so Ernst was very supportive, and of course, later on, he was a great friend of ours in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after he'd retired, not retired, after he'd left Dumbarton Oaks. I met a number of people later, Milton Anastos for example. I met him in UCLA on a couple of occasions – still it's hard to say how they directly influenced one at the time, but they were all very encouraging and gave one all sorts of thoughts and ideas. Milton Anastos was a bit memorable because he had a Greek diary, or, not exactly a diary, it was a collection of funny stories, one for each day, which he got while he was in Greece, and he insisted at lunchtime reading us all the funny story of the day. Some of them were really not very funny. I remember groaning when he got up to tell us this funny story of the day. Now, I remember you asked or mentioned earlier the question of my relationship with the Director. Now that really didn't – there wasn't any. I don't remember him at all except what he looked like. I must have gone to a reception in his house, he lived in the house that we later lived in, but there was really no contact at all. The contact I had was with the people in the Byzantine program.
ABF: You have perceived, you must, when becoming Director later on, the way that the institutional character changed based on the directorship. So, I was interested if you had any impressions of the Director at the time when you first arrived in 1960?
RWT: Well, of course, I never met Jack Thacher again because by the time that I became a Senior Fellow he had died, and I didn't know his successor Bill Tyler until I went there in the '80s and he, Tyler, also had retired. I didn't see him very often, just two or three times socially. He was a bit reclusive, but we managed to persuade him to come have lunch with us one day, so the directorship was very different, I think, from what it was, at least in my immediate time, and probably in Giles's. Because Thacher was very much involved with the running of all these projects that Dumbarton Oaks had in Turkey, in Istanbul, in Cyprus, and elsewhere, so I got the impression. And that, of course, didn't affect me in my work at all. So, he was, he was doing things that I, as a Junior Fellow, never came across.
ABF: Because other people have talked about the fact that Thacher had a relationship with Mrs. Bliss, for example, and they were from the same social world.
RWT: Exactly. And he – it was Thacher who sort of ran the place from the beginning, and it was Mrs. Bliss who – and Mr. Bliss but especially Mrs. Bliss, a very strong-willed woman – who pretty much indicated what she wanted him doing.
ABF: My impression from listening and reading some of the interviews was that, whereas some of the later Directors such as yourself were very much primarily interested in being scholars, he once even told one professor at the institute, to a Junior, I guess, Fellow, he said "I am not a scholar," at one point, implying that perhaps –
RWT: Well, I think that he was certainly very well aware and informed of what was going on, indeed. But he wasn't involved in scholarship in the way that the people like Milton Anastos and Kitzinger and Cyril Mango and Ševčenko, and all those others, Glanville Downey, all these other people, not at all. So, that's, from my own personal point of view, they're pretty much blank.
ABF: So, let's move on to your years as a Senior Fellow after you'd been at Harvard.
RWT: Yes. I'd been at Harvard. I didn't really – I went to one or two of the annual symposia, early in the '60s – but I really didn't have much contact with Dumbarton Oaks for a long time. By chance, the last time I was in Trebizond with my wife, we happened to meet Giles Constable in a restaurant, and he thought that Judith and I were just going around in our usual fashion, taking the buses. We were going into the Soviet Union afterward and all the way up to Georgia, but we were at Trebizond. And he, Giles, and his wife had a car and chauffeur, so they very kindly took us along. He asked me to be his interpreter, not that my Turkish was brilliant, but I certainly had spent a long time in the country and was able to get around. And so we were able to go visit a number of Armenian sites, like Ani on the border and so on. And he went off, and we went on into the Soviet Union. So, he must have been aware of my interest in that part of the world and in the '70s, I presume, when he became Director, he thought of me as a possible Senior Fellow in that area. Anyway, I don't know who did it, but he was the director when I was appointed one of the Senior Fellows in, what was it, '78 or something like that, can't remember exactly. I remember, do you know Alice-Mary?
ABF: Yeah.
RWT: Alice-Mary Talbot. Well, we, she was a Senior Fellow at the same time, and her period, she only served about three years or something at the time, and I remember saying goodbye to her at National Airport even before I became the Director, thinking that was probably the last time we would ever meet. And it was kind of amusing to see her back at Dumbarton Oaks later on. So, there were several interesting collections of people, and we would meet twice a year, sometimes more often if there was something really urgent. Our main task, of course, was the selection of Fellows, junior and senior, from all the applications, so we would spend a weekend at the beginning of the year in January interviewing the junior ones and discussing the senior ones; that was interesting. Then we had to share discussions about projects that were going on and any other serious academic business because there was not a Director of Byzantine Studies. The great change came, I don't know whether you're going to interview Giles Constable –
ABF: We are, definitely.
RWT: The great change came with him from Bill Tyler, who took – continued the Thacher tradition, and having then someone there to run the Byzantine program. I think Bill Loerke was for a while, but I'm not sure about that – before my time. Then, there was quite a revolution, if that's the right word, because the Director was appointed from Harvard, an academic, and, in fact, Giles and then myself acted as the sort of chairman of the Senior Fellows in Byzantine Studies. I don't think you could have called us directors, not me certainly, Director of Studies, but simply we coordinated the efforts of the Byzantine program, the Fellows and the publications and all that.
ABF: What did you think of this new institutional arrangement?
RWT: Well, it seemed to me very sensible, not having of course – I didn't experience what it was like – whether Jack Thacher, in those days, needed any outside committee, I have no idea. I don't know – he had a whole bunch of people. How these senior people all got on together is a more tricky question. I don't really know. Of course, I had plenty of friends of my own I had to amuse myself with and wasn't involved with any of the problems of the institution.
ABF: How did you perceive the change between when you were there as a Junior Fellow and then as a Senior Fellow, some eighteen years later?
RWT: Yes, it must have been about eighteen years later.
ABF: Yes, sixteen, '79.
RWT: I don't know that I noticed particularly any great difference.
ABF: Well, the Blisses were gone.
RWT: No, the Blisses were gone, right. But really, they had not influenced the life of the Junior Fellows all that much. They were sort of talking points. They were no longer around. The Junior Fellows and the Byzantine Senior Fellows – the Byzantine Fellows would come and go just as they had done in my time. I thought that life for them was pretty much the same as it had been for me, so I didn't, from that point of view, notice any sort of difference. But it was apparent when I took over in '84 that there were still some dedicated but very long-serving staff there and that there had been quite dramatic changes from their point of view when an academic came in and also had to organize the place both financially and in other respects much more in conformity with the way universities are run. Not that the university interfered, but we didn't have control of our own funds, as perhaps you know. The Blisses' moneys became part of the Harvard endowment, and they – of course, it was like having a certain number of shares, if you like, in the funds. We had our budget, over which we had control, but thank goodness, I wasn't in charge of trying to invest or whatever the actual funds did. We just operated with a large budget that was done through the Harvard Financial Office.
ABF: So, when you became Director, what was it like to take over from Giles Constable, who had been something of a controversial figure?
RWT: Well, I think he was controversial because he'd had to introduce these changes. I mean, they were – he wasn't the ultimate boss. The ultimate boss was the president, and in those days – I think there's been a big change now – but in those days one reported directly to the president, there was no intermediary. My relationships with Derek Bok were very good, he left us pretty much alone, I must say. The only times I was ever worried was when he said, "Now, Robert, are you sure that you wouldn't like a little help?" And I always dreaded that and I thought, "No thank you! No thank you very much!"
ABF: What did he mean by that?
RWT: Well, I was never quite sure. Whether he meant that a little bit more direction from Harvard would be required I don't know. Anyway, nothing ever came of it, but he was supportive of the things we wanted to do and helpful if I had problems. The only thing that slightly worried me was that he did want to use Dumbarton Oaks as a place where he could meet people in the government. How much – my wife thinks I'm a paranoid about that. I didn't like – except on a social level, we had good relationships with a number of people in Washington, we'll come to that later – but I didn't like that. Now, so far as following on from Giles is concerned, I didn't notice any difficulty, because that was the system I was used to. I wasn't immediately aware that many of the staff had been disrupted or things had changed and they didn't like them, and so I must say, I felt my first year or two was very much a time to just be quiet and let things settle down and not do anything too dramatic and try to be as unobtrusive as possible. I don't know, I mean, I'm not the one to judge what it was like to be there when I was the Director, but I certainly was aware of that.
ABF: But did you feel that things had been unsettled when you came in?
RWT: No. I mean, the programs were running properly. No. I mean, one shouldn't exaggerate that. It's simply that I was aware that some of the staff who had been there a long time felt that changes had been made, changes which basically I certainly approved of, in the way of accountability, that was apparently one of the most extraordinary things about the way the budget was presented. Giles used to say, and then I can't speak to this except what I remember him saying that the budget used to consist of three lines, but I think that was an exaggeration. But there was much more accountability required, just as there is at a university these days. So, I'd been chairman of my department before going to Dumbarton Oaks for quite a long time, and Derek Bok and Rosovsky, Henry Rosovsky, the dean at the time, they had introduced a much more rigorous way of doing business. I suppose as you grow up you don't think about it, but if you live through a change like that some people do notice and regret it, as it were. No, I didn't have any serious problem with that. I didn't want to change the way things were run particularly much, no. But there's always a problem, and one has to be a bit tactful here because if you come in to run an institution and you aren't going to be there permanently – it's different if you're going to be permanent, I said to Derek Bok that I would to take it for five years, and I did; I didn't stay on. I mean, you can't just hire and fire everybody, especially at university, and sometimes people are not exactly the kind of person that you would want in that job if you were ultimately in charge of the whole proceedings, in other words, there were some very good people at Dumbarton Oaks, excellent, and there were some people that were very efficient but whose attitude toward life didn't exactly conform with mine and whose way of treating staff – that's some cheeky business – who treated the staff in a very offhand fashion. I don't mean the academic staff, there were a large number of people just running the place. There are about ninety or so on that list, I don't know whether they still produce a list of all the staff, do they, these days? We used to produce a card every year.
ABF: Yeah, I've seen them.
RWT: With all the staff. Now, of course, out of the ninety, about twenty, twenty-five, thirty might be academic in some way or another, but a lot of people are just keeping the place going, and they have to be happy, and so that was a problem. And it requires a certain amount of what I call emotional energy to deal with those problems.
ABF: Speaking of keeping people happy, what was your perception of the relationship and relative parity or lack of parity between the three programs?
RWT: What was my perception of it? Well, it's very interesting in different ways; it's quite clear though that Byzantine Studies had started with a big bang and had flourished. In fact, Dumbarton Oaks in that regard had made a great difference to the discipline the world over, the vast numbers of people from every country who wanted to come and be a Fellow are just a small indication of that. The Pre-Columbian program, in a much more modest fashion, was doing the same. It started later; they had that wonderful museum and collection, and that has probably attracted more visitors than the Byzantine museum as such. I don't know about scholars. Landscape Architecture was a bit more diffuse. It had been, of course, an interest of Mrs. Bliss's, hence those three subjects, so diverse. Nobody these days sitting down would think, "Oh, what a wonderful idea, let's have a research institution with these three subjects." It's a historic development. It didn't bother me. I sometimes wondered whether the people in the other programs were sort of jealous of the relative funding. If so, they never made it apparent, or they never said so overtly. There was never, on anybody's part, an effort to say, "Look, we've got three programs, we need to divide the kitty up exactly into three." No, no, no. No such suggestion, and I found it very interesting, especially the social side of it, there were significant differences between the Fellows, the Junior Fellows who came to do Pre-Columbian Studies, their backgrounds their interests, et cetera, were very different from those who were doing Byzantine Studies or Landscape Architecture, which was also very international. So, it was an intriguing thing, but it didn't bother me, and I hope that the people in the other programs thought that they were reasonable treated.
ABF: Did you, were you involved in changing any policies for the allocation of funding?
RWT: There wasn't much change, no. In my five years as director, we didn't make any significant difference there, no, not at all. Now, as I was involved in the programs, each of the three programs had its little committee of Senior Fellows, and the smaller programs, interestingly enough, had their Director of Studies, Elizabeth Boone for the Pre-Columbian and Elisabeth MacDougall for the Landscape Architecture, and when she retired John Hunt came. Now, they had in their small group of Senior Fellows, some of whom were very interesting. Some were in Washington – I met a number of people that way – and some of them came from further afield, so I was always a member of that group. Now, I don't think my name would appear on the card, but I went to the meetings of the Senior Fellows and joined in the discussion and so on. So, it was my job to try and mediate any difficulties that might arise. So, it is quite possible that, since space, for example, was limited, we couldn't have all the Fellows who wanted to come, junior or older, that we would have to have a little bit of give and take about how many we're going to have this year. I'd read all the applications in all the fields – that was quite interesting. I didn't get too much involved in the publications outside the Byzantine area, relying more on – that's very much a technical expertise, but I didn't myself, don't remember that being a difficult aspect of the job, no.
ABF: So, you had a relationship with people like Elizabeth Boone and Gordon McEwan and John Dixon Hunt?
RWT: John Dixon Hunt, yes, he was a Senior Fellow in that program, and then he took over for Elisabeth MacDougall. Yes, these were all colleagues and friends, yes.
ABF: So, can you tell me a little bit more about the relationship between Dumbarton Oaks and Harvard at that point, because you mention sort of in passing that you felt that Bok was trying to use –
RWT: No, well, don't say that he was – oh, I see, he was trying to use – yes, he was pretty standoffish about it, but he did, on occasion, want to have events at Dumbarton Oaks, which were to do with his relationship with various government bodies. A lot of funding comes to universities from the government, and so maybe I shouldn't have made too much of that. The relationship with Harvard in my time was remarkably easy. I would go up twice a year for a discussion about what was happening, I would present a report, of course. The budget had to go through the financial office, but I don't remember any problems about it. The lawyer for the president was occasionally involved in one or two things and he was very helpful. So, they had a small committee of advisers, the president, the dean, and somebody else I've forgotten, but I can't say that they really took much of a role. I think they thought the place was going along alright, and that was fine. The question that did arise was that of the library. That was an on-going thing which later directors had to deal with. It started – I can't remember exactly when it started. The problem of whether there should be an integrated catalog, which of course there is now, the union catalog, of all Harvard holdings and Dumbarton Oaks' included, like Villa I Tatti, I presume, and so on, and the Hellenic Center, and then, well, should all institutions have the books that they want or should the system only buy one or two books, the very expensive kinds. These were the sort of nitty gritty questions that the librarians would get all uptight about, but it's an interesting and serious problem. The costs of cataloging – for example, if Harvard doesn't use – does Harvard use the Library of Congress system or not? They certainly didn't in those days. These are sort of difficult problems and especially, I would say it falls into a category somewhat similar to the idea, Giles' idea, at least it came about in his time, that Dumbarton Oaks should sponsor university positions. Now, as you know, at Harvard there are three professorships that are partially funded by Dumbarton Oaks money. I don't know to what extent the system of junior positions in other universities, which are meant to be a kind of seed money to encourage that university, Johns Hopkins, The Catholic University, Georgetown University, and elsewhere. The idea was to encourage them to appoint somebody in Byzantine Studies on the understanding that that person would make good and be continued; that's always a bit of a risk – some worked out and some didn't. So, that was what you might called a diversion of Dumbarton Oaks money outside Dumbarton Oaks, that was always a rather tricky sort of question, different from a project which is a one-time thing: you go and restore the frescoes in such and such a church in Cyprus or what have you; but these were more ongoing things.
ABF: So, that brings me to another question that I hadn't thought of until this moment: Dumbarton Oaks had stopped funding excavations and projects in Turkey, for example. What was your opinion on that and that use of money?
RWT: Well, I mean, in the days when I was involved with the budget, the amount of money Dumbarton Oaks had was not all that great. You couldn't run down to the business men and say, "Well, we need an extra hundred thousand dollars." It certainly was a question of priorities. There was another point which was that permits for excavation were not always very easy to get, and there was a third point which is more of a psychological point, that not all of those projects had been published or published properly. That was a sore point with many people. They'd say we'd spent all this money and there's nothing very obvious to show for it, and that was a serious, I think, it was a serious problem, that people who had been supported to do projects, interesting, valuable, I'm not against that, did not come through and produce the reports and the final publications. That's why we had some trouble trying to persuade people that, people who shall be nameless, who had been ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty years behind them, sometimes they wanted money, sometimes they didn't, but it was very difficult – that I found a tiresome business.
ABF: So, was it for these reasons or is it something that should just be in the nature of the job to just take it for five years? What's your opinion on a term limit?
RWT: Oh, alright, just change the subject to that. Well, it's a very tricky question. It's a fairly small institution; it's run by the university. If the – let me start from the beginning. When Derek Bok first asked me – I was still at Harvard, I think I'd stopped being chairman, anyway, never mind – would I take on the job, I said, "Well, I'm interested in my academic work. I'm not sure. Maybe I'll do it for five years." I think five years came pretty much off the top of my head but it turns out to have been about right for me, I'll explain later. So, he said, "Well, you could always try it. I mean, you won't lose your position here. If you go down and you don't like it you can just come back." Now that of course is a kind of relationship that if you've had a permanent Director could not possibly work, because if for some reason or other the people at Harvard who are ultimately in charge and the Director did not get on then that Director would have to look for another job. Now for a man – oh I don't know how old a Director might be, but certainly Jan is reasonably young, and Jack Thacher of course was much older when he left – but shall we call him someone between the ages of about forty-five and sixty-five, it's not always very easy just to leave your job and find another one. I mean, even if you are a very respected scholar, not everybody is going to offer you a job, so I can see the advantages of that relationship and the reason why the president might not want to have somebody there too long. Now, I know the previous director, Ned Keenan, was there for ten years, which strikes me as quite a long time. So, what do I think about it? I don't know. It's a very tricky situation. I don't have any strong views. I think if it's going to be run as an academic institution there has to be a kind of lifeline for the Director, because I can imagine some people not enjoying it. On the other hand, see what happens if the chair does enjoy it? Some people do not, this hasn't happened to the Directors, but I'm just speaking in general of people I know in the universities here and at Harvard and elsewhere, who, after they've reached a certain age, have accomplished many of the academic things they've wanted to do, and are very interested in going into something more administrative. A fair amount of that goes on here at Oxford, and probably at Harvard, I don't know. So, I could easily imagine somebody who at the age I was – sort of middle of my life – went there, became very interested in Washington, one had an entree into all sorts of different fields – I'll come back to that later if you'd like – it could be very interesting and you might want to make a career out of it. But if you did, the people at Dumbarton Oaks might not be very happy with that. They might want you to concentrate more on what you're doing at home, I don't know, so I think there are pros and cons, and since I'm not in charge and I don't appoint the Directors I think that's as much as I can say.
ABF: So, why was five years right for you?
RWT: Well, I think if I'd stayed away longer I would have got further, even further away from my academic interests. I taught once a week, every Thursday afternoon I set aside, and I had classes in Armenian and sometimes in Georgian, and for any students who wanted to come, and I had them from Catholic University, from Georgetown, and elsewhere. And so that sort of kept me awake, that was good, and it led, in fact, to some interesting publications eventually.
ABF: Was it something that you missed? Teaching?
RWT: I like teaching, yes. I knew nobody else around there was going to do any teaching in Armenian, and once you got involved in the field you want other people to share it, so I enjoyed that and thought it was important. I suppose if you're in Byzantine Studies it's a much better known field. Armenian is very small and very few people know it, so I don't regret the five years. Of course, when I left I didn't know that I was going to be invited here. I mean, I always thought I would go back to Harvard, so for various personal reasons, if I had known – but who knows the future – if I had known that I would be offered this position here, I might have said, "Well, I'll stay seven years if that's alright with you. Then I'll go straight to Oxford." But of course you don't know the future. So, five years was fine.
ABF: So, your family came and lived with you in Dumbarton Oaks?
RWT: What do you mean came and lived with me? It was a family enterprise. We all moved there. Now, this was very important, and I don't understand why Ned Keenan moved out of the place, he has his own reasons if you ask him, but we lived right – it wasn't all that comfortable, it was fine for us – we lived there as a family and the boys had to share the attic. At least we had managed to get it air conditioned, can't live the whole year in Washington without some air conditioning in an attic.
ABF: You were in the Refectory?
RWT: Yes, they call it the Refectory now, I understand. It was quite a nice house. We did a lot of entertaining there, and with the garden in front, and of course the gardens. I felt that while I was living there, this was my institution. I would get up in the warmer weather very early, go out into the gardens before the gardeners – what, they arrived about six or seven – go for a swim, get to know everybody on the estate. I had to look after the estate. I'd go around regularly with the head gardener. I would be in charge of everything that was there, the music, the programs, the connections to people outside Dumbarton Oaks in Washington. It was like running your own little estate. I thought that was very enjoyable. I remember the very first party we gave at Christmas the first year, and we invited children, people's children, and we laid on various entertainments for them. One of the Junior Fellows came up – she was from Italy – and she said, "You know, we would never have a party like this in my country, where everybody from the Director to the doorman is all here." And I thought that was very sad. Whether I succeeded, I don't know, but that was the kind of place that I wanted to make it, and which made it enjoyable to sort of be right there and be involved with everything, get to know everyone.
ABF: How old were your children?
RWT: Jasper finished his high school, so he must have been fourteen, and his brother is three years younger, so he would have been eleven.
ABF: It must have been kind of magical to wake up and go out in these gardens. They probably didn't think that.
RWT: I don't know, you'll have to ask them. The elder boy still lives – he got bitten with the political bug while he was in Washington, as so often happens. In fact, he worked for a while on Capitol Hill and he still lives there. The other one is a free spirit, he's gone off to San Francisco. So anyway, it was a bit tricky, you haven't had children yet. When I first broached the subject to the children, that we were going to move from where we lived in Arlington, Massachusetts, right next to Cambridge, to Washington, Crispin, he didn't say very much, but Jasper said, "No, I'm not going. That's fine, you can go and I will stay here and I will live with my friends." And we said okay, and let's see, and he said no more about it. Then some months later, out of the blue, he said, "Father, when we go to Washington, will I be able to do this?" So, he'd obviously got around to it without too much prompting and he obviously had a good time, we found a very good school. The other one was a bit more difficult, I don't know. There are problems with having children, though. I'm afraid the local school is pretty terrible, so it's: can't send them to the local high school. It's not always easy to find the right school for the right child, that's the same anywhere, I guess, but it worked out very well.
ABF: Were there other families there with children, living on the property?
RWT: No, oh no, no. The head gardener, Don Smith, he had a little house down in the gardens. The Kazhdans lived – there was a house on the corner of S Street, at the end of S Street, there was a double house there – and the Kazhdans had one half of it and the other half, which is where Sirarpie Der Nersessian had lived when I was a Junior Fellow, was occupied by the assistant director, so they lived on property; there weren't any children though. I don't think that any of the other staff – we weren't that friendly, I mean that close to any of the other staff who might have had children, so their friends were all made through school or the boys' club. There's a good boys' club just down the road
ABF: Right, it's still there. The Boys' and Girls' Club.
RWT: It was called the Boys' Club then, I don't know whether they had girls, I don't remember. I remember Crispin breaking his leg there and just before we were going to have a big dinner party, and so Judith took him off to the hospital and I had to get Elizabeth Boone to stand in as the hostess for this big dinner party. She was a bit surprised, but it was very enjoyable and the staff there were very friendly, so it was, from that point of view, a very agreeable place. But also Washington was agreeable, it was a pretty dull place when I'd come there in 1960, well, I had a jolly good time, but that's by the way. By the time I went back, there were good relationships with the Hellenic Center, Zeph Stewart, a classicist, I don't know whether you ever met him before he died.
ABF: Harvard?
RWT: Yeah. He was very cooperative and we would, once a week, Fellows, some Fellows would come to lunch with us from over there and visa versa, so there was some give and take there. But the other institutions made, were involved in this sort of luncheon club, I don't know what else really to call it. Fairly regularly, Zeph Stewart and I and the directors of various institutions in Washington would meet for lunch and talk about things of common interest. Hank Millon, who ran the institute at the National Academy, was called the Research Institute, I've forgotten the exact name of it, where they had some program in the study of art. They had Fellows and visitors and things. They were very agreeable, so we had – and the people from the Smithsonian, in fact, the secretary of the Smithsonian, Adams, he was friendly, too, and some of the smallish institutions, the Library of Congress, I met Billington and the Boorstins were very friendly; they entertained us. And Billington, he was then in some Russian center, I've forgotten what, so I thought of other museums, too. I mean, Dumbarton Oaks counted as a museum, so when Mrs. Bush gave a big lunch for museum directors, I was included, which was the only time I've ever gone into the White House, actually, but one met all sorts of interesting people that way. I was invited to their opening shows, etc., so I went, and of course there are always connections one then made with people in government. So, I can imagine someone getting very involved in that and it's a very interesting life, but that's not really what I wanted to do with myself.
ABF: It sounds like a very interesting intellectual world.
RWT: Well, it could be, yes, absolutely it could be.
ABF: What about the symposia?
RWT: Well, they were a long fixed, established tradition. We had lots of them, we had the regular spring symposium, and all, in Byzantine Studies. Each of the programs had its annual symposium which was important for that program and the people in it. So, a very large number of people came to Pre-Columbian and so on. And we had a good number of smaller gatherings, some of them really quite small, and on occasion we would let a Harvard group or something, in which people I knew could come and have their own little gathering. For example, there was one on philosophy which someone in my own department was interested in, so Dumbarton Oaks was host, as it were, to quite a number of occasions, not just the annual symposia. When I was here, we had the great big international symposium for Byzantine, whatever you call it, that occurs every four, five years. It was in London recently, so that was very funny, especially towards the end of the Soviet Union.
ABF: Really?
RWT: So, anyway, never mind, because, I can't remember the names of all these people. Now, whether any of these were more valuable or more important that any of the others, I don't know. I can think of several that I attended, but I – and in which I also participated – but I think they are an important feature of life and we continued that. I wouldn't like to say that any one was better than any other, but I think that they were significant, and also these smaller gatherings.
ABF: Were there any papers that you delivered that were particularly interesting or memorable to you?
RWT: Did I give them? I don't remember giving a paper while I was Director, though I went to conferences outside Dumbarton Oaks, so I did continue with my work, so, no. When I was a Senior Fellow there was a big symposium on Syria and, it was called East of Byzantium: Syria and Armenia, and people like Marlia Mango and Tom Mathews, Nina Garsoian, myself, and others whom perhaps you don't know, published this work which is in the field of Armenian studies still to be quoted, still to be used. I presume that in other subjects the proceedings of the symposia, whether they were published as such or included in Dumbarton Oaks Papers, would play the same sort of role.
ABF: What about your relationship with Angeliki Laiou, because I know that you –
RWT: With Angeliki?
ABF: Yes.
RWT: I first met her soon after she became, soon after she came to Harvard. I don't remember exactly when the first time was, but there, before I went to Dumbarton Oaks, I'd been appointed Professor of Armenian, and as I've told you, the community played an important role in founding this position. The Gulbenkian Fund had given some money, but nothing like the relative amount they gave to Oxford, so I had important connections with the community at large, which most academics don't have. I mean, they don't have a constituency – the Ukrainians of course did, and they were very successful in raising a vast sum of money. Anyway, never mind. Now, at the beginning, I thought it would be a useful idea to have a kind of committee of Harvard people, partly, between us, partly for show, but partly to perhaps get some interesting ideas in a broader sphere, because my interests in Armenian are in the literature of the classical and medieval periods, but Armenian studies encompasses quite a broad area, including archaeology and art and linguistics and so on. So, I got together about four or five of my friends and for history I was a bit puzzled, but anyway, I asked Angeliki, and she said yes, and we had the chairman of the linguistics department, an old friend of mine, and a colleague in archaeology, basically we just had a few pleasant lunches together, but the plan was, and it did work up to a point, the point was to think of ways in which the Armenian program, in a broader sphere, could be fitted a) into the university – well it was part of the university – but how it could incubate things a bit better. So, that's when I first met her, but I can't say our relationship was particularly close. So, she was really just a Harvard colleague of which I had a large number, we weren't close friends or anything, and then when she took over I saw her once or twice, but not very often. So, I can't say that we were – I mean it was all very positive, but it wasn't very much. Why do you ask?
ABF: Oh, just because I was looking at your publications with DO and I saw that you published "The Crusaders through Armenian Eyes" in a volume.
RWT: Well, she published it with Roy Mottahedeh, and so they'd invited me and a whole host of other people to give papers. So, I gave a paper in it, that's right, sure. So, I went back and gave that paper, but as I said, it didn't really lead to any close relationship or anything like that.
ABF: She's somebody like you who's had a long history with the institution both scholarly and administratively.
RWT: I know when her appointment was announced and she came down for the day to talk to me and Judith about what went on and what was happening, she was concerned about the music. She said, "I don't know anything about the music." Well, I enjoyed that very much. I wasn't totally in charge. We had a woman who'd been at Dumbarton Oaks for a very very long time who would come up with the ideas but I would make suggestions and had to approve things and so on. I must say, I enjoyed that. One was able to make hints and I said that on occasions, well you know, looking through, we haven't had any Schumann in a long time, and then a month or so later we had an absolutely marvelous pianist who played the Symphonic Variations by Schumann. That's the sort of thing you can have input to, it's really very satisfying.
ABF: One more question about your directorship years. Since you were there through '89, and many people have talked about how Dumbarton Oaks had this European and also very East European feel.
RWT: East European feel?
ABF: At certain points. Ihor Ševčenko talked about it.
RWT: Well, there were lots of people there, I mean, from very early on, who came from Yugoslavia or Eastern Europe but that's not very Eastern, but still I wouldn't say this was anything very new. What did happen, of course, by '89, was that once the restrictions –
ABF: That was going to be my question.
RWT: Ah, now, you see, what happened then was that the possibility of people coming became so much greater and the pool of applicants, people who wanted to come, was enormous. So, I mean, the Bulgarians are very strong in Byzantine Studies, not to say that people from Russia too and the Ukraine and everywhere. So, that creates a problem, simply because you have an even larger pool of good people and you can't take them all – now that just has to be handled as best you can. I don't know that these days any special consideration would be given. It was pretty difficult up until then to find people coming as Junior Fellows. You did get some from Yugoslavia. I'd have to look at the list; I don't really remember how many Fellows or visitors we had from Eastern Europe. We had people from Poland, I remember, from Moscow, Leningrad. I don't particularly remember. On one occasion we hosted a visitor, a Russian museum director, Piotrovski, from the Hermitage, and various other people from Moscow. I was slightly amused; I laid out a little reception in the Orangery and I insisted that we serve them wine from the Russian River, you know, in California? You know that part of the world?
ABF: I'm from California.
RWT: Oh, you know it well. Good. Well, it's a very interesting part of the world, but I think the significance was lost.
ABF: It must have been interesting to see these, to watch Perestroika and Glasnost happen also through the eyes of people like Alexander Kazhdan, who must have felt very personally invested in the changes that were taking place in the Soviet Union – that just kind of embedded in the institution a story, the stories that I get about people like the librarian Natalia Scheffer Ihor Ševčenko talks about, so, I always wondered if there was a –
RWT: That was just happening by the time I left, so I must say that I personally wouldn't have been much involved in that. While I could see it was going to be a problem from the point of view of trying to help all these people, there were just so many more who couldn't easily come with no restrictions. That was a problem.
ABF: So, I guess we're sort of coming to the end of your time at Dumbarton Oaks, but I kind of wanted to ask a sort of big picture question, or you touched on almost all the questions that I had put together. So, I wanted to ask, what do you see as Dumbarton Oaks's role in the field of Byzantine Studies as a whole and do you see that role changing in the future?
RWT: Changing in the future. Well, it plays a very significant role, I think most of the prominent Byzantinists have had some connection with it and speak very highly of it as a place where one can go and do some quiet research. And that was my objective, too, as Director – was to make the atmosphere as relaxed as possible so that people could get on with their own work. Now, there are two ways to run, to think of an institution. One is to run an institution where the institution has objectives, and the objective is to produce this or that and the people who come are appointed to work on specific projects. Now, the other way of looking at it is to say this is a place where people can come, we provide the facilities and they can get on with their own works. Now, Dumbarton Oaks has been able to balance that somewhat, it's a tricky balance. The more people you have in the institution working on a large project of the institution's own making the less space and money there is for people coming to do their own thing; so I could imagine that balancing act continuing. I'm not sure that I would like to see it go one way or the other extreme; so I would hope that it does continue. Some of the projects in the last ten, fifteen years have been very interesting. They don't affect my own research in my own field – it isn't a corpus we see too much – but they're obviously very valuable, but it would be sad if that became such an important feature that the possibility of people just doing their own thing was no longer there. This was one little problem I had with the Byzantine Dictionary, the famous Oxford Byzantine Dictionary, which had been started by Alexander Kazhdan under Giles's time. The previous Director had wanted some of the academic staff to write the pieces and some of the Junior Fellows or especially those who had joint appointments, they were hard pressed because they had to get on with their own research, they had to teach for the institutions, and they had been assigned quite significant portions of work, and I thought that wasn't quite fair. So, we tried to relieve the junior people of that, but that isn't to say that an institutional undertaking like the Dictionary of Byzantium wasn't a wonderful thing to have done, that was just a minor detail in it. I'm not going to be in charge, but it would seem to me that there is a role for both sides – if bounds can be kept so much the better. In the old days, that's the way to put it, I mean forty, fifty years ago, the projects were mostly archaeological. These days the projects are mostly in the field of publication, that's, I mean, it's the same idea really, except that when you have people working on publications, things like dictionaries or the edition of texts can be done elsewhere, but there were quite a lot of things done in house, that does take up space and time and money, of course, so it's a balancing act. I mean, it's a balancing act, just as it is with the programs and, indeed, in the Byzantine world itself, how do you balance all the different areas in which Byzantium is of interest. It was often said that if somebody appeared, somebody made an application, especially a junior person, in a subject that the Senior Fellows didn't know anything about, they'd be much more likely to get the fellowship, otherwise the Fellows would be rather more critical, as they would know the subject. Well, you have to balance all these things. Should you support research in Byzantine music as opposed to some aspect of art history or should you do this or that? You just – my philosophy is rather pragmatic – you just have to deal with things as they turn up. You must have something in your mind of what you're doing, I don't mean to be entirely frivolous, but the role of Dumbarton Oaks in the future I hope will include both aspects of this: a place for personal study in a congenial atmosphere where you can interact with other people and get some good ideas, but also some specific projects that are going to be a benefit for the field at large, so we shall see what we shall see.
ABF: Is there anything else you'd like to add that we haven't touched on?
RWT: I don't think so. I suppose if I were to reminisce, one of the more amusing things that happened when I was a Junior Fellow was that we would have visitors coming to the Fellows Building, staying a few days. We would see them, on those occasions we would see them in the evening, because dinner was served and the regular staff didn't appear, just the Junior Fellows. One day Ernst Kantorowicz came and he brought some wine for dinner. He was absolutely shocked to discover that we did not serve wine with dinner in the Fellows Building. Well, it hadn't been a policy. So anyway, we decided that we should rectify that policy and I was appointed the steward, so I collected one dollar every week from all of the people resident in the building and I went out and I produced wine. My only complaint was that the cooks kept the red wine in the fridge all the time, but it altered the tone of our conversations in the evening for the better. So, a little initiative can improve things within larger parameters. I am no revolutionary.
ABF: Well, thank you very much.]]>
IS: I'm glad you started by asking me about that, because I have been dealing with this theme for half a century. So, I will speak with some detail about it, because it throws light on my stay at Dumbarton Oaks and the various periods of the development of the institute. I conceived of my project, which is Byzantium and the Arabs, when I was a student at Oxford, reading Literae Humaniores, that is, classics and Greek and Roman history. My tutor was a distinguished historian, Nicholas Sherwin-White, and I used to go to the lectures and hear the famous Sir Ronald Syme. I chose as a special subject not the early Greek history, but the one which involved Alexander the Great, because he came to the Near East, where I was born. I was born in the Holy Land; I left in 1946, long before the Arab-Israeli conflict.
So, I took that and I decided to deal with the history of Byzantium and the Arabs; not with the Arabs as such, but to deal with them as a force in Roman history. In other words, the traditional view of the fall of the Roman Empire was to the German tribes in the west in the fifth century, but in the east the Arabs attacked in the seventh century. So, the fall of Rome has to take care of the two thrusts, the German and the Arab. Gibbon in his book put between two stiff covers the two peoples, but then they parted company. The descendants of the Germans, distinguished German scholars nowadays in Germany and in the nineteenth century and the twentieth, have dealt with the German problem. No one has really dealt with the Arabs as part of Roman history. They dealt with it as Arab history or as Islamic history, but not as a theme in the larger theme, the fall of the Roman Empire. This is what I decided to do. And I thought that that would be a worthy theme. It would be both Arab and classical and would do justice to my training.
Then I came to Princeton for my Ph.D., where I did Islamic and Arabic studies. The distinguished Islamic historian Philip Hitti was in his last days, and I added Persian and Turkish to my Arabic, to surround Arabic with a new family of Islamic languages which Islam created. They are unrelated structurally to each other: the one is a Semitic language, the other is an Indo-European language, Persian, and Turkish is a Turkic language, but they are Islamic, united by Islam.
Then I met there the famous distinguished scholar Amerigo Castro, the Spanish scholar who has written important works on the Arab factor in Spain and its importance, and he asked me to help him on the Arabic words in his book on the structure of Spanish history. The atmosphere there was no longer Mohammed and Alexander; it became how the Arabs split the Mediterranean. Everybody was talking about Henri Pirenne and Mohammed and Charlemagne and how the Arabs made Western Europe by the conquest of North Africa and Andalusia.
So, when I received my Ph.D., the department sent me to the Institute for Advanced Study. Ernst Kantorowicz, the famous medievalist, was there. He had just left Berkeley, having quarreled with the administration there about swearing an oath which he didn't want to. So, he said, "You know, it's better for you now at this stage of your development to start with the East rather than with the West – with Andalusia." I wanted to do Arab-Spanish history and try to answer Pirenne's question. I thought then, as I still do, that Pirenne raised the right question, Mohammed and Charlemagne – the Arabs contributed to the rise of Western Europe and Charlemagne – but he may have given the wrong answer. So, I wanted to give the right answer from Arab history, which briefly is that the Arab wall on the Ebro in Andalusia prevented the Carolingians from invading the Mediterranean, and so they stayed in the landmass of Western Europe, and this is how partly Western Europe was created.
So, he said, "Well, you should really apply to Dumbarton Oaks, because then you can deal with the Arabs and the Umayyads in the homeland before you come to the province," which was Spain, and so I came to Dumbarton Oaks. That was in 1954, as a Junior Fellow. 1954-1955. I thought I would stay for a few years there, and then I became so involved in it. I decided that this is the more difficult theme to do, much more difficult than the Arabs, Spain, and Charlemagne, because it was possible to do only by one who had the two sets of sources, the classical as well as the Oriental. In my case, by the accident of birth, I had the Arabic and Islamic, and then by training, I did the classical course. So, I thought, well, this should be done and that it is more difficult than the other one, because it involved dealing with inscriptions and with the various languages – Arabic, Syriac, and Greek and Latin – and it had to do with seals and coins, which is very time-consuming. So, I decided to stay in this field, but I didn't realize it would take that long. However, I'm glad I did.
So, this set what my project would be: Byzantium and the Arabs, especially in the seventh century, the rise of Islam and the Arab attack. And then I said, "Well, how can I deal with this without dealing with the centuries before the rise of Islam?" This had been a blank, only a few references here and there. The German scholar Nöldeke has done a classic on one Arab group, the Ghassanids. So, I decided to do the centuries before the rise of Islam on all the Arab groups involved with Byzantium.
My project became tripartite; so I divided it into: Rome and the Arabs from the settlement of Pompeii until Constantine, and then the middle period, Byzantium and the Arabs from Constantine to Heraclius, and then the third part, which is the climax, the rise of Islam and the Arab conquest. So, far I have finished one and two in six volumes, and volume seven is being now prepared for publication, which will bring to a close part two. Byzantion in Belgium has published three volumes collecting my articles, which are collateral with the six volumes, so we have now almost ten volumes on these three centuries. These have their own identity as contributions to late antiquity, but they are more importantly prolegomena for the rise of Islam and the Arab conquest, the climax of my work, which I hope to finish in the next few years. I have done most of the researches; it is a matter of reflecting on it and writing it; and if it has one virtue, it will be because I'll be the first historian to have filled the gap of all these centuries with my gaze fixed on the seventh to know exactly what happened and why it happened the way it did. My work will be facilitated by the two important works which have appeared by Fred Donner and Walter Kaegi on the Arab conquest, but I will treat problems which have not been done by them and which have been left out. In my hands, I think, there are the answers to the big questions of the Arab conquest: one of them is the incomprehensible victory of the Arabs over not only one empire, but two empires: Byzantium and Sassanid Persia, which they challenged and defeated, both within two years. So, it is an incomprehensible victory. This is part of my job to elucidate.
So, much for my work, which has been done here. It could have been done only at Dumbarton Oaks, because here is the major center for Byzantine studies. I keep telling Junior Fellows who come here when they are bored sometimes, "Now, look here. Napoleon said, 'Ask me for anything except time,' and scholarship is energy and time. One hour's work here is worth five hours' work elsewhere." And I give them an example: when I was in Oxford in 2001 for my sabbatical, I think one of my volumes – the last volume was printed in 2002 – was being done by the copy editor, and he asked me about a reference; I couldn't find it. I ran from my college, St. John's, to Balliol to the Ashmolean and to the Bodleian – couldn't find it. So, I called Glenn Ruby, in Publications at D.O., and I told him, "Glenn, please go to the third floor of the Main Building and look it up for me." So, he did it in five minutes, and then it was done. Working in Dumbarton Oaks is a great privilege, and it is a great economy in time.
Well, I think I have given you now how my work is related to Dumbarton Oaks and how Dumbarton Oaks has made it possible. Now, you want to see how the administration reacted to my work: when I came here, Dumbarton Oaks was in the hands of art historians, and it was natural, because it started as a museum. The director, Mr. Thacher, was an art historian too – although he was not an academic, but he had a degree in art, I think Spanish art – painting. And Miss Der Nersessian, who was then acting director in '54 after the death of A. Friend, was an art historian, Armenian. And then E. Kitzinger was a distinguished art historian; he became the director. So, there was little interest in my work, and the other scholars who were not art historians were not interested in it. Then I had some trouble.
When I came in 1954, Dumbarton Oaks had asked a distinguished French scholar, Marius Canard, who had worked on Byzantium and the Arabs. So, I felt at home with him, he was a very good man, and very helpful, and he came to look at the Nachlass of a distinguished Russian scholar, Vasiliev, who had worked on Byzantium and the Arabs, and unfortunately for me, he had died before I came. In other words, if he had been here when I came to D.O., the administration would have been more understanding of what I was doing.
Marius Canard understood my work, and I contracted a friendship with him until the end of his life, as I did with Speros Vryonis, who was with me as a Junior Fellow, and we still correspond. In the second semester I felt in a vacuum. I worked with Mr. Downey, Glanville Downey, who was a scholar here, but who had no interest in the Arabs. He was a very competent scholar, but a very difficult man. I understand he used to see a psychiatrist. If you made a mistake with him, he became angry. Let me give you an example: there was a Fellow, Byron Tsangadis, who came to work with him. He had an appointment with him, and he came three minutes late, so he kicked him out; he told him, "I cannot waste three minutes of my short life on earth waiting for you, so come tomorrow at the exact time." So, the poor man came two or three minutes before, so he kicked him out again. He told him, "Come exactly at the same time, at the time I wanted you to come."
In any case, he had also difficulty with the most distinguished man in Dumbarton Oaks, the leading Byzantinist of his generation, Cyril Mango. He picked him up from Turkey, because he noticed that he was precocious: he had written an article when he was, I think, twenty-one years old, and Downey said, "Well, we must bring him to Dumbarton Oaks." Then he had the same trouble with him – I get this from both Mango and from Julia Warner, who was the editor of Dumbarton Oaks Papers: Mango corrected him on the translation of, I think, the word teleosis, and Downey thought it meant "perfection" and Mango thought it meant "death," the "dormition of Virgin Mary." He became very unfriendly to him. Julia Warner told me that he used to sing his praises and then all of a sudden he said, "We cannot have him here, because his German is not very good, and you must read German to be a good Byzantinist." So, nobody, of course, listened to him: Miss Der Nersessian and everybody knew that Mango was a distinguished young scholar, precocious, and came to his support.
Well, I had the same problem with him; I forgot what was the problem, and he became rather unpleasant. And I presented him with an essay on Procopius. Procopius, as you may know, is the main historian of the reign of Justinian, and I discovered many mendacities he said about the Arabs in his work, so I collected them and wrote an essay. He was negative towards it; it was very strange, and I said, "Fine." Then I had an appointment to go to UCLA to teach. I sent the same article, but with footnotes and appendices, to the BZ, the Byzantinische Zeitschrift, the foremost Byzantine periodical, and F. Dölger loved it, but the article I gave Downey was without footnotes then, because I wanted him to know the substance of my argument. It has been described by some of my friends as one of the most influential articles I have written, the one which Downey had reported negatively on. However, Downey was a decent man; he became very friendly later and he gave me every support writing recommendations.
When I was teaching at UCLA, Sir Hamilton left Oxford; he gave up his Laudian Professorship of Arabic and accepted the Jewett Professorship of Arabic at Harvard and became a University Professor. He was a giant in every sense, physically and otherwise. So, my fortunes with the administration improved. Since he was an Arabicist/Islamist, he could understand and so appreciate what I was doing, and he asked me to participate in the first symposium of 1963, Byzantium and the Arabs. That was truly exciting. Mrs. Bliss herself wrote me a letter; she said, "This is the only lecture I enjoyed. Will you please send me your lecture?" So, I sent it to her and she sent me a letter, which I still have, in which she thanked me for the lecture. And so I contracted a friendship with her since then, until she died in the late '60s. Unfortunately Sir Hamilton disappeared; he had a stroke and went back to England.
In the '60s I was a little diverted (not entirely) from Byzantium and the Arabs. The Teubner Classical Series asked me to do a speech by Themistius which survived only in an Arabic translation, so I had to prepare it for the Teubner, and it appeared in 1974 in volume three of Themistii Orationes.
Something more important happened: when I came again as a Senior Fellow when Gibb was still at Harvard, I discovered in the library of Dumbarton Oaks a reference to a most precious manuscript, Syriac manuscript – which has been ignored by all the South Arabian scholars and by all the Syrologists – on the persecution of the Christians in South Arabia before the rise of Islam. I immediately wrote to the patriarch in Jerusalem and then we got the manuscript from there. It turned out to be a translation into Arabic of the original Syriac, and we wanted the original Syriac, so he traced it to Damascus to Istanbul to Mardin and finally we found it; it had returned to Damascus and finally we got it. I translated it with an extensive commentary.
The Bollandistes, the Société des Bollandistes, asked me to submit it to them, and they published it as number 49 in their Subsidia Hagiographica as The Martyrs of Najrân. It is a very important volume, because it opened the dossier on the importance of Najrân as the major Christian center in Pre-Islamic Arabia, which was radiating Christianity to all the Peninsula. So, those who talk about Koranic Christology and how the Arabs got to know about what Christians call unorthodox views of Christianity depend on Najrân; and so the Najrân problem is now open, and everybody's talking about Najrân and its Martyrium Arethae from different perspectives.
In the '70s I was still dealing with Byzantium and the Arabs on the side, but these two volumes had taken most of my time in the '60s. In the '70s Giles Constable became the director. Now here for the first time the Director was not an art historian. Before him was Loerke, who was an art historian, and Kitzinger, and Der Nersessian had been an art historian. Giles Constable was a medievalist, a historian who had worked with the Islamicist, J. Kritzeck, so he had a clear conception of the importance of Islam. He looked at my work and he saw my publications, the Teubner and the Bollandistes, and what the BZ had published, and so he appointed me as an Associate Fellow. But since I came to Washington from UCLA and Indiana in 1963 as a professor at Georgetown University, there was no need to apply for fellowships, because I am here, and it's only a ten minutes' walk from Georgetown. And this is the big bargain of being at Georgetown, because Dumbarton Oaks is close. I do my other work there, Arabic poetry and Koranic studies at Georgetown, and I do Byzantino-arabica at D.O.
Giles Constable made me an Associate Fellow because he thought of me as a historian who is dealing with a major theme, Byzantium and the Arabs. I reverted to working on my theme now for volumes, not for articles. So, since then and for the last twenty-five years or so, I have been able to publish these six volumes: Rome and the Arabs, which dealt with the first part of my trilogy, and the second part, the Byzantine one, from Constantine to Heraclius, the five volumes which have appeared, and the sixth will appear, hopefully next summer. This was made possible because of working conditions here at Dumbarton Oaks.
A propos of Constable and me: in addition to my representing the Orient, Christian as well as Islamic, Giles Constable also felt that I was a liaison between Dumbarton Oaks and Georgetown. Why? Because there was that program of joint appointments between Dumbarton Oaks and various universities, which is still going on. I spoke very strongly with the administration at Georgetown for having Frank Trombley, who was there for three years, to be there.
When my last book comes out, then I will work on the climax of my work in two volumes, one on the rise of Islam, the big questions which only the Byzantine sources can give. And I have collected all the references. And then the second one – the Arab conquest, the incomprehensible victory of the Arabs both in Syria and in Egypt, which split the Mediterranean. So, this is then my work here, and I need your prayers to finish them. Do I have them? Because I crossed the Rubicon of longevity recently, so I am an octogenarian now!!
Well, so much then for my work. You said you wanted to know something about the directors and what I think of them. As you know, I have seen Der Nersessian, Ernst Kitzinger, Ihor Ševčenko, Romilly Jenkins, William Loerke, Giles Constable, Robert Thomson, Angeliki Laiou, and then Edward Keenan, and then our current director, Professor Jan Ziolkowski. Now, of all these people – and all these were distinguished scholars – the one who really attended to the problems of Dumbarton Oaks, the first one to do so, was Giles Constable. Let me tell you what he has done.
First of all, this building in which we are sitting was a scandal. In other words, it had one bathroom here and most of the people had to come to this one, and it was not even closed. So he renovated the building, made of it eight self-contained apartments upstairs, and so it became a place where scholars would come and live here. That's one thing he did.
Then he started the idea of summer fellowships. You know, these are very, very valuable. Many scholars in Europe and elsewhere may not be able to come during the term, and so the summer provides them with the time to come to Dumbarton Oaks, do what they want. And, as you know, Dumbarton Oaks has become a pilgrimage center, when you come to Dumbarton Oaks, especially from Europe. So, the summer fellowships are very important.
And then he restructured the administration of Dumbarton Oaks. Dumbarton Oaks used to be ruled by the director, then he instituted the Senior Fellows Committee, which includes scholars from various parts of the world, who get together and discuss problems.
Then even the gardens: he said those who visit the gardens should pay at least a nominal fee in order to pay for the upkeep; so like all people of a powerful mind, he had interest in details too, not only in the general problems.
I think there's something else which is his achievement – let me see [looks at notes]. The lunches used to be formal; they used to be sit-down lunches. He thought that was good, but you know, a buffet is better, when people can come not only precisely at 12:00 or half past 12, say, but between 12 and 1, and then they can serve themselves. So, he's the one who started the buffet.
Because of the five things he did for D.O., it renders utterly untrue the charge that Constable wanted to move D.O. to Harvard.
Robert Thomson did something very good. Where the museum is now had been open: there was no roof. He roofed it, and he started what has become D.O.'s splendid museum. So, this is to his credit. And before he retired as director, he recommended that D.O. cannot be run by a director only: you need a director for the entire establishment, which is tripartite in structure – Byzantine, Landscape Architecture, and Pre-Columbian – and you need a director of studies for each of these three divisions.
By the way, Giles Constable also paid attention to Pre-Columbian Studies, which was the Cinderella of the three, and he gave it prominence, and I think the Pre-Columbian scholars appreciated that. Elizabeth Boone was then the main figure there, and so that speaks well for him. Although he is a medieval historian, yet he was genuinely interested in other periods of history. I keep telling our Pre-Columbian friends, "We are not so distant from each other, the Byzantine and the Pre-Columbian, because both of us chronologically are Pre-Columbian, because Byzantium existed before 1492!"
Angeliki's contribution was to buy the La Quercia. Before, visitors to Dumbarton Oaks used to be housed in an apartment house on Wisconsin Avenue. It was not good at all; I mean, the conditions were bad. So, she decided to buy the apartment building. La Quercia, as you know, in Italian relates with Dumbarton Oaks: the same as the word "oaks," La Quercia. The only thing about La Quercia, which I gather from those who live in it, is its distance; because I have a car, I used to drive many of the Fellows, especially the ladies, in winter at night to it. It takes a good ten minutes' walk to reach it from the Main Building. So, I thought that in the future maybe Dumbarton Oaks can sell it and buy something close. S Street should all be Dumbarton Oaks. There are houses which are in the market for selling on the corner. It will be difficult, but I think Professor Keenan did well to buy one house at S St., because it is not only the director's house, it is useful for other functions and also for visiting scholars.
Director Edward Keenan, as you know, was a Russian scholar.
ABF: Yes.
IS: He was also understanding of my project, because he had done some Arabic, and he was the dean or the director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies at Harvard. So, he was very supportive. And he, of course, did the major part in creating Dumbarton Oaks as it is. He realized there is a big endowment for Dumbarton Oaks, and money's function is to be used, so instead of having it in banks, let it be used. And everybody first did not take kindly to the renovation, but now they are reconciled. They know it was a great achievement. Some think it lost its intimacy and closeness, but you know this is a research institute. It has many redeeming virtues, and I think that this is a great plus for Ned, the reconstruction of Dumbarton Oaks. Now everybody comes and wonders at it.
The present director, Jan Ziolkowski, has inherited what Giles Constable had done in administration and what Edward Keenan had done in the physical plant. And he is the ideal one now, because he is not an art historian. I don't mean to speak pejoratively about art historians; I mean, his sympathies are wider. Jan Ziolkowski is a classicist to start with; Ned was not a classicist, I think. He's a classicist and he is a medievalist, and of course Byzantium is part of medieval history, especially its relations with the West, with Western European history. He's open-minded, he takes an active part in the life and work of the Fellows, and he lunches quite often with them. He also has done some Arabic, so he appreciates my work and I feel that for writing the climax of my work, he is the ideal director. Let me give you an example of how he is aware of what can be done now for Dumbarton Oaks, and he discusses this with members of his academic community.
I spoke with him about the most important things that Dumbarton Oaks, as far as research is concerned, can do as an institute. I told him the most important project which Dumbarton Oaks has done started with Giles Constable when, under the direction of Alexander Kazhdan, Dumbarton Oaks did the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Although it's called the Oxford Dictionary, it's Dumbarton Oaks. These three volumes have done more for Byzantine history, for promoting Byzantine studies in the Anglo-Saxon world and elsewhere, than any other book. Better than the German Pauly-Wissowa, which is a great work, but you know it is so difficult to use it. There are many volumes, and the print is not so clear. But the ODB is so beautifully printed, clearly printed. I told him this was done in 1992, so it is utterly out of date. These are the most important three volumes which Dumbarton Oaks has done for the promotion of Byzantine studies. It needs a supplement, as even Pauly-Wissowa has a supplement, the new Pauly-Wissowa, even the smaller one is there. I told him what is needed is a supplement. Of the many fellowships you give, ten or whatever, give one or two to a scholar who will spend a year, either at home or doing it here, corresponding with all the authors who have written these articles asking them what new bibliographies have appeared, what new researches have been done. If they are dead, you can ask somebody else. Also, there are many mistakes in it. I have myself listed some of them, many of them. So, this is the first and the most important thing that should be done. I think the Senior Fellows Committee should attend to this.
Then I told him, "You know, Byzantine studies would not have prospered in this country had it not been for the Blisses." We made a joke about this. I told him, "Well, if Mrs. Bliss was more fertile and she had a child, maybe she would not have donated the estate to Harvard." We are not writing an essay in praise of sterility – no, no. We are very happy that this happened, so their memory should be perpetuated in a way which will keep their memory alive. You can have a bust for them in the entrance, you can have a picture of them in the Founders Room, but I suggest having a series called the Bliss Byzantine Library. Mr. Loeb – I think he was a banker or some such profession – endowed the publication of the famous Loeb Classical Series, and the Classics Department at Harvard operates it. And this has been a great success. I said, "The Bliss Byzantine Library would be the best 'thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Bliss, for what have you done,' because the people will use it all the time, and the word 'Bliss' will be very visible."
Now, of course the volumes which appeared in the Loeb Classical Library are more important in a sense than the Byzantine ones, more important in the sense that they have more popular appeal, but there is enough in Byzantine history to justify having a smaller number of books there, and the Loeb Classical Library has hijacked some of the works which belong to Byzantium. Let me give you an example. Ammianus Marcellinus is the first – his Res Gestae. He is Byzantine, he worked when Constantine and Constantius ruled. So, he should be re-done in the Byzantine Bliss series. Procopius: everybody would love Procopius! Everybody loves it: gossip – it's too human to be suppressed. So, the works of Procopius should be re-done, with so much scholarship now done on them, and published; there are other fragmentary historians. So you can have a perhaps smaller Byzantine Bliss Library.
Director Ziolkowski said a Medieval Bliss Library would be an alternative possibility, because in one of her inscriptions on the outer wall of D.O., Mrs. Bliss talks about the medieval humanities. She emphasized the word "medieval." So, he thought this one will perpetuate the memory of this couple who have given such an impetus – not only in America, but in the whole world – to Byzantine studies.
And then the third point I discussed with him concerned the symposia which are held. Sometimes these symposia deal with problems which may interest a member of the senior committee, but it should have a more universal appeal and a more important one. I gave him an example. There was a time when I think there was a symposium on Anatolia and Oriens. There is no relationship between the two of them – two dioceses. And then even Oriens, half of it was in the Byzantine period and half of it was in the Islamic. It was interesting, but the papers were not published, apparently, because it was not a successful symposium. Its conception was not a sound conception, as interesting as it was: either Oriens or Anatolia would have been much better. I said symposia should deal with major problems, and I gave him an example. I told him, to use that cliché, the mission civilisatrice of Byzantium, its civilizing mission, was the translation of the Bible to every new people that was converted to Christianity: the Slavs, Cyril and Methodios; the Goths, Ulfilas; the Armenians; the Georgians; the Copts; the Ethiopians. Whenever the Bible was translated (and Byzantium actively, positively, and aggressively favored the translation of the Bible), then a Christian literature exploded in all these literatures.
This is not unknown, but so much new research has been done on each of these translations that there is need for having a symposium on all of them to show the extent of the mission civilisatrice. When you bring them together, when you publish that in Dumbarton Oaks Papers, it would be a beautiful thing for an art historian to see the various scripts. You can take, for instance, a page from Genesis or a page from St. John in Old Slavonic, in Old Gothic, in Armenian, in Georgian, in Coptic, in Arabic, in Syriac, in Ethiopian, to display them. It is a theme which inspires so many areas of research. And then I told him, "What about Byzantium and Islam?" There are about eight centuries: four with the Arab-Byzantine conflict, from the seventh until the 11th, and then the Turkish one from the 11th until the 15th when Mohammed the Conqueror captured Constantinople in 1453. This is a theme which needs to be telescoped and to be freshly understood. This is not to say the themes which have been dealt with in previous symposia are not important; they are. But I feel that more attention should be paid to the Orient, because Byzantium is in the Pars Orientalis.
This, by the way, brings me also back to how Giles Constable, being a historian, understood my relevance here. He looked at me as representing the Orient. In other words, because of my knowledge of Arabic, Syriac, and Persian, I am here to write on this and also to help Fellows in their areas when they come. Invariably, whenever a Junior Fellow, or not only a Junior Fellow, scholars and Senior Fellows would come, they always have Arabic problems. Even last year I spent some time with one of the students of Angeliki Laiou, a Turkish gentleman, correcting his translations.
Perhaps you might like to hear how the outside world looks at Dumbarton Oaks as it used to be when you had about ten scholars and now after those have left.
CW: Yes.
IS: When I came here two or three times the first two decades, there was an impressive number of scholars who were working here. Cyril Mango was here, Ihor Ševčenko was here, Romilly Jenkins, Glanville Downey, Milton Anastos, Paul Underwood, and above all, there was Father Dvornik, the most colorful of all the scholars.
So, let me tell you something about Father Dvornik. Father Dvornik was a Czech ecclesiastical historian, and he used to live in this cottage here. It makes a lot of difference, especially for Junior Fellows, to come and be inspired by these people and talk to them. As far as Father Dvornik is concerned, he was at heart a peasant and remained a peasant until the end of his life here. Although he lived most of his life in an English-speaking country, he never mastered English. "Frankly say" – "frankly say," translating from French, was his favorite phrase. And then he was a great cook; he used to invite people for supper. And then he was fond of a whiskey, of a scotch, called VAT, and he used to say this was the telephone of the Vatican! And I told him once, "Father, someone called the other day and asked about you, but he thought your name was Father Dvořák," the composer. He laughed and said, "Well, fine, we are very proud of Dvořák." Many outsiders used to think that his name was Dvořák.
And then he used to tell us how surprised some of the saleswomen were. He had nieces in Czechoslovakia who would write to him to buy for them nylon stockings; the nylons had come into existence then. So, he would go to buy stockings, and then the girls would look at this priest who would buy stockings for women; it was very embarrassing for him.
However, we miss him; he used to go every year to Czechoslovakia, and he was lucky. The last time he went, he died in his village in his homeland in his bed. I think he had a heart attack. So this was Dumbarton Oaks as it used to be.
And then we used to have lunches here, sit-down lunches and dinners, served, and Miss Der Nersessian used to preside with a bell; she used to ring a bell and the waiters would come. And once I put a little piece of cloth in the bell and it didn't ring, so we all laughed at her. She had a sister called Araxie, and she was a good cook. And there were two Armenias: Armenia Maior and Armenia Minor, and we used to refer to Sirarpie as Armenia Maior and to Araxie as Armenia Minor, and we used to refer to Father Dvornik as Moravia – he was very fond of it. And he created a Slavic atmosphere in the house, especially when Father Meyendorff used to come here. And then, of course, when Alexander Kazhdan came, it was very Slavic, and we used to call the West Cottage the Slavic lodge, the Slavic cottage, because all the Slavs used to live here.
We must say something about Alexander Kazhdan a propos of resident senior scholars, when in the '70s it was decided to disband these scholars and spend the money on fellowships. This was justified up to a certain point, but as you see, the institute lost that scholarly weight it had by the concentration of talent. In any case, in my opinion, it did more good than harm, because when these scholars disappeared – for instance Downey to Indiana, Milton Anastos to UCLA, Cyril to Oxford – they created new centers for Byzantine studies in these universities. There wasn't anything in Indiana before Downey went there, there wasn't anything in UCLA before Anastos went, and Oxford was rather sleepy as far as Byzantine studies was concerned. Cyril's presence made the difference. So, I think that the dispersion of the scholars, and the diaspora – you could call it the diaspora of the scholars – was helpful in that sense.
When Alexander came in the '80s, he functioned more or less as a senior scholar with whom others could consult. And as I said, a most fruitful project was the dictionary, the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. The ODB is a product of both Constable's initiation and Kazhdan's writing most of its articles and acting as its editor.
You ask me about the Blisses. I am one of the people who remember the two Blisses, and as you know, she was the predominant partner as far as the Bliss visibility in Dumbarton Oaks was. She used to come to the teas and she used to talk to the Fellows.
By the way, there used to be teas, afternoon tea at 4:00, in the Founders' Room where the Study is. It was a very colorful room, and her formidable presence was felt; we enjoyed her conversation, she spoke perfect French, she was a highly cultured woman. And so she created a certain atmosphere, and it's interesting to see the books she used to read – old-fashioned now from our point of view – it will tell you what people of her age used to read so many years ago.
I must not forget to say that when William Tyler was here, he was of special interest to her, because his father, Royall Tyler, used to be Mrs. Bliss's boyfriend. And one saying has survived from Mr. Royall Tyler – I think it was his son William who told me. By the way, we got on very well, because he was a very talented linguist; he served as ambassador to Holland, and he went the length of learning Dutch. You know everyone in Holland speaks English, French, and German, but he decided to learn Dutch, which impressed the Dutch so much, who said, here is an American ambassador who learnt our language. His mother was an Italian contessa, so he was already bilingual. So, here is what his father said about marrying into money: "The bonds of love are never so strong as when the links are made of gold."
What else would you like to hear? Let's see whether I have left anything. I think we talked about the directors, the Blisses – oh yes! The Center for Hellenic Studies.
ABF: Yes.
IS: I have always been interested in curricular development. I don't like administration, I have no talent for numbers or the practical aspects of administration, but I like curricular development. So when I came here in '54, another family other than the Blisses wanted to do what the Blisses had done: they endowed some money for a center which was to be in Washington – I forgot the name of the family. So, what should the center be? I gave them, as my opinion, it should not be classical, it should not be Byzantine, it should be a Hellenistic center. If that became a Hellenistic center, then Harvard would have three centers which will take care of the entire Greek heritage: the pagan classical, the department in Cambridge; the Hellenistic, which came after the Hellenic, after the conquest of Alexander for three centuries of the Macedonian period and three centuries of the Roman until Constantine; and then Dumbarton Oaks, Byzantine. They will be complementary to one another.
And I said, "I do not know whether there is any Hellenistic center in the world just called 'Hellenistic'." It is usually lumped together with other periods of Greek history. And I remember none other than W. Jaeger, the distinguished refugee German scholar, who was interested in Arabic – I don't know why; I think because he taught Walzer, the Jewish refugee who went to Oxford and became the professor there of Arabic philosophy and who had been both a classical scholar and an Orientalist. So, he said to me, "You know, I agree with you, but Harvard doesn't seem to want this." However, it became a Hellenic center for the classical period. Not all its directors were distinguished. I think one of the most distinguished was – what was his name? the Yale man who wrote on Greek tragedy and who fought in the Guerra Civil in Spain; oh, what is his name? It's on the tip –
CW: Bernard Knox.
IS: Yes, yes, Bernard Knox. He was really a very good man, distinguished. But now it is also under another distinguished scholar, Gregory Nagy. Do you know why? – because he brings something new to the study of Greek poetry, because he is a trained linguist. I mean linguist in the strict sense of the science of linguistics, and he is abreast of all of the breakthroughs in the discipline of linguistics, so he's applying all this to the study of Greek classical poetry. And he's married to a lady who's an Iranist, Holly. She is also a very good scholar in Iranian studies; she wrote on the epic of the Persians, the Shāhnāmé.
So, Greg is a distinguished director, and I think he justifies that the center deals with classical Hellenism, although I hope that he will pay some attention to the Hellenistic period, because it is the child of classical Hellenism, after the torch of Hellenism was carried by Alexander.
As I told you, I have a great love for Alexander, because I did him as a special subject in Oxford, and I always read Arrian, his inspiring history of Alexander, in my study of Christian theology and its relations to the Koran. Few people realize that Alexander contributed one of the most important words for Christian theology, and no one I think has mentioned this: the word logos! You know, the word logos which appears in not the Synoptic Gospel, but the Gospel of St. John; we owe to Alexander. If Greek had not spread, the word logos would not have been at the disposal of Christian theologians for dealing with the mystery of the incarnation and the mystery of Christ's being the logos. When you translate it into English as "the word," it loses its meaning, it doesn't mean "the word," it means both "word" and "reason" only in Greek, and when you translate it into Arabic as kalimah, it spreads theological confusion.
CW: We should take a break, because the tape is about to run out.
IS: Yes, we are about finished now. I have been thinking of answering two problems about Alexander: the question of the brotherhood of man. I have no doubt that the old controversy between Professor Tarn and Professor Badian, our distinguished scholar, whether Alexander wanted the brotherhood to be between the Persians and the Greeks or whether he wanted a universal brotherhood. I had delivered a Mellon lecture called "Mohammed and Alexander" thinking that Badian was correct. Now after so many years, I have come to the conclusion that Tarn is correct and I will deliver a lecture on the brotherhood of man as conceived by Alexander by bringing several new points not mentioned before in this controversy.
The other problem is Alexander's sexual orientation. Many people have thought that Alexander was homosexual. I don't think so. I have now so many new points which have never been brought even by Mr. Cartledge, the Cambridge historian who wrote so well on Alexander; there are so many elements which I think support the view that his sexual orientation was heterosexual.
Well, thank you for having me, and I enjoyed it. I think that my six volumes, which will soon be seven, and my three volumes published by Byzantion, I owe to Dumbarton Oaks and to Mrs. Bliss and Mr. Bliss. Dumbarton Oaks's self-image has been "the most civilized square mile in America," and I truly believe in that. Thank you for having me reminiscing on it. "Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility," as Wordsworth said.
CW: Thank you.
ABF: Thank you very much. You answered all our questions.]]>
IS: Oral history is treacherous. I will first tell you how I remember it. And then if I have a chance, I will tell you what others wrote and printed about the state of it. To my best recollection, I heard about Dumbarton Oaks from Peter Topping, a librarian here. Peter Topping at that time was a Russian [sic] medievalist working on these Assises de Romanie, or some legal text, connected with the Crusaders, and he got a Fulbright to Brussels. And he also was a frequent guest, but not a daily guest, to Grégoire's seminar – Henri Grégoire having a professorship at the Université Libre de Bruxelles – having a seminar close to the library, Royal Library of Belgium. And this was called Petite Rue de Musée 5 – neither the Petite Rue nor number 5 exist anymore; neither Grégoire nor Peter Topping exist anymore, so really oral history should be now very important. The short answer is I heard about Dumbarton Oaks from Topping. And Topping, as many people in that stage of my life, noticed me. And he was, to my recollection, the first who said that that was an interesting place and that I should apply. Why should he have said it in '48? Eh, I'll explain when it comes to your question about why did you come to the United States and not to Patagonia, and so on. But I think the decisive moment of my coming, which brought about my coming here, was not connected with the fact that I knew that there was a Dumbarton Oaks and that I should apply for it. This event was 1948. There was a World Byzantine Congress with two venues, one in Paris and one in Brussels. And it was in Brussels that, you know, I kind of ran around with Grégoire, that I was connected with the Congress. Parenthetically, I will tell you something connected with this Congress and with Grégoire, which is perhaps of some relevance to your question. I wanted to give a paper. Why not? And I went to Grégoire and I told him, "I have a general topic, which I've forgot by now, and I have a very concrete topic. Which one should I choose?" And the answer was: "Choose the general topic. You don't have to be right. If you choose a precise topic, you must be right." I chose the precise topic. And without knowing it, I made a decision for my whole life – although as you'll know tomorrow, I do essays which are very general. So – that much about the choice of topic for the Congress. The Congress was a small affair. First of all because many people who went to Paris did not go on to Brussels, and so on, and secondly, because as you know, the practitioners of this field grew in number. Notice the diplomatic way in which I tell you the truth. I went to my lecture – it was a twenty-minute lecture – I had something new to say – it was published. It was my first – I think – Byzantine article, or the second. That can be checked, because this volume with a critique of my "Two varieties" is in my Festschrift, and the Festschrift has bibliographies. And there were in the audience – which numbered perhaps twenty, twenty-five people – there were three persons whom I remember pretty well. One was a man of huge size. Another was a small lady with a hat with an enormous brim. And the third I cannot describe, but I gather was Milton Anastos. I suppose that I had no reason to ask the questions – they come; everybody comes. I attribute my success in applying to Dumbarton Oaks to the fact that these people came and found that this man gave a good paper. Now why they came, this I don't know.
AMT: Was the big man Robert Blake?
IS: Yes. This was Robert Pierpont Blake. A long story with him: he died in the spring of '50 – Blake. But there's a long story with his widow, you know, who liked me – she was a Kuban Cossack woman.
AMT: And who was the woman? Sirarpie?
IS: Yeah, Sirarpie der Nersessian. And the link there was of course that we spoke French. With Pierpont Blake I don't remember speaking at all. But since he spent some time in St. Petersburg studying with Marr, the great funny linguist, he spoke Russian. And since he was married to a Russian, it was clear. And with Milton Anastos I spoke English – such English as I could bring forth. And he gave me the proofs of his article on Pletho's calendar. It was a very long article. And I must have really – beginning to put two and two together, because I made a point of reading this article and being on my best behavior.
AMT: So it worked.
IS: Apparently.
AMT: So…
IS: Sorry – I'm too long. Now we come to the documentation. In my Festschrift – first Festschrift – is an article of Charanis about Byzantine studies in the last 30 years – yes? And he speaks of many things, including people who influenced him and his own peregrinations. You'll be as surprised as I was that in 1982, recalling the late '40s, and recalling his stay in Brussels, which I of course remember, he said later that the person who influenced him the most in the Byzantine sense was Cyril Mango. And then he said, "And there also was Ševčenko, whom I helped to get into Dumbarton Oaks." Well, he didn't. I had no idea about it – and whether it is true or not. So, I think that would be the answer to your first question.
AMT: So you came here – you were working on early Paleologan cultural/intellectual history at that point? What had you done your dissertation on at Louvain?
IS: I wrote it on the polemic between Choumnos and Metochites –
AMT: – so, that's what eventually turned into your book? So, you worked on that during that year. You continued to work on it…or, others?
IS: Hmmm. Of course I prepared it for publication. Publication occurred in '62, I remember. It's not my problem at that time, but the problem of the death of Grégoire, which didn't prevent my appearing in the series of – I don't know – corpus or the Byzantium series in which Ostrogorsky appears, Vasiliev appears. I was lucky in that sense.
AMT: Now I think you will probably be the only Fellow who was here in the '40s whom we will be interviewing.
IS: Ok, so let me –
AMT: – and therefore I do want to ask you some specific things about what it was like to be a Fellow in these early post-war years at Dumbarton Oaks.
IS: Well we will – I will have to view things with my eyes. And my eyes had to be, were opened to America. I came to America on a "Liberty ship" – you remember what it is, they were mass-produced ships for the war. Liberty is the word – quick transport of soldiers and so on. And they were then used also for transporting grain and such things and they had place for twelve passengers.
AMT: Only twelve?
IS: Yes. I got in, a rather young Romanian got in – we will not pursue it – because it's for memoirs and not for answering your question. And after the shock of getting on the dock, after the shock of a very rough voyage, you know, vomiting and so on, because it was a ship not for passengers, I spent three days in New York and – well that was under the Ukrainian milieu; doesn't matter for us. And then traveled by train and was absolutely fantastically impressed by those refineries of Newark and New Jersey. I never saw so many burning – eh, what is it? – flames growing out of nowhere. Then I came to Dumbarton Oaks, which for a long time gave me a false impression of America. There was no rough handling by the dock hands and so on. No brutality of the – what's the word? – Ellis Island immigration. There was an evening in which I made those steps, looked up, and there was Dvornik standing, whereupon we started speaking Czech, everything was okay (everything was not okay later), but there was a feeling that of course that America is a very interesting country, but where are the Americans, you see? The later contacts were, I think – second contact was after spending the night in excellent conditions, I thought, you know, one of those narrow rooms, number 7, maybe.
AMT: You were staying in this building in the summer?
IS: Yeah, yeah. As even until '73, when I left, Fellows were staying, I mean, many of them lived there – of course, no Dvornik, because there was no faculty by that time. My second contact with Dumbarton Oaks – official Dumbarton Oaks – was a visit by – with Jack Thacher. It was a rather interesting visit. You probably have only a vague recollection or none of Jack Thacher.
AMT: No, I remember Jack Thacher.
IS: You remember Jack Thacher. So, I don't have to go into details. I'll simply say what struck me most at this first meeting – tell you what struck me most – it was his sentence, "I am not a scholar." And I misinterpreted this sentence, of course. But this was the beginning of this painful process of superficial acculturation which never became complete. So I – in other words – I didn't know how to interpret a very simple sentence in a language which I thought I knew, yes? I don't think it's necessary to pursue; it's very much of interest, but if you give me two hours…I better stop. Then there was the dining room – the one which is not there. There was – and other Fellows – everybody lived here. By Fellows I mean Junior Fellows – which I never was. Very interesting – they made me "Fellow." And this was where there were lunches and dinners for a few people who were inmates of the house, and of course, the service was there. You were served as if it were an upscale – I don't know – restaurant or hotel. This was also – since I tell you everything from my point of view – the first time of my having made my first pun in English. And it shows you about this simultaneity of inventions of discovering the wheel. My first pun was "I scream for ice cream." I thought it was such a wonderful invention. And that's why I remember it. Now the inmates of this place varied. Although they were always the same – they varied in quality and in my reactions. There was Vasiliev – Vasiliev lived there – there was Dvornik, who I think lived there and then moved to a cottage – which is the West Cottage – and there were various guests. In the first year, of course, I remember un russe savant, André Grabar, and that was a saving element for me. And then there was the then-Director of Studies, already in my day existed, unless Koehler was that. But Koehler is a historian known to Kitzinger, you know. The first big shot here was him – art historian, I mean, world fame. But in my day that was Albert Mathias Friend. Much shrewder person than I thought, but it turned out that everybody was shrewder than I thought, for at least the first three or four years of my stay in America. It was very slow and I begin to realize how matters work and I still haven't learned the finest details of it. So...
AMT: If I can interrupt it, I've looked, and the number of actual fellows is quite small.
IS: Four, four, four, four – of whom I remember only three, including myself. There was an American – a very nice man – but, you see, he didn't count in my eyes. It was one of those observations which were not false but which were fatal. He didn't know Greek. How can you be at Dumbarton Oaks without knowing absolutely...? – an anomaly which ruins my universe. Correct? So let's move. I mentioned all these names, but I will then talk…
AMT: There was Deno Geanakoplos.
IS: No, there was Deno Geanakoplos, and him I don't mention. Excuse me, don't record it, but Alzheimer. I'm like Goering. Goering said, "Who is a Jew, I decide," you know? So, I decide when Alzheimer kicks in. Laourdas is much more important. Basil Laourdas was there, and there was Deno Geanakoplos, who was basically a Greek convert to Byzantium, but a violinist in some very important symphony orchestra – I don't know, with Koussevitzky or something, you know? – who became a Western medievalist and moved to Byzantium. It depends on how you want to structure it, because there is a possible remark that the difference between the foreign population on the level of Fellows and the native population was that the native population went into Byzantium, for reasons which are not so bad, from Western Middle Ages, while the foreign population went from classical philology. So, of course, it's also obvious that I thought that anybody who doesn't know Greek was very stupid. Now the evenings were interesting... No! Grabar and I established immediate rapport. Vasiliev was rather reserved as a person, but he had this quality of the love for music and knowledge of music. We played a lot – every evening we played a lot of music here, owing to Vasiliev. Friend was a Western medievalist, basically – he came here once a week…
AMT: From Princeton.
IS: From Princeton. And lived first here – I claim, but it may be not true. But then in the main building, there was some little room where he resided, you know, with bath and so on. It was on the first floor – on the what – second floor, you would say. Now, why Friend was who he was has to do with his problems, which precede Dumbarton Oaks. He had problems with over-boldness and fear, a last-moment fear, to show the results of what he did. Beautiful papers, general papers, and nothing from that published. I don't know; he is known for one article, "The Traces..." – of course his Festschrift – wonderful people there. And one, I mean, it's very easy to become a sinner in the eyes of an insecure and therefore critical newcomer. The unforgettable sin of Friend was to have told me, with a smile – I don't know; the English words fail me now – after a musical performance where Grabar performs, I mean playing, where André Grabar spoke of the "moonshine" Sonata.
AMT: Did Geanakoplos play for you?
IS: Not – no. Not here. But he was full of stories about the conductor. I hope. No, no, no. It was a Greek. It was a famous Greek starting with "D": Dimitri...
AMT: Mitropoulos?
IS: Maybe Mitropoulos. So, he was an admirer, let's say, of Mitropoulos. Now the interesting person, perspicacious and basically un-understandable in the sense of the Near East, was Laourdas. Laourdas' great supporter was Kenneth Setton, if you know that name – you must know that name. And Laourdas was brought for Photius, yes, and Photius was there because Dvornik was there. And there were some things which are later than – slightly later than my first year, which had been his quarrels over the rights to his translation, his not staying on, and which I think led to the fact that Cyril Mango stayed to continue with this translation of the homilies – translation of the homilies, which in part already – it was his final days somehow overlapped, I think, with Jenkins' arrival. That can be checked. So I described all these things. It was very informal and still a problem for me. I mean, this new America, where everything was like in the film 2001 – the same, and not the same, yes? – the same in that they spoke English and were polite at table, and so on. This is not about Dumbarton Oaks any longer, you understand, but this type of reaction – kind of reaction – was not unique to me. Not Geanakoplos, who was born in that country.
AMT: Let's move over to the Main House, because I want to know...
IS: Main House? Ah, over there!
AMT: The Main House.
IS: Yeah. Where we sit –
AMT: Did you have an office there, or were you in that big reading room?
IS: No, no, no. The only people... I mean, the answer to your question is "no." The only people who had offices were members of the faculty. I was not a member of the faculty. And they were in enormously small cubicles on the floor where the periodicals were. In the –
AMT: On the third floor?
IS: On the third floor. No air-conditioning. Although air-conditioning already existed in theory, because I remember going to an Alec Guinness movie and leaving it and suffocating from this heat, so there was... I think that at some time – and here this is not oral history – they introduced this.
AMT: They didn't really completely air-condition it until Giles Constable came.
IS: Well they must have air conditioning in the – in the other –
AMT: They had individual room air-conditioners. Now tell me about the library, because it must have been very small, wasn't it?
IS: Good, good, good, very good. Now you didn't – may I supply to your – a detail to your question? You asked whether – had there been offices. No. No, no, no Fellows had offices. All Fellows sat in the wonderful spacious bedroom of the foundress. That's where later for long years Fellows also were sitting. And I was one of those. There was more than four places, because there were occasional visitors – one of whom was, for instance, Kenneth Setton – at that time at the University of Manitoba – which he called Civitas Monohippica, "one-horse town." But that was all – and we had, relative for my own experience – even at the Bibliothèque Royale in Brussels, where I go to the professors' room – I was sitting in the professors' room – it was spacious. In Brussels I could have thirty books, and here I could have I don't know how many, but I never complained. The problem – now we move to the library, because you mentioned that – true, the library was small. The library had some amateurish aspects, but they didn't apply to me, because they had to do with the art. You see, here is where the Alzheimer begins to be victorious, because there was a number of advisors of Mrs. Bliss pre-1940, yes? Royall Tyler, of course, everybody knows, yes? And everybody knows about the relationship. Not everybody – I didn't. And then there were these two famous gurus of French art – art in general. So he comes…and he doesn't come…it's there. And then there were librarians. Librarians were, I suppose, a choice of Mrs. Bliss. I remember only the name of only one. Maybe Louise or Lois Hassler. And the other one started with "R." And then there were the parents of Leontief, the Noble Prize winner, economist, who were wonderful. Why? – because they spoke Russian. Of course they must have been wonderful. And they did something to the Russian collection, yes? And then very soon there was the aristocratic lady for the Slavic collection, and this is Natalia Petrovna Wolkonskaya. Wolkonsky is a Bolkonsky in War and Peace – is a Wolkonsky, and so on. What her enemies said, "Wolkonskaya – she is a Wolkonskaya because of the husband, but in fact her maiden name is Lukina." And you cannot say anything worse. No, she was – Lukina is very good for her. So this – I am telling you there was a certain aspect of amateurishness to it. But except for the Russian wing, again, I perceived the library part as usually unfriendly. And that was the – Laourdas was very cagey, but that was the impression of Geanakoplos, you see. And that is the beginning of the formation of my own opinion about Dumbarton Oaks. And I could compare it to Brussels, you know. People would see me and say, "Why don't you go to the professor?" – to the salle de professeur, yes? Nobody told me that. The attitude was, "Who do you think you are? You make demands?" yes? and "You don't deserve to make demands." Well, at that time I had reasons, you know, to say, "yes, diploma here, diploma there." But I had the other experience of my life – namely, to be always a foreigner, which I instinctively remain and in fact am perceived deep down as a foreigner. So a foreigner has to know his place. Correct? Remember métèque in the discussion of yesterday. So, I did know my place. Except that I didn't – that I would have preferred that this place be a user-friendly place.
AMT: Was the faculty better treated by the librarians?
IS: I don't know. No, I mean, of course. I mean, this is a strange society, but it obeys some universal laws. I don't have any proof. Of course they were. But do you want to know anything about the library? You see, I tell you more than you want to know. But you will cut it out. The library was small. The library was amateurish, as I told you, but the library had a remarkably well-selected collection. Now for art I attribute this to the tailors of all kinds and to the art advisors of Mrs. Bliss. For the other part, I have only a guess. And the guess is that Milton Anastos helped there, because Milton Anastos was not a productive scholar, as you know. You know, because you're teaching. He was this mind of Byzantium, the mob man, I don't know – of which I don't know what remains. But he was absolute nuts about buying books for the library. And I remember these boring discussions after luncheons where he, like Cato senior, said, "We must acquire Mansi."
AMT: Well, that was good advice.
IS: Sorry?
AMT: That was good advice.
IS: Yes, well, I mean – extremely. Since I am a professor, I expect that people remember every word of what I said. And three minutes ago I said that it was a good thing about him. So, I attribute the reasonable character of the collections of the early period to him. Now it did grow. At a certain stage, which must have been '66 or so (and here I may be completely wrong), but the institution of the position of librarian was created. And the first librarian was the Princeton religious history person – a very well known – died of cancer – and I talked to him as a Director of Studies when he was in the hospital already. So, in theory it could help, and maybe it did, though I have my pets, I had people whom I didn't like, but I cannot, I think that that was a good move.
AMT: Well let's – I think we need to move on to your experience of the Blisses in 1949-50. Did you see them very often?
IS: Her, teas. She was dominating the teas. Him –
AMT: Were the teas daily?
IS: Sorry?
AMT: Were the teas daily?
IS: Daily? As far as I remember, it was daily. It was a good idea. I mean, this, Dumbarton Oaks – you are going to ask me the last question, but maybe I will anticipate it. Dumbarton Oaks grew in my experience from a relative generosity of a rich patroness' house into what I call an unnecessary stinginess, and I see from your question that you wonder, "Why does one have tea every evening after five o'clock?" So, yes. And, you know, service for the Fellows here. Why a service, you know? You can go and get your – fill your plates with a spoon.
AMT: With your cornflakes, yes.
IS: The short answer is yes. And of course you would come often. So, I had an opportunity to see her. One thing that of course made her quotation-marks "acceptable" to me – it is an astonishing answer because how can you – that was the way I was and the way I remain – was that she spoke excellent French. It was, as I reconstructed later, a French of a young girl who was sent to Europe and who came from a rich California basically parvenu family and who made the money on this Castoria for the children. Which didn't mean that her French was any worse, but now for the thing which I couldn't accept, she had – she was the greatest person – the person with the greatest talent in my experience – long experience – to put you at ill ease. Now I had some perils. I don't know – I lived – I had dinners with, I forgot what, not the husband of Queen Juliana, but some brother of the Princess, not dowager, but successor to her. And that is a recollection of people who know how to put you absolutely at ease. Second was the wife of Isaiah Berlin. She was not a royal child, but she was a Ginsburg. And the luncheon with her was a delight. Now, maybe my conditions were different, but that was the impression which colored my attitude towards her. It is very interesting that the woman who comes to mind in that sense is Margaret Thatcher. But Margaret Thatcher's French was not as good as Mrs. Bliss's. Also imperious – but doesn't matter. So, him, I saw much less. I saw him at a dinner, here and there, at some speech here, probably connected with the foundation, if I'm not mistaken, as a pre-Columbian collection, which I understood as her gesture towards her husband so that he would have a wonderful, best, most beautiful toy he ever had – is me saying it, it is. And I exactly remember there his joke about maybe his falling deadly in love with her, but in any case, he said, "Socrates died of," and he made a pun on the poison. You remember the official name of the poison?
AMT: I just remember hemlock.
IS: Hemlock. Yeah, [whispers] "wedlock." Socrates – "I, like Socrates, died of 'wedlock.'" At that stage in my life I thought that puns were the highest – the English – was the highest form of humor. That's why I remember it. I have most pleasant recollections of him because on the scale of making you feel ill at ease, he was one on a scale of one to ten. Vasiliev told me some stories about the dark past of Ambassador Bliss where he was supposed to have either killed or seriously wounded some person while driving. No? It's not spread? I thought this was...well, Vasiliev may have invented it, but that he said it, I guarantee, because Alzheimer is now on vacation, correct? And this is – was somehow – what's the word?
AMT: Hushed up.
IS: Hushed up. Bravo. But this is not about my impresion of him, of Bliss. It is simply that when you are in a certain position – social position – hushing up is easier when you're in the other position. Correct? Now whether I saw her or not, I saw her as everybody saw her. After some big occasions – mostly symposia – she then received people at this house on 28th.
AMT: She did invite Fellows to her home? Occasionally?
IS: Of course I was invited, but very occasionally. Maybe there were, what's the word, favorites. I must say that what I remember well is her saying to me, "Venez, on va casser la croûte ensemble." And I noticed she knows French idioms. "Let's break the crust together," yes? She took her opinions of us very much from Jack Thacher. Now she told me that she fell for Jack Thacher. Told me, I mean, this is a joke, yes? She was very devoted to Jack Thacher. I don't know how it was – through which connections – it was not a family connection. Now after having calumniated Mrs. Bliss, I will tell you that I owe her something very important. And it has something to do with your question – you allow me to make some fun of the great interviewer when you come to it. I had no future. I was on some visa which had a number which allowed me to stay in this country only for the period of my connection with a learned institution or something, or being employed. And I don't remember exactly the date, but it may have been either before planning or after my application for the second year was refused. And that is worth telling you how it was done. And I went to Thacher and I told him, "Listen, I'm going to be removed from this country. To go…where? To the Soviet Union – son of a white bandit? To Poland, where socialism has triumphed? To Belgium, where I had to go to the police every month and answer the ritual question, 'When are you going to leave Belgium?' The answer was, 'next month.'" I didn't say all this as I'm telling it to you, but he understood.
And I knew – and here Alzheimer comes in, but he can be helped – that the former governor of Massachusetts, and for some reason a friend of Mrs. Bliss, was a congressman. And as such, he was entitled to introduce private laws – bills, private bills. The private bill passes, then the person involved can stay for the duration of the Congress, you see. My chance was not so bad – one in seven, I was told later. But he did it; Herter was his name. He did it, not knowing… [speaking of the camera man] he has to go, yes?
AMT: No, no, keep on going.
IS: And I was saved. I was technically, and I have reluctantly to admit it, I owe it to her.
AMT: And you think Mrs. Bliss was instrumental in this?
IS: Yes, I think, I mean, Jack said, "I'll see what can be done."
AMT: And then he talked to Mrs. Bliss.
IS: He didn't tell me, he was no Charanis. He didn't brag, after all. Louisa, I think, Bellinger, the sister of the Bellinger of the collection, said, when somebody asked why Thacher's name is spelled...why did he lose the "T", her answer was, he lost the "T" at the Boston Tea Party. I thought it was a wonderful pun.
AMT: We're going to take a short break so Joe can change the tape.
IS: Perfect!
AMT: So I think now we should leap ahead ten years, to 1960, when you came back to Dumbarton Oaks as a Visiting Scholar in the spring, and I believe this was in connection with the preparation of the symposium.
IS: Yes, but I came as a Visiting Scholar, and I owe it to Sirarpie der Nersessian. Yes, but why don't you ask me how I left Dumbarton Oaks after the first year?
AMT: Oh, in 1950?
IS: 1950, yes. '50.
AMT: Oh, because you had gotten this extension of your visa.
IS: No, no, I speak of Dumbarton Oaks. It's not so that one got an extension and I told them, "to hell with you, and so on." No, this thing is worth knowing, although you can reconstruct it from the Archives. I think that if there are Dumbarton Oaks archives, after this talk you can go back and make it much better.
AMT: They're excellent archives.
IS: Sorry?
AMT: They're excellent archives.
IS: Oh, so you'll ... there will be all the decisions and the correspondence concerning...
AMT: And you started teaching then, right? After your fellowship there?
IS: No, no, no, no, no. But that is out of ... no, it's really very interesting from the point of the biography of a newcomer in America, but it's not interesting from the – but of course I was not...ah yes, one thing will be interesting. Now, Dumbarton Oaks, no...I committed a number of sins and I didn't know that they would be so fatal. Now it's my reconstruction. First of all, at luncheon, Dvornik said, "Grégoire is not a historian."
AMT: And you defended him?
IS: I said, "I knew." I said, "It's very interesting, because Grégoire told us that Dvornik is not a historian."
AMT: Ooh.
IS: Which was true, I mean... I don't think it gives you brownie points, does it? The second was that I think that all these coats of arms of Mrs. Bliss are not as good as the one which I would – which I propose. It is Castor and Pollux. Helps little, yes? But Greek, nobody can do that, yes? And Grabar is on the Board of Scholars that I'm – there was such a Board of Scholars. I was the head of the Board of Scholars. Board of Scholars is the ancestor of Senior Fellows, and he was on it. And I got a letter saying, "With great pleasure we inform you that you have been renewed."
AMT: Oh, that you were renewed.
IS: Yes, letters signed, maybe by Friend, whoever. And I came to Grabar and I told him it is such a wonderful thing and relief, and he was very gloomy. He said, "You know, it's not so clear. There are procedures." Two weeks ago – later, I think, let's say a week ago, two weeks ago – let the Archives tell you – I got a letter from Mr. Sachs, who I think perhaps was the head of the administrative board, you know the one which is now headed by the President. There were – I was a member – are you a member? Probably not. You know, there are three or four guys.
AMT: No, you have to be at Harvard for that.
IS: Ah, so I was a member because I had a letter from Mr. Sachs from the Fogg Museum, big millions, and we are very sorry, because for I don't know, financial reasons, we did not approve the decisions of the Board of Scholars. This I really – as an observer from the outside – did admire. I understood Grabar. And I remember Sirarpie der Nersessian coming either here or somewhere where we were alone and said, "Je suis navrée." I am... disconsolate. Then there was a question, "What to do? What to do?" And then we move into my history, which is that people noticed me, you see. By complete accident an unknown person to me came to Dumbarton Oaks, who was probably then connected with it in one way or another. His name was Ernst H. Kantorowicz. And it so happened that there was the oath controversy, which was a great event in American history – now the oath controversy in middle McCarthy era. So he moved – well, let's make it simple, he was to move to Princeton – Institute, yes? And he did so that I replaced him. I was –
AMT: And this was in California?
IS: Yeah, Berkeley. My first teaching job was Berkeley. But in the meantime I had to live somewhere – I was with nothing, no future, no money, and no place. So, I must say that I owe also to Susan Kitzinger the suggestion to go to the International House at I don't know – 1825 something street – let's say R Street – which was held, which was presided by a Quaker – in other words, that's how my position towards the ex-Soviets is weak, because I say, "In America, there is no favoritism." Of course there is. And then – that's an interesting story, because the next phase is – so Kantorowicz remained until the end of his life. Now after Berkeley – same thing – no future, no nothing. And I get a fellowship, probably, I don't know, research program on the USSR or something like that. I said, "Splendid," – and that was fellowship. And I go to Washington and I go to Thacher, and I say, "Listen, you know, you have outside readers." And his answer was, "You know," he said, "we are a public institution. You can use the library." At that time I wrote many things, including this hundred-page article about the history of Byzantine studies. It was the end of World War I and throughout the whole Soviet period. This article was called in the periodical "Questions of History" as belonging into the dustbin of history – everything was. The reason why I dwell on that was that I did the normal thing, which of course my past taught me: never ask for anything. So, I would come...the den of the teas – Jenkins comes out and says, "why don't you come in?" I never entered that room, and that gave me a feeling of purity, if you want. Then how do I get back? There must be something earlier, because when I was in Cambridge, at Harvard, without any position, any future, and so on, I know, I remember Sirarpie der Nersessian came to the guest house where she stayed and she asked me to do something, and in her eyes, at least, I was needed, and that was before '60, because at '60, I was already a big man at –
AMT: At Columbia.
IS: Columbia, I mean. It was not when we met, but it was the time... So, so this is the exit, I think that I was – that I didn't fit in Dumbarton Oaks, and I didn't realize it. I said, "What do you mean I don't fit? You don't fit; how is your Greek?" You understand? So that it is an illustration of the extent to which certain outsiders are – what's the word? – cheated or by this superficial identity of the world's, you know – she speaks excellent French; I speak maybe not as excellent, but I speak good French – what has changed? So now you want to jump to '60?
AMT: '60, mhm.
IS: '60, I think – I say I think, which is always to underline – was Sirarpie, because she was the one, in my fantasy, to offer me a prolonged stay in Dumbarton Oaks. '60.
AMT: But wasn't Kitzinger Director of Studies?
IS: Sorry?
AMT: But Kitzinger was Director of Studies then.
IS: Yes, but she was the one who came to Cambridge, you know. Oh no, probably on all the – all the letters will be signed by Thacher, I think. You know, that is one other thing which is basic for me and which I think you will – hope when we come to the Director of Studies. But she was the one who went to Cambridge for some other reason. I think that the symposiarch, as it was later called, was Underwood, in 1960, the man who ran it –
AMT: Underwood – yes, he was.
IS: – and not her. You see, you didn't ask me about the faculty, so I never came to every member of the faculty; I just spoke about those people who were here...and not her, certainly not Thacher, who had no special reason to like me, although at that time I never really offended him, in my eyes. I have my scale of values, and a man like Thacher doesn't have to know Greek. This is, you know, since you laugh, you realize that half of what I'm saying are metaphors and jokes. So I thank her, as during every stay in Dumbarton Oaks I did other things in addition to what I was brought in for. The very first time, instead of preparing my book for publication, I wrote the first article which an American periodical published. Kenneth Setton was the intermediary; it was in Speculum. It was about the Imprisonment of Manuel Moschopulos, dating it, I think, small letter, yes, but it's true, yes. Grégoire's ghost still hovers. But I did also the Metochites thing, and this was one of the things which I considered to be the first in American Byzantine studies as to the form and to conceptions. Who psychologized before? It's not Ljubarskij. Ljubarskij doesn't know yet that he's going to be a Byzantinist, you understand. And it was well-researched, because I had time to do it. You remember that you wrote the index to something.
AMT: I remember helping you do something with it; I can't remember.
IS: No, no, you wrote the index of whatever. And I remember that you were there, and I think that maybe you even brought it to the security office. So, that would be the answer to year 1960, and in anticipation, I'll say that I think that on some level – not on the level of discovery, because there are some little discoveries – but the big discovery I made when I was a very young man and, again, penniless, in Brussels, it was – but in the sense of conception, in the sense of writing things the way nobody wrote before, that is, flight of fancy plus footnotes –
AMT: Plus very long footnotes.
IS: Okay. And Grégoire had enormous flights of fancy. And that was also a triumph, basically. First of all, this paper lasted for one hour, ten minutes. There was a silence throughout: no shuffling of feet, you understand. And then I remember Turyn, you don't know – this famous Pindar editor, of course, from Warsaw, comes with a beaming, a beaming smile, and he says, "so over-subtle," and so, and then Kantorowicz – it was evening, because when he came to the symposium he had wine and so, but I don't know whether it was that evening or when we were alone – he said, "Sirarpie didn't give a damn about her own paper, but she was so happy about yours." Well, I can understand it, because her man was vindicated, you know, the man whom you didn't appreciate. So, that's the answer to '60, yes, unless you have some more. I lived in the East Cottage, which was different –
AMT: At that point. That's where you're staying.
IS: Oh, I'm sorry, I lived in the East Cottage; Dvornik lived in the – I lived in the East Cottage. I remember reading the Tropic of Capricorn, which was an indecent book and was nothing special, in the evenings, it was a happy, happy, happy year. I wrote most of the final text in the Dumbarton Oaks gardens. I found a bench where nobody went.
AMT: [sound of airplane in the background] The airplane going up.
IS: Yes, yes. I wrote it in the gardens and of course I finished it three days before the symposium. Some people would have long had the second bypass.
AMT: What I didn't ask you about 1960 was that Kitzinger was Director of Studies by that time, and when you came back in '65, or whatever it is, he was just finishing up as Director of Studies, so I wanted to ask you a little bit about how you perceived his role as the Director of Byzantine Studies.
IS: You didn't ask me how I first met Kitzinger and what my impression was, because my judgment of the role depends on it. It will show you something not only about Kitzinger, but about me, when I tell you that a few days after I installed myself, I came in, there was a fellow with whom I think I wanted to speak German, because he's Kitzinger, and didn't understand that he didn't very much like to do it, and when I learned that he was a Byzantine art historian, I told him, why don't you show me the collection? Imagine, you know. He may have thought, "Who do you think you are?" – and he showed me the collection. He showed me the collection, and it was wonderful, and balanced judgment, much of it is new to me and so, a nice illustration: you tell him, and he does, yes? Now, as a Director of Studies, he was a very careful man. Very important to take into consideration was what Mrs. Bliss would or would not like, and never any tension with Thacher. Now his role model and idol was Koehler, I think, because he spoke in glowing terms about him, and I don't know the details of Koehler's fall, but at least some of them have to do with scholarship, you see. As you notice, we speak very little – we have been speaking for one hour – and very little about scholarship.
AMT: That's for tomorrow morning.
IS: You see, there will be – no, no, no Dumbarton Oaks' scholarship – the scholarship and Dumbarton Oaks. It's a fact for the time being, unless there will be a question which I forgot. So Koehler wanted to organize, inherited from Kitzinger, Dumbarton Oaks, there has to be some order, and he wanted to create a team which would work on projects, and there was, presumably, rebellion of the masses. I remember that the chief opponent was Milton Anastos. I remember Kitzinger telling me, because it was all before my time, and the project died. Why Koehler left back to Harvard, I don't know. He didn't tell me, and it probably will not be in the Archives.
AMT: Well, there's a very long article by David Wright about Koehler, about a 20-page article.
IS: While he was a student. But this was –
AMT: No no, at Dumbarton, about his –
IS: Correct, at Dumbarton Oaks. How does he know? Archives?
AMT: I guess.
IS: No, he couldn't know personally. Aha! Oh, good!
AMT: Or you can read that.
IS: No, I mean what I told her was a memory, so maybe I remember at least to ask questions so that you will give me the bibliography or some other things you told me. Now let's return to Kitzinger, although I think that talking about Koehler, his view of Koehler, tells you something about him. Devoted to the work, you know, doesn't cut corners as administrator. I mean, of course, you see that there is a silent parallel being drawn, certainly not with me, yes? Now, devoted to Dumbarton Oaks Papers but letting in fact, is my recollection, essentially Dumbarton Oaks Papers to be run for substance by Cyril and myself and for the details by Julia Warner, whom I remember having seen last in my life in your place, because he invited her for dinner once. Well, therefore, under Kitzinger, I remember Dumbarton Oaks Papers as a relatively natural thing, i.e. intellectually, i.e. Kitzinger, let's assume, because I don't remember his input, there must have been his input in art articles, correct? Cyril and myself decided what should be done. If we don't know anything, we send it to somebody who does. If it's an article by Pingree about something which we don't know anything, publish it, you understand? That's how it worked. Julia Warner, slow, everybody's mad at her, but the results are excellent, you understand it? So what is there to be discussed, you know? And in that sense Kitzinger was not cowardly or imperious, and I don't remember what his views on the nuts and bolts things were. I think that that was simple enough to be run simply – sorry, cross out simply – it was run by Thacher and his assistant, who was a teacher at Beard College, or is that the way, in New York, a progressive college, very?
AMT: Oh, Bard.
IS: Bard College. And they understood each other very well. Kitzinger as a host I think did the right thing. I think I personally and I think the Fellows cared less about being invited by Mrs. Bliss, but they enjoyed being invited by Kitzinger, and Susan, so I saw those children grow, and so on, I saw them making their own puns. "Why is Tony" – Tony's the younger son – "Washingtonian?" "Because Mommy is washing Tony." Get the joke, no? "Washingtonian" and "washing Tony." It was a rather non-stiff atmosphere, but it was not so cozy, warm, Slavic soul – it's impossible, given his past.
AMT: Now, was he the one who brought you to Washington to join the faculty? Was it Kitzinger, or whose idea was it?
IS: Oh, well that's very important. I can tell you that the chief negotiator was Kitzinger, but my interpretation is that Dumbarton Oaks must have decided, or even Kitzinger, psychologically normal, I am going instead of the world, as though the institution, so we must do something, and we have a savior, who's going to save the institution, and knows Greek, blah blah blah, other things, energetic, yeah – always that, you know, lots of energetics know Greek; lots of Greeks know energetics – you know what I'm going through. So, I was really wooed, and I'll give you one example. I must give that. See, these things, plannings are very long at Harvard. That Laiou was going to be Director – for reasons which are accidental – I knew years before she became director. Thacher told me once that, you know, "Maybe once you'll be Director of Dumbarton Oaks." I'm telling you that to explain the '60s. Now, of course, this – basically I was not interested in being director of anything, not of anything, I was very much interested in being Director of Studies, but I was interested at that time as being the – if not the greatest, then the most intelligent – Byzantinist in the world, I think. It's an allusion to what was said in Krakow. So, wooed. But on the other hand, I lived in a dream world. 1960, you remember. I lived in the greatest suburb of Warsaw in the world. I was at Columbia. I was in New York. There everything was clear. The things which were not clear were so far away, but I was introduced to art collections, art owners, you know, all those apartments on Park Avenue, Park and Fifth, which I suspected to exist, but that is not – my New York is the New York of the Jewish Quarter of Warsaw, you see? I mean for the sake of transparency I am as un-Jewish as DNA can prove, but that was the world where I grew up, the world with the Jewish intellectuals. In the rich part there were no Jews, but there were Jews who were of Polish culture. That was the world. It was where everybody appreciated my jokes and who were sought out by one another, where one third of the faculty of history spoke with a foreign accent. It's a fact, yes? That's why I hesitate – I refused, you know that, you don't know – archives, yes – I refused the offer, and a year later I returned. So, I was to be the savior, yes? Dumbarton Oaks wanted me. I will give you now the example which I promised to give. This was the time of what I now, I call Kumluca treasure, the silver, and I was taken to the basement and shown the treasure, I was told, "Here are the inscriptions; you will write the inscriptions," you understand? There was even kind of a sloppiness on the part of the administration, because they left, they left, I looked at it, and then on a chair there was a yellow piece of paper signed by Zakos which was a receipt for one million dollars – put that there. So I knew what they paid, and yet I was stupid enough to say – it's not to say, to act, and let's say, it's not a good thing for Dumbarton Oaks' future. Well, this is one of those illustrations of a general truth, that it's not important what is being said, but when, who, and on behalf of whom. I was pretty good on the first; very bad on all the three others. So that was the situation, and then very soon I was made Director of Studies. I don't know why Lemerle, at the Congress of Cambri – at the...
AMT: Oxford.
IS: Oxford – already alluded – he wanted me to become a member of some internal thing – and he alluded to the fact that I am going to have some position at Dumbarton Oaks. Now that must have been rumored, but I think that in '60, six years ago, maybe, I don't know – in '60 I refused, I don't – the first offer – if you want, you'll find out.
AMT: No, you left Columbia in '65, I think.
IS: Yes, I know that, yes! But no, before I left Columbia, it was the second time, you understand. The first time was very important for the history of wooing, you know: he refused, to hell with him! We go to somebody else.
AMT: Kitzinger retired in '66.
IS: Yes, and he retired –
AMT: – and then you immediately succeeded him, is that correct?
IS: Immediately – well, I immediately became Director of Studies? I don't know, because there was a long negotiation between Ford and Pusey and myself.
AMT: Because I seem to have a – because that was my first year as a Junior Fellow –
IS: And was I Director of Studies?
AMT: And I seem to have a memory that Carl Kraeling was the acting Director –
IS: No.
AMT: – and that he died.
IS: No, Kraeling was the librarian.
AMT: No, but he was made something like acting, and then he died within a month or something.
IS: No no, he died as a librarian, and within a year, but you are close. It's quite possible, but I don't have that recollection. I know that Kraeling had prostate cancer and that up to seven years it flared up, and he insisted on running the library from his hospital bed. I must have probably made the librarian mad by that time, no? So, listen, as when it comes to the precise dates, the rule which – the observation which I learned from Mr. Kennan, George Kennan, holds. Mr. George Kennan was a newcomer to the Institute in Princeton, it was '56 or something, I was a member, a year member, and he was insecure, you know, "I am not a historian type," so we met relatively often, and once he said, "I am going to interview Kerensky," head of the provisional government which was kicked out by Lenin and the Bolsheviks – it's 1917. Kerensky – I saw he was on Park Avenue, by the way – I talked with him; Columbia, I really just triumphed, because people told me, "Kerensky? You want Kerensky? Nobody will come." 150 people – we had to change our waiters, and he said upon return, which was the same day, "Kerensky doesn't know anything; he mixes up dates."
AMT: That's – We can check the dates. But I know you were certainly Director of Studies for a while...
IS: I think, yeah, you said a brief –
AMT: A brief –
IS: Sorry, what?
AMT: A brief period.
IS: Ah yes, that was hurt to me, because to me it was an eternity, and secondly you used the word "replaced," which hurt me. I resigned to everybody's surprise, and the fact that the truth, which is determined by what people say, is that I was replaced, of course hurts. Of course I was replaced; everybody who resigns is replaced, so technically this is no problem. But you didn't ask me, "why you were replaced," you understand, and I think that this is an important answer first of all for the conceptions or misconceptions of Dumbarton Oaks that I held. If one doesn't have misconceptions, one doesn't resign, yes? And for your last questions: how Dumbarton Oaks changed, yes? Well, since the time is late, I would say that the superficial answer that is acceptable was that I imagined that I was a head of an institute – I, you know, not anybody else – or rather of a Byzantine branch of an institute, Byzantine branch being the main branch. My reality support was that it was seventy percent of the budget. Well, you come to the last questions, perhaps. And therefore that together with my colleagues, I have a budget which I distribute according to the decisions of my colleagues, which of course has to be approved, as all the budgets at Harvard, by the dean here, I also thought by the dean, but I knew that the realities are that it will be – have to be approved by the Director, or whatever you want, yes? – who, I hoped, like all the intelligent presidents of everything, says, in ninety percent of the cases, "yes," once the budget is allotted, you know. In other words, I know in advance what I have to do. Then the policy had to be archaeological exploration on the surface. You know this type of... And the expanding of the limits of the unknown, that is, including excavations, correct? And then the concept of what I invented and which died, unfortunately, and in part died because it happened by itself, Byzantinologie totale, that there is no such thing as Byzantine philology, etc. In other words, I was practicing what I of course even today despise, interdisciplinarity, what is not a discipline of interdisciplinarity? Because I didn't compare the Eskimos with the folklore, and of course the library policy – Byzantine library policy – is within the province of the Director. Well, I don't know whether you wish on this side... My first step was, without asking anybody, to call the Secretary of the University, in Cambridge, and saying – asking – what is the budget of Dumbarton Oaks, yes? – thinking that, you know, I'd be able to see the budget, I will say how much is spent already on Byzantine Studies. The secretary goes, "Absolutely wonderful." I forget the name of the secretary, but never mind. She said, "Yeah, Mr. So-and-so will call you back very soon." Mr. So-and-so did call me back very soon, and he said, "Why do you want to know the budget? You don't need to know the budget in order to function." That was the first sign that I didn't understand anything about how things really work. Well once I don't know how the budget looks, how can I demand a budget, correct? How can I demand excavations when the Kumluca treasure is here and when it is the hap – this is the Turkish word for "pill" – on which Dumbarton Oaks will choke? I am quoting Nezih Firatli at night returning from the south coast, and I said, "Well, you know, the Turks don't like what we did. They swallowed the hapı," and he said, "It's Dumbarton Oaks that swallowed the hapı," and...yes? Of course what happened later was – it has nothing to do with me, because I'm out; no I'm not, really – and it is Giles Constable's open statement that you have to finish with what about it, I don't know – drunken bout about archaeo – excavations, you know – drunken bout was not there, but something to this effect – you can read it! So Dumbarton Oaks Papers was probably not important enough to be controlled, you see? I don't tell you everything, but... because of the time, but I outlined my conceptions, and I didn't know that there were insane conceptions in terms of the system. Now, there are ways; there are ways a) to accommodate yourself in the name of saving the institution. I knew that too many administrators do it in the past; the head of the Warsaw Ghetto under the Germans did it and had to commit suicide, you know, so of course, resignation. Now Jenkins came in very quickly.
AMT: I think, Ihor, maybe we'd better stop there for today; sorry.
IS: No, no sorry, no sorry. I have to finish the sentence. Then Jenkins dies – the circumstances, you may know – and what to do? Mr. Tyler comes or will come, so no Director of Studies. But I am the senior faculty member, and there we can stop, because then comes Loerke, and that's already done.
AMT: Because what I want to start with tomorrow is this era when Mrs. Bliss dies and Thacher retires and Jenkins dies, because a lot of things are happening at the same time.
IS: No, Jenkins is first. According to me, death of Jenkins.
AMT: No, it's actually –
IS: Thacher dies before Jenkins?
AMT: Not dies, he retires.
IS: Oh, that's true! That's absolutely right.
AMT: So, we'll start with that tomorrow, then, because I think that's in a very interesting time.
IS: Anything you say.
AMT: So let's pick up where we left off yesterday: that we were talking about the crucial – what I consider the crucial transitional period of around '68-'71, when many, many changes happened at Dumbarton Oaks, and according to my information, Paul Underwood died in September '68, Mrs. Bliss died in January '69, Romilly Jenkins died in September of '69, and John Thacher retired in December of '69. So you had three deaths and one retirement within 15 months.
IS: Retirement is Thacher.
AMT: Yes. So I wanted to ask you if indeed this was a period of, shall we say, extreme dislocation at Dumbarton Oaks, were…
IS: Well, you will get an answer of a witness. And the great authors who gave, in anticipation of what I'm going to say, were Stendhal in the Chartreuse de Parme – to show you how useless I am for that – and of course Tolstoy in the War and Peace, who copied from Stendhal. The witnesses of great events have not necessarily an idea that events were great. I am referring to the famous discussions of the battle where the guy in the battle has no idea what happens – he's wandering around. And so, with this as a background, I will tell you that the results of these events were, I think, objectively felt two or three years later, namely with the demise of the faculty.
AMT: Mhm. That's what I was getting at.
IS: But the demise of the faculty – since I'm a self-centered – start with the last member of the faculty leaving. It was after Mango, I think. There was nobody left. Kazhdan who to me –
AMT: There was Loerke –
IS: Loerke lasts very shortly. And is not mentioned, yeah. So, that, from my point of view, was one of the decisive events in the history of Dumbarton Oaks.
AMT: But what caused the decision to not have a faculty anymore?
IS: Well, you have to go to the archives of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. First of all, I mean, my interpretation is that first of all, nature helped. Jenkins, Underwood, blah blah blah, died. Faculty diminishes. So, if you have already a previous conception that this faculty is doing something – what are they doing, really – that gives you not only food for thought, but start for action, future action. Then there comes – I don't know whether chronology bears me out – Mango's departure. Then there comes my outspoken desire to become a foot soldier in saying, "I want to be in – I want to go to Harvard." What I really say I want – to leave the atmosphere out... exposed to the dangers – psychological dangers – of small groups. Such dangers are very easily defused in a milieu where the alternatives are there. To what extent my departure was so subtly engineered that I thought, "how wonderful it is," I don't know. Constable would know, but he probably will not tell you.
AMT: But you were the first so-called "Dumbarton Oaks Professor" at Harvard. The system began –
IS: Yes, and then come Laiou, Laiou, and of course Ioli.
AMT: Yes, and John.
IS: Sorry?
AMT: John Duffy.
IS: But John Duffy, that is –
AMT: Later.
IS: Later…John Duffy is me, in other words, the same, you know, the spot, the spot was created with my departure, but the spot can be replaced by other people.
AMT: But am I correct that you found yourself in a situation that your colleagues had either died or were leaving? You were left here almost alone.
IS: Well, not alone. I was left with Loerke.
AMT: [laughs] Yes.
IS: At least, you didn't mention the appointment of Loerke – because it would be very interesting to place it chronologically, you see.
AMT: I think it's about '71.
IS: '71 – that is quite possible, because Jenkins dies in '69, correct?
AMT: Mhm.
IS: As I told you, I know about it sitting in that expensive cabin of a Polish ship, returning from abroad. I get this telegram. So, everything is okay, as I said before. Let's say, the powers that be don't know what to do. And therefore the solution is found. Kitzinger is still there. '69.
AMT: No –
IS: Already, already –
AMT: He left '66.
IS: Ah – to become the Porter – the Porter – but he is somehow instrumental –
AMT: – but he is probably at the Harvard end.
IS: Yes, yes. So, I am named the senior faculty member. It is impossible – there must have been more than two. But that's what I remember and I remember already Mr. Tyler's time. So, that must be after Thacher's retirement. Which year is it?
AMT: Thacher retired in December '69. So, Tyler must have come in 1970, I would guess.
IS: Yes.
AMT: So, I did want to ask you what this transition meant.
IS: No, you did ask me. Now man's servitude to Dumbarton Oaks is beyond my purview, but not beyond my judgment. He was a grand – the godson of the foundress. From the point of view of a man for whom the glory starts in 1200 Sorbonne with the fights between the magistri and the archbishop, this is a throwback to the time of patronage of the obviously post-Renaissance and post-Renaissance, yes? From the eighteenth century and the great reforms of the university which my hero, Alexander von Humboldt, was participating, ended all that, you know. And that's where I grew up. And that's my reaction. Is understandable. But this is the reaction of somebody who doesn't get it, you understand. Thacher was already bad because he was a – because as Mrs. Bliss said, "I fell for him." Yes? Now my personal answer is the indirect answer to what you said. You may know the changes that you considered important. Now you may remember the story of my first encounter with Thacher. It was – quotation marks – "I am not a scholar." Mr. Tyler told me that he was a scholar because he wrote a history of some castle in Burgundy.
AMT: The castle where he lived.
IS: Maybe the castle which he owned and to which he retired. He had views. I brought Guillou in. Guillou knows it. The Archives know it. I brought many people in. Hunger, Beck, and so on. I want a history of Dumbarton Oaks' visitors. And who came. Comes Guillou and tells me, "J'ai apporté une niece." Une nièce, nièce – nepotes – is mistress, yes, pas ma nièce, mais la nièce. What's new? I invite, for instance – in short, Mr. Tyler took it very amiss.
AMT: I remember that.
IS: You remember that?
AMT: I remember it was a great scandal, at least for some people, yes.
IS: Well, it was still the time where the clock in Dumbarton Oaks ran on a different time than it ran in France. It ran on a different – was running on a different time since the Liaisons Dangereuses, which describes the world of 1760's. Good. With Guillou, I invited him to dinner. He did come. But he didn't drink a glass of wine from me. Come, it means la nièce was there and Fellows and so on. You can imagine that having been already partly acculturated I didn't say anything – I didn't say, "Why don't you drink this Chateau de Beychevelle which is – costs so much?" – you know? Then there were the meetings. I'm describing indirectly the mind of the new Director. The meetings, obviously, in my case, had to do with the Byzantine section – whom to invite, to write and so on. Senior faculty member [points to himself]. Is asserted Mr. Tyler,
"you write the drafts, and I shall sign it." Now the whole acculturation disappears in a second. "Mr. Tyler, you write the draft." I know that he's an ambassador at Bonn. I know that this is the way ambassadors act, correct? But I say, "You come into a different milieu. If I have to adapt, you may also adapt a little bit, you know." "I write a letter, but I'll submit it to you, because you know these things, maybe it will…correct, of course, I'll sign it." I mean, that is a variant that never happens. So, that I am a scholar and I have somebody who writes drafts for me. Mango, who I think still is there, obviously is of the same view, although he does not think of the Sorbonne or the fact that St. Andrew's is the third oldest university in America. But he don't like it, yes? And that is one of the reasons why he left. After, as you remember, returning as the – leaving the Toynbee chair, I claim, after this fantastic discussion at the top of Acropolis in an enormous heat where he taught me the sentence that this is the weather in which only mad dogs and Englishmen venture out. I sold him, I sold him the Brooklyn Bridge, because you didn't ask me. But I knew that the new era in Dumbarton Oaks begins. You come, we shall build something – new era to which I would have added, when you asked me what my conception was, would be long projects, would be an encyclopedia of Byzantium, and would be long systematic archaeological activity. Well, things did happen. The O.D.B. came into being. So, this is perhaps our fault. Whatever we said was blocked. Well, maybe if you said exactly the same thing, you would have been immediately accepted, you know? We didn't know how to solve the personal problems.
AMT: In your personal view, was it better to have the permanent faculty here?
IS: I would say, yes, if it were a better faculty than it was, and if it had a vision, a common vision. So, I don't know how to do it. The faculty as it was, was a kind of All Souls College. No students, obviously, no common projects, but All Souls managed to create excellence. Maybe because it was not limited to a field, you know. So, my answer is unclear. At that time I wanted out because I wanted to have a larger group of colleagues and intellectuals. And it worked – I mean, it's a proof that I'm not quite neurotic, because I'm kind of a success at Harvard.
AMT: Well, I think it was definitely the right decision.
IS: Maybe it was engineered, but only Constable will tell. I didn't feel it.
AMT: Now let me ask you something else. I believe it was just at this time, perhaps around 1970, that the idea of moving Dumbarton Oaks to Cambridge was raised.
IS: I have an answer to it, but before I do it, I want simply to say that Tyler was not the big catastrophe, subjectively. Subjectively, the big catastrophe was Loerke. It was an accidental appointment during some stops between two places by President Pusey with whom I had a lot to do. Pusey liked him. And I don't remember if I can do the right example, but for me a man who uses loca sancta as if it were a masculine plural – I wasn't able to answer the question. Listen, but he's going to be a superb administrator, because Dumbarton Oaks Director of Studies is not about administration, so of course, a horrible insult to you. I mean I'm speaking of administration, maybe Thacher if you want, a Thacher. So that was an injustice of cosmic dimensions. It's probably – we'll cut it out, but it was a time when Beck, important friend, was here. Because when I said they took – I know, but why? And he knows all that I felt, and he said to me once in his office, "Why don't you make up with Loerke?" Make up possible? And I exploded internally with enormous hatred towards Beck, and then I said, "If I hate Beck, it means that it's something really the matter with me." And then I could always control it. For he was the intellectual modal inhabitant. Loerke, Shmoerke, as long as he has what he needs, it's perfect. But the question of vision, the question of quality, the question of understanding, and so on – ach, terrible things. And that was one also of the reasons of trying to have an alternative. If the chairman of my department is a nincompoop, big deal. You know, I can make jokes. But if the Director of Studies of a small, small group who decides in theory about the intellectual direction – is a Mr. Loerke, then this is a collapse of the world. Is correct? So that I want to introduce. Now I'm ready to answer the question of transfer.
AMT: I'll just mention one thing about Loerke and that is about ten years ago, I did contact him after I interviewed Philip Grierson to try and do something similar with Bill Loerke – and that would have been the late nineties – and he told me that he couldn't remember anything about his period as Director of Byzantine Studies.
IS: Maybe he repressed it, no?
AMT: Either he repressed it or his mind was gone. I'm not sure, I haven't seen him.
IS: No, he should be about my age, so it is perfectly likely, yeah.
AMT: I think he's been in probably really declining health. So, we won't have his version –
IS: – to have his version.
AMT: Yeah, but…maybe now we can go to the move to Cambridge.
IS: What is your dating of the birth of the idea?
AMT: I'm not sure, but I do seem to remember reading something about the year 1970 and a committee to discuss this.
IS: Ah, there was the committee, of course, of the Smolensk man, started with an "F." It will come. No, it was about a conception of the future of Dumbarton Oaks. Of course I was on it.
AMT: I mean, you were still here.
IS: Oh yes, yes. But that – see what a difference between '72 and '70 – is enormous. Now if '70 is the date, then I can better answer your question, yes? Yes, such an idea was considered. And again, it collapsed. The proponent of the idea, the great proponent, was myself. The willing member of the club was Mango. And that is it.
AMT: Kitzinger was not in favor?
IS: No no, Kitzinger was...well, neutral. He was not against it.
AMT: Because from reading his dossier I gathered that –
IS: He wanted it too. Maybe. But I don't remember him meeting with us and saying…whatever.
AMT: So, tell me why you and Cyril thought it was a good idea.
IS: Wanted it. Into, into – end of the psychological problems of a small milieu and big pond alternatives. And I even knew the building where it would come, and of course, compromise, because leaving anything at all that is from my point of view ballast – the gardens which should not be neglected, or the old Mediterranean tradition, the beautiful chairs on which already during my time it was not advised to sit, you understand. And big building which could accommodate everything – it was – in short. The opposition was enormous and I understood it towards the end – I didn't approve of it but intellectuals, so – why we provoked it. A) There were the old surviving friends of Mrs. Bliss. They were a power with Keenan even who didn't want the library because it would ruin the landscape. B) There was the staff. I just woke up and said, "I propose to uproot a number of families or make them unemployed." And then there were the satellites – all the Majeskas of this world. For them this was the end of the world, now they were close to a very comfortable, even scholarly center, and then they would have to go to Cambridge, where they never would go to. So, the answer is – there were three groups of opposition.
AMT: Do you think it might be fair to say that this was an idea which would have more favor with the permanent faculty than with Fellows who came for one year?
IS: I don't know, because this permanent faculty acquired houses, and so I never even considered, because there was – I mean, there were not enough of –
AMT: Because it seems to me that for the permanent faculty it was more of a problem, this rather, you know, small, ingrown atmosphere, that you might want the broader university community.
IS: No, I think – I see your point – but I think that the problem is seen when you, personally, are uncomfortable. I don't think that Paul Underwood was uncomfortable.
AMT: Mhm. But he died.
IS: And he died, yes. No, so I cannot say –
AMT: But I think that from the point of view of the Fellows, who came here for a short period of time, that they liked the isolation, as it were, because many of them spent all their lives at big universities, and they relished the opportunity to get away for a year. So it's a –
IS: And here we come again to the definition of research. Service versus research. So that is, I mean – whatever it is, it was the time of Bok, I think, with whom I had contacts, and well, was a very reasonable man, he just [sniffs] smelled and he saw the opposition as such, and that it's not worth his while.
AMT: Mhm. But my memory is that the controversy dragged on for several years.
IS: Well, certainly, I am out from '73.
AMT: Yeah, but after you had moved to Harvard there was still some discussion of it.
IS: Very nice, because I remember pointing out the exact building where I thought it would have to be moved – only the research part, you know. And that must have been already when I was there – if I could have chosen the building. Kitzinger was, yes – Kitzinger, it was true, was already there on this Waterhouse Street and so on, yeah. So it's very – this is new to me that there was this – of course Villa Bellagio, of course, Hellenic Center, very nice, but Hellenic Center has a director, yes. It has no problems of patronage, because the lady left this money by mistake, she didn't say, "I want the Mediterranean civilization." "Whatever remains," she thought, "maybe five dollars, goes to the Center." And there were more than five dollars. So, that was a very much simpler thing. May I interpolate – maybe you will replace it – the contacts, you know, it was all matter of contacts with the bigger world, yes, was established, they were established in my time – once a week, an exchange visit. One Fellow goes to the Hellenic Center, and one Hellenic Center Fellow comes here.
AMT: Which we continue to do –
IS: Yes.
AMT: Although we do it in groups. We have three go.
IS: Well, you continue to do like Chinese railroad workers, because it was done before. End of this – also the fact that it was continued is important – that some anonymous traces that… Seen from the perspective of this year, I think it was an attempt which required much more support and much more awareness of the interests of various groups. Joe Alsop was a man who liked me very much; I visited him practically once a week for – doesn't matter. He needed me because he was writing his Mellon lectures. He wasn't so sold on moving. He was sold on my returning as Director of Studies. Because, you know, I mean, doesn't –
AMT: Was he on the advisory committee or whatever it was?
IS: Oh no. That is a future story that goes to Constable's time – big tragedy there. And Constable is after Tyler.
AMT: Yes.
IS: No, I was – he warned me – Joe Alsop's solution is it stays here, but I come back as Director of Studies. I told him, "Sorry, the world and Dumbarton Oaks are not entirely overlapping." Yes. Now, that's the answer. Now if you want to speak about Constable or later things – Constable is the time when I am in, yes? Now, real love. Which starts somewhere in the past. There must be some past where I – no, no, no. When did Giles Constable become Director?
IS: Ah, good. Three years of absolute romance.
AMT: At Harvard.
IS: At Harvard. I remember Giles Constable in his own hands bringing the Bonn Corpus to my door, which he got from the Athenaeum, the Boston Athenaeum. So, that's the extent of love, correct? And then he becomes Director; from my point of view, it's not perfect, because perfect is a Byzantinist. You hear this sequel? But someone medieval understands things.
AMT: But I remember he invited you down to do a joint seminar on hagiography.
IS: Yes. No no, but – I said romance. Period. This joint seminar, I think, was a repeat of – here – was repeated at Harvard. Now, he becomes Director and I am automatically a member of the Senior Fellows and I am even a secretary. It's a very nice move.
AMT: A secretary of what?
IS: Of minutes.
AMT: Of the Senior Fellows?
IS: I take minutes.
AMT: Oh, I didn't know there was such a position.
IS: Well, it's probably very quickly…very quickly...so it's very nice. Two friends, everything. And then comes one event. He wanted to appoint Mr. X – sorry I repressed the name, but I – no – as a sidekick, as an equivalent to the teacher at Bard College who was associate director to –
AMT: Baird, Thomas Baird. That was Thacher's sidekick –
IS: Sorry?
AMT: That was under Thacher.
IS: Ah yes, we discussed fishing in the Great Tetons and so on, so on. And he asked my opinion, and I said, "No." I thought, senior faculty. And there was a discussion of I don't know how many hours in the refectory with Evie listening in when finally I left and said, "No." But it doesn't mean that I had a power. For some reason this man who later became dean of everything was a specialist in church history. You know, easy to find.
AMT: This isn't Franklin Ford?
IS: No, Franklin Ford is my man. He is the Dean. He was a dean of students. No, Franklin Ford was a man who was witness to every – this dramatic period. I can say something good about him. I think he'd refused, and somebody else was appointed, and that was the end. I stopped being a secretary. My turn on the Senior Fellows expired. Very nice.
AMT: Could it be a man called Graham?
IS: Sorry? Graham is the man.
AMT: William? Who is an Islamic –
IS: Yes, exactly. You see, you may remember it, or maybe you know it from the Archives, I guarantee it was him. Our conception is if you want to have an assistant, you have either somebody who knows only nuts and bolts, or you have a Byzantinist, you know. So, that was the end of the friendship. But I kept the Bonn Corpus. So, that was a very big difference. He needed me as a right hand in a field – an area – where he was a newcomer, yes – not intellectually, but really, physically. And I needed him because he was an improvement over his predecessor.
AMT: Now this was the time at which Giles abolished the position of Director of Byzantine Studies – in 1976.
IS: He did it?
AMT: He did. He abolished it.
IS: So, this is after Loerke, yes?
AMT: Yes.
IS: It's possible. There was this protest of the – led by Meyendorff.
AMT: Very briefly, yes.
IS: I was not in it at all. Now it's true. Because after Loerke – what happens after Loerke…yes. Now that's where you begin to probably…wake up. Now I forget what – he was his own Director of Studies?
AMT: Yes.
IS: Yes, well, I – you know, Freud is always victorious, because I repressed this fact.
AMT: Well, that's where they'll interview me to pick up. Okay.
IS: Well, I remember these things from various angles and I don't want to make you cringe about what I did, that's all. So, you asked this question just to refresh my memory? My memory represses the date.
AMT: No, I wondered if you knew anything in particular about the decision to abolish the position of Director of Byzantine Studies.
IS: No, because I'm out. I'm out and happy. I knew whom to support and it doesn't – maybe in spite of my strong support they made you Director. Were you made Director under him?
AMT: No. Under Giles for two years, I was made something called Associate for Academic Affairs –
IS: – under him?
AMT: Under him. I did about a third of the job of the Director of Studies, mainly in connection with organizing symposia, for example – the logistics of the symposium, of public lectures – all the academic events, essentially. I had nothing to do with the publications, because Peter Topping was still here at that time.
IS: Yes.
AMT: And then I get sort of fuzzy, but I remember at some point there was John Duffy, and Irina Andreescu was involved. I can't remember. I have to do my homework on that. Anyway, there was a long period until 1991, when Henry Maguire became once more Director of Byzantine Studies.
IS: No, no, but where are you – where do you come in?
AMT: I was this "Associate for Academic Affairs" between '78 and '80.
IS: No, when do you become a candidate for the position of Director of Studies?
AMT: Well, in 1997. So, many, many, many years later.
IS: I see.
AMT: I was here working on projects. I was here with the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium beginning in '84 until '91 and then from '91 to '96, on the hagiography project, so I was here.
IS: That's what I remember. I was involved at a stage where you were a candidate for the Directorship of Studies. So, very late. How did it come, if I may ask, to the decision to reestablish the Directorship of Studies? Do you know that?
AMT: All I know is that Robert Thomson, who did know Greek, and was Director from 1984 to '89, recommended at the end of his tenure that a Director of Byzantine Studies be appointed – he said that it was ridiculous for there not to be one because there were directors of Pre-Columbian Studies and Garden Landscape Studies. So, he recommended that. And then when Angeliki became Director, she, I think, came in with the idea that there would be such an appointment.
IS: Oh, so she was implementing, implementing the –
AMT: That's my understanding, but it took two years to institute it and to hire Henry. So that was the –
IS: Very good to know your answer. But Thomson was an example which I always mention in the fact that he was in the field because he said, "I'm going to be four or five years and no more," because he was not accessible until ten AM, because at seven or something he came and he worked –
AMT: He worked from six in the morning.
IS: Six. Beck did the same thing in Munich, by the way – and because he was the man with the smallest chip on his shoulder in my career. But such people stay for five years and go. Ah, good. Now it's Laiou, and now we are in business and now I'm really completely out. The last time when I was involved was with you – and I think that it's a monument to Laiou's impartiality that this letter didn't finish you completely. Very good.
AMT: Mhm. So, I know that you've certainly been back. I remember with great fondness that month we had of the seminar with Henry Maguire on the epigrams on art –
IS: Oh – because I had something I thought to say –
AMT: – which I enjoyed enormously. I think –
IS: Hörandner was there.
AMT: Hörandner, you, and I, and Henry. And I thought it was a wonderful seminar to have –
IS: Continue, continue that, that kind –
AMT: Yes, so it was terrific, you can come back on –
IS: Oh yes, it was a pleasure because I respected everyone, you see, and why not? You were doing the Philes thing, Hörandner started his epigrams on monuments, and I think I remember having coined one of those winged words which will have to enter the collection of my winged words, and the word was "if it ain't broken, don't fix it." I was against too many conjectures. And proponent of the method of deciding that it "ain't broken." And I knew something about things – it was really really, in fact – was Henry Maguire – was before you as the director of studies?
AMT: Yes, he was '91 to '96.
IS: Well, it is not my turn to ask you questions, so I will simply, now keep going because there's some last question, yes?
AMT: Yes, well, the last question is just if you'd like to sum up what you've seen are the changes.
IS: What is the question?
AMT: the changes over the years –
IS: From '49 'til now?
AMT: Well, more since the time you left. But of course, you weren't here. But from what you observed from outside – you'd come to symposia, you came back briefly as a Senior Fellow –
IS: Yes, I mean, no – '60... This epigram seminar is also after, yes?
AMT: Yes, that's part of it. But you had a chance to observe Dumbarton Oaks – at least for a month. It was in June, though, so it was perhaps not during the academic year. But the –
IS: I can say it, but you may not want to – cut it out. As I remember it from after '73, yes – that is your question really – it was a development in the direction of which I experienced the culmination at the time when everybody was very nice to me. In order to get this [grabs the microphone] – judging by the letter I got, you had to contact four people. That was it for me, you understand? And I realized where the power in Dumbarton Oaks was – it is in my house. Immediate reaction: I made a scene yesterday, but it means it's possible to do something with scenes. Security runs the place. Harvard University has five million books in Widener, correct? Of course there is security. And they survive, no? And the books, after all, were stolen, but they were stolen by great specialists with an inside contact. As I said the very first time, already when I came, I was of two minds. On the one hand, all those nice black ladies served me, but already very soon I thought the library was an – this was the first year – user-unfriendly place, already a Fellow didn't have all the freedoms. And then the question of – the symptomatic question – of the copier, of the Xerox, of allotments, and so on, or something that struck me: I had even in our discussion of these two hours – between friends – I didn't have any questions about "how do you view the contributions of Dumbarton Oaks in these years to the widening of the territory of what is known?"
AMT: Would you like to end with that?
IS: I'm sorry?
AMT: Would you like to end with that? I think that's a very appropriate topic.
IS: Good enough.
AMT: It's better than ending with the security.
IS: Sorry?
AMT: It's better than ending with the security issues.
IS: But the security issue is – I am willing to be recorded on that. Because that's the reaction. And if you want, I will end with the general observation that – it's in many places, the system forms people, and the system always wins. But it is possible, in a very small group, to change the system. You can put it wherever you want. That is a wish, you see. So, thank you.
AMT: Thank you.
I wanted to say something positive about the institution which influenced me and to which I was connected for so long. The first thing good about Dumbarton Oaks and myself – because what I will be saying is Dumbarton Oak's impact upon myself and not a general appreciation of Dumbarton Oaks which belongs to a different context. The first good thing then about Dumbarton Oaks is that it gave me the opportunity of meeting a number of people who were prominent, stars on the firmament of that time, who passed by D.O. and who either took some interest in me or whom I had occasion to admire. I'll mention some names: first of all, André Grabar – a man of no pretense, a man of warmth, a man of such chips-on-his-shoulder that absolutely didn't concern me because they had to do with his position in France, a man whom I admired for the width of his perspectives, whom, being a young and foolish man, I pardoned for the inexactitude of his footnotes, and who I remember remained devoted as a reader till a month or so before the end of his life. Then there was Ernst Kantorowicz, the important historian of the twentieth century – as it was said in my day but is no longer said – whose approach was diametrically opposed to what I considered as my scholarly credo. That is, he was a man of the history of ideas, a current in which he grew up while I was always a kind of neo-positivist. Still, he taught me that, although the ideas did not float in the clouds or by themselves, following them is one of the most fascinating aspects of research – to which – which in part I myself later followed. These two people in addition to being scholars were also gentlemen and the remnants of the elite of their respective countries. There were other visitors because both Grabar and Kantorowicz were visitors: a person who comes to mind is Hans Peter L'Orange – a man within the mainstream or the cutting edge of research of the fifties, still the fifties, namely the late antiquity.
I'll tell you what comes to mind at this moment although I am sure you are not going to print it, I especially would not wish that you do. L'Orange was the author of a book which was called Der späatantike Bildschmuck des Konstantinbogens. D.O. duly accessioned it and the then librarian classified it – after having looked up the word Schmuck in the dictionary – under the category of Jewelry. It means Ornament of the Arch of Constantine. So, now with this parenthesis to be erased, I'll continue with my list. There was Alföldi, Andreas Alföldi, who in the forties was described by Kantorowicz as a man who has introduced a new field, namely Late Antiquity. And Kantorowicz referred to the late thirties of the last century. He was a man who gave me an insight in the ability of systematic work, namely he showed me his boxes of cards which were forty years old, so that at that time I was not even thirty, I couldn't imagine that someone would do such a foolish thing. Now, I have reached the age of which is more than forty years later – they are not continued because of the advent of the computer age. Alföldi also revealed to me some motivations in the scholarly activity of which I hadn't been thinking before. Namely, the secret of the positive role of the chip-on-the-shoulder.
He told me once that his motivation in his studies on some medallion of the late fourth century called Die Kontorniat-Medaillons was to show those people in Vienna that in Budapest one can also do a good work. From the perspective of history it was astonishing because the Hungarian Academy of Sciences was founded in 1825, several decennia, I think, before the Academy of Sciences in Vienna was founded. There were also meteoric figures like Roman Jakobson by whom I was struck as dozens of other people were and whom I began to challenge as some other people were but whose brilliance and talent were something both to admire and to emulate. Then there were people in Dumbarton Oaks. Here I may have been not very impartial or just. In part, it may have been due to the fact that I consider myself as a pupil of Henri Grégoire who at that time was universally considered to be the most brilliant Byzantinist of the period, a view which is no longer wide-spread because of the changing currents in scholarship so that his name is practically forgotten today. From the perspective of 1949, however, that was somebody who had no equals in my mind. Therefore, I had rather limited capacity to appreciate the qualities of the permanent members of Dumbarton Oaks, with clear exceptions: Sirarpie der Nersessian, of course a student of Charles Diehl and of Gabriel Millet, passed the grade and gotten A from a thirty-year-old man.
Then there was Ernst Kitzinger about whom I spoke before. He was, again, certifiably of the good German school. He was tolerated under Hitler so that he could finish his dissertation. Even if he refused to speak German with me at first, he relented afterwards. And I never doubted the value of his work even if I faulted him for the same thing for which I faulted Kantorowicz, namely for believing that ideas somehow float in the air, that they float especially to his conception of the Hellenistic background of Byzantine art. Then there was an honest yeoman, Paul Underwood. His job oversaw the archaeological publications, and he supervised the activity of Dumbarton Oaks and previously the Byzantine Institute in Istanbul and on whom one could rely.
At the end I want to mention an encounter which left an imprint on my life more than all the other stellar figures that I just described. It was Cyril Mango. He didn't know that he was to be a star of first magnitude on today's firmament. I think our meeting happened after I stopped being a Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks. And he had just come to be a Junior Fellow. The Archives will testify to the exactitude of my statement. Cyril, who is the most reserved of men, came up to me and said that since we were going to see each other we may as well acquaint ourselves with each other. Well, it turned out very quickly that he spoke excellent and practically native Russian; that I spoke accented Ukrainian-type of Russian although this Ukrainian accent has disappeared with the course of the years, with a rather rich vocabulary; and that we had very similar views on our surroundings. And also very similar views of what Byzantine studies are and should be. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship that has lasted at least until June of this year. I was very influenced by Cyril, his scholarly precision. And I was happy to push him in the right directions as a person who was more aggressive than he was – and I mean more courage in exploring the outside world, including Turkey, of which, although a native of Istanbul, he had very little knowledge of at first.
Without these people, my life would have turned differently. In part, because some of them were very instrumental in helping me when I was out of the loop or in a parlance which you, Alice-Mary, would not approve, "on-the-skids." My first job, at Berkeley, was provided by Kantorowicz, whom I met at Dumbarton Oaks. My other job in Michigan – Ann-Arbor, Michigan – was facilitated by Roman Jakobson, whom I first met at Dumbarton Oaks but with whom I had later contacts in Cambridge. And Kantorowicz was the person who provided me with the membership at the Institute for Advanced Study. I spoke only of my scholarly contacts but I would be remiss in not mentioning the person on whom I made a number of critical remarks, if I remember, in our main interview and these are two persons. One is Mrs. Bliss and another is John Thacher. I certainly was not their cup of tea, neither were they mine. But when it came to my being threatened with expulsion from the United States because my visa had expired, I turned to Jack Thacher, telling him that there is such a thing as a private bill in the Congress and a member of the Congress can introduce such a private bill which postpones deportation for the duration of a given Congress. And the former Governor of Massachusetts, Mr. Herter, was a Congressman. Therefore, would he help? Jack Thacher said he would talk to Mrs. Bliss. I don't know what he told Mrs. Bliss. Mrs. Bliss didn't tell me anything, but Mr. Herter introduced a private bill which was a first step in my establishing myself in this country. There had to be another private bill but that doesn't belong here.
Another point which I would like to mention has to do with the horizons and perspectives which being a member of Dumbarton Oak's faculty gave me. They fall into two categories, first of all the ability to participate in the archaeological activities of Dumbarton Oaks, either together with Cyril Mango or as a Director of Studies which you would call a short-lived Director of Studies. This opportunity went beyond learning about the world of Istanbul, of the archaeological bureaucracy of Ankara and Istanbul, of the hinterland from Nicaea in the West to Rize in the East and, of course, Kumluca in the south but also the opportunity to put in practice what we, that is Cyril Mango and myself, considered to be a goal of modern Byzantine Studies.
Remember, the perspective I am talking about is that of the sixties of the past century – we called it Byzantinologie totale, that is Total Byzantinology – did not limit itself to various branches – classical philology, archaeology, numismatics – that should be pursued independently. The Total Byzantinology was to be a field of total study, recognizing that all the aspects which I just mentioned are interconnected as a part of a sometime living whole. And here, of course, surface archaeology which we practiced with Cyril was a very important part. And that involved travel in the Dumbarton Oaks-owned Land Rover, that involved long-stays in the Cihangir Flat, from which one could contemplate the Bosporus, which was a pied-à-terre of Dumbarton Oaks, and where we could savor contacts with the non-Turkish population, the so-called Franks of the Sweet Waters. And it ended in the importance of archaeological activity as a part, an important part, of the mission of Dumbarton Oaks. The other effort was a little bit less objectively valid but of course connected with Dumbarton Oaks. Owing to my position at Dumbarton Oaks, I could initiate and undertake a number of activities which otherwise would not have been undertaken. In order not to prolong this addendum too much, I'll simply say that I could make or cause to be made the entire recording of the inscriptions in the Sergius and Bacchus Church done on the level of the inscription itself. Such things, as far as I know, never were undertaken afterwards.
I'll close by quoting a few happy moments that were or, I'll say, that I inextricably connect with Dumbarton Oaks. Here belong first of all the pleasures that came from delivering successful lectures that were, in most part, later printed also in Dumbarton Oaks Papers and that would not have taken shape without the stimulus that came from those whom I respected at Dumbarton Oaks. There were the moments of preparing those lectures in the rather unusual ambiance of Dumbarton Oaks gardens in the balmier spring days in some corner where I was encouraged to jot down irresponsible statements which I would not have made at my desk and which later I was glad to have made. So, the recognition of the people I admired in Dumbarton Oaks and those visitors I revered like the famous paleographer Alexander Turyn. Then finally the happy afternoons which I shared with everybody who spent some time in Dumbarton Oaks. The afternoon teas where I felt most of the time at ease and where I exercised my abominable puns, the abomination of which I was at that time not aware, and, finally, there was the Dumbarton Oaks pool and my obligatory five laps along that pool every afternoon. That will be all, Alice-Mary, for the nonce.]]>
EG: I'm Beth Gettinger.
AS: I'm Anne Steptoe.
JNSL: We're delighted to have a conversation with you today –
EF: Thank you.
JNSL: – talking about your memories and the history of your affiliation with Dumbarton Oaks, and influential things that you recall, and people with whom you were able to be in contact. Would one of you ladies like to start off?
AS: Sure. Well, you began as a graduate student in the wonderful Harvard Classics Department.
EF: That is so true. Yes indeed.
AS: Is that how you first came to know of Dumbarton Oaks?
EF: Yes, indirectly. I took a seminar in the Classics Department on the textual criticism of Ovid's Heroides, taught by E. J. Kenney, who was a visiting professor just for a year at Harvard. And as a part of that seminar, I wrote my seminar paper on Planudes' translation of Ovid's – no, I heard about Planudes' translation of Ovid's Heroides. And I thought, "How strange! Why would someone in the thirteenth century translate Ovid into Greek?" So, we talked about that a little bit in connection with textual history of the Heroides. And I just kept thinking about this personality, though, that would do such a thing, because the Heroides are pretty large. So, I asked Kenney at the end of the seminar if he thought there was a thesis topic in this translation. And he said, "Well, I think that you'd do better with the Metamorphoses. It's longer." And it certainly is. And he said, "That's also kind of nice to work with Planudes." So, he said, "You'll just have to learn some Byzantine studies in order to do that. And you'll have to find an adviser." – because he was not on the permanent faculty at Harvard. So, I went to Glenn Bowersock, and I said, "This is what I'd like to work on." And Kenney said, "Don't work on it as a textual problem. Work on the translation as a work of literature." And I really liked that idea. So, I told Bowersock that I'd like to work on the thirteenth-century translation into Greek of the Ovid's Metamorphoses as a literary work. And Bowersock kind of looked at me, and he said, "Well, the approach interests me, but I don't know anything about Byzantine studies. So, you will have to go and get a Byzantine adviser." And I said, "Well, who?" And he said, "There's a very good assistant professor here who's working on the thirteenth century, and she would be good for you to work with. It's Angeliki Laiou. But," he said, "you'll have to be careful about this because Robert Lee Wolff is the medievalist at Harvard." Well, this is true. So, I went to see Robert Lee Wolff. I don't know if you've ever seen pictures of him, but he was a very large man. And he was ensconced behind his desk in Widener Library, which was one of those interior offices that was lighted from the hallway, so it was kind of gloomy in there. And he had a very high voice for a very large man. So, I explained what I wanted to do and that I needed to learn about Byzantine studies up to the thirteenth century. And he kind of looked at me, and he said, "Well, unfortunately I will not be here next year so you'll have to work with someone else. But you can work with my assistant professor Angeliki Laiou, so goodbye." So, I went to see her. It was July; it was about this time of year. It was high summer. She had an office down in maybe Lowell House at Harvard. She had her office down there – it was one of the Harvard houses. And it was a chair like this – they must have ordered them in bulk. And it was very hot, and I had sun tan oil all over me, and I was kind of sliding off this thing. But she and I hit a deal. She said, "I'll give you a reading list." Well, she certainly did. It had things on it like Das Papsttum und Byzanz – because this was after all in the late '60s, and there wasn't a lot – and Krumbacher. "Just read it," she said. "It'll be good." So, I went off, and it was a long reading list. And I would read and go and see her, and eventually I started to work on the thesis. And Bowersock was very tough. He was a very tough adviser. But it was probably good for me. And eventually the thesis did get written, and she was co-director. He was the formal director because he was the Classics philology professor and she was in the History Department. Well, in the course of all this, Dumbarton Oaks had a wonderful symposium called "The Book in Byzantium," I think. They had people like Nigel Wilson and Irigoin, the Frenchman, and Ševčenko of course, and Mango. And this was really a landmark symposium for people in literary studies. At that time a Dumbarton Oaks symposium was open only by invitation. The people who were invited could bring one guest. Angeliki was invited, and she brought me as her guest. That was my introduction to Dumbarton Oaks, which was quite an introduction. [Laughter.]
JNSL: What were some of your first impressions from that symposium, the people there and Angeliki herself?
EF: You know, she and I were not very far apart in age. So, we were kind of friends, you know, and we got along very well. I remember Weitzmann was there and his wife as well. He was talking, and she was a very fierce, little tiny lady. And she said, "Wo ist dein Schal?" because it was April, but it was kind of cool, and he wasn't bundled up as apparently she thought he should be. I thought that was kind of funny. And I remember asking a question of maybe Ševčenko – daring to ask a question – and he didn't understand it. And he had to have it repeated and translated. And I said to her afterwards, "Why did he have to have my question translated? He knows all these languages. He knows English." And she said, "Well, he doesn't hear" – well, it could have been Ševčenko but at any rate, one of the luminaries – she said, "Well, they don't hear very much American English here, and they're not really used to it." [Laughter.] That's all I've ever spoken, is American English. But I remember the gardens just astounding me – and of course the museum. And as Angeliki said, it's so nice to go to a place where you don't have to explain what a Byzantine emperor is – because really, in general, in the Harvard Classics Department, that's what you had to do. You had to explain what Byzantium was. And she was right. Here was this Mount Olympus of Byzantine Studies. It was a very large impression. At that time, too, the food was terrific. They had lunch set up in the Orangery with crystal and white tablecloths, and everything was served. Oh yes. It was very elegant. And I had never seen anything like it. They didn't do that for us in the Harvard Classics Department. I don't know if they did it for you. [Laughter.] I sort of doubt it.
AS: Not quite as nice.
EG: So, then you became a Fellow here at Dumbarton Oaks in 1990?
EF: Well, I took my first job at the University of Minnesota. And that was a strategically important thing to do because the job market was very bad. I'd applied for a fellowship here, and actually I was granted one, but I was also offered the job, and it was a tenure-line job. I knew I had to take it. So, Angeliki said, "Just be very careful. Be very tactful. They don't care about jobs in tenure lines. Just tell them that you can't at this point, and you hope that you'll have the opportunity to apply at a later date." So, I did tell them that, and two years later applied for a fellowship at the Center for Hellenic Studies and got one. That was very fortunate, and at that time the two institutions kind of exchanged Fellows. I think that's happened still. And we were invited to symposia, so I got to go to a second symposium. That is where I met Leendert Westerink, who was a tremendous influence for me. He was a brilliant textual critic, and one of the kindest and most humane people I've ever met. He was at the symposium, and he was actively prospecting for people to work on the Psellos texts. Well, I'd never done a Greek text. I did an article after the Kenney seminar that was published in HSCP. So, when he met me, we talked a little bit. He asked me if I was interested in doing a Psellos text, and I said, "Well, I've never done any Greek textual criticism." I'd done a review of Renaud's Chronographia for a periodical. He said, "Well, let me look at your work." So, I sent him those two things, and he said, "Oh, you can do this." He said, "I'll help you." And he did. I would send him my collations and my text and he would look them over and offer comments. Especially in the days before the TLG, he would offer me fontes which he had in his head. And this was a great gift because I depended entirely on printed concordances. He gave me so much. Also, he gave me acquaintance with some of the other people working on the project for Psellos. Tony Littlewood told me that Westerink called him up in his office once and said, "My name is Leendert Westerink. I'm at SUNY New York, Buffalo. And I'd like to come and see you." "Fine," Antony said. He had no idea what this was about. Westerink's wife drove him up because he never drove. And he walked into Antony Littlewood's office and said, "I would like you to do a textual edition of Psellos's hagiographic orations. I know your work on Geometres." So they struck a deal. And that's how Westerink recruited people for that really major project. And it was through Dumbarton Oaks that I met him, through the symposium. Then I applied for a fellowship in 1991, for 1991-92, and I did receive it. And that was the last moments of my Psellos work. Never let anyone tell you that textual edition will go quickly. It doesn't. It doesn't. But that was finishing it up. At that time, George Dennis was here, and Ljubarskij, and we were all working on Psellos editions for Teubner. Angeliki was the director at that time – Director of Dumbarton Oaks and also Director of Studies. I remember she said to me, "Well, all I can say is you all had better come up with something really good, because we put an awful lot of money on Psellos." [Laughter.]
EF: We did. Ljubarskij was working on another project with Psellos that I think eventually turned into an article in a book in Russia.
JNSL: What was Laiou like as the director here? How would you describe her presence here?
EF: She was conscious that she had a position to maintain. And she was cautious not to compromise that in any way. She kept to herself, I would say. Obviously she dealt with the Fellows. She attended our research reports and talked. She was interested in trying to get something going with publications for Dumbarton Oaks. She felt that was a strength the institution lacked. She may have interviewed everyone, I don't know. But she called me in once and said, "Well what do you think Dumbarton Oaks should be sponsoring?" And I said, "Well, translations, because there's nothing to use in the classroom. I mean, it's very spotty." And she said, "Well, what?" And I said, "Oh, history." And she said, "Oh, those things have been done." So, I said, "Well, I don't know, Saints Lives?" And she must have heard that from other people because then they got the Dumbarton Oaks translated Saints Lives going. I think those have been a very good thing. And I've been very, very grateful as an instructor that those three volumes of Saints Lives are available on the web free. It means that people can put a Byzantine work into a course without undue expense to students, and I think it's been very important. I think those translations were well-conceived. It was Alice-Mary who did them, but I think it was Angeliki who got things going. Of course, they had National Endowment for the Humanities money for at least one of them – maybe more, I don't know.
AS: Were there three volumes in all?
EF: Mhmm. I actually worked with Alice-Mary on one of the translations for Defenders of the Images, which was a great privilege. I think it was one of the happiest experiences of my life to send in a part of the translation to her, and she would go over it and sometimes Lee Sherry or Alex Alexakis would too. And then she and I would talk about it. It was like playing tennis with a really good tennis player.
JNSL: Did you have interaction with Alexander Kazhdan as well?
EF: With who?
JNSL: Kazhdan.
EF: Oh, yes! Definitely. When he first came, I remember he was at a symposium, and he asked a question. And he was just arrived, and his English was halting. But I thought, you know, "Oh my goodness, this is really a mentality." It must have been '79. Well, shortly after that, John Duffy called, and he said, "You know, Kazhdan would like to do a reading group of local people, reading Psellos." And I thought, "Oh, terrific!" Because I was buried in Psellos at this point. And I just felt kind of hopeless because I was really working on my own, and I hadn't read that much Psellos, and he's a difficult author. So, John said, "Would you like to join the reading group reading the Chronographia with Kazhdan?" And I said, "Yes, of course!" So, we would meet every week, and Kazhdan would set us a passage from the Chronographia, and then we would translate. Some really wonderful people passed through that seminar. Apostolos Karpozilos, and Roger Scott, and John Duffy himself was always a good participant. Sydney Griffith for a while was in that seminar. It was such a good experience. Kazhdan would bring in things that something in the Chronographia reminded him of. And he'd bring in a passage. And then we'd have to sight translate. Ugh! [Laughter.] But it was good for us. It was like playing at Wimbledon with the champion from last year! But he was a very nice man, very kind, and very supportive and wanted us to come along and enjoy Psellos. At one point he also brought in – he was interested in the life of the Emperor Basil that Ševčenko's working on. I think that's right. And he brought in just a part of that for us to work on. And I remember there was a section about the emperor going on a hunting expedition and being caught on the antlers of a deer that carried him off, and he was rescued by one of his henchmen or helpers. And I thought, "What kind of a deer is that?" Because I grew up in northern Minnesota and they're not – you wouldn't carry a full-grown man if you were a deer with antlers. You know, that would be quite a challenge. So, I said, "What could this be about?" And he said, "I don't know." So, I asked around at the university, and one of my colleagues in the Biology Department said, "Oh, you should call so-and-so at the Smithsonian. He does historical species." Fine, so I called him up – very nice man. My experience here has been the more important the people are, the better they are to deal with. It's the people who are kind of on the make that are trouble. Remember this, ladies. [Laughter.] But the really big people are just eager to help and they're interested in helping. So, this man was just fascinated with the idea of a deer that could carry a full-grown man on its antlers. He said, "It must be the European red deer, which is very large." And he said, "I didn't know their range was that far south." "But," he said, "in the tenth century it could be." So, you know, it was kind of interesting to all of us. Well, I have to say that Kazhdan did not have a burning interest in historical biology and zoology. And I told him this with the air of someone bringing him the treasure of Ali Baba and he said, "Oh." [Laughter.] Textual problem, probably. Kazhdan, yes – he was brilliant, you know. I will say though that I wrote one article for the ODB, and I thought it was pretty good. It was on Planudes. I thought it was pretty good. And I got it back just all marked up. He said, "This is too literary." I thought, "Well, I mean, what's wrong with that? It's a literary figure!" But he was right. He was a very good editor-in-chief, and I put in the kind of historical things that I should have. And then of course I got an author's discount for the ODB, which didn't hurt. He broke his leg at one point, I think, and we had to meet in the house because he couldn't get around very well. So, the reading group met upstairs in the little house, which now is where the guards are and the grounds people and so forth. But that was a little house at that time with two sections – one of the gardener and one for Kazhdan. So, as you're facing the house, they had the right side of the house. It was just a house, with a kitchen and so forth. And we met up in the little top room and did our Psellos all together. It was fun.
AS: Were there other such seminars that took place over the years?
EF: Yeah. I had an interesting experience. Robert Thomson did a seminar for local students, and the idea was that they would be able to register through their universities for credit. But all the teaching and the grading would be done at Dumbarton Oaks. This was terrific. So, they contacted local people and said, "Do you have anybody who could benefit? If they knew Greek well and they're good, they can do classical Armenian with Robert Thompson." I had one student, and he was brilliant. He was pre-med, but he was a double major in biology and Greek. So, he joined that seminar and he said to me, "You know, the best thing that happened to me at G.W. was being able to get on my bicycle every week and ride my bicycle up to Dumbarton Oaks and do classical Armenian for two hours with Robert Thompson and then come back down." And let me see, there was also a seminar that I took. It was probably in 1978 or '79 – that Ševčenko and Giles Constable did together. It was called "Hagiography East and West." And that was wonderful because we would read various things in Latin or in Greek, and we all had seminar papers assigned, so Ševčenko took the Byzantine people. Most people were in the Latin side, and most were from Catholic University. But I did the Greek side. So, I did my paper with Ševčenko and I was really worried about this. He said, "Well, do the life or Lazarus. You'll find it in the Acta Sanctorum." So, I thought, hmmm. I got the Acta Sanctorum and I looked and there were two lives of Lazarus – Vitae of Lazarus. And one was this huge one and one was by Gregorio and I thought, this is the one he means for me to do because its 14th century and that's my area. And look, it's only about ten pages. That was wrong. He meant for me to do the eighty page one. Ahhh! Which of course wasn't translated except for in the Latin. I was dying. I was teaching full time, you know, and I couldn't go over – we didn't have the Acta Sanctorum at G.W. I'd have to go over to Georgetown and use it down in their library. I finally figured out a way to photocopy part of it. It was so heavy I could hardly lift it, to photocopy it. I thought, I have to be strategic. Maybe Ševčenko knows this. Please don't call him up to tell him [laughs.] I did the beginning, I did the end, and I took apart the middle, and I hoped he wouldn't catch me. And he didn't! Now he may have suspected what was going on, but I did the seminar paper. I wasn't doing it for a grade, and I don't want to know what it would have been. But eventually that was the life that Greenfield translated so wonderfully in the series for Dumbarton Oaks hagiography translations.
AS: So, how did you come to be involved in all of these different seminars? Was it by invitation only or –?
EF: Well, I would hear about them because I was an outside reader. Oh, and there was another one – Robert Browning. He gave twice – he gave seminars on paleography. And I had never had a paleography course. It wasn't so easy to find one. The medieval academy would give one every year, but it was in the summer and I couldn't necessarily go. So, when Browning came and gave a semester long seminar on Paleography for two years running, I took them both years. That's how I learned what I know about paleography as a paleographer. And he was a wonderful teacher. He would give us things to prepare and he would hand us things and say, "Here. Read this." It was very good for us. It was hard, it was very hard. But again, it was something – it may have been advertised for graduate students also. We didn't have another undergraduate really who could do a seminar with the exception of the Thompson Arminian seminars.
EG: As a professor, did you find undergraduates at local universities had other forms of interaction at Dumbarton Oaks? We've heard various things of community access to the collections and the museum.
EF: I've found them to be very cooperative. I got to know Cynthia Pinkston in my years here. She would be very supportive of having the classics club come over and do the garden as a Roman garden. The garden does have its base in Roman gardens. It's a French garden mostly, but that's based in Italy – in Roman gardens. So, she was very helpful in that. She was also very supportive if I wanted to bring my beginning Greek classes over to look at objects in the Dumbarton Oaks collection that incorporate Greek into their design and conception. The beginning Greek students could do that and they were really quite thrilled. I would typically bring them over on a Saturday morning and they would have their tour. They would always do the apostle spoons and the Eutychianos paten and things like that, that were so obviously Greek it was the natural language. For the students, it was really good for them. And then at one time G.W. wanted professors to do these outings with students and they would pay if you would take students to lunch afterwards. So, we would go down to the Georgetown Café, which is run by Persians and they would have their lunches. I would say, the only condition is you have to try Hummus. Because that's what an ancient diet really included. Really a lot of vegetable protein. Some of them really had no idea what this was. I said, you don't have to make your whole meal of that. I think one of the most interesting variations on eating hummus I ever saw was this student who dipped his French fries in it. I said, whatever, whatever. Let me see – I also had the opportunity twice to do a Byzantine literature and civilization course at G.W. in the Classics department. I could send the students here to do a paper. So, I tended before they had the new exhibition on lighting, to send them over to do a project on lighting. Because all the objects were here, they just weren't particularly integrated. I'd ask them questions that meant they'd have to look at the objects and figure out what they were and the changes in the technology of lighting, so to speak, and the public use of it. So, they'd get over to the museum, and they'd never been. Many would never have come. So, yeah, I've found them very cooperative. Then I wasn't teaching beginning Greek. Another colleague was doing it for awhile. So, I didn't have a class to bring over. Kristen and Gudrun have been very supportive that the students could come over and we could even look at some manuscripts, which I think they would find really thrilling. The fact of a human hand visible on these objects would be, I think, very thrilling to them. So, this year I'll have beginning Greek again and I'm looking forward to reestablishing contact.
AS: Is there a lot of interaction between scholars and Fellows and the museum and collections? Or are they really quite separate?
EF: Well, in 1991 I really don't remember interaction, no. But when I had the fellowship in 2007-8, Gudrun was very forthcoming about that. She wanted our ideas about display and about how people would interact with the collections. I found that really exciting. I hope that there's more to come. But I think part of the problem is that the collection is so precious. That's something that they have to take responsibility for.
AS: Can you give some striking changes since when the first time you arrived to your more recent fellowship? Some of the things that pop into your mind about how Dumbarton Oaks has changed in, say, the last two decades?
EF: You know, it was not easy to get access when I first came. It was 1976. And I had to convince them that I really was working on a Byzantine project. At one point the librarian became convinced that there were too many classicists using the library for their own non-Byzantine purposes. So, the librarian at the time revoked the library privileges of all readers who were in Classics departments. This was a very severe blow for me. It would have really been a very severe blow, but the angels watch out for fools and small children. And I'm not a small child, so I guess I know what these angels are concerned about. So, it was January that the assistant librarian said, "I'm very sorry but I have to revoke your card." Yes, your face said it all, Jeanne-Nicole – hmm. I said, "You know that's going to be very difficult because I've just been awarded a Dumbarton Oaks fellowship in 1991-92 and I don't know how I can fulfill the terms of the fellowship if I don't have library access." So, that finished that little moment. And I think Dumbarton Oaks has become – they have to be sure the people who have access are serious scholars. I understand that. But in the late 1970s it was very difficult. And then this kind of thunderstorm in January of 1991 was very difficult for me. Of course, I was accustomed to the old house and all the books in the old house. And we ran. We went up the stairs and down the stairs, and there was a curling staircase that took you up into the one side of the attic and you took your heart in your hand and you went up the curling little staircase if you didn't go up the main one. So, it was really something to get at the books. You got your exercise. Outside readers were allowed to use what was then the reference room with a large table, but if there were a couple of art historians there with large folio books, there wasn't room to sit. So, I would sit on the floor sometimes up on the third floor attic and do my work. I found some little secret places that had tables. There was a table where Irfan Shahid set up with a typewriter that was kind of hard to find. But I found it and I could sit there if he wasn't there. So, I would sneak off in this secret little corner or off in the side where they kept the microfilms, I could sometimes work up there if there was no room downstairs. So, you learn these things. I think the darkest moment for me in the old house was when they put in the first compact stacks. They were in one room in the basement. And this was quite new and we didn't know about these things. We were all told, "This is how they work, do it. You'll just have to use them." They didn't always work. They worked too well the time I was in there getting a book way at the end. And someone just closed it on me. I screamed and ran and I made it. But thereafter whenever I went into those stacks I would sing. Maybe singing at the table was a sign of insanity, as I was told growing up in the Midwest. And maybe singing in the stacks was a sign of insanity, but I don't want to die in the stacks. But now they have all these new trip devices and you couldn't possibly be compressed into the stacks, but I was determined not to have that happen again. Let me see – well photocopying was difficult in the old building. It was expensive. It's much easier now. Things are – the new library works very well, I think. I miss the old house. It had such a feeling of tradition about it. And the card catalogue room, you know, was in an open brightly lighted space. And I remember one of the people who – maybe it was Seka Allen who said – or maybe it was Dina who was the assistant librarian when I first came to Dumbarton Oaks. They said they remembered when Mrs. Bliss would first come over to the house. And the card catalogue room was set up as a card catalogue room. So, one of them was working in that card catalogue room. And Mrs. Bliss swept in with some of her friends, and she said, "This was my dressing room." And they all went, "Whoops! Excuse us!" [Laughs]. I never met Mrs. Bliss. I just heard stories, you know, from people who had known her.
JNSL: Are there any other times you recall being told stories about Mrs. Bliss?
EF: Yes, she used to give the Fellows ties because there were no women Fellows.
AS: Why were there no women Fellows? [Laughs]
EF: Because women weren't serious about these things. They were going to have babies and get married. Well, no – get married and have babies! [Laughs.] This was not an age when people thought of having babies and then getting married. I think it was just her feeling that the Fellows at Oxford were all men, so the Fellows at Dumbarton Oaks would be men. This was a story that I cannot substantiate, but it is such a good story I have to tell you. When I first went to the University of Minnesota, the Byzantinist was Carl Sheppard who had had a fellowship here at Dumbarton Oaks in, I think, 1948. He was one of the early Fellows. He was an art historian. And of course Sheila McNally joined that department, but Carl and Sheila overlapped a bit. But Carl said, "You know that Mrs. Bliss – she was really formidable." And I said, "Oh, I never met her." He said, "You know, the Fellows were all men," and I said, "Oh." "And they weren't supposed to be married." And I said, "Well what happened? Did anyone ever get married?" "Oh, yes," he said, "I got married the summer before my fellowship. I had gotten married after it was already granted, but I wasn't married when it was granted and then we got married that summer and we came as a couple to Dumbarton Oaks. Mrs. Bliss was furious. She said, 'What, he has a wife? Well we can't put them in the Fellows Building. Clean out the snake house, they can live there.'" Now I never saw the snake house and I don't know. You'd have to do some inquiring among some people who know the grounds better than I about if there was a snake house. It should have been down over there somewhere. I don't know, over there. There were some little buildings. I remember seeing their roofs. But that was never open to the public and I was the public, so I don't know.
JNSL: So what do you see as the Blisses' legacy here at Dumbarton Oaks, just from what you've heard in stories and, you know.
EF: Oh, you know I think that they had very good lawyers and they had a very good sense that the humanities were not going to be in the central position of American academic life and that Byzantine studies was not going to be in the central position of academic life and that they needed to protect the collection, both the museum collection and the books. They had a very good will drawn up. There was a rumor that went around, and I don't know if it's true, that in 1942 when the Blisses drew up their will, it looked like the Nazis may capture the southern part of the United States. And a friend of mine who used to work for the OSS before it was the CIA told me that that was something that people talked about. It was very bad in 1942. The will was written so that the collection couldn't be moved to Harvard unless this Washington would be occupied by a foreign power, but I'm not sure. I've never seen the will. I don't know if that's true. There was talk in the late 1960s that Dumbarton Oaks would be moved up to Cambridge and that this would be turned into a kind of a place for, I don't know, government studies or something – I don't know, something like that. And Giles Constable was director at the time and said, "I have no intention to preside over the demise of Dumbarton Oaks." So, I really don't know about that story. At the time people said, they can't move it because of the will. But that's what people down here were saying they were desperate for it not to move. And it didn't. And I think the Blisses' legacy of the symposia has been important. I don't know how that will evolve through the years, but the idea of a place where people who are at the top of their profession met to exchange ideas and stimulate one another and to allow others to participate in that was important. The fact that they secured this space for it to happen in and the resources to support it is their legacy, and a very important one. Its much more important than "This was my bedroom." And "Put them in the snake house." That's just tittle-tattle. It doesn't matter. But there's serious dedication to not only the beautiful objects – because a lot of people are dedicated to beautiful objects and you can read about those people, and they're kind of notorious. But the Blisses believed in the scholarship to support the understanding of those objects and that was the fact of the library. And that was the fact of scholars and the fact of the Fellows. I think that acknowledgement of a living tradition through the objects, the books, to understand them and the ability of people to interface with those things and with one another, that was very important. I don't know of another place like it.
AS: What was your perception of their decision to combine pre-Columbian studies and garden and landscape architecture with Byzantine studies?
EF: Oh, it's fine with me.
AS: Was there a lot of interaction with the other departments?
EF: Oh yeah. There was a man in 1991 named Norris Johnson, who was a Garden Fellow. He did Japanese gardens. We had wonderful conversations – just about, I don't know, landscape and life. I feel that's an important part of literature, that interaction between physical environment and people, humans, who mediate it through literature. And I found Norris Johnson had a very stimulating intellect. Also, there was a woman that year named Rebecca. I think she was University of Virginia, that may not be right. I was working on some gloss at the time and I had encountered a section in the oration of the Blachernae that I was editing where Psellos quoted himself, and it was quite extensive. I just happened upon this quote and I couldn't understand it. I said to Westerink, what's going on? He's quoted himself exactly. And Westerink said, "He could have had his own work on his desk and copied it out." So, I was telling Rebecca about this, and she was a Garden Fellow. She said, "Well, you know some people have embarrassingly retentive verbal memories." And I said, what do you mean? She said, "I find that I have to be very careful when I write because I read something and take notes on it, and then I go to write an article and incorporate the material, you know, that I had taken notes on." She didn't copy out a photocopy or something. But she said, "I'll just find the words fall in a certain way and that's a perfect way to express it." And then she said that she would find that she had inadvertently quoted a source that she had read a year ago, and it's just in there. And she had to be really careful. I think that the medieval had that same people. She didn't cultivate hers. She didn't want it, because it could get you in trouble for plagiarism. But I think medieval people had the same ability we do and don't cultivate, but they did cultivate it. But someone like Psellos who said he memorized the Iliad and the Odyssey, he had that ability, you know, for a really retentive verbal memory. And I think I sort of discounted things he would say, like "I memorized the Iliad and the Odyssey." I would think, sure. Tell me another one, pull another one. But that experience talking to her, just over lunch – we were sitting right over there in the lunch room at the time – really opened my eyes and made me think of human capacities that I hadn't thought about. And pre-Columbians – I've enjoyed talking to them. I formed a good friendship when I had my last fellowship with Liz, who is another parrot person – not really, but she works in Central America. I found their work with the NEH – they had a fellowship meeting about getting NEH fellowships. That's not very different from my colleagues who work in archeology – in Bronze Age and Classical archeology. So, I found that very interesting. So, yes, I think it's a fruitful exchange, and I never have been conscious that the programs were in combat or competition. Maybe they are, I don't know.
EG: What was your social life like here, both in the 1990s and more recently? – typical day to day activities?
EF: Not at all typical. Because you remember that I live here. And so my – I had two lives. I had my friends here in Washington. I was married in 1991 and my late husband and I were both readers here. I had the life I would have had just on my own, except I got to use Dumbarton Oaks more regularly. And I had a desk and got to meet Yildiz "Ötüken, who became a very good friend – a Byzantine archeologist. Three of us – my husband, who was fluent in Turkish, Yildiz and I had wonderful times together in 1991-2. I can more or less define my social life. If I wanted to invite people over, I could. I didn't have to live with them. They were at the time living up on Wisconsin Avenue in the apartment buildings, which were not entirely desirable, I think.
JNSL: This is before La Quercia.
EF: Yeah, and I think you would just get such different impressions of social life at Dumbarton Oaks from the people who lived here in different years. I think you have to honor that. I had just another life, you know, in Washington. I can walk from my apartment to Dumbarton Oaks, and that's always been a good thing. In 1991-2 when I was married, I would go home and have dinner. I would have lunch here. I gained about ten pounds. I thought, that's got to end.
JNSL: Were there activities for all the Fellows to participate in? Christmas parties –
EF: Oh yes. That's true. There were the activities like Christmas parties. That I remember well. And I remember there in 1991, my other life conflicted with this one. I had arranged to go and serve at Christ House, which is a facility for the homeless in Adams Morgan, and I couldn't substitute, so I had to miss the Christmas party. I heard about it, and I thought, this is the most bizarre contrast on Washington, you know. Dinner at the homeless facility in Adams Morgan versus the Christmas party at Dumbarton Oaks. I understand they had tiny éclairs, and I love tiny éclairs. I didn't get any. And of course, the symposium. In 1991-2, we didn't have these colloquia that they have now. That was something that I really enjoyed in 2007-8. I think that there were almost too many opportunities for lectures and so forth that we needed to get our work done in 2007-8, and it was almost too much. Do we need to stop, Jeanne-Nicole? I don't mean to be voluble.
JNSL: Ten more minutes.
EF: Okay.
JNSL: Do you have any – who were some of the most unique characters that you met here? – almost quirky, or quirky memories. Anything funny or peculiar that you recall from Dumbarton Oaks? – people, stories, parties? You mentioned the library.
EF: Oh! That's true. Well, I remember Kazhdan, you know, sitting in his office and reading with books on his nose, practically, because he was so near-sighted. And then he had a corneal transplant, I think. And suddenly he didn't have to wear glasses. And his life was just transformed. That was miraculous, really. All his life, he had been so near-sighted and suddenly this was transformed. I remember that Jakov Ljubarskij had a heart attack in the year that we were Fellows. And of course this was frightening. And he had Dumbarton Oaks on his Kaiser Permanente healthcare, I think. So, they did a bypass and it was either triple or, I'm not sure. It was a major bypass surgery. We would go and visit him at Georgetown hospital, and I remember he was kind of groggy, and he said, "Shall we waltz around my hospital room, Elizabeth?" And I said, not yet, Jakov. Later! [Laughs} But he said to me, you know, I never could have had this operation in the Soviet Union. That was 1991-2 and it was not yet what it is now. I don't know what it is now. But anyway, he said, I could never have had that operation. Even though he needed it desperately – it saved his life. I said, "Why not? Don't they know how to do it?" So dumb. He said, "Well, it's for high party members and people like that." He was at the pinnacle of Byzantine studies in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union honored Byzantine studies, and so does Russia, in a way that we don't here. But he said that it wouldn't have been available. I think that – I don't know the circumstances of his death, but I know that a bypass lives about five years and he didn't live much longer than that. I remember when – let me get this right. Kazhdan had brought his History of Byzantine Literature to a certain point, and a number of us were asked to read it. Is this right? And – yes, I think this is right. And so they circulated an electronic copy, and I remember Littlewood was there and Duffy and Browning was given a copy – and Ljubarskij. He presided over. This was just a kind of discussion over the directions where the History of Byzantine Literature should go. I felt so privileged to get a copy of that because the sections, for instance, on the aristocracy in the sixth century were just brilliant. I used them with classes, they were wonderful. But we met and Ljubarskij presided over this gathering and it was announced that Robert Browning couldn't come. He had died. It was so fast. We were all shocked. But Ljubarskij presided, and he had a nervous habit of cleaning his eyeglasses when he was nervous. I first noticed it when we were Fellows together and he was giving his Fellows report and he was cleaning his eyeglasses nervously, but he didn't have a tissue in his hand, so he was sort of rubbing them just worse and worse and worse [laughing.] But he presided over that. There was something of a pall over the gathering because of Robert Browning's absence. And then of course a year later, I remember it so well – May 29th. I was in the old mail room over in the old house and Kazhdan came in and said, "Here's the History of Byzantine Literature. I'm sending it off." And I looked at him and thought wow! And he said, "I put an article on your shelf that I want you to fix the English for me." Well, I mean his English was fine, but he didn't think it was a native speaker's English, and it wasn't. So, I would do that sometimes. So, I went home and the next day I heard that he had gone to the swimming pool and that he had collapsed at the pool and died. And Stamatina was with him – Stamatina McGrath. And then, you know, people came. His funeral was very stark because his son is very orthodox and they did it exactly correctly by an orthodox funeral. So, I remember they couldn't speak of the dead, and his son had to wear exactly what he was wearing when he heard the news with a tear just over the left pocket and they couldn't look at us or speak to us. Kazhdan's grandchildren could, and did, and that was good. And Ševčenko spoke, and Alice-Mary. It was very hard to say goodbye to Kazhdan. He was such a presence at Dumbarton Oaks.
JNSL: I think that's a very appropriate place to end our conversation. And I want to thank you so much for talking with us and sharing your memories. We're very grateful.
EF: You're very welcome. It was a pleasure. Thank you all.]]>
The sixth session of the biennial Dumbarton Oaks summer school in Byzantine Greek was held between June 4 and 29. The program was co-taught by Alice-Mary Talbot, Director emerita of Byzantine Studies, and by Stratis Papaioannou, Associate Professor of Classics and Director of the Modern Greek Studies Program at Brown University. The school attracted a diverse and lively group of ten doctoral students from the United States and Europe, including four Americans, a Pole, a Finn from the University of Birmingham, a British student now at Berkeley, an Italian studying in Paris, a German studying in Budapest at the Central European University, and an Israeli now at Princeton.
The intense class schedule included sessions of group translation of Greek texts, practice in paleography (the reading of medieval manuscripts), private tutorials, two lectures on Byzantine literature by Margaret Mullett, and an introduction to the resources of Dumbarton Oaks, such as manuscript facsimiles in the Rare Book Library and manuscripts and inscribed objects in the Museum collection.
The Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Greek summer school alternates annually with a similar program at the Gennadeion Library at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, modeled on the Dumbarton Oaks curriculum. Following a rigorous selection process, Dumbarton Oaks covers accommodation and half-board for successful applicants, and does not charge tuition.]]>
Panagiotis Agapitos is Professor of Byzantine literature and culture at the University of Cyprus. In addition to being a highly respected Byzantinist and philologist, he is also a best-selling novelist. Dumbarton Oaks was pleased to welcome Professor Agapitos as a Visiting Scholar in Byzantine Studies in April of 2012. The following is an interview conducted by Margaret Mullett, Director of Byzantine Studies.
Well, it has been a great stay and I have very much enjoyed the company of the fellows, a really young group, but also it has been great to spend time with colleagues, and old and new friends. I have been working on a little book on histories of Byzantine literature on the way to writing one myself. I've also been looking at periodization of Byzantine literature: it sounds rather precious but it is in fact a useful methodological tool. I have been exploring the attitudes to Byzantine literature of one of the founders of our field, Karl Krumbacher (1856–1909) who wrote a Handbook to Byzantine Literature 120 years ago. I discovered that the DO library was amazingly helpful: I wasn't expecting it to have almost all the old material, but it does, including an offprint of 1895 which allowed me to reevaluate Krumbacher and his developing views. For example, we always think of him as believing that Byzantine literature started in the fourth century with the emperor Constantine, as the second edition (1897) of his Handbook does—but in fact in his first edition (1891) he thought that Byzantine literature should start in the seventh century with arguments very similar to the ones used today to mark the end of Late Antiquity, but he was forced to start in the sixth century where the classical volume in the series ended. I've also discovered that Krumbacher in 1905 proposed how Byzantine literature should look, in a chapter within a popularizing book with no footnotes, but in his most mature synthetic moment.
Yes, indeed. I've also been looking at Franz Dölger (1891–1968), who we wouldn't automatically think of as a student of Byzantine literature, largely because we think of him more as a student of Byzantine diplomatics, but his PhD research after the First World War was on Theodore Meliteneiotes' poem Eis ten sophrosynen [On Chastity]. He never integrated his interest in literature with his social and economic concerns--he never developed a theory of Byzantine literature as a socio-cultural product of its time: rather he saw it as a field where endless imitation, variation and repetition went on, and only in vernacular literature was there anything original. This is a very different view from ours today, but also from Krumbacher's. Dölger's approach reflected an ideology close to that of Nazi Germany in which texts that failed to conform to his hieratic model, perfectly organized in a ceremonial system, were regarded as dissidents to a perfect regime. His views were hugely influential in that he wrote the overview of Byzantine literature for the Cambridge Medieval History IV.ii (published in 1967), and also provided the foundation for the Greek philology curriculum during the junta through a student of his who acted as consultant to the regime. Even now Greek university education reflects a tripartite division into 1. Introduction to Byzantine philology, 2. Byzantine poetry, 3. Byzantine prose—and this is exactly the structure of Dölger's chapter in Cambridge Medieval History IV.ii.
Yes, but he made the leap from his early work as an economic historian to look at Byzantium as having a literature like any other literature, and he reacted strongly against Dölger's overschematic and rigid categorization. He suddenly began in the very late 1960s to work on literary texts with his first article on Niketas Eugenianos, and in subsequent essays and finally in the two volumes of his History of Byzantine Literature he tried to liberate the texts, their authors, and their social setting from Dölger's categories. He was one of the first scholars really to think of Byzantine literature as a literature in its own right, not a tissue of classical quotations and evidence for lost tragedies, or the means of transferring ancient Greece to the Renaissance, or a powerful influence on Slavonic literature or a stage in the transfer of the folk tale from east to west and west to east.
Yes, indeed. The way we looked at the field twenty-five years ago has moved it dramatically away from Dölger, and a younger generation has done fantastic work and established firm theoretical foundations. You might think that postmodernism has crushed any idea of history of literature, but in fact this has not proved a problem for Byzantine literature, given that it never had a history of its own to start with.
We started there by building our own syllabus, not by adopting the Greek system, and we created a more modern program of study: students take six courses in Byzantine literature over three historical periods (early, middle, and late), which gives them the opportunity to read a large number of texts and this creates confidence in them for understanding the texts.
Well, Harvard was very important to me, a real transformation from my German-speaking education in Athens and Munich, a chance to put it into perspective. And from the cradle of Byzantine studies (and modern Greek studies) I was now involved in a department where there were other Hellenists and specialists in Vergil and Seneca and comparative languages like Sanskrit and Old Norse. And the exposure to the methods of classical philology opened up a dawning awareness that Byzantine philology demands different methods. Finally, for the first time I was exposed to the theory of literature through scholars in comparative literature, which led me to change my dissertation topic from metrics and Byzantine music to narratology. I was fortunate to be there while Ihor Ševčenko was in his prime, and also to have been at Harvard when Margaret Alexiou, famous for her classical training and for her father George Thomson, arrived in January 1986. I took her first course on death in Byzantine literature and was astonished to hear an intelligent educated scholar freely interpreting Byzantine texts as literature. Meg finally took over the supervision of my dissertation.
Well Meg was not that kind of Neohellenist: she wanted to see those texts both in a Byzantine context and from the viewpoint of modern Greek literature, but she never tried to capture them for modern Greek. She believed in the 'continuity' of Greek literature where others were anxious to push the origins of modern Greek literature as far back as possible. This arose from the early nineteenth-century concern for nation states and national literatures and a desire to find an equivalent to Old French and Mittelhochdeutsch: without that equivalent modern Greek literature appeared to be impoverished. What these scholars didn't immediately realize was that vernacular literature was not "popular" but high-level aristocratic poetry, produced under the very highest patronage, steeped in the most sophisticated of rhetoric. A Neohellenist will look at the twelfth century and see only the so-called epic of Digenis Akritis and the vernacular experiments (Ptochoprodromos, Glykas, Spaneas); a Byzantinist will see these texts in the context of everything that was written in the period. Literature like art is an open space, not a territory marked out by fortresses. And this is true at the other end of our subject—the relationship of classics or Late Antiquity with Byzantine studies is just as fraught with battles for territorial control.
Traditionally Byzantine texts have been made to look like ancient Greek texts; they have datives and infinitives and were edited as ancient Greek with fully normalized spelling, accentuation, and punctuation according to the German school or the French school. Byzantinists have the advantage over classicists in that we have manuscripts written in the time of the authors, which means that we can reflect contemporary practice in our editing, not the unchanging mimesis of older philologists. We no longer think that manuscripts of vernacular texts are full of scribal errors which need to be corrected (normalized) by the editor: we know now that a scribe with a nice professional hand would copy two texts, one learned with "good," educated spelling, the other vernacular spelled chaotically. The chaos reflects the experimental state of a language and literature which was written without being taught in school. We need to see how the text is structured, how it can be understood, how it uses language before we can decide whether or not to "correct" it. We can learn a great deal from architects restoring monuments: our ideas of preservation now are very different from those of the nineteenth century.
I originally thought it was straightforward. Why shouldn't a Byzantinist set a murder mystery in Byzantium? For forty years now Ellis Peters has enabled Cadfael to solve medieval mysteries, not to speak of Umberto Eco and William of Baskerville. But I admit I was wrong. It is neither unlaborious nor simple. The process of writing narrative in three dimensions drives us beyond scholarship. Ninth-century shoes may not have come down to us, but we need to represent shoes in the narrative. So I decided to take the process seriously, to be self-conscious about it, to control my own laboratory. So I ask where are the limits, and instead of creating a Philip Marlowe in Constantinople or a body in a library, I ask instead what did the Byzantines perceive as crimes in society, and I go to the legal handbooks of the ninth century to find out. This has the result of allowing me to portray a whole society not just one individual crime. This has taught me not to assume that everything happened in Constantinople: Byzantium was an empire of many cities and languages and also frontiers, and my hero experiences all this diversity. It has also helped me see that when we look at Byzantium we cannot rely on a single specialism: literary scholars must know history and art and architecture, and it is very clear that that is the way Byzantine Studies is practiced here at DO with a great concern for interdisciplinarity, and an openness to surrounding fields. Something else I gained is that writing narrative has given me a broader perspective on the history of Byzantine literature: the author is not down on the plain or on the beach but he climbs a mountain, and the distant view from the height offers clarity. And crime fiction offers its own delights of postmodernity. Intertextuality is to be expected; authors are now competing to complete Conan Doyle, or to offer Oscar Wilde as a detective; readers love that sort of game because they knowingly participate in it. Texts exist because other texts exist, and this is no surprise to the learned reader of Byzantine literary texts where mimesis creates a metalanguage which will drive dynamic response, nor is it a surprise to the avid listener to saints' lives in monastery, church or home expecting the topoi of a narrative genre and rejoicing on finding them. All kinds of narrative constantly recur; all literature is always true. Texts are not individual masterpieces but part of a linguistic system of production and use. We should forget the concept of a masterpiece, which in the classical world has been so much promoted by processes of selection, edition, education and loss; we should concentrate on the whole of what we have and begin to understand and appreciate the processes of production and reception in Byzantium.
AMT: Good afternoon, Jeanne-Nicole.
JNSL: Today is August 5, 2009. My name is Jeanne-Nicole Saint-Laurent and I have the honor today of interviewing Dr. Alice-Mary Talbot. Thank you for coming.
AMT: It's a pleasure to be with you today.
JNSL: I would like to begin with the beginning and if you will think back to the first time you heard about Dumbarton Oaks, how you came to come here in the beginning, and the circumstances of your first involvements as a young scholar.
AMT: That's a very easy question for me to answer because I first heard about Dumbarton Oaks through my professor, Ihor Ševčenko. I was taking my very first course in Byzantine studies with him at Columbia University, which was a seminar on Byzantine epigraphy, a very strange way to begin the study of Byzantium, but that's the course he was teaching that spring, and it was a very small seminar of four students, and in the springtime he invited three of the students to accompany him to Dumbarton Oaks for the annual spring symposium. And I still remember it was on Byzantium and the Arabs, a topic I knew nothing about. In those days you couldn't just sign up for the Byzantine symposium, you had to receive an official invitation, and basically students were not encouraged to come, they had to be essentially invited and escorted by their professor. So, this was necessary in order for me to attend it, and it was a truly remarkable weekend. The weather was superb, I still remember the white azaleas in flower, the amazing buffet lunch that was served – a whole salmon with scales of cucumber slices – and meeting so many people whose names I just knew from the bibliography. And the symposium itself was the first time I had ever attended any kind of scholarly symposium, so I think I would have been impressed by almost any such event. But obviously the Dumbarton Oaks symposium was of unusual quality and it was a truly thrilling experience and I think it did have a major impact on making me decide to become a Byzantinist.
JNSL: And so at that point you hadn't even chosen your thesis topic yet.
AMT: At that point I was a first year graduate student and I was actually planning to concentrate in Ottoman history, so I was still very much searching for my field. But, as a result of beginning to study with Ševčenko, I decided to change my priorities and to make Ottoman history into my minor field and Byzantine studies into my major field.
JNSL: Was he a demanding supervisor?
AMT: Oh, extraordinary. He is certainly one of the most brilliant scholars I've ever met. His knowledge of foreign languages is unparalleled, and I remember at this first symposium sitting at a table with him and hearing him switch into at least six different languages during lunch. I was just astonished at his facility with modern European languages, and his knowledge of Greek was amazing. He had very high expectations of his students, and he had a rather unusual way of teaching, in that he was not very good at presenting introductory materials but he liked to plunge right into the middle of things with an actual text and then he would pretty much leave it to the students to develop their own bibliography and to figure out how to deal with it. When he taught paleography, for example, he just handed us a – in those days there weren't even photocopies – it was something called a thermofax, of a text and essentially said start reading it, with absolutely no introduction to things like abbreviations or ligatures or whatever. But we supported each other, and he obviously would answer questions if you asked him. But he, I think – he was a much better teacher of very advanced students and would not have been successful with undergraduates. I don't think he ever taught undergraduates as a matter of fact.
JNSL: And then you later came back as a Junior Fellow?
AMT: Yes, once I decided on my dissertation topic, which was to edit the letters of the patriarch Athanasios I, by that time Ševčenko had already sort of begun the process of leaving Columbia and taking a position as a permanent faculty member at Dumbarton Oaks. And so, it made a great deal of sense for me to be a Junior Fellow there because he had been away from Columbia for already one full year at that point, and so it gave me an opportunity to take advantage of Dumbarton Oaks and to be close to my mentor. So, it was a rather unusual situation in that my mentor was here, and I ended up staying two years, which was very common in the '60s. Most Junior Fellows, in fact, did have a renewal of their fellowships, and so I was here from 1966 to 1968.
JNSL: And that was – who was the director at that time?
AMT: Well, it was a time of transition. Ernst Kitzinger had stepped down as the Director of Byzantine Studies at the end of the spring of '66. And there, I think – I'm not sure there actually was a Director of Byzantine Studies when I first came. And then Ševčenko held the position, but only for three months and then they appointed Romilly Jenkins. I'm not quite sure of the chronology but, well, certainly when I was a Junior Fellow Romilly Jenkins became director, but he only lived for three more years, so that was a very short tenure. He died very suddenly of a heart attack.
JNSL: And Mr. Tyler was –
AMT: No, Jack Thacher was still the director, the original Director of Dumbarton Oaks. He was nearing the end of his tenure, he stepped down in 1969, I believe. I did get to know him a little bit because he was an art historian and since my husband was an art historian he was interested in getting to know us perhaps a little bit more than some of the other Fellows. And Mr. Thacher was very helpful to us. We were planning a trip to Europe and he helped us to gain entree to some private collections, which was wonderful, and just in general gave us advice on our travels in Europe, so we were grateful to him.
JNSL: And then – so Mrs. Bliss died in 1969, so you would have seen her.
AMT: Yes, I pretty much literally just saw her. She was very elderly by the time I came, not in good health. She would come to the symposia and sit in a huge sofa which was put at the front of the rows of chairs and would sit there during the symposium and listen to the papers, and then she came every Friday afternoon for tea, a rather formal tea which was served to the Fellows and she would pour for us. But she had very little interest in the Junior Fellows as far as I could tell, and she was more interested in chatting with the faculty members. So, I may have told her that I wanted a slice of lemon in my tea, but that was about the extent of my interaction with her. Still, I did have a chance to see her and to gain the impression of her as a true grand dame. We were, of course – we all were very aware of the role she played in the establishment of Dumbarton Oaks, and so we were – we felt that she was responsible, in a way, for our being there. So, we were very excited to have the opportunity at least to lay eyes on her as we were, but she never, by that time – she never entertained at her home. So, earlier Fellows did have a chance to go to her home in Georgetown and meet her more informally, but by the time I came it was sort of too late for that.
JNSL: Did you have further responsibilities as a Junior Fellow in addition to working on your project? Were there other things you were expected to do?
AMT: No, in the mid-'60s our only responsibility was to work on our dissertations, it was in the earlier period that you had assigned work projects.
JNSL: And did you interact closely as a group? Was there a lot of sort of social interaction or was –?
AMT: Well, I would say that the group of Junior Fellows was very close, there were seven of us, so it was a substantial number, in fact, we outnumbered the regular Fellows. And we all lived in the same apartment building up on Wisconsin Avenue at 2702, and we all sat in the reading room on the second floor, and we did develop very, very close friendships. I would say of the – during the two years I was there I developed really lasting friendships with three of my colleagues, George Majeska and Jaroslav Folda, who are – I still count among my very close friends today. And then Margaret English Frazer, who tragically died a number of years ago, and she developed early onset Alzheimer's and it was a great tragedy, but she was a wonderful friend for a while at least. And we had, I would say, less contact with the older Fellows. And then there was the permanent faculty of whom there were about six – it was a very hierarchical arrangement then. You were very conscious of this strong difference between the faculty and then the regular Fellows and the Junior Fellows, and it was also a very small, relatively small group, because only Byzantinists, for example, went to lunch, and we all had lunch at the same time every weekday at – seated at a table, served by a waitress. So, it was very different from the quite informal come-when-you-want, serve-yourself, buffet style, sit-with-whomever-you-want that you have now. And then after lunch there would be coffee – was served in this room here with – usually one of the faculty members would pour, and we would try to have more general conversation. And Francis Dvornik never came to lunch because he had a weight problem and had to always watch very carefully what he ate, but he would always come for coffee because he enjoyed the company. And so, we always enjoyed when he would come and he would – he was very friendly with the Junior Fellows. And he actually made a point of inviting us to his home for a meal at some point during the year. In some ways, he was the most outgoing of all the faculty members, so – but I did certainly have a chance to get to know obviously Ševčenko, my own professor. Cyril Mango was there the entire time and had incredible respect for him; Paul Underwood who was working on Kariye Djami, and then Robert Van Nice, who technically was not a faculty member – he was more of a staff person – but he did come to lunch every day and he was working on the drawings of Hagia Sofia, and I did get to know him quite well and enjoyed him very much because he lived in Istanbul for many years and he was a great raconteur of stories of life in Istanbul and what it's like to work in a great church like Hagia Sofia for many years. So, I did feel privileged to get to know these people, but it was a very, very different atmosphere from what it is today, and there were no Garden and Landscape or Pre-Columbian Fellows.
JNSL: None at all?
AMT: None at all, yeah.
JNSL: And you came back, then, in – did you continue to come to the symposia after you finished your Ph.D. and before you came back in –?
AMT: I came to some of them. We moved to Cleveland in 1968, and I finished my dissertation there and started teaching as an adjunct at various colleges. And I was not able to teach Byzantine studies – I was teaching mainly modern Middle Eastern history, and I began to feel that I was quite isolated from the field and I was not at all sure I could continue because there was no library in Cleveland and it was a very difficult time. But I did come back occasionally and I guess a very important event was the symposium of 1972 because this was a major departure in the tradition of symposia at Dumbarton Oaks. Because, up to that date and after that date, symposia, Byzantine symposia, were always on a theme and all the speakers were invited and it was usually only senior scholars in the field, and so there was no opportunity for junior scholars to participate in any way except as in the audience. And in 1972, I think through the wisdom of the Senior Fellows, they decided as a one-time innovation to invite mostly some recent Junior Fellows and recent post docs and also a few scholars who had not been at Dumbarton Oaks and were also recent post docs. And they invited about ten, eleven of us to give papers on our research at Dumbarton Oaks, and so that was a really very exciting opportunity, a bit terrifying, to be, to give – this was my first conference paper ever, and to give it in the Music Room at Dumbarton Oaks before a Dumbarton Oaks symposium audience was really quite intimidating, I can tell you. But it was a wonderful opportunity to meet sort of all my – a cohort of all of the young scholars, most of whom I knew but not all. I'd never met Tom Matthews, for example, or Angeliki Laiou before, and they were participating in that, and it also, I think, gave me encouragement to stay in the field – the fact that I was invited, and then was invited to publish my paper in the Dumbarton Oaks Papers. And that was my second publication, I guess, in the Dumbarton Oaks Papers, so that was really, it really gave me a boost when I really needed it.
JNSL: Then it wasn't too long after that that you were part of the founding of the Byzantine Studies Conference.
AMT: Yes, and there's a definite connection, I think. What happened was that this 1972 symposium was an absolute – like a lightning bolt for young Byzantinists, because I think up to that point we hadn't – we just sort of accepted the fact that there was no possibility for Byzantinists to get together and give papers and talk to each other and meet each other, and when we had this symposium in 1972 with the young people giving papers, a lot of the younger people who were at that symposium said, we should do this every year. But we realized that Dumbarton Oaks was not going to do it every year, this was a one-time event, and the next year they went back to their normal routine. And so, that, I know, is what gave the impetus to a group of people to get together and decide we should start an annual conference. And I honestly don't remember how I got so involved in it, I just don't remember – it's possible that Walter Kaegi would remember – all I know is that he and I ended up being the co-organizers of the first Byzantine Studies Conference and that, for reasons which I also don't remember, I agreed to host it in Cleveland, which turned out to have been a foolhardy move because I had no real institutional affiliation as an adjunct. I had no university I could hold it at, so I had to go to the director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, where my husband was a curator, and I essentially asked the director of the museum if he would be willing to host it, because the Cleveland Museum has one of the great collections of Byzantine art. And I obviously pointed that out, and he very graciously agreed to host it. I, looking back on it, I'm amazed that he agreed to do it, and I'm very grateful to him, and it was very difficult because I had absolutely no support in Cleveland to do it. So, I had to do virtually everything myself except that some women from the local Greek church did help me. But I had no students to – the place I was an adjunct was an hour from Cleveland – so, I had no students who could help, and fortunately these ladies from the Greek church agreed to do things like help set up the registration table. And they very kindly hosted a dinner for the participants. Anyway, we had said that if seventy-five people came we would think it was a great success, and to our amazement one hundred twenty people came, and that was the beginning. We then drew up a constitution, and it's been going ever since. But I think it was founded in reaction to the symposia at Dumbarton Oaks as a place where it would be for – primarily for younger people, although obviously anyone was able to offer a paper – where you volunteered to give papers, there were no invitations, it was always a shoestring operation. Everyone paid his or her expenses for everything, and it was always intended to be as sort of informal and un-intimidating, in contrast to the Dumbarton Oaks symposium.
JNSL: And were there any, at that first conference, were there any Fellows or faculty members from D.O. who came over as a gesture of support for what you were doing or were they –?
AMT: I don't think so, no. There might have been some Fellows, but certainly none of the faculty came. There were very few senior scholars, it was definitely a project of the younger generation, which it has continued to be, which I think is the way it should be.
JNSL: And looking at your work, how did you become interested in the history of women, how did you develop that focus of Byzantine women?
AMT: Well, it's an interesting story, I think, actually. When I was working at Lake Erie College, which is another of the schools where I was an adjunct teacher. I started teaching there in 1970, if I remember correctly, and that was the era when women's studies were just beginning, maybe more around '72-'73, and it was a women's college. And so, I remember the dean calling me into his office and saying that we're a women's college and I think it really important that we start offering women's studies here, which we never have, he said how would you like to teach a course in women's studies. And I told him that I really didn't feel comfortable with doing a course on the entire history of women in the world, and I'd never done any modern history, but that I would be happy to do a course on women in classical antiquity and the middle ages, and said that maybe someone else could do the Renaissance to the present. So, he was happy with that, and so I put together a course, I believe in the fall of 1973 for the first time. It was all completely new to me. I mean, obviously I'd never – this topic was not discussed when I was an undergraduate and in graduate school. And I was quite fascinated by the topic, and I only devoted one week to Byzantine studies, most of it was classical Greece and Rome and the western middle ages, because that's where more secondary materials were available for the students. But when I was doing the preparation for the course I read a wonderful book by, dear me, now I'm going to go blank on the woman's name, a very famous Oxford historian, on medieval nunneries in England, and I was absolutely fascinated by this book. It was maybe – very fat book – five hundred pages long, based on – I think it was mainly on sort of very late middle ages, based on episcopal visitation documents to women's convents, and I just thought the material was fascinating. And I began thinking, I don't know anything about nunneries in Byzantium, and this might be an interesting topic to research. So, I began to do research and to find the surviving typika – which survive, the six surviving typika – and at that point I really didn't have any time to pursue the subject, but that's what triggered my interest. And it was only in the early '80s with the typikon translation project, which I became involved in, that I then had the opportunity to follow through on that interest and to translate the six, and to really develop more detailed knowledge of the phenomenon. But it was definitely that course at Lake Erie that sparked my interest.
JNSL: And did you return often in the '70s to Dumbarton Oaks or were you more really out in Cleveland at that time?
AMT: I was very much based in Cleveland. I had two small children so it was difficult for me to travel very much, and I didn't have very much connection with Dumbarton Oaks. I did publish my dissertation at Dumbarton Oaks, and so I did come back a few times in connection with preparing the final manuscript and checking proofs and that sort of thing. That book was published in '75, so I would come very occasionally, but I had pretty minimal contacts until 1978 until I came back as a staff member for two years.
JNSL: So, let's move to that period.
AMT: Okay. What happened was that when Giles Constable became the Director of Dumbarton Oaks in 1976, he decided to abolish the position of Director of Byzantine Studies. It's something I've never understood completely. It was – whether it was a cost cutting move, whether it was because of supposed difficulty in identifying an appropriate candidate – I've never really understood why that decision was made; I think it was a very bad decision. In any case, Giles assumed the duties of the Director of Byzantine Studies, but he very quickly realized that it was very difficult for him to do both jobs, and so he and his successors, as Director at Dumbarton Oaks, had to make a series of accommodations over the years to try to get help in carrying out all the duties of the Director of Byzantine Studies. And so, the first such effort was hiring me on a half-time basis to help with organization of academic events. So I, for example, organized public lectures, and I organized the symposia, and I also helped with the publications program with reviewing manuscripts.
JNSL: What was your title?
AMT: I was called Associate for Academic Affairs, and then in later years – I only did it for two years because I had to commute and with my small children that turned out to be very difficult. In later years, at one point, there was a troika of very junior professors here including Henry Maguire, I think, and John Duffy and Irina Andreescu. And they divided up the duties of the Director of Studies among the three of them, but none of them held that title. They also hired a man called Peter Topping who was here for maybe ten years and he was responsible, completely responsible for publications and also was very involved in advising the library on acquisitions. So, there were a number of these what I would consider makeshift efforts to carry out the responsibilities of the position, but there was no single person who was really responsible, and I think that was very unfortunate. But I did myself have two wonderful years back here and they were absolutely key in enabling me to continue in the field because at that point, as you can see, I was teaching as an adjunct – I was teaching Middle Eastern history – I had had no library, and it was very difficult for me to continue as a Byzantinist – and being here in Washington on a regular basis meant that I could return to serious research. I began to work very seriously on my second book which was on the posthumous miracles of the patriarch Athanasios, and what I did was I would work during the day on the Byzantine studies job and then at night I would work on my book, and I was able to publish that in the early '80s. So, that was extremely important and it also meant that I began to get back into the field and to be able to network again and sort of catch up with what was going on. But having access to the library was just extraordinarily important.
JNSL: Who were some other Byzantinists who were there at that time?
AMT: Well, the most important figure was definitely Alexander Kazhdan, who arrived in February of 1979. So, that was the first year that I was in that position, and I, because of my position, Giles essentially asked me to help him with his, shall we say, his acclimation and adjustment, which was a very difficult one, to Dumbarton Oaks. His English was very poor, he had no familiarity with the American academic system. And he did need a lot of support, I think, in those early days, but for me it was an extraordinary privilege to get to know him. And it was the beginning of a very long and fruitful both friendship and collaboration. I, in that early period – my main collaboration with him was that we did teach a course together. He was very anxious to start teaching, even though his English was really not adequate to the task, and this was very unusual since Dumbarton Oaks is not a teaching institution and it's not accredited, but we did work out an arrangement with local universities that they would send their students to Dumbarton Oaks and the universities would give the credit. But what happened was that Kazhdan organized this course, and then he informed me that he couldn't be there for the first four weeks because he was going to be in Europe. So, he asked me if I could teach the first four weeks of it, which I think was a good thing, because I, being more familiar with the needs of American undergraduates was able to give a rather general introduction before he came and began giving much more sort of detailed presentations. Then he had some serious health problems at the end of the semester and – very serious health problems – and I had, in fact, to read all the students' papers and do the grading, which I also think was a good idea because I think he actually wouldn't have had any idea what the normal standards of American undergraduates are and it would have been difficult for him. And then the third thing I did was I took notes as he lectured and afterward we would go over all the mistakes he'd made in English and I tried to help him improve his English. So, I learned a lot from his lectures, and that was the genesis of the book he wrote with Giles Constable on, again I'm going blank, on the Homo Byzantinus, and I was fairly involved in editing the early drafts of that book. So, that was the beginning of our association. We, obviously – we were very complementary figures to each other and could help each other in various ways. And so, that I think led him to call upon me when he began to work on the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium.
JNSL: And before you began that project, you began your work on the typikon? Is that right – that was first?
AMT: Yes, I actually did all that work in Cleveland. Since it was a translation project, I was able to do it completely at home, which was wonderful, because all I needed was essentially the photocopies of the text and a dictionary. And then Angela Hero, who served as the editor, was in New York, and I would just mail my text to her and she would correct them. We did have, I believe, two meetings of all the translators in Washington where we all, at the early stages – where we got together and discussed guidelines for the project. And those were wonderful, wonderful meetings, too, to launch the project, but after that we all worked very much in isolation essentially, but in close contact with the two editors, John Thomas and Angela Hero.
JNSL: And then, am I correct, you started work on – as the director of the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium in 1984, is that right?
AMT: Correct, yes. What happened was that I went back to Cleveland essentially full time for four years and went back to the adjunct teaching, and worked on the typikon project and also finishing this book on the miracles of Athanasios. And I was increasingly unhappy with the adjunct teaching being underpaid and not being able to teach anything in Byzantine studies. And so, when Kazhdan approached me in the fall of 1983 – what had happened was he had always – for a long time – had a dream of doing what he called a dictionary of Byzantine studies, even in the Soviet Union. And when he came to Dumbarton Oaks he hoped that he could realize this dream. He had – he was not a very practical man – and he had very little concept of the amount of money it would take to do it, or the amount of organization it would take. And he also didn't understand the ways in which funding agencies like the National Endowment for the Humanities operate. And he assumed that all that needed to happen was for Giles Constable to phone the head of NEH and Dumbarton Oaks would be given the money. And so, before I got involved Kazhdan had actually submitted an application to NEH which was rejected because it was inadequate, and I think that was sort of the wake-up call for him. He realized that he just didn't have sufficient familiarity with the American system of doing things and getting funding for projects. And so, he invited me to work with him, and I had almost no experience myself except that the typikon translation project had received NEH funding. I hadn't been involved in that application, but I knew how it had happened, but I was very tempted because of my dissatisfaction with my teaching arrangements in Cleveland. But I did insist that I couldn't commute on a weekly basis, and so we worked out an arrangement whereby I was hired on a half-time basis and I came one week a month to Dumbarton Oaks, funded by NEH, when we got the grant, and then I, in theory, worked one week a month at home on editing and doing my own research and writing. Of course it turned out to be much more than that, but at least it meant that I was only away from home one week a month and that proved to be a very manageable schedule which I continued for seven years. And so, we formed an editorial board of five, and with Kazhdan as editor-in-chief and I was the executive editor, and then Tony Cutler was the chief editor for art and Tim Gregory for archaeology, and originally Gary Vikan was sort of the assistant art editor. But at that year, in 1984, he was hired away from Dumbarton Oaks by the Walters, and they would not give him leave to work on the Dictionary, so he had to resign. And at that point, we decided to replace him with Nancy Ševčenko who was my former elementary and high school classmate and life-long friend. And so that proved to be a very good choice. She, like me, was working a lot sort of as an independent scholar, so she welcomed the opportunity to become involved in this project and did a superb job.
JNSL: You were aware when that began – or how long did it take for you to realize what would be required to complete a project like that? I just think it must have seemed like a tremendous undertaking.
AMT: It did. We actually did manage to complete it within the projected time, which I guess in hindsight is pretty extraordinary. I think we had projected seven years, and we actually submitted the manuscript after five years and it took two years to go through the press, but it was a tremendous job of coordination because of the very large number of contributors – I think it was one hundred seventeen contributors – and it would have been so much easier to do it today with email. But in those days we did everything by snail mail, and we had several contributors in Australia and it took three weeks for the mail in each direction. So I just – I often fantasize about what it would have been like to do that same project now. I bet we could have done it in maybe three or four years, certainly much, much less time.
JNSL: And at that time, then, was Angeliki Laiou, or was Thomson –
AMT: There were actually three directors at D.O. during the course of preparation of the ODB. Giles Constable was there at the beginning and was very, very helpful in getting, helping to arrange for the publication with Oxford University Press. He was very involved in those negotiations and actually signed the contract. He also did help a bit with the original planning process and initial contact with NEH although he didn't have anything to do with the actual application. Then in the middle years Robert Thomson was there from, so let's see, Constable left just as it started, but was very involved in getting it launched, then Thomson was there for the heart of the project, '84-'89, and he was a key author himself, he wrote all the entries on Georgia and Armenia, and was a model contributor. It was my great privilege to work very closely with him on editing his entries and it was so easy to work with him because he – everything was in such good shape the first time around. And he was very conscientious about meeting deadlines and very reasonable about doing revisions and it was just a great pleasure to work with him. And then Angeliki Laiou – by the time she came it was really at the very end, when we were sending it to press and reading the proofs. So she – she herself was on the advisory board, and did contribute some entries, but by the time she became Director, it was winding down, essentially, so she was not so involved with it.
JNSL: I'd like to ask you a question about the beginnings of your Greek reading group with the Fellows? Did that start under Kazhdan or were you the beginner of that?
AMT: I would say that it did begin under Kazhdan, although it was called a seminar then. He called it his weekly seminar, and he – since he was a full time researcher – he very much enjoyed having ways of interacting with the Fellows on a more sort of formalized basis, and very often volunteered to give courses of various sorts or to meet somewhat less formally with the Fellows. To tell the truth, during the '80s, I was so busy working on the Dictionary of Byzantium that I was not able to attend most of these sessions. I just felt I had – my time was so limited here that I couldn't take the time off to do what would have been a great pleasure for me. But it wasn't part of my job, so I actually did not attend any of his seminars in the '80s. I did attend in the '90s when he presented essentially his history of Byzantine literature as a series of, really, lectures over the course of a year. But in the '80s I just would hear about them from colleagues. I know he did, for example, a Psellos reading course, and he would pick texts and they would read with a group, but unfortunately I can't tell you very much about it since I didn't personally participate in that.
JNSL: In what year did you become a Senior Fellow?
AMT: I was appointed a Senior Fellow the year I became Associate for Academic Affairs, which was perhaps a little bit strange because I was a staff member and I was quite junior, but the director Giles Constable was for some reason very anxious that I be on the Board of Senior Fellows, and so he did appoint me and I stayed on for five years.
JNSL: And were the duties at that time similar to what they are today, I mean in terms of selecting people? What were your responsibilities?
AMT: Yes, it was primarily the selection of the Fellows and very much advising on academic policy and various types of problems which emerged. In those days, when Dumbarton Oaks was very involved – I'm talking now about the late '70s and very early '80s – Dumbarton Oaks was still involved, to a certain extent, in field work. It had actually – it wasn't as much still actively engaged in field work but with the aftermath of these projects and ways of publishing them or dealing with the materials, and there were a lot of problems with various projects. Kalenderhane Djami, for example – there were grave difficulties in its publication – dissension and disagreement between the two chief editors, and great delays, and so the Senior Fellows spent a great deal of time trying to remedy that situation. There were also many difficulties with the San Marco project, which was more a project to photograph mosaics and publish them. That's what I have, you know, very distinct memories of, spending a great deal of time on that kind of issue.
JNSL: And were there many women involved in the field when you first began? Or how has that changed through the year? You mentioned Angela Hero was also a student of Ševčenko.
AMT: For the M.A., she was a Meyendorff student, she went to Columbia for her M.A. and to Fordham for her Ph.D., but I first met her when we were in the same seminar at Columbia with Ševčenko. There were almost no senior women in the field when I was a graduate student and in my early years as a post doc researcher. Certainly Serarpie Der Nersessian, who had been the great exception, had retired by the time I came to Dumbarton Oaks, so I don't think I ever actually met her. She was somewhat of a legend, but I never got to know her personally. She moved to Paris so she didn't come back to Dumbarton Oaks after she retired. At the symposia, there were, at first, no women speakers, as is very readily apparent if you look at the photographs of the symposia of the '60s and '70s. And I know that we always were very conscious when a single woman would be invited to speak, and that was another way in which the 1972 symposium was so earthshaking, because when the young people were invited to speak, many women were included in that, so that was another sort of consciousness raising event. Now there were many junior women and we were very supportive of each other and I think most of us have done fairly well in the field, but we did not have many role models to follow. At Harvard as an undergraduate, I only had one female professor in four years and that was in astronomy. At Columbia, I had no female professors. I had one female instructor in Turkish. At Dumbarton Oaks, there were no female members of the faculty, so it was a very, very different situation.
JNSL: Did your work in the '70s and '80s – did you ever have opportunities to travel to Greece and Turkey through your connections with Dumbarton Oaks?
AMT: No, I had absolutely no opportunity to travel, except any just personal trips I arranged on my own. I, in fact, didn't go to Greece I think for a period of, well, there were long gaps in my visits to Greece, unfortunately, and to Turkey.
JNSL: But Dumbarton Oaks always had a very international –
AMT: I certainly met people from all these countries, definitely, yes.
JNSL: And let's move on to the beginnings of the Hagiography Database project, if you could remember. Was that an idea of Kazhdan's originally?
AMT: It was, yes. Maybe I should backtrack to talk a little bit about my own emerging interest in hagiography, because this is a topic which I knew really almost nothing about as a graduate student. When I worked on my dissertation I did use two saints' lives of the patriarch Athanasios as a major source, but I didn't think of them as saints' lives really, I thought of them more as historical sources, and I'd never read any other saints' lives, believe it or not. So, I was not aware of how they were typical or atypical of the genre or anything like that. I had nothing to compare them with, and really a sort of a series of coincidences, I think, led me into the study of hagiography. The first and absolutely key event was while I was here at Dumbarton Oaks working on the letters of Athanasios. Ševčenko mentioned to me that in the microfilm collection was a manuscript from the Halki Library in Istanbul which included not the letters of Athanasios but it was devoted to the cult of the patriarch Athanasios, and he was aware that there was an unpublished text of the posthumous miracles of Athanasios, and he suggested that I look at this to help me with the biography of the saint which I would need to write for the dissertation. So I did find it and, you know, read enough to realize that it very important and interesting text. But I had little time to do anything with it because I had to focus on the letters for my dissertation. But after I finished the dissertation, I decided that I really wanted to work on this unpublished manuscript, again, not that, at that point, I was particularly interested in saints' cults or thinking of it as hagiography, but because it was connected with Athanasios, and I was really interested in the afterlife of this historical figure whom I'd worked on so much. But as I worked on the text, which included the account of the translation of his relics and thirty-nine of his posthumous miracles, I became absolutely fascinated by the text itself, and this was the beginning of my very strong interest in healing shrines and the development of saints' cults. But I still, I would say, was not reading more broadly in hagiography at that point. Then when Kazhdan came to Dumbarton Oaks I discovered that he had a very strong interest in hagiography and he had been extremely frustrated in the Soviet Union because this was a verboten topic, and he was unable to pursue research on it and he was only able to publish one article on the life of the patriarch Euthymius of Constantinople and he was able to get away with it because that particular text closely resembles a historical chronicle. And he called it the "Chronicle of Psamathia" instead of the "Life of the Patriarch Euthymius," and titled his article something like "Two Tenth Century Chronicles." And he got away with it because there was this woman who had to read everything he wrote and give the imprimatur before it could be published. But that was the only thing he could do, so when he came to the United States he felt this extraordinary sense of liberation that he could now read whatever he wanted and write on whatever he wanted and he set himself a regiment of reading the life of every saint before the tenth century and taking copious notes on these vitae on these little tiny cards about this big. And he was primarily interested in the information these texts revealed on realia and every day life, although he did read the texts extremely carefully and he noted down all kinds of information. And he was interested in the date of composition, and he was interested in the authors, and he had all kinds of interests. But his primary focus was on the information on everyday life, and he put together a work which is unpublished but available in the Dumbarton Oaks library which he called a bio-bibliography in which he assembled an account, an entry for each vita in which he wrote a brief – a paragraph on the saint, the author of the work, the date of composition, and then a complete bibliography. And it's an extraordinarily piece of work. Someone someday should revise it, update it, and publish it, or do it on the website or something, because it's still a very valuable piece of research. So, that's one thing he did, but while he was doing this and writing many articles on the lives he read, he began to think about ways in which he could make what he called his little cards more widely available to Byzantinists. And he himself was not very comfortable with computers. He started using a computer as a word processor around maybe 1990, I would say, but he used it only as a word processor. And so he had to rely completely on others to understand how a relational database could be developed and disseminated.
JNSL: And I have one last followup question. Who else was involved in, who else worked on that project?
AMT: The two primary staff members were Alexander Alexakis and Lee Sherry. Lee worked for it for I believe five years, Alexander maybe for three years. And then we had three other sort of shorter term employees, Stephanos Efthymiadis, and Stamatina McGrath, and Beate Zielke, so there were six altogether who worked on it, and the project lasted, I believe, from 1991 to 1997.
JNSL: And so that was during Angeliki Laiou's time as Director?
AMT: Yes, that's right, and also while Henry Maguire was the new Director of Byzantine Studies.
JNSL: When was that position restored?
AMT: In 1991, yes.
JNSL: That must have been an exciting time.
AMT: It was indeed. What I am told had happened is that Robert Thomson, when he stepped down as Director of Dumbarton Oaks after only one five year term, and I am told that he strongly recommended that the position of Director of Byzantine Studies be reinstated, but then they hired Angeliki Laiou as the new Director. And since she was the most specifically byzantinist director that Dumbarton Oaks ever had, I think that perhaps some people thought well maybe it's not necessary since she's the director. But she herself came to realize fairly soon that she felt that the position should be reinstated, and so she hired – she came in 1989, and Henry Maguire started in 1991, and was here for one five year term. He was on leave from the University of Illinois and that's all, that's the maximum leave he could get.
JNSL: And you became Director of Byzantine Studies in 1997.
AMT: Correct.
JNSL: Can you maybe speak a little bit about that era?
AMT: Well, first of all, there was a transitional year that Henry left Dumbarton Oaks in 1996 and for again reasons that I do not understand, although it was well known that he would be leaving that year, no search was mounted for his replacement. And so Angeliki became the de facto Director of Byzantine Studies once again in '96-'97. But at that point I was working two thirds time, I think, for Dumbarton Oaks, at that point and she – or six tenths time, I can't remember, something like that – and she asked me to take on all the responsibilities for publications and work full time at Dumbarton Oaks and move to Washington, and so my husband took early retirement from the Cleveland Museum of Art and we moved here in 1996, and so during that transitional year I did do all of the work that the Director of Byzantine Studies does in terms of publications, and Angeliki was involved with the primarily the organization of academic events – she retained those duties for herself. And then in the spring of that transitional year, there was a search and I was hired.
JNSL: Wonderful, and it must have been very, in a way, very relieving for you to finally be here permanently and not having to – commuting must have been very tiring.
AMT: Yes, over my career I did commute for fourteen years, so it was a very, very long time. But I was very fortunate that Dumbarton Oaks always permitted me to stay here in the Fellows Building and so that meant I didn't have to get a separate apartment. And so, it was relatively easy to go back and forth, and although Ohio, for people in Washington – Ohio sounds like it's very far away, but the plane trip is actually only one hour, so it's no further than going to New York and there's no time change. So, that meant it was doable, definitely, but yes, it was very nice not to have to commute any more, and to be here on a full time basis.
JNSL: How were your responsibilities articulated when you took up the position, or what were your main responsibilities at that time? That's changed through the years.
AMT: Well, there was a major change in the organization of Dumbarton Oaks which occurred under Ned Keenan. I became Director of Studies in 1997, and Angeliki left one year later, and then Ned Keenan was director from 1998 to 2007. At the time that I became Director of Studies in 1997, there were the three programs of studies organized much the same way. The Director of Studies had very broad responsibilities, and each of us supervised the library collection in our field and we supervised any types of collections in our field. So, when I began I had the Byzantine librarian reporting to me, and she in turn supervised eight staff people, and then the Byzantine curator, who in turn supervised two staff people, and then the curator of the, what was called the Byzantine visual resources, what's now the Image Collection and Fieldwork Archive, and she in turn supervised about three people, so I had, as did the other directors of studies, very broad supervisory responsibilities. And we were much more involved with the collections and the library at Dumbarton Oaks, and this was the system that had been in place for Byzantine studies since the beginning. But Ned Keenan decided that it was silly, for example, for there to be three separate libraries, each having a cataloger, and that it would make more sense to integrate the libraries and have a single either cataloger or cataloging staff who would do everything, and that acquisitions should be concentrated in one or two individuals, and not have such duplication of effort in the three programs. He felt there would be efficiency of scale and that it might be handled in a more professional manner, so he began with the library and the first thing that happened was that the three libraries were integrated in name. In those days all the library, all the books were still in the Main House and there was no way of physically integrating them, so they remained physically separate. But a head librarian was hired and slowly the process began of reorganizing the library staff, and so that there was a cataloging department and an acquisitions department and then there were specialist librarians in each field who were responsible for working with the Fellows and visitors and for recommending acquisitions of books. And that system was fully instituted by the early 2000s, and so that was one major major change. Then when Susan Boyd retired in 2004, Ned Keenan made a similar decision to integrate all the museum collections and to have a museum director – such a title had never existed before here – and to no longer have the Directors of Studies supervising the collections, and so in 2004, actually we were searching simultaneously for a new museum director and for a new Byzantine curator, and Gudrun Buehl was hired as Byzantine curator and we hired another woman as the museum director, but unfortunately she, in the end, was unable to come and had to withdraw. She was living in Germany and there were complications about her pension, I believe, from the German government, and Gudrun Buehl had made such a positive impression that she was rapidly promoted to be museum director and she effectively has been serving as Byzantine curator ever since. And so, then she took over supervision of, for example, the Pre-Columbian curator and also of the photographer and the head of the docents and the museum shop, and so that was another major shift. And then the – I can't remember the date of this, but also sometime in the early 2000s – the, what used to be called the photo collection and fieldwork archive was transferred to be under the head librarian, and so I no longer had responsibility for that. So, there was a major loss I would say of responsibilities. The Director of Studies definitely has a weaker position than in the earlier days. On the other hand, I do think that most of these decisions were good ones to make, that with the increase in the size of staff at Dumbarton Oaks and with the increasing complications of the digital age and all that, it has made a great deal of sense to do this, this reorganization, and that things are going well with the new system, and as it turns out, I've still had more than enough to do because of, I would say, increasing responsibilities in other areas, primarily publications and academic – organization of academic events. But that I'd say has been a very major change here in the past twelve years.
JNSL: Which parts of your job as Director did you cherish the most, did you enjoy the most?
AMT: Oh –
JNSL: – apart from – I'm sure there were a lot of difficult administrative responsibilities.
AMT: Well, I think I probably enjoy interaction with the Fellows the most, but that actually is a rather small part of the job. I have gotten a lot of pleasure out of the organization of academic events, which have been hard work but I think have had good results and it's been a wonderful way of bringing so many tremendous scholars to Dumbarton Oaks and they've resulted in good publications; so, I've enjoyed having a role in that. I've spent most of my time on publications – that definitely is the lion's share of the position now. I think it may always have been fairly important, although in the early days I think fieldwork, the supervision of fieldwork was an extremely important component and that stopped completely in the 1970s, and also I think when Kitzinger was Director of Studies, for example, I'm sure he was more involved in the museum because of his interest in art, but the publications are just a constant – constantly demanding because of the need to produce an annual journal and then the fact that every year we have events such as colloquia and symposia that, in turn, lead to new publications. So, you're just sort of finishing up publishing one symposium and then another symposium takes place and you have to immediately turn around and start soliciting papers for that and going through the review process, revision, editing process all over again. And it also has been true that we have tackled some unusually large editorial projects in the '90s and early 2000s. Henry Maguire realized that one of the problems about not having a director of studies for so long was that there was total neglect of the publication of Dumbarton Oaks field work, so that the projects in Cyprus, for example, which had mostly taken place in the '60s and very early '70s, were never published. And Henry started to try to pressure the responsible parties to prepare publications of the fieldwork or of the monuments on which they worked. And so, he launched that project and he should take almost full responsibility for Lagoudhera which was done by the Winfields, David and June Winfield, and he made a good start on the publication of the Episcopal Basilica at Kourion, which was the project of Megaw. But that project turned out to be particularly difficult because of Megaw's extremely advanced age, and he was unable to serve properly as an editor-in-chief of the volume. And so, the materials were received in very unsatisfactory condition and it took literally many, many years to pull that publication together, and it was only published about two years ago. I mean, that took maybe twelve years to publish, and then Asinou has also been a very, very difficult project because two successive scholars renounced its publication, one after fifteen years and one after sixteen years, so thirty-one years later we finally started with a new team to publish it. And that is finally out in copy editing, but I have spent a huge amount of time on Asinou and Kourion, for example, just trying to pull together all the contributors and to get the manuscripts and the photos here. Then we had other huge projects like the Typikon Translation Project, which, although the translations were pretty much finished by 1990, there were great delays in doing the final editing, pulling the work together. And those five volumes were not published until 2000, and there were five volumes, so that was another very large project. And then Angeliki Laiou's Economic History of Byzantium in three volumes was published in 2002, and these were all multi-contributor books, which just compounds the difficulties when you're dealing with many, many, many authors. So, I think that's one reason why the publications have been so totally absorbing and time consuming, because they have been very major publications and have had various degrees of complexity. We've also published – we've finished publishing the coin catalogs, for example. That was a project which went on for – it took almost fifty years to publish those, and the final two volumes, each in two parts, were published in 1999. So, I do feel that we made major, major strides forward in completing a lot of projects which had been underway for, in some cases, decades, and I'm very very happy that they are available now. I also was involved in the project to, for the first time, make our publications or at least some of them available in digital form on the web. And this was an idea broached, under Ned Keenan, by Glenn Ruby, who was director of publications at the time, and his idea was to make these works available at no cost to users, which was a quite revolutionary idea in 1998, 1999. And so, I was involved in the discussions of which books we would make available and getting author permissions and sort of dealing with the ramifications of that project. We didn't put everything online that we publish but a very substantial proportion of the books we published between '99 and 2005 were put online, and the DOPs that were published for about five years in that time period. But then with Glenn's death in 2005 that came to an end, and I hope it may be revived at a later time.
JNSL: At what point did the summer programs in Byzantine Greek begin, was that also during your time here?
AMT: Yeah, they started in 2000, and I had – this is something I had wanted to do since I became Director of Byzantine Studies. I found recently the letter I wrote to Angeliki Laiou in the first month I was Director of Byzantine Studies. She'd asked me to outline my goals, and I wrote down there that I felt keenly that there were very few opportunities, especially for American graduate students, to receive training in auxiliary disciplines except at a handful, well, less than a handful of universities, and that Dumbarton Oaks could provide a real service by offering a training in medieval Greek and paleography and sigillography, numismatics, epigraphy, et al. And she stepped down the next year, but I brought up the idea with Ned Keenan and the Senior Fellows and received strong support to start the summer school in medieval Greek. And so, we began that in 2000, and it ran for two summers in a row and then we decided to also institute one in coins and seals, and so that one was held in 2002, and then we began to alternate the programs. Then what happened, the coins and seals program was held in 2004 and then we began the major construction project at Dumbarton Oaks, and so for four years we had to not hold the summer schools, because either the Main House was inaccessible or the Guest House – the Fellows Building – Guest House was unavailable, so that was very frustrating, because we'd just gotten the project rolling and then we had to stop for four years. But I was approached by Maria Georgopoulou who is the director of the Gennadius Library at the American School in Athens, and she had heard about the summer school and was anxious to launch something similar in Athens. And so, when she heard, first of all, that we couldn't do it here because we were closed down, she asked if we would have any objection if they sort of imitated us and did something similar, and we said no of course not. And then I met with her and we agreed essentially to alternate years, so the year in which we had the coins and seals summer school here they do the medieval Greek program in Athens, and so every summer there is one available. I mean, there is also a program in Belfast, but it's – I think ours is at a higher level. The one in Belfast starts, in some cases, with beginners, and our program also lasts a full four weeks, whereas the one in Belfast is for two weeks, each program. So, we were able to resume that program of having the summer schools in 2008 and I trust they will continue in the future. We've had wonderful faculty for them. The first two years I co-taught with Alexander Alexakis and George Dennis and then George Dennis had health problems and moved. And Alexander Alexakis moved back to Greece, and so I've most recently began partnering with Stratis Papaioannou, and we'll be doing it again next June in 2010. And then Alexander and Stratis are the two teachers in Athens which ensures that there is a great deal of similarity between the two programs because the faculty is the same. There are some differences between the schools, in Greece that they can take them on wonderful field trips which – we can't unfortunately go to Byzantine churches here in Washington. But we have been making a real effort to expose the students to the resources at Dumbarton Oaks, and they get to visit the museum and to look at manuscripts in our collection and look at the facsimiles in the Rare Books Room, and I think they have a very, very full experience here.
JNSL: That's wonderful. And in starting to close this interview – some broader questions. Do you have one particularly funny anecdote that stands out in your memory of all of these years that you think should be part of our institutional memory as well?
AMT: Well, there is one story I tell, it's just about myself, but it is a – it was a very amusing event. It was in the early era of the compact stacks. Giles Constable introduced compact stacks to Dumbarton Oaks. It must have been around 1978, when I was working here, and I have to – they were, at that time, in the room which is now D.O.'s archives room. And I have to tell you that in those early days of compact stacks people were extremely nervous about the fact that they closed automatically and people were really scared of getting caught in them. We just weren't used to them, and there were lots and lots of jokes about people getting caught in them and tales of murder mysteries and things like that. And these particular compact stacks were extremely long, the ranges were very long, which made them, especially in those early days, very vulnerable to breakdown. So, there were problems with the compact stacks which, I think, made us even more nervous about them. So, one day I went down to get a book out of the stacks and I had to move a range of them to get my book, and after I'd gotten my book and I was walking out, I heard a voice say, "When you have finished getting your book, could you please put the stacks back the way they were so I can get out?" And this was a perfectly calm voice but I absolutely panicked because I was sure I had trapped someone in the compact stacks, and the person didn't sound injured but I was really, first of all, startled at this voice because I hadn't seen – I had checked, and there wasn't anyone in the aisle, so I couldn't understand, so I said, "Where are you?" And he said, "I'm in the wall." I said, "You're in the wall?" He said, "Yes," he says, "I'm a workman. I'm working on some plumbing in the wall." And it turned out that he had opened the stacks so that, to expose the hole in the wall where he could access some pipes, and then he'd gone into the wall to fix his project – to do his project, and I had locked him in by moving the compact stacks, and so he obviously was concerned that I move them so he could get out again. Well, I can tell you, I was extremely startled and very relieved that I found out that he was in the wall and not squished between two stacks, but I can assure you, it was one of those incidents I will never, never forget.
JNSL: In which of the symposia of the many that you have attended – which one stands out for any particular reason?
AMT: That is very hard. I guess one that does stand out is the 1998 symposium on Constantinople which was organized by Henry Maguire and Robert Outsterhout, and that stands out for a number of reasons. First of all, because it was certainly the most popular symposium we ever had. In those days we could accommodate 200 people in the Music Room, as opposed to 120 now, but this symposium, because it was on Constantinople, was so popular that we were incredibly oversubscribed, over 250 people wanted to sign up for it. And it was a very, very difficult experience to deal with the unhappy people who wanted to come. So, I remember that one because of my poor assistant who had to keep fending people off on the phone and telling them they couldn't come and the difficulties of that. But for a happier reason, I mean, it was happy that so many people came in the end, but I also remember it because we did organize a wonderful exhibit in connection with the symposium, which was based heavily on material from the Fieldwork Archive, and Natalia Teteriatnikov organized it. And it was just spectacular and it was the first time that the great reproductions of the Hagia Sofia mosaics were mounted and made available to be on display, so there was enormous excitement. We were only able to show three of them, but still they made an amazing impact, and then Natalia had extraordinary photographs of the, of Whittemore's work on the restoration in Hagia Sofia. There were fieldwork notebooks on display. It was a truly, truly memorable exhibit which everyone who came enjoyed enormously, and it also was the beginning of making available those reproductions from both Hagia Sofia and Kariye Djami, which had been rolled up for decades and forgotten. And it was Henry Maguire who first really rediscovered them and began to set the wheels in motion for their restoration and mounting which has happened gradually over the past decade. So, that really, for me, was a quite memorable symposium, yes. In terms of colloquia, I think one of the most memorable was the one in 1999 which I organized with Cécile Morrisson because that marked the retirement of Philip Grierson after serving as Adviser for Numismatics for forty-five years. And I had become very close to Philip Grierson because he always stayed in the Fellows Building when he was at Dumbarton Oaks, so we had many breakfasts and dinners together. And it was an extraordinary privilege to get to know him and it was a bittersweet event, I mean, it marked the completion of the cataloging of the coins and the final publication, so we were very happy about that. It was a celebration of Philip's amazing contributions to Dumbarton Oaks over forty-five years, but it was also very sad as it marked the end of an era, that he would no longer be coming to Dumbarton Oaks on a regular basis. But it was a truly marvelous colloquium full of emotion, really.
JNSL: I am just so grateful for your time today, thank you very much. Are there any other final thoughts that you would like to share before we end? There so much more we could speak about.
AMT: Well, maybe I should just maybe say a few words about the changes I've seen over the decades –
JNSL: Oh yes, I'd meant to address that.
AMT: – since I am one of the relatively few people who has had some connection with Dumbarton Oaks for over forty years, and I have see enormous changes in the place. When I first was here as a Junior Fellow it was a very, very small institution – very small staff. There was one person in the finance office, as opposed to six now, there were only Byzantinists here, it only operated in the academic year because there was no central air conditioning, and so the place was pretty much closed down during the summer and only had a skeleton staff during the summer. There were air conditioners in a few offices, so people could work, a few staff people could stay on during the summer, but there were no Fellows here. It was impossible to work in the library as a reader, and so it was a very small, very hierarchical institution, extremely formal. Giles Constable made an enormous difference in the history of Dumbarton Oaks in doing two things. First of all, in installing air conditioning which had incredible implications for the institution because it meant we could operate year round and so, as of 1980, we were able to offer summer fellowships, to put summer fellows in the Fellows Building, for example, to have people work in the library all summer long, and it meant he was able to just expand all the programs substantially. He also greatly democratized, if that's the right word, Dumbarton Oaks by making great efforts to have all three programs on a more even basis. The Byzantine Studies program has always been the biggest, has always had the largest budget, has always had the most Fellows, it's always had the biggest library, it's always been the biggest, but Giles did a great deal to make sure that the other two programs were much more comparable in their facilities and in their programming. And he also made changes such as altering the system at lunch so that it was no longer sit-down all at the same time, but it was a buffet that you could come at any point which meant that more people could use the dining room – because we had lunch in the dining room in this building – that more people could eat lunch. And therefore he was able to – essentially to open up lunch to a larger number of people, although it was still very crowded and basically it remained used by Fellows and what I would call sort of professional staff, such as museum curators, librarians, publications manager. It's not the way it is now, that absolutely everybody can come to lunch, but still, it was a very important change that Giles made. Then I saw the time in which there was no Director of Byzantine Studies, which, as I say, I think was a mistake. I've been very pleased to see the reinstatement of that position in the early '90s and really the, I would say, the steady growth in activities since that time. Angeliki Laiou was – one of her important changes was to encourage what she called "innovative activities," because up to 1991, the main academic events we had at Dumbarton Oaks were the annual symposium, and we did have public lectures, and we did have these seminars by in-house staff, but we never had colloquia, roundtables, the type of event which we now sort of take for granted. So, she provided more money in the budget to open up the programs of academic events to be more flexible, to accommodate a range of activities which my predecessor Henry Maguire launched – those early programs – and that I've continued since then. And that trend has, I would say, dramatically increased under Jan Ziolkowski, who has encouraged even more activities here and has been extremely anxious to involve more people in activities at Dumbarton Oaks, to bring more people here. So, I would say another major change I've seen is a much greater interest in opening up Dumbarton Oaks in recent years, more interest in making the museum collections more visible and encouraging people to come, for many years I don't think the directors cared if the public came to the museum or not, now I think there's much more emphasis in active public programming and having a series of special exhibits and encouraging great visitation. Jan Ziolkowski has greatly increased the interaction between Dumbarton Oaks and Harvard, which I think is a very important development. Dumbarton Oaks has had surprisingly little contact with Harvard over the years, and I think Jan is doing a great deal to change that pattern, and I think Jan also is being very supportive of having more of the type of lecture that will be of interest to a wider public and bringing more people into Dumbarton Oaks. So, I am very happy about these developments, I have to say, that again, when I looked at some of the goals that I had when I first became Director of Studies, they included exactly some of those initiatives and with the support of recent directors of the institution we've been able to move in that direction and I'm very happy at the direction we're going in now.
JNSL: Well, I am tremendously grateful for this opportunity to speak with you today. Thank you so much.]]>