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GV: My name is Günder Varinlioğlu. The date is May 19, 2011. I have the pleasure of interviewing Ercüment Atabay, a former professor in the Department of Western Languages and Civilizations at Bogazici University. This work of oral history is a joınt project between the two departments of Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, located in Washington D.C.: namely, the Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives and the Dumbarton Oaks Archives. Before we begin, do I have your permission to record this interview?
EA: With certain reservations, yes, you do.
GV: Alright. Could you tell us your name for the record?
EA: Mehmet Ercüment Atabay.
GV: Thank you. Where and when were you born?
EA: I was born in Besiktas in 1338 of the old style and 1922 of the new style. July 25, that is.
GV: Where were your parents from? And what were their professions?
EA: My mother was a house wife, and my father was a merchant.
GV: Were they from Istanbul, too?
EA: My father is from Crimea and my mother is from Istanbul.
GV: Do you have any siblings?
EA: No, I'm the only child.
GV: Alright. Are you married? And do you have children?
EA: I'm married and I have three children: An elder daughter, a son and a younger daughter.
GV: What are their professions?
EA: This is a difficult one. My elder daughter is a Professor of English, my son is a business man and my younger daughter works for the United Nations.
GV: Can you tell us about your education?
EA: I can. First I went to the English High School for Boys in 1929. That was where I learned how to read and write and the rest. Then I passed the University of London's Matriculation in 1939. For the first semester of 1939, I was a student at Robert College. But, because I had gotten accepted to the Faculty of Literature at Istanbul University, I studied there with Mrs. Halide Edip until 1942. In the year 1942, the British Council gave me a scholarship for the United Kingdom. And so, I went from Turkey to Britain during the war in 1942. The way I went was – first from here to Egypt, then I flew from Egypt to South Africa, and after travelling from South Africa by ship for three months, I finally arrived in the UK. The university that I went to is St. Andrews, currently a famous university. This here is the tie of that university.
GV: Is it?
EA: This – anyway, I arrived there. I graduated from the History Department of St. Andrews in 1945. I returned to Istanbul in '45. I worked as Mrs. Halide Edip's assistant in the Department of English Philology of the Faculty of Literature until 1950–51 and taught classes on English Literature. I finished my Ph.D. in the year 1950 with high honors. I went to Robert College as a professor of humanities at the beginning of the year of 1951. And then, after a while Robert College – I worked there, at Robert College, until 1971, when it was closed, that is when it was renamed "Girls' College." And it was transformed into – it reopened under the name of Bogazici University. I continued teaching there. It was in 1982, I think, when I retired. This means that the total of the number of years I taught at Robert College and Bogazici amounts, more or less, to fifty.
GV: Did you do your Ph.D. with Halide Edip Adivar?
EA: Yes, I did my Ph.D. with Mrs. Halide Edip.
GV: What was the topic?
EA: The topic was "Classicism in Edmund Spenser's Work" –Edmund Spenser, the poet, of course.
GV: What courses did you teach at Bogazici University?
EA: Many –
GV: So many?
EA: I taught 26 different courses. And so let's not get into that.
GV: Let's not get into it – alright.
EA: Suffice it to say I taught courses on English Literature and European History, if you will.
GV: Alright. Let's get into Byzantium. When did you start to get interested in Byzantium?
EA: I have no personal interest in Byzantium. Mine is more – I'm interested in archaeology. I met Mr. Paul Underwood. Well, it indeed happened more like this: It was in 1947, I think. No, either in '47 or '48. There was this Professor Muller, H. J Muller. Van Nice was working in Hagia Sophia. Together with Muller, I tried recording the masons' marks there in order to help Van Nice. It was a long time – for fun, you know. During that time I was seeing Mr. Whittemore coming and going. I don't personally know Whittemore. Whittemore was such a, well, mysterious person. He would come and he would go. Nobody knew from where he collected the money. He would show up, just like that, for a while, and would not talk. He would wander around Hagia Sophia with his hat on, would sometimes chat with us, and leave. And so thereafter, as a result of our work together, Van Nice recommended me to Paul Underwood, telling him that I was his friend. When, later, Paul Underwood came here, we became friends. We were friends for a long time. After 1955 – anyhow, after Whittemore died, the Byzantine Institute, which had been a private institution to begin with, disappeared all of a sudden. Its name persisted for a while. Its works were taken over by Dumbarton Oaks. And then Underwood requested me to help him in '55, and I accepted it. From then on, until, well, until his death, I did certain jobs for him while he was a field director here. I tried acquiring the necessary permissions from the government, and, together with this, this guy, I took care of relations in Hagia Sophia, etc.
GV: So, how did you meet Van Nice?
EA: Van Nice – well, he was doing these things at Hagia Sophia. He was friends with this Mr. Muller. I met him through Professor Muller.
GV: Yes, we know about that project. How did you meet Muller, then? I mean, how did you get involved in this project?
EA: How did I meet Muller? Muller was – well, H. J. Muller was a visiting professor at the Faculty of Literature, where I was an assistant. That is how we met.
GV: Because of your interest in archaeology?
EA: No, no, not at all. I'm only curious because I am a historian; that's why.
GV: And so, this "masons' marks" was –
EA: No, we did it together for fun!
GV: Yes, I think you have recorded fifteen hundred masons' marks.
EA: Yes, well, more or less. It is written there, isn't it?
GV: Yes, it is. I saw it written in a correspondence. So, you never spoke with Whittemore? Only –
EA: We were only introduced once. I do not know much about Whittemore. He had a friend here, living somewhere on the Bosphorus. I cannot recall his name at all right now.
GV: I can tell you: Archibald Walker.
EA: Yes, Walker, that's it! He used to stay at his place. They used to be very good friends. I mean, Walker used to like Whittemore a lot. Walker used to praise his knowledge of English Literature highly. Walker and I – I only saw him a couple of times on occasion; he wasn't someone I knew. Also, he had an apartment on the Bosphorus and he used to help out Whittemore in certain things. He used to stay with him.
GV: Did Walker use to visit frequent –
EA: No, no, no, no, no. He was just a friend of Whittemore's.
GV: Yes, but you do know about his staying at his apartment.
EA: Sure, he used to stay at his apartment.
GV: Yes. So, did you have relations with anybody else working at the Byzantine Institute?
EA: Yes, I did. Byzantine Institute, wait, where? Here?
GV: Here.
EA: Its head, if you will, was Ernest Hawkins. Ernest Hawkins – he later on continued at Dumbarton Oaks. He was a sort of, a very learned, very knowing man. And so, he used to take care of all the business with the workers, etc. He would always help with projects like the uncovering of the mosaics. Also, Paul Underwood – well, not much. He used to visit frequently. And Larry Majewski! Lawrence Majewski. He took on the project as the field director or the assistant field director. One person who worked with him was Mr. Carroll Wales. He worked on the frescoes. Four, five, or six workers, most of whom were Greek, worked on cleaning the mosaics and, well, uncovering the frescoes.
GV: It seems there weren't many Turkish workers, were there?
EA: There were Turkish workers and Greek workers. Turkish workers would be hired more for – well, as masons.
GV: But it was predominantly Greeks who worked –
EA: Well, they were more – well, it was more or less equal – more or less. There was no specific discrimination, anyway.
GV: Were there any Russians?
EA: No, none.
GV: No Russians. How about any other nationality that you remember?
EA: No, there was nobody.
GV: Were the ones that you call Greek from Istanbul?
EA: Yes, yes, from Istanbul.
GV: They didn't come from abroad?
EA: No, no, they were from Istanbul. Let me try to remember something here – an American lady, who was visiting, told me how she had always wanted to see – Americans tend to be naïve like that – a Byzantine mason. I told her that if she really wanted to see one that much, I could show her one. She told me she would be grateful. "Well then," I said, "Yusuf come over here." There was this Yusuf. I told her, "Here! A Byzantine mason was just like this one." She did not get the joke but – anyway, so it was.
GV: I will not ask who Yusuf was. I presume, he was one of those who worked there.
EA: One of those who worked there.
GV: Now, to continue with my questions concerning the Byzantine Institute: Do you know about Foto Iskender?
EA: Yes, my dear, I do. There used to be some – Sebah Joaillier, and it is their – at the turn of the century – well, it is the most famous photographer here, this Sebah Joaillier. So, much that they had also taken our school pictures at the time and everything. Photography, then, used to be –
GV: You mean when you were in Robert College?
EA: No, this was at the English High School.
GV: English High School.
EA: They were taken when I was there. That's not important. They were the ones who took them. He did not do anything with anyone anymore after the cameras were brought. I mean, Majewski would take the photographs and we would print them, ourselves, at the apartment in, in Cihangir.
GV: I asked, because in our records it is written that all of the photographs of the Byzantine Institute were taken by Foto Iskender.
EA: It may well be the case.
GV: Could it?
EA: Yes, because they were the one during the time of the Byzantine Institute. It was after Dumbarton Oaks took over that they were let go. Only then did we start to take photographs ourselves. I could not, but Majewski took photographs.
GV: Yes. This one will be a bit of a side question but, do you know anyone by the name of Nicholas Victor Artamonoff?
EA: By the name of what?
GV: Artamonoff.
EA: No.
GV: Nicholas Artamonoff.
EA: I don't know him.
GV: You don't know him. You were a student of Sven Larsen. Have you ever – because Sven Larsen was also very interested in Byzantium, in archaeology.
EA: Well, Larsen. The year 1939 – Mr. Larsen was my mathematics teacher during the first semester of the '39–'40 academic year, when I was a student at Robert College. I don't know how interested he was. I only have this one memory of him: One day I was at the Hagia Sofia Mosque, where I used to go pretty frequently, anyway. He came up and I remember him shouting: "This wonderful space!"
GV: You have already mentioned him but, how did you meet Underwood? Did Van Nice –
EA: Through Van Nice. He gave him my name when he was coming here. We met. We came home. We were friends for a long time. I started helping them out with work after '55, anyhow.
GV: Do you have any other, more personal, memories of Underwood that you would like to share? What was the nature of your friendship? How was Underwood's personality?
EA: He was, really, very nice! How shall I say? It is difficult to answer such kind of questions. He was a little timid – I don't know. He was a very loving person. He did not have much to tell. He trusted me. Together, we – so, I was helping him. In certain respects, he was a bit too – for example, he would let things out. Like, for example, when he would be talking to the Director of the Hagia Sophia Museum, and I would be translating, for example, and even when the Director would prefer to not hear something, he would keep on telling it. I would then work on saving the situation, etc. We quite often had anecdotes like that.
GV: Was this with Muzaffer Ramazanoglu?
EA: No, dear, not with Ramazanoglu. This is before Ramazanoglu, with Feridun Dirimtekin.
GV: Now, I think you were playing a major role in the bureaucratic procedures during the abandonment of this Byzantine Institute and its transformation into Dumbarton Oaks. There is a correspondence where you tell Paul Underwood not to change the name Byzantine Institute. You advise them that, even if they do change the name, they should at least keep the term "Byzantine" in the new institutional title. You tell them that it should be so because the Byzantine Institute had managed to establish a good place, a good reputation in Turkey; should there be such a transformation, the new institution should sustain ties with the Byzantine Institute.
EA: Yes, exactly. That is correct – because the other one was Ataturk. Mr. Whittemore had talked to Ataturk. There is a document by Ataturk that states the mosaics to be uncovered. This document was lost by Dumbarton Oaks.
GV: I was about to ask that –
EA: That, that –
GV: We never saw this document.
EA: It must have lost it. This is a fundamental mistake. And then, later, approximately – well, I do not remember its date, and I never cut it out to keep it. But this Turkish – Ataturk Foundation would issue a different calendar each year with different photographs from Ataturk's life. I think it was ten years from now, that they included a photograph talking to Whittemore. It was a large photograph. Not many people knew it. It was, of course, only me who understood who that was.
GV: Yes, so there was a single document. And that was probably given to Whittemore and then got lost –
EA: That must have been lost.
GV: Yes. So, as you have already mentioned, your affiliation with Dumbarton Oaks started in 1955.
EA: Approximately.
GV: Approximately…It seems to have intensified in the '60s.
EA: Well, it continued, like that, until – until Underwood died. After him Cyril Mango became the, well, the field director. Lawrence Majewski was responsible for the field direction here. Later he left to teach at New York University. It all started to bog down slowly thereafter coinciding with the time of Cyril Mango. The name remained for a while. The closing down of the apartment in Cihangir, I think, was in 1974. The director of Dumbarton Oaks around that time was Bill Tyler. It was Bill Tyler. His son – well, his daughter and son-in-law were working here at the consulate. The name – it'll come to me now. At any rate, I packed away the furniture in the apartment in Cihangir. There was a library there. We had bought this library from the renowned, well, the renowned Byzantine scholar Mambouri many years ago during the time of Underwood. I think it was bought for something like two thousand dollars at the time. This library had been set up in the apartment in Cihangir. Some of the books there – Dumbarton Oaks wanted some of them, which we then sent. The remaining ones were donated to ARIT, the American Research Institute here.
GV: Yes. How about – you have done many things for Dumbarton Oaks, but how about your actual responsibilities.
EA: Honestly, my responsibility was utterly ambiguous, meaning subjective. Whenever there was like – for example, if there was need for a new tire, and at the time it was a bit – well, I would go to the distributor, talk to them about it, and get the tire. I mean, I had such kinds of responsibilities, as well. Or, for example, there would be a need for permission from the Directorate of Museums, and I would help the correspondence therewith. So, such kinds of things.
GV: But there is no written contract or document defining your responsibilities?
EA: No, no, no, no, no, entirely subjective. I mean with – I was only helping Paul. That's all.
GV: So, always through Paul Underwood?
EA: I was helping Paul Underwood. We would also go when he was not here. I would go to Kariye Mosque and would relate the necessary instructions to the masons, etc. Paul Underwood would stay here for very short periods, and so I was spending more time with Majewski.
GV: Meaning, you were not responsible to a specific person? It was more of a friendship?
EA: Yes, okay, that is it.
GV: So, there was no official contract?
EA: No, no, no, there was no such thing.
GV: I read another correspondence between you and Paul Underwood in 1962, whereby you write: "I am not concerned by your calling me "the secretary." "But so far," you state, "…I have always helped Dumbarton Oaks in a subjective manner until now." You wrote that in '62, and two years later, in 1964, there still isn't a trace of this official title of yours. And yet, you also tell Underwood that he had better avoid referring to you as 'secretary' or 'translator' in his official correspondence with Turkish authorities, since that may create certain problems.
EA: That is correct.
GV: Well, why is that? Can you, please, explain?
EA: No, well, I did not have any official – I actually don't really remember the circumstances then. That was long, I don't know, about fifty years, ago.
GV: Yes. But, I mean, how did the Turkish authorities recognize you?
EA: The Turkish authorities? Well, I was friends with the director of Hagia Sofia, anyway, and work was completely on Hagia Sophia. Both Kariye and Fethiye were connected to Hagia Sophia. And even though Fenari Isa was itself not connected, the excavation there, too, was connected to it. And I – I was friends with Mr. Feridun. In cases of need for correspondence I would be the one to get through to him.
GV: Yes. So, for the Turkish authorities you were only a help.
EA: They would not even know my name.
GV: Interesting.
EA: No, I mean there was no – we didn't have much to do with Turkish authorities at any rate.
GV: So, only when acquiring permission.
EA: Permission – well, the permission had been granted to begin with, and was still valid. And there was no other.
GV: How about your friendship with Feridun Dirimtekin? I mean –
EA: He was the director of Hagia Sophia. We met there. We became friends.
GV: Yes. Alright then, we will talk a little bit about money now. You seem to have been responsible for the management of Dumbarton Oaks's funds, as well. As far as I understand, this money couldn't be transferred to an account under your name. Instead, it was brought to you by Hawkins or another person who would be coming here at the beginning of the season.
EA: Now, here is how it was: The Greek workers were paid in the winter, as well. Because the rest were day-laborers, their work would be terminated by the winter. They would leave the bulk sum of their salaries to me. I would distribute the salaries at the beginning of each month. That was all there was to it.
GV: Why were they transferring the money to your account, but coming to you, as such, with cash? Is there –
EA: No. At the time there was a strange – I don't comprehend the way they dealt with money.
GV: I mean, is the way they would bring such a bulk of money to you about transfer –
EA: Like – that's – nothing difficult. It's a simple matter. A certain amount of money would be – well, a "gratuitous bailee" – that is how they call that, you know. They would leave it. I would then make the monthly payments from this sum. This is all.
GV: Why were the Greeks paid in the winter while the Turks were day-laborers?
EA: Well, they were – Turks. There was no such discrimination. The others – they were artists. They were hired for a year. They would clean mosaics, etc. The others were laborers. That is to say they would lift masonry, and such – whatever there would be. It wasn't because of some discrimination between Turks and Greeks. Some were artists, others were not.
GV: So, Dumbarton Oaks would pay a pension then? A retirement and –
EA: No, no retirement or anything. Everyone's tax was paid. I mean, there was nothing – well, nothing unlawful would be carried out. There was this Mr. Emcet, who was a lawyer, and he would do their – the records of all of them were held at the Eminonu Taxation Office. Their employment history would be recorded in these official cards. So it was –
GV: While you are at it can you mention more about Mr. Emcet?
EA: Emcet Agis.
GV: Emcet Agis.
EA: Lawyer.
GV: But, apparently, also this – Archibald Walker was Socony-Vacuum Oil's –
EA: He was the former director of it.
GV: Yes, and Mr. Emcet, their lawyer –
EA: He was the lawyer of Socony. That was how they met each other to begin with. They must have met so.
GV: So, must they have met through Walker?
EA: I do not know, dear, I do not know.
GV: You do not know this. Yes, alright then, let's get into this apartment in Cihangir called Yildiz. Did you rent this? Did you see about this apartment? Was it you who found it?
EA: Honestly, let me tell you this: When Paul Underwood first came here, we rented, from a friend, this apartment right across here. This one right here. They were friends of ours.
GV: Right here?
EA: Right over here.
GV: On Husrevgerede?
EA: Yeah, over here. Anyway – but then around that time there was a – a sad situation. Let's leave that. Let's leave the private life aside. After then there – I'll tell you about it off-the-record. Anyway, they found the apartment in Cihangir. Paul Underwood found it. I don't know how he found it. I had nothing to do with that.
GV: But you were – well, you prepared it for the visitors, members of the team or, at any rate, for –
EA: I mean, the apartment – I would have the key when they would not be here. For example, Striker would come and stay there. And he would stay, and then leave, and then if another one of them – he would come and stay. There was, well, David Oates. Professor David Oates stayed. George Forsyth stayed, too.
GV: And what did Saban Kolat do?
EA: Saban? Well now, Saban is a mystery. Saban, you see, was the "all around man." He was there at the time of Whittemore, as well. He was Hawkins's man. It is not possible to explain what he – well, what Saban was doing. He was – well, he was our connection man. One would give him the money and have him get things, or ask him to fetch a specific artisan. He was a man like that. Exactly like that. It would be a lie if I said his job there was clear-cut.
GV: What was he doing exactly? What are certain things in your mind?
EA: It really is very difficult! I don't know – say, he would find the artisans and the foremen, or he would send out payments and things – and things like that.
GV: Would he work as a laborer, too?
EA: No, no, no. Saban would be wearing a tie with his shirt, he was no laborer.
GV: He was not a laborer, but he was also not an educated –
EA: He was a – a trusted friend, if you will.
GV: He was so, but didn't have a profession?
EA: No, no, he didn't have a profession.
GV: Yes.
EA: He was a corsair during World War Two – One – Two.
GV: World War Two?
EA: [Laughs]
GV: Yes. Saban Kolat, isn't it?
EA: Kolat, that's right.
GV: Kolat is his last name. You are saying that it was Whittemore who found him?
EA: He was Whittemore's man to begin with. He later stayed on.
GV: When did he pass away?
EA: I don't remember.
GV: You do not remember. You mentioned an apartment near here. Was it this – I came across, in the documents, a place called Pansiyon Villa Rest on Kalipci Street at Apartment 104 – Hawkins and Cyril Mango had stayed there. It says that –
EA: I do not know this one.
GV: You don't know this one. Alright. Providing the journals and books from here was among the duties that you fulfilled for Dumbarton Oaks, I think. I've come across one entitled "Belle –"
EA: Belleten! I don't know what happened to it.
GV: And so, were you finding –
EA: I just was at booksellers – I would purchase books for libraries. I would –
GV: For the one in Deniz Apartment or for the one at Dumbarton Oaks?
EA: For the one here. I was buying them here. Dumbarton Oaks, later on took some books and they – we had bought, this, Mambouri's library as a whole. And then later with Paul Underwood – you have heard the name Mambouri, haven't you?
GV: Of course I have.
EA: We bought it and put it there. Actually when the library was dismantled I took most of those custom-made shelves there. The salvaged shelves are here at home. After that Dumbarton Oaks asked for some of those books. I mailed them to them. The ones that were left – well, Robert College wanted some, and they were donated to Robert College. And well, the rest – No, they were not! Robert College bought those! The college paid the money to, well, Dumbarton Oaks. The rest – I the rest were reference books. And so – was it the year of '74? – I think it was '74, when we were moving out of the apartment. Thereafter, I – Loerke was working there at the time as – as the field – well, director of studies. W. C. Loerke. Thereafter, I met with – I knew him very little. He was not a very nice person, anyway. Did you know him?
GV: I did not.
EA: That's good. You didn't miss much. Don't put this in, it's off the record.
GV: [Laughs] Alright.
EA: After that they told me to give them to ARIT, to the American Research Institute. So I gave all the books to – well, to the director there, who was Lowry, Heath Lowry. The one who is currently working at Princeton University as – well, he is a professor. He used to be the director of that. I gave all of those books to them. I took them there.
GV: Yes. Were you, perhaps, living on Akaretler at some point?
EA: Me? No! I am still living where I was born, my child. I live approximately – I was born ten meters below here.
GV: Yes. Were you organizing parties or dinners here for the Dumbarton Oaks affiliates?
EA: No, my friends would come over for dinner.
GV: So, normal – nothing special. I will now go back to the year of 1956. Again, in a document I read you write to Underwood, "I want to use equipment belonging to Dumbarton Oaks in Hagia Sofia and Kariye." You ask for permission to do so. Was that for your own research? Given that you asked for Underwood's permission, it must have been for a project unrelated to Dumbarton Oaks.
EA: Honestly, you are right. But I really don't remember.
GV: We have already talked a little bit about this, but, so Underwood consults you about both field work and plans for future projects. And you were also – you would visit certain sites in the winter and write your impressions of the works of Turkish specialists to Underwood. Have you ever – were you ever present at works undertaken by Dumbarton Oaks in Kariye or Fenari Isa? I mean, did you work there or would you just be visiting?
EA: No, I would work there. I was going every day. I was going in the day time and, you know, checking things. But, I mean, of course, I was not actually doing anything. I would talk to the workers if need be and whatever. It was like that. I was Underwood's – when he was away we were with Majewski, who doesn't speak Turkish.
GV: Did Underwood speak Turkish?
EA: No.
GV: Hawkins?
EA: Hawkins? Well, he knew some nonsensical things. He was a little – put colloquially, he was a little out of it. I mean –
GV: His mind?
EA: But he knew his job well. He was good. In that respect he had a bit of an inferiority complex, thinking, well, that he didn't have a degree. And yet he would outdo many degree-holders in his knowledge.
GV: Yes, but, it seems Turkish people liked Hawkins very much.
EA: They did. So they did – Ernest Hawkins.
GV: Apparently you had also conducted photographic recording projects.
EA: What, dear?
GV: The project of photographing.
Atabey: Honestly I – I would help him – I was not photographing.
GV: But it seems you were organizing their production?
EA: They were taking them themselves. Majewski used to take all the photographs.
GV: Alright. Have you ever come across Yani Makridis?
EA: Yani Makridis? Well, now – his name would be written there.
GV: Yes.
EA: He was working mainly on the frescoes as an assistant to Carroll Wales. Later on, Carroll Wales left here and went to Boston. He opened a studio there – for restoration work. And his, well, his Greek friend – his name was not Yani, though. Help me out here. It was –
GV: Koco?
EA: Koco! Koco. Koco was his name. He –
GV: Is Koco another person?
EA: There were two Kocos. This one was – he was Carroll Wales's friend. And he used to do – cleaning frescoes. Later on they left for Boston together. He helped him in a studio. Later on – after a while he died of cancer.
GV: Do you know Koco's last name?
EA: I can't recall right now.
GV: Who was the other Koco, then?
EA: He used to work on – well, on mosaics.
GV: Do you mean he was cleaning them?
EA: Cleaning mosaics.
GV: So Yani Makridis is –
EA: Yani is someone else. He was like that, too. He was also mosaic – they would do mosaic and fresco cleaning.
GV: He was not a photographer, then?
EA: No, no, he was not a photographer. Larry Majewski would take all the photographs.
GV: We saw his name in the context of a photography project and wondered if he did photographing –
EA: No, dear, he was not. He did not take photographs.
GV: Yes. So, you were also doing, well, you were taking the foreign visitors and –
EA: The visitors – I would greet – well, like a protocol. When an important person would come – I met Igor Stravinsky. It was me who showed Katherine Hepburn around. It was me who showed Bernstein around. It was me who showed Adenauer around – I mean Chancellor Adenaur – together with Adnan Menderes, I did his – I mean everyone would go there. I even made a list of people that I'd met.
GV: You have a list of that here at home?
EA: It is here. Now – of the ones I remember.
GV: Is there anything that you would like to tell us about them? – any anecdotes?
EA: There's this one, where Adenauer asked me, "What do you do?" I said that I was, well, I said I was a professor. He responded, "How I wish that I, too, stayed that way." This is all.
GV: Yes. Well, you were helping Dumbarton Oaks to get work permits.
EA: My child, this business of getting permissions of Turkish authorities is a sensitive issue. Let me tell you one: Ševčenko is a little obstinate. He likes himself a lot. He came here – I mean several times. He even told me once, while we were walking on the street, "I am headless." And I told him, "You do have a head, it is just that it does not work." He could not say a word. Anyway – he wanted to get this one permission. He said that he had written to the museum in Ankara and got a response the following day. "See," he said, "This is a record!" "What was the response?" I asked. "No!" Well, now – [Laughs]. He resumed silence. They wrote such nonsense that Ankara, without giving it much thought, sent away the rejection – there are three ways of acquiring, or well, getting a response from Turkish authorities. You write to them: In one kind of case they say "yes", that is fine. Another one is that they say "no," and that is fine, too. Yet another one comes about when they don't respond. When they don't respond, one shouldn't push it. If you push it, it resolves into a "no." And if you wait it resolves into a "yes." This – well, I was the only person actually doing this. These Americans tend to be a bit tactless. They, themselves – poor Paul was like that, too, and that was why he used to trust me in these matters.
GV: Would you travel to Ankara?
EA: No, no, no, no, not at all! – only from here by mail.
GV: By mail.
EA: No, no – not so – no such thing.
GV: Were you translating the documents, as well? Because the permissions were likely to have been written in Turkish.
EA: It was no big deal. A document would be written in Turkish, signed, and posted. Not much of a – we did not have much to do. The permission had already been granted and it went on being valid.
GV: Yes. I have a question about the Kariye Mosque project, now.
EA: Go ahead, dear.
GV: Now – Dumbarton Oaks was having made the canvas replicas of these frescoes –
EA: They made a replica of it.
GV: A replica.
EA: Carroll Wales made it. One of them – it was sent to Dumbarton Oaks. The one that went there, by the way is of, well, when Jesus went down to Hell, and, well, the one with him resurrecting Mary and Adam. They asked for permission to send it abroad. The permission for this was my – the dean of the Academy of Fine Arts was a friend of mine. I went there, got it signed, took it, and we sent it away.
GV: Carroll Wales did not do it himself, it seems.
EA: Carroll Wales – he made the replica.
GV: So he made it? There was also mention of Charles Compton.
EA: Ah, yes, sorry! Compton made it. It was Compton who made it. Carroll Wales did the cleaning – Compton made it. That is correct, I am sorry.
GV: Alright. Then there is this issue of – to our knowledge it was made in the 1950s. But it only reaches Dumbarton Oaks, much later, in 1963.
EA: It wasn't until the '60s?
GV: Not until the '60s.
EA: The replica was made slowly by Philip Compton. Philip Compton was – he was making these replicas for a long time at the – and then he left to work at the British Museum. Thereafter he went to the Ashmolean Museum as a restorer.
GV: So, where were these replicas kept in the winter? They are quite large and –
EA: What?
GV: These replicas –
EA: Honestly, I think they were at –
GV: – they are said to have remained in Turkey for about a year.
EA: They were not that large. They were stored in the, well, this southwest room, also known as the priests' room. It must be mentioned there.
GV: So, that room was in use?
EA: Yes, it was.
GV: Alright, let's now talk about Turks. I have a question about Semavi Eyice.
EA: Go ahead, dear.
GV: Once again, this is something that I have come across in the correspondences. Coinciding with the correspondence between you and Underwood in 1963, Underwood was planning on working in Fenari Isa Mosque. You tell him that he can see Semavi Eyice, who is a friend of yours, about it. You tell him that he could, well, you tell him that you will let him know of his response. How was your relationship with Semavi Eyice?
EA: Semavi, dear, is a professor at Istanbul University. He is still alive.
GV: I know.
EA: Anyway, he was a friend of mine from Istanbul University – because, well, I knew most of the people who worked at the Archaeological Museum. I would visit frequently since childhood. And so, Semavi was there and also – anyway, it'll come to me now. That is how I knew him.
GV: Was he a close friend of yours?
EA: No, he was not. I visited his apartment a couple of times. I mean, he was not especially a good friend. He had given me his books as presents, and things like that.
GV: But Mr. Semavi had no affiliation to Dumbarton Oaks?
EA: No, he has no affiliation.
GV: Yes, so, I will now get into the projects of Sarachane and Kalenderhane.
EA: Harrison!
GV: Yes. I –
EA: This is what you just got into: Harrison.
GV: Martin Harrison.
EA: Martin Harrison.
GV: And Lee Striker, of course, first in Bodrum Mosque, and later in Kalenderhane. This –
EA: Lee Striker. Do you know Lee Striker?
GV: Lee Striker is my thesis advisor. I did my Ph.D. with Lee Striker.
EA: Okay, then, in that case.
GV: No, no, please, do tell!
EA: If you know him, then there's no need.
GV: Yes, but this will be recorded.
EA: Don't record it.
GV: Why not?
EA: Nothing. It's alright. Don't worry.
GV: [Laughs] I wish I hadn't told you.
EA: No.
GV: How about Martin Harrison?
EA: Martin Harrison, my child, was – I think he was at the University of Manchester, I am not sure. He was doing the excavations at Kalenderhane. No, no, not at Kalenderhane, at Sarachane. He didn't have much to do with, well, with Dumbarton Oaks. And that was all there was. We didn't have much to do with each other. I think I was the one who got their permission. I helped him out, etc. And then he, the poor soul, died.
GV: Yes. But it seems that you had also helped Lee Striker – in Bodrum Mosque.
EA: As well as in Kalenderhane.
GV: So, did you use to visit those sites?
EA: No, no, he would work there by himself. I mean I had helped Lee Striker, sort of, indirectly.
GV: Yes.
EA: He is alive, isn't he?
GV: Yes, he is.
EA: How old is he now?
GV: How old?
EA: He must be in his late seventies.
GV: He is in his late seventiess right now, yes. Yes. So, you helped in the acquisition of the permission for this Sarachane project, as you have mentioned.
EA: Yes I did.
GV: But you were also helping to provide work force and equipment.
EA: No, I did not help out in Sarachane. That, Harrison used to do by himself.
GV: He did himself – but then how about the supplement of the missing photographs, payments? Did you not have anything to do with those?
EA: No. Well, you mean for Sarachane, don't you?
GV: For Sarachane.
EA: No, no.
GV: Nothing to do there, either, then.
EA: And then there is this Zeyrek Mosque. You haven't gotten to that yet.
GV: If you could tell us about it now that you have mentioned it – and that you have said you didn't do much at Sarachane.
EA: No. In Zeyrek Mosque, it was Peter Megaw. His name should be mentioned there.
GV: Yes.
EA: His real name was Arsenal Megaw, but they called him Peter.
GV: Why is that?
EA: I don't know.
GV: Nobody knows.
EA: Peter's real name was Arsenal Megaw. He came here for a year as an assistant to – I do not know for what. It was at the – the floor of Zeyrek Mosque was uncovered. The floor there was this very beautiful – there is a term for it, "opus sectile," or something. They uncovered that floor. Many glass, stained glass, were found there. This stained glass is very important. Peter worked on those there for a long time – because, in that period – apparently, it was thought that stained glass had not yet existed in that period. So, that was something. And then something rather strange happened. It was in the Kariye mosque. George Forsyth came and did an excavation there in the – this excavation revealed the – the reliquary box there. So, the reliquary box was found. It was, like, a lead box. The same excavation also revealed some of this stained class. I am not sure if it was that they couldn't understand the value of these – this stained glass. I kept some eight to ten kinds, or pieces, of that glass because I am a collector. That is, I took them. The rest were all thrown away. They were chucked away like that. And then later on when they found out that this was very important I gave the pieces I had to Peter Megaw. And so, it was revealed in Kariye that stained glass did exist in that period.
GV: Yes. Anything else that you may remember about Zeyrek?
EA: Honestly, there is – there is another thing I remember from Zeyrek! They excavated this large marble thing with a relief, whose shape I don't remember exactly. But through that it was understood to have been taken from Sarachane.
GV: How about works at Fenari Isa, did you ever visit –
EA: I know that one, too. There at the Fenari Isa site – there were not many mosaics uncovered there. Some frescoes were found. There, they did – I mean, it was a functioning mosque, anyway. No such big project was carried out there. Only a few frescoes were revealed. For example, here, let me give you one off-the-record: Now, we were doing certain things without asking permission. Because I was friends with Mr. Feridun. Now, for permission, Mr. Feridun didn't want to know, because if he did he would have to act. He didn't want to know; he condoned. Now, for example, Paul, tactless as usual, would tell him, we are doing these things because you gave permission! Mr. Feridun would turn a blind eye. And so, I would negotiate between the two of them.
GV: Were these happening in Fenari Isa?
EA: This would be happening more generally.
GV: In general.
EA: In general.
GV: Since you know Majewski, did you also help him with the discovery and transportation of this – this well-known fresco? It was a very small project.
EA: I must have. I don't really remember.
GV: Okay, so who else do you remember from that time? How about Cyril Mango?
EA: Cyril Mango was a friend of mine from high school. We were in high school – I graduated from the English High School for Boys here, and so did Cyril Mango. He is a high a school friend of mine. Later on, I went to St. Andrews University and Cyril Mango did so too, after me. Anyway, so – he would visit here. He would come and go and when he would come I would see him, etc. He is younger than me. He is 82 years old, and I am 89.
GV: So you are old friends?
EA: Well, old acquaintances. He is a very good scholar.
GV: Is there anything else that you would like to mention about Cyril Mango?
EA: No, nothing. He was, like, cynical and extremely intelligent. And so – A very good scholar.
GV: You have mentioned Ihor Ševčenko.
EA: Ševčenko. Ševčenko is strange – the way he is.
GV: Yes. And Martin Harrison?
EA: To be honest, he was like, well, a happy school-boy! [Laughs] He was a very nice gentleman. We did not have much of a friendship.
GV: Megaw?
EA: Megaw was a typical "English civil servant." He had worked as the director of a museum in Cyprus at some point. What else – he used to find our work a little strange. He would – "It's rather a strange institution," he would say, and could never figure it out.
GV: How about David Winfield?
EA: David Winfiled. He never worked with us. He had worked mainly in the Sumela Monastery. Anyway – he came here. He is a bit of a bad lot. Well, I mean, I say this off-the-record. There – I will not say any more.
GV: And Robin Cormack? Did you ever run into him?
EA: No, never. I am not sure if he visited here.
GV: He had worked at Hagia Sofia with Hawkins for a short period of time.
EA: That must have been before me.
GV: He was –
EA: I don't know him.
GV: Alright. And you will not say anything about Lee Striker?
EA: No, there's nothing to be said! You know him very well, at any rate.
GV: We were curious about what you might know.
EA: No, that's alright.
GV: Alright.
EA: For example – let's take, for instance, the apartment in Cihangir. I was responsible for its – he would call from there to tell me how it had not been properly cleaned. I mean, he is a bit of a rude one.
GV: Now, about Van Nice – I think you were pretty close. You were communicating with each other very frequently.
EA: Honestly, it was through him that I had gotten involved with Dumbarton Oaks to begin with.
GV: What was he like? What were the things that he –
EA: Well, he was working in Hagia Sophia on the – he was making plans. There is not much to say. He had worked, I think, in Iran, before.
GV: In Isfahan.
EA: In Isfahan. He had worked in Isfahan. He had a friend, who – this friend of ours would always tell him "When you were in Abyssinia…," and he would respond "I was not in Abyssinia, I was in Isfahan." A couple of months would pass by, and then again: "When you were in Abyssinia…" "I was not." He would forget and respond. We were, well, we didn't have much to do with each other. We knew each other. It was because of his friendship with Herbert Muller that we went to do the masons' marks, in the first place.
GV: And so this work of yours – did Muller take it or –
EA: Muller.
GV: – or was it given to Van Nice?
EA: Nobody was given anything. Van Nice was asking for this, I mean, to be done. And Muller was interested – Muller is a historian. I have some eight or nine books of his. We had travelled together in Anatolia and things like that. He is not an archaeologist at all. We were doing that – recording the masons' marks for fun.
GV: No, but this "masons' marks" document is in our archives. I don't think that there are any names written on it. So, apparently, you made it together with Muller.
EA: I made it with Muller.
GV: There is a draft of it there.
EA: We would do this thing with this black material on paper, and the mark would come out.
GV: Yes, so you were doing that. Alright. Did you meet Van Nice's family? Were they –
EA: Yes, I met them. But I can't remember, really.
GV: You don't remember much.
EA: Her name was Betty, wasn't it?
GV: Betty Van Nice.
EA: Betty Van Nice.
GV: But they seem to have stayed here for a while and their children went to Robert College.
EA: That may be right.
GV: You don't remember them. Then, now, quite a number of students from, well, from Robert College seem to have worked at projects of Dumbarton Oaks, especially those of Van Nice. Did you help organize –
EA: No, I never helped with that.
GV: You never helped Van Nice?
EA: No, not that. I knew some of those students; they were my students. I mean, that was a coincidence. It had nothing to with me finding them or anything.
GV: Who are they? – their names.
EA: I don't remember at all.
GV: You don't remember. But, from what we see in the correspondence, you would go and visit the works of Turkish archaeologists. And then you would write your impressions of them to Van Nice. Among these commentaries, the one that attracted my attention the most was Muzaffer Ramazanoglu's work. You didn't –
EA: Well, Ramazanoglu was the director of Hagia Sofia. He was a strange man. He was a very vain and rude man! We didn't have much to do with each other. I tend to avoid conflict with people. We didn't have much in common. And so, he was, at some point – Paul and I would go and we would sit there. Ramazanoglu hadn't started working at Hagia Sophia, yet. He would come by and – strike dully into conversation and leave like that. I mean, I didn't have much to do with him.
GV: Alright.
EA: I knew Mr. Feridun better. Feridun Dirimtekin, that is. Feridun Dirimtekin was a former military officer. And also – I mean, he was a military officer in the old days. But he was interested in things Byzantine. He even published a book entitled "Fortifications of Istanbul."
GV: And so, these visits of yours to excavation sites – from what I can gather you were visiting them regularly over the winter. You were checking what was being done and how these buildings were. Was that a result of your own personal interest?
EA: Well, I mean, like, it was help. I was a full-time professor here in the winter, anyway. I would go and have a look on some Tuesday afternoons, when I would be free.
GV: Alright. I had seen, on a letter that you had written to Underwood, "Ercument Atabay, Pantologist" in the letterhead section.
EA: Pantologist. [Laughs]
GV: What's the story behind that?
EA: Well, I came up with this made-up word, "pantologist," on my own. It means "a person who deals with all things." I came up with that word. I had even had it printed on paper – I got printed this mailing paper that read "Humanistic Studies Research Institute, Ercument Atabay, Pantologist." There are some interesting anecdotes about that. [Laughs] So, this is how it came about.
GV: What are the stories?
EA: I don't mean any story as such. But, for example, we needed this one book by Oxford Press. And they would not give it to us – I mean, sell it. And so I removed this "pantologist." I'll show you.
GV: Sure.
EA: Instead I wrote…I sent it as just "Humanistic Studies Research Institute." And they sent it. They sent the book.
GV: [Laughs] When did you adopt this – this title? When did you declare yourself a "pantologist"?
EA: My child, this was sixty years ago. [Laughs] sixty to seventy.
GV: We were very intrigued by it.
EA: And no one would know what it does there, because I made it up.
GV: [Laughs]
EA: You know there is this word "polymath." "Pantologist" corresponds to that.
GV: Have you ever visited Dumbarton Oaks?
EA: Yes, I have.
GV: Would you tell us about it?
EA: In 1966 –
GV: Yes? Were you invited?
EA: No, dear. Robert College had sent me for a conference. It was at Bennington College. And that was my first time in the United States. That was also when I went to Washington to see Paul. He was – I visited the Dumbarton Oaks building. It was – well, it was Grierson who showed me around the building.
GV: Philip Grierson.
EA: Philip Grierson that is.
GV: Who did you meet while you were there?
EA: I didn't meet anyone.
GV: What were your impressions of Dumbarton Oaks?
EA: Well, Philip Grierson was an English person with a wonderful sense of humor. "Look," he said, "let me show you the most crucial section of this building." And he took me to the boiler room of the building. "Here is something that you cannot find anywhere else," he told me, "you can leave out the rest." Because, really, it was something – like a factory.
GV: Alright, but you had helped Dumbarton Oaks substantially, and yet, they never officially invited you?
EA: No, no, no, what would they do that for? I didn't have anything to – I mean I was not a scholar or anything. My – well, my degree is in medieval history.
GV: Alright. I have a couple of more personal questions. Again related to something that I'd come across in a correspondence, something that involves both Ernest Hawkins and Dumbarton Oaks. It is referred to as "Jan affair."
EA: What affair?
GV: "Jan," as in the proper name, J-A-N. "Jan affair." I think that this person had also worked at the Byzantine Institute. They considered suing Dumbarton Oaks about a particular affair, but then decide not to.
EA: Who is that?
GV: I do not know. I was wondering if you did.
EA: I don't know either.
GV: "Jan affair?"
EA: I don't know, my dear.
GV: You don't remember. Alright, then. Certain minor problems with permission at Hagia Sophia – that is certain minor problems regarding work at Hagia Sophia arise in the year 1965 as a result of the turbulent political situation in Turkey. And in a letter to Underwood you write that the movement to turn Hagia Sohpia into a mosque revived. What are the things that you remember from this period?
EA: I sincerely do not remember.
GV: Alright. You have mentioned ARIT a couple of times.
EA: Who?
GV: ARIT, American Research Institute in Turkey.
GV: It seems that you were quite involved at the time of its establishment. You were even giving advice to Underwood about where precisely ARIT should be set up.
EA: Underwood did not have much to do with ARIT – not with ARIT.
GV: What was your role there?
EA: The director there – they all would know me, anyway. ARIT had, well, it had two directors. One of them was Heath Lowry, and I knew him. And then there was the current director, Tony Greenwood. And his father was a colleague at Robert College. That's all, not much to it.
GV: But during its establishment, too, you –
EA: No, no.
GV: There is not much. Alright. Do you remember Rustem Duyuran?
EA: Very well indeed!
GV: Could you tell us about him, then, because –
EA: Rustem Duyuran. Rustem Duyuran was the director of the Archaeological Museum. He got his education in Germany. To put it colloquially, he was out of it. He was also interested in, well, drinking. This guy would always start up fights and things like that. Between him and Paul, and because Paul was a little tactless, I would be the go-between. I would intentionally call him "big brother Rustem" so that it would be easier to make up with him after a potential fight – because if you call someone your big brother, then you do make peace with him. But otherwise – Rustem – for example, let me tell you a little something: One day at the – there was this Nezih Firatli who was working at the Archaeological Museum. Nezih Firatli. He was a very good archaeologist, and a good friend. He, too, passed away. He would, you know, help us. And then, well, we were to borrow something, I now forget what it was, from the Archaeological Museum. We needed Mr. Rustem's permission. Now, Mr. Rustem would not be there in the mornings. And so, I told Paul to leave his card on his desk, so that we could later claim to not have found him in his office. And that way we could get the "little permission" from Nezih. Then we went back one afternoon when Mr. Rustem was there. What would Paul do but tell him: "We left that card intentionally in order to be able to say that we didn't find you there." The man's face was like – "Big brother," I said, "don't dwell on it, you understand the situation here." And so we resolved it. Paul had such gaffes to make.
GV: But I think that Rustem Duyuran worked in Anatolia.
EA: He did. He was the director of the Archaeological – of the museum in Izmir. He had some – but he was a strange man. At Sarachane, for example, some, well, some marble pieces with monograms were found. I told Mr. Rustem to get some of those. "They don't concern us," he said. Nezih and me, we would take those to the Archaeological Museum at night in order to, well, salvage them. Anyway, so Mr. Rustem was an odd man like that. On the corner there, in Beyazit, there is a bath-house, under which there are reliefs from the Theodosian period. These reliefs are very precious because there are very few of them that date back to the Theodosian period. I went to Mr. Rustem and told him, "Big brother, just give me two men and I will take care of the money. Let's remove these pieces, and take them to the archaeological museum." "Just leave it!" he said – things like that. And then all of those pieces got broken. I had actually taken pictures of those. There must be photographs of those pieces at Dumbarton Oaks.
GV: What happened to the photographs that you had taken?
EA: I gave them away. I didn't take many pictures.
GV: You were giving them away?
EA: No, I wasn't taking them. Larry Majewski would take them.
GV: Yes.
EA: I'll show you the ones I have, but they are all taken by Larry. I would only do the enlargement. With a friend of mine, we'd enlarge photographs.
GV: So you were taking the films and –
EA: No, no, they – we – these were for me.
GV: For you, but you were enlarging them in a dark room?
EA: Yes.
GV: And this was in the Yildiz Apartment?
EA: No, no, it wasn't there, dear. This was at a friend's house. We were doing this for ourselves, not for them.
GV: So, for yourself. Well, there is also this story about the removal and installment of the bronze doors of Hagia Sofia.
EA: Let me tell you about that. Those doors – they are very old. I mean, they are from the Hellenistic period. Someone named Carlo Bertelli came from Italy for – to clean and restore those doors. And, well, Saban had an older brother, his name was Salih. He was unbelievable. Van Nice used to call him – he would say, "He's a medieval man." He would lift the enormous door by himself. How would he do it, how come? Well, anyway he – those doors were cleaned, and crosses and things were exposed. This was Bertelli's work. Also there happened something tragic. They put some of that bronze on the floor and they got stolen. Whoever stole them was unknown. I mean, I guess, they were handed over to the guy who roasted chickpeas.
GV: I think, their installment was also –
EA: Bertelli took care of that. The door was not completely removed, to begin with. The doors were not removed.
GV: They were not?
EA: No, no, no. There was no way!
GV: Yes, they really are very large. I think, also, that there was this group of Armenian artisans at the covered bazaar – one or two artisans. Did you –
EA: I don't know about them.
GV: You don't know about them. Alright. If I told you names of some people whom we don't know, perhaps you could –
EA: Go ahead.
GV: First is this Tahsin Bey that we have come across. I thought that it may be Tahsin Oz, but –
EA: Ha! No, his name was not Tahsin, though. His last name was Oz. I think he was the director of the Archaeological Museum.
GV: Was he? Do you know anyone by the name of Tahsin?
EA: I don't personally, but I think this may be him.
GV: Boris Ermeloff?
EA: I don't know him. Wait, he was a friend of – the one you mentioned – of Mister Walker's.
GV: Ermoloff?
EA: Ermoloff.
GV: A friend of Walker's.
EA: I mean, he was staying with him.
GV: He was staying at Walker's. Yes, okay.
EA: I think, perhaps, that he was the Polish Ambassador. He was – well, there was this great antiques dealer here by the name of Zakos.
GV: An antiques dealer.
EA: And so, he used to have very large pieces. This antique – this guy goes and buys a coin, a very expensive coin, from him. He shows this coin to Whittemore in the evening. Whittemore tells him that it's a fake and tells him to return it. And so, he takes it back to Zakos. "For the life of me," says Zakos, "this is not a fake!" "No." and so Zakos gives him back his money and half an hour later Whittemore shows up and says: "Where's that coin that Ermeloff brought you? – and "don't sell these things to illiterate persons after this." He pays him and places the coin in his pocket.
GV: Anybody by the name of Richard or Robert Gregory?
EA: I don't know them.
GV: You don't know them. Alexander Piankoff?
EA: Alexander?
GV: Piankoff.
EA: I don't know them.
GV: Nor him. Alright. Jack Loveless?
EA: [No response.]
GV: No. Okay, we come across the names of certain people that we think were workers: Halil, Hayyam.
EA: They were laborers – just masons, you know.
GV: Yes, alright. Then there is a person named Halasi Khun.
EA: Halasi Khun. I know him, but – he is a well-known person – but I can't recall who he was.
GV: Yes. Peppa?
EA: Who?
GV: Peppa.
EA: Peppa was the maid at Paul's apartment. She was a maid.
GV: But she did not work in the Yildiz Apartment, did she?
EA: She worked in the Yildiz Apartment.
GV: So she was there.
EA: She was there. She would stay during the winter, too. She would stay there. She was a kind of a, well, a care-taker. I would take her monthly payment to her. Later on when she quit the job, they got her out of the apartment. There was not much need in the winter in the first place. And Paul Underwood had been sending her – he had been sending a certain amount of money every month until the day he died. And I would take that money to her.
GV: Was Peppa of Greek origin?
EA: Yes, she was Greek. Also half-blind.
GV: Was she? And about Koco – we have already talked about the two Kocos. We have also come across someone called Nashi, or, perhaps, Naashi.
EA: Nashi. Nashi must have been the brother of this Koco.
GV: Of which Koco, though?
EA: Of the one with the middle name. Well, he was the brother of one of them. The one who was Carroll Wales' friend?
GV: Gano, Seth Gano, I think…
EA: I have heard his name, but don't remember him.
GV: You don't know him. There's also this person, Mehmet, who constantly comes up.
EA: Mehmet.
GV: He would carry buckets, apparently.
EA: [No response.]
GV: He must have been an unimportant person, then. There are a couple more names, but – McMurray, for example, is one.
EA: [No response.]
GV: You don't know him either. Yes, alright Is there anything else that you would like to tell? This is it for my questions.
EA: Not really, no. I don't think there is anything left.
GV: Would Mrs. Atabay like to add anything?
Mrs. Atabay: No, no. I was not in that world actually. And yet, I know most of the names that you brought up here, of course. I mean, I know them as friends.
EA: Let me also give you these – book of visitors to Kariye, with signatures. There are two. Take them both.
GV: I would appreciate it.
EA: You take those.
GV: Are there any – are there any photographs of the workers?
GV: Or your photgraphs –
EA: No, no.
GV: – of that sort? No, okay. I will end the recording now but I would like to show you a couple of photographs of people you may recognize.
EA: Do show!
GV: Alright.]]>
JWC: My name is James Curtin, and I'm here with Joshua Wilson, and we have the great pleasure of interviewing Natalia Teteriatnikov, on June 24th, about her relationships with Dumbarton Oaks over the years. So, our understanding is that the first time you came to Dumbarton was when you were a Junior Fellow in 1982. Is that correct?
NT: Yes, it was 1982 and '83, and it was the time when, I think, Margaret Mullet was here as a Fellow too, so it is even more enjoyable to remember that time. I got the fellowship and I worked on the subject of apse decoration of Cappadocian churches. And I received the letter, I remember, from Madame Thierry from Paris, that her student works on this subject, and imagine my surprise when I'm supposed to give a paper at Dumbarton Oaks, and I had completely changed my subject. So, I change it to the liturgical plane of Byzantine churches in Cappadocia. And at that time, Dumbarton Oaks had wonderful staff, and I was able to get an idea—the people like Joan Thomas, who worked on private foundations, private ecclesiastical foundations, was especially important for me, and chatting with Mike McCormick, and many other people were absolutely wonderful. So, this time, of course, was different from the way it is now, because Dumbarton Oaks was more formal, but less regulated. I'm saying more formal—I mean that, for example, Joan Aston who was in charge of the House Collection, and she was also in charge of the concerts, did not allow men without tie to enter the concert. So, this was different time, and the time changed gradually. I remember the lunch we had—I think, the last lunch, formal lunch at the symposium— where we enjoyed to have flower bouquets over the chocolate mousse. This was of course discontinued with a limited budget, and after that we had lunchboxes. But I think Dumbarton Oaks' atmosphere, then and now, was always welcoming, focused on research, but also paying attention to people. And I think that people need my personal time, and I'm sure many of my colleagues memorable. So, I'm a positive person and I always remember good times.
JWC: Was Dumbarton Oaks something that you had heard a lot about while you were still in school before you came here, or how did you come to first hear about it?
NT: Well, I studied at the Institute of Fine Arts, and Thomas Matthews was my advisor, who obviously suggested to me to come for one of the Dumbarton Oaks symposia. And when I was there, of course, like everybody else, the physical setting and the library and the scholarly atmosphere was very, very attractive. So, Dumbarton Oaks was a dream, it was not just a—I mean, it was a legend that, in name, we did know about. We just dreamed that we may be a part of it one day, and for me, I was very grateful that this happened.
JWC: So, when you first came to Dumbarton Oaks, you must have known Giles Constable as the Director, and also Judy Siggins. Can you say anything about how that administration facilitated research for yourself and other Fellows that were there at the time?
NT: I think extraordinary good of Giles Constable. I think he even had a nickname as "the abbot in the monastery." He was one of those people who sort of try to democratize—right?—Dumbarton Oaks and make it more open. My personal account was especially his discussions. So, I remember with Mike McCormick, he was so excited about the monastic beards, the fashion of wearing a beard in monastic setting. So, many other things: he was a very stimulated person, very encouraging. As for Judy Siggins, she was wonderful. She helped me a lot when—I'll tell you later about the various projects, and especially the grant I wrote for the Weitzmann Archive—but she was a person during my fellowship here—she entertained in her house, which was of course not her house, but it was the left part of the cottage house in Dumbarton Oaks. She entertained Fellows and staff. She organized wonderful Halloween parties, which we enjoyed, and people used to come in great costumes, like, for example, Elizabeth Boone was dressed up as the Statue of Liberty; it was spectacular—I remember it—as it was. Again, she organized parties for us and many other things. So, she was a very generous person. But, professionally, she was extremely helpful and efficient, so I couldn't say more about it.
JWC: It's funny you mention the Halloween parties. Someone else also spoke about that. Was that the same year that Giles Constable dressed as the Grim Reaper and scared everybody, or was that maybe a different Halloween party?
NT: It was a different Halloween party.
JWC: Alright. So, I have one other question about your early time here and then we'll transition to your professional work with the image archives, and that was that, during the time you were here, you knew Curcic personally, right? Is that correct?
NT: Yes, yes. Slobodan Curcic, from Princeton.
JWC: That's correct. And he went on to later become a Senior Fellow here as well. Now, to what degree would you say that men like him and other Senior Fellows interacted with the Junior Fellows and—I guess the question I'm getting at: do you think there was contact between the Junior Fellows and the Senior Fellows such that they sort of shared what they knew with the younger generation of scholars?
NT: Yes, it definitely was. I certainly consulted with Slobodan on my work because I dealt with architecture of Cappadocia and he was a great specialist and great scholar. And, later on, when, after I finished my dissertation, I went to work at Princeton as a Research Assistant in the Princeton Index, I worked with him on the exhibition Byzantium at Princeton where I wrote on the manuscript collection of Princeton. And he was actually organizer for the exhibition. He advised me to work on this collection, and I was so surprised that I was able to work on manuscripts which were discussed previously by Professor Weitzmann himself and by other people—so it was really encouraging for him to give me this project, and I am very grateful that it was published in his catalogue.
JWC: Very good. So, as I said – to transition to the photo archive: first, what was the name of it when you came? Now it's the ICFA.
NT: It was the archive called Visual Resources. And when I came in 1996, it actually had only black-and-white collection, and that's it. So, when I came, there was no one in the department except Amy Heidelberg, very nice person who was an assistant, and who was supposed to leave in about two weeks; so I was fortunate that I knew Charlotte Burke, the previous curator, who was a very nice person and also contributed to the archives, especially from an archival point of view. So, she explained to me how to type the labels and, you know, a little bit about the stuff, about the supplies. At that time, this was a very important part of the department, because all the photographs were mounted on boards, and labels were typed and dry-mounted. And this was a tedious process. So, I needed to know these details in order to further deal with the archive. Anyway, Charlotte was very, very helpful. And then I simply analyzed the archive, and I realized that it actually full of photographs of general views, basically, and some details, because scholars at that time interested in style, and therefore they photographed faces, hands, sometimes the figure or occasionally a scene. But it was difficult to have an idea of the decorative program; or even the interior of the architecture was difficult to understand from these photographs. So, dealing with Cappadocian churches, where I myself photographed a great number of churches, I focus on the detailed photographs of the interior, on the full covering of monuments. And that's what I taught scholars from whom I order photographs for the archive. When I came, there was a decision to add the Princeton Index to the Archives, and that was, I think, a wise decision. The idea came from Herb Kessler, who was an advisor at that time, and he was a wonderful advisor, and he, of course, was a student of Weitzmann at Princeton, and he knew Weitzmann. So, his suggestion was good, and I wrote a grant, with the help of Robert Thomson, who was very much encouraging of the project, and Judy Siggins, and applied for a grant and received $94,000. It was one of the largest amounts of money Dumbarton Oaks received at that time. Of course, I had to justify why this archive was important for Dumbarton Oaks, because the original was at Princeton. So, I had to analyze the Weitzmann Archive, and fortunately I knew him personally from Princeton. I felt that this archive was extremely important since Dumbarton Oaks was a center of Byzantine studies, and scholars would have an easy access to the archive, but also it was an advantage—if we had an archive and also the negatives, our scholars will be provided with the photographs, which very hard to get. So, the project was so difficult because I had to hire a photographer who had to live at Princeton for three months, to find an apartment, to get along with Weitzmann, and to photograph the entire archive. So, all this has been done, and he moved back to Washington. So, the second part—another part of the project becomes he started to print the photographs; and the photographs should be on the fiber-based paper, because we're required to have high-quality paper. But the equipment for fiber-based paper was old, and, at that time, there was a change in the use of paper. RC paper become popular on the market, and all the equipment for drying photographs, for drying the fiber-based paper, was not available. So, his equipment collapsed. And I received hundreds of emails from Angeliki Laiou, who was the Director at that time, who really even wanted to stop the project, because she was really responsible for its completion. And I certainly put the pressure on the photographer, so miraculously he was able to pick up the equipment in some second-hand store, and the project was finished. As a result, we had 17,000 photographs, all of which were catalogued by the person I hired for this archive. I certainly had to check every photograph with folio number and so on, to make sure that it is properly organized. In addition, we had to organize the negatives and provide the cross-references between the negatives and photographs, because we provided photographs from this archive to scholarly community. So, we finished this archive – this project – in time, but this was a really difficult project. The next step was – I just did want to add a little about the Princeton Index. So, when I got the Princeton Index, I was – I didn't say anything about the Princeton Index here, right?
JWC: You said a little bit, but –
NT: A little bit, yeah –
JWC: – tell us more.
NT: Now, the Princeton Index was added to the department, but, for me, the importance was that we could use the Princeton Index as an authority for object names and for the subject names, for the cataloguing of the entire collection, because, when I look at the collection, I realize that the same subject called different names, and so on and so forth. So, the Princeton Index was, at the beginning, an authority file. Later on, of course, the Getty is standard for art and architectural terms – was online; and the Library of Congress National Geographic standard for geographic names of countries and cities was also online. So, we used these resources, but I wrote, in addition, a glossary, and I'm sure that Rona probably saw it. I wrote two glossaries of architectural terms, with a description and object type terms, with a description for the cataloguers, because I hope that these standards will help to improve the collection. When I came in our collection, there were some monuments called three different names, and filed in three different locations. For example, there was the Lavra in Mt. Athos, the Monastery of Lavra. It's called Lavra, it's called the Great Lavra, and the Monastery of St. Athanasius; and all the materials were filed in three different locations in alphabetical order. So, that was the reason I was trying to establish the standards and establish the way things should be catalogued. I also created the lists when I did my acquisitions. When I received the photographs, I would prepare the detailed list for the cataloguers with a bibliography and identifications. I also checked all the information after things were catalogued, dry-mounted, and so on, because it was necessary to make sure that everything was fine, because of the difficulty of the materials. Now, again, when I came, we had lots of transparencies and slides and color transparencies were not in the cold storage in those days, and they continued to deteriorate, and I was trying to get the refrigerators. And in 1990, I first got two refrigerators, and I put five thousand slides in these refrigerators and all archival fieldwork films, which were in the department when I came, and I put them also in these refrigerators. In 1993, Robert Thomson asked me whether I would like to get the fieldwork archives, and especially the Van Nice Archives, and some Byzantine Institute materials, and I certainly was excited about it. These materials were located in the library somewhere not far from the office of Irene Vaslef, so she showed me these materials, and I certainly welcomed them to our collection, although we had very little space. These materials were – partially, it was not clear for me at the beginning when I received everything what belonged to – which archive is the Byzantine collection, which archive belonged to Van Nice, and so on and so forth. So, there were tubes and Van Nice materials. I had a brief meeting with Van Nice at that time, and he asked me one thing, just to keep all the materials together, so I tried as I could, but later on when I properly arranged these materials. Now, I started first to deal with the drawings, and before re-housing the drawings and storing them, because they were stored in very rusty metal cabinets – actually, map cases. There were three map cases: two small map cases and one very large one. So, I went to Harvard, because Harvard at that time received three hundred thousand dollar grant, to restore and install, actually, Richardson's drawings, and it was publicized in the Harvard newspaper. So, I went there and learned about the installation of these archives and the materials. So, it was certainly helpful, and here in Washington I went to the National Gallery and to the National Archives and looked at their display and arrangement of all the drawings, and, sure enough, they were in the metal, modern map cases, archival folders, and so on and so forth. So, I used the materials – I bought two map cases. Unfortunately, we didn't have enough space and archival materials such as folders, paper, tissue paper, and so on and so forth. And I started to sort of access them, to catalogue them, on EmbARK, and then, in the year 2000, when we began digitization project, I digitized all of these drawings. That is why, right now, the current staff could easily put them on the Web. Now, we – there was, of course, much more to the discussion of the fieldwork archives, and hopefully I will talk about it tomorrow, but I just want to add that some of the materials – other materials came later, in several installments. When we were about to move to the new library, in 2005, the – I think the Assistant of the Director brought me some boxes from the archive – it was from the Byzantine Institute archive – and large number of materials came from James Carder. These were in folders, some were just loose materials and photographs, which I later identified. For example, I can tell you – an interesting example: we have now a wonderful exhibition of Diaghilev called, "Ballets Russes," which is in the National Gallery. I don't know whether you saw it, but I advise you to see it. It's a wonderful exhibition. And when working on this archive, I saw a tiny little – I think it's a water-color – color image, a color image of an oriental man, and there was a little inscription in Russian called Скороход which is a runner. Well, I immediately recognized that this image belongs to the theatrical part of the Diaghilev Ballet, and it was from, probably, the costume design. And Whittemore, who certainly knew everybody in Europe in those days, in the 1920s and '30s, when Ballets Russes was so popular in Europe and in Paris, particularly. He certainly knew the artists who did this particular image, and probably from, I think, the ballet of Scheherazade. Anyway, this is just a little thing which is a memory for me, which I hope may be even published, which I connected with the exhibition, which is right now in the National Gallery, and you can see similar images there. Anyway – so, all these materials, I organized. I didn't have a chance to work on the Van Nice paper materials, but I did work on the Byzantine Institute and Thomas Whittemore materials on the conservation of Hagia Sophia and on conservation of Kariye Djami and many other archives. I added some of the archives as well, and I wrote a very detailed manual of all the archives – very detailed descriptions, which I think was used as a basis by current staff. And I think what I've heard that it's probably some – some changes were made, technical changes were made, but it was put on the Web, because it was basically complete in its content and the description. So, I certainly learned a lot dealing with this archive and I continue to use this archive in my publication. I'm really grateful that I had this unique opportunity. In the year 2000, we started digitization, and that was a very difficult project. For this, we established standards, of the city names, country names. As you know, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, countries changed, and cities, which belonged to one country belonged to another country; and our collection reflected all of this. So, after all this situation with the countries settled – I waited for several years – then we started. All staff worked on that: on the city, the names of the city. We used, of course, the Library of Congress standards for the geographic names. Even our volunteers worked on this project. So, we had to shift the entire collection, photograph collection and slide collection, in the photograph collection, which changed all the names of the countries, shifted all materials which belonged to each city and so on. It was incredible project because things should be retyped, the names should be retyped and applied to each photograph. The same should be done for the slides, because in the slides we didn't use full name of the country but we used the abbreviations, and the abbreviations also came from the system of abbreviations of the Library of Congress. Now, during the project on EmbARK, I think the entire Dumbarton Oaks was involved. I had two choices: either to choose the library program for computerization, or to choose the EmbARK. And my choice was with EmbARK, because at least we will be able to have and retrieve materials together with the Byzantine Collection, because we had similar objects. But I went and I saw Harvard's project, and I gave advice at that time to obtain this program, but unfortunately at that time the decision was different. So, we had no other choice. Now, there was a sort of two programs which were going on simultaneously: the EmbARK program and digitization program. So, we digitized almost all our slides, large format, color transparencies, and the drawings, Van Nice drawings, and the Byzantine Institute drawings, and this was a very difficult project because we dealt with the Image Delivery System company, and they constantly redo the images, either because they were placed upside down or backwards and so on, and it was so difficult that finally, in about 2004, the project was discontinued. Even some of the incorrect images are still on EmbARK – I know that, because we were not able to change them, because we no longer dealt with the company. So, the project was stopped because we were supposed to move to a new library. Now, with the EmbARK project, there was also lots of work on the object names, on the monument names, and I'm sure that all department created this list, but this list should be constantly updated because, if you introduce one monument, that means the city and the name of the monument can also be added to the list. So EmbARK was really continuous project, and everybody dealt with that: my staff at that time, myself, and Katherine Hill, Smiljka Soretić. Before Katherine, Michelle Savant worked on the project as well. So, it was a big project, and not always enjoyable, but, as a result, we did digitize – how many? probably close to fifty thousand images for a very short time, for four years. And that means all images had to be processed. I checked myself every image many times, because you have to check how it was done, the color corrections we did constantly, and so on and so forth. And the color corrections were necessary because many color transparencies lost their color. For example, Underwood – when he photographed Kariye Djami, he had small budget. I read about it in his archive. And he didn't have the money to buy really good, new film, so he bought often expired film, and that's why there was a considerable change of color. So, we tried very hard to somehow restore the images. The images were very important, I can tell you know that. If you go to Kariye Djami, the image of the Virgin in the knave lost the right eye. Therefore, Underwood's material is very important. For example, the Archangel Michael image in the Parekklesion. I just recently found my own image – digital image – which I photographed several years ago in Kariye Djami, and I noticed that the inscription – the monograph of Michael was barely visible, but it is very well visible in the Underwood picture, published in his two volumes. I'm sorry; three volumes. The fourth volume was published later. So, that is – I'm just telling you this to show how valuable these archival materials and photographs are. Now, there was also lots of work on the restoration of the color copies. The one which you see here, as the centerpiece of the Anastasis, is one of the fourteen color reproductions which were made by the Byzantine Institute. Some belonged to the images of Hagia Sophia. This one and others were reproductions of images from Kariye Djami. These reproductions of Kariye Djami were done by Phillip Thompson. I discovered that he did it. He was a British painter who worked for Underwood. Earlier reproductions were done by the Byzantine Institute, but I found these – some of these reproductions, for example, of the Anastasis were in rolls and stored in the boiler room. For me, the task was to restore all of them and to exhibit them, but how? Dumbarton Oaks didn't have the money. The first big exhibition we did in 1998, Dumbarton Oaks gave the money for conservation of three big panels. So, we did a wonderful exhibition on the restoration of St. Sophia mosaics, and we were able to exhibit these panels and other materials from the archive, and my book on the Fossati restoration and the Byzantine Institute was published by Dumbarton Oaks. The second time when we restored them was in 2004 when Holger Klein, a professor of Columbia University, suggested me to do the exhibition of Kariye Djami and to take some of our materials. I actually suggested him to apply for a grant to restore color reproduction. There was one trick I knew to apply for grant from the Kress Foundation because it was Kress Foundation who gave money for the restoration of Kariye Djami and publication of Underwood three volumes. So, all of this was beneficial for our color reproductions. When Van Nice passed away in 2004, I organized our first exhibition in the hallway of Dumbarton Oaks to honor his survey – architectural survey – of Hagia Sophia. Van Nice was extraordinary person. I was fortunate that I was able to talk to him when I was a Fellow. I remember when we were sitting in the Fellows Building at lunchtime; one scholar, who's name I will not mention, was passing by and said, "Hi, Bob. Are you still doing Hagia Sophia?" And Van Nice always had a sense of humor and he said, "Of course. Is there anything else?" And when I went through his drawings, of course I knew him so well, near one minaret of Hagia Sophia, which was drawn very carefully in small details, there was a curse. I found a curse, which it said, "In millions of years, don't draw this minaret. We had ten exhibitions after that, and Alice-Mary Talbot, who was really supportive in making this exhibition – she was personally involved, and I must say very enthusiastic. I'm very grateful for her and for her help and support. I did mention – can I come back a little bit?
JWC: Yeah, yeah.
NT: I should mention that after the exhibition was opened in 2004, after our color reproductions were restored, we sent them for an exhibition to the Columbia University gallery. It was really a great success. The exhibition was opened at that time there was a great exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, "Faith and Power." And then this exhibition traveled to the Krannert Art Gallery at Urbana-Champaign in Illinois, where I worked with Bob Ousterhout who worked on the installation of this exhibition, and that was really fun to work also with Bob at that time. I traveled together with Stephen Zwirn from the Byzantine Collection. It was even more pleasant to have scholarly interactions and discussions. The next trip was to Istanbul to a Koç Museum, where another exhibition on Kariye Djami took place in 2007, where the catalogue was also published. There were two catalogues. One, Restoring Byzantium in 2004, and in 2007 a catalogue called Kariye organized by Holger Klein and Bob Ousterhout . I wrote an article for both of them on the Byzantine Institute and the restoration of Kariye Djami, where I published many photographs, some drawings, and so on and so forth. Also, we were able to publish albums which I found just by occasion in our department just before – during our first move to the new space. We had also moved at the end of the – during the early 1990s we got new space, which previously was occupied by the library. So, at that time, we were cleaning up all kinds of materials and there were albums which were stored above the supply cabinet, which was in a passageway through which everyone in Dumbarton Oaks used to pass through. The albums were behind the door. The door was always open, so you were practically not able to see them. So, when I opened the door, I saw the album. When I started to look through, I realized that one was a piece called "Byzantina" but the second one contained photographs of yacht and people. And then, I slowly start to recognize an image of Thomas Whittemore and then his friend and then I identified this album. He's actually – it was records of his trip on this yacht to Greece and Turkey. So, the album was included in this exhibition on Kariye Djami in the Koç Museum. So, there are many other things, perhaps some things you would like to ask me.
JWC: Yeah, I know we had heard a few stories about the Kariye Djami. Is it true you found that initial set of prints – you said in the boiler room – you were doing a walk through with Henry Maguire. Is that correct? He pointed them out? Is that a story you could tell?
NT: I was told, yes, by Henry Maguire that there were – it was a while away. I don't want to misrepresent what I am saying. But, I learned probably from Henry, but also from the staff of the boiler room that the copies were there. My fear was that I open – and because it's very dry there, I was afraid that it would be a really serious restoration. Fortunately, the canvas was in a pretty good condition. I found, when I found the conservator – his name is Arthur Page – when I went to his studio on 7th street, we discussed the way these panels should be laid out. For example, if we wanted to exhibit Anastasis in three panels – because it is an apse decoration and the surface is curved, but the painter of course did a flat surface. So, we did it on three panels. It was my decision because I thought it will really show the authenticity the way artists work. I choose the material for the backing of the panels, because I thought it would be easier to display them, as you can see now. A few panels which were not restored are still in the archives and I think they are still on the rolls. There was another exhibition in the Prince George Community College, organized by Svetlana Popović. She also asked me whether we can give our copies for this exhibition, and I certainly was happy about it. Two of our images were included in the exhibition and in your little booklet. I wrote a paper which is unpublished yet, but I hope I will be able to publish it, on the color reproductions from Dumbarton Oaks, and I gave a lecture because she organized a series of lectures, and she invited different scholars to talk. The subject I spoke on was of color reproductions – Dumbarton Oaks copies. That was practically beneficial. What can I say? Those are sort of things which we did there – many more are still to come. Of course, during the years I had great opportunity to deal with people and to have many friends, who either lived at Dumbarton Oaks, like Alexander Kazhdan and his wife Musja, were my close friends. I always want to remember them, because they were very hospitable to scholars. Lots of people have the chance to be in this house. Have chance to eat dinner, or sometimes breakfast. They were always hospitable. They had one secret, which I wanted to tell you. They liked to serve quince jam. Kazhdan always admired Dumbarton Oaks – the gardens. And he, walking through the garden, he discovered two quince trees. He also discovered when the fruits are ripe, they fell down and squirrels come and eat them. So, he knew the time when the fruits were about to fall and he was checking the fruits and tried to get them first before the squirrels come. So, he bring it to Musja, and they make a display before all the friends come and enjoy the scenery, and they later on enjoy the jam. So, this is a Dumbarton Oaks hidden story [laughs].
JWC: Everyone has a story either about parties they went to at his house or his hospitality.
NT: Right. He also had a very welcoming office in the library where he had little card catalogue with tiny little cards which he brought from Russia. And he made them very small because that way he was able to bring them through the custom border. And then he continued to use the tiny little card. Whenever you come to ask him for a bibliographic reference, he – with his very thick eyeglasses would start to look through those tiny little cards, and would always find the solution to your problem or question.
JWC: In another interview, someone mentioned the cards. You know, when he came here, he was really supposed to be going to Israel, right? But he came to the United States instead. And he shipped all of his books and especially this card catalogue here. They thought that may tip off the government that he was actually coming here, but he needed to have his card catalogue.
NT: [Laughs] I understand.
JWC: So, you have laid out the whole history of the image collection from the time everything was still in boxes in the boiler room until now, which is digitalized and available online, in part. How has that changed the way that scholars who are coming in to use the collections interact with it? Do they – I'm sure they come in less now because there are things online – what is the shift in the dynamic?
NT: Yes, it's a good question. I was happy to have the Princeton Index, the photograph collection, and the fieldwork archives, because that, as you pointed out, changed the dynamics of the department. Whenever I gave an introduction or whenever individual scholars come and I learn about their project, I was trying to help. For example, not just simply explain how to use Princeton Index but how to explore it for scholarly research. Even now the Princeton Index is online and you can use it to retrieve some information, but I knew at that time that even the physical presence of the drawers and cards in the Princeton Index can provide important information. Even for myself when there was a jubilee of the Princeton Index, the director asked me to write an article for the visual resources file. I wrote on the subject "The 'Gift Giving' Image" the adoration – the case of the adoration of the Magi. And the reason I wrote on this subject, I just opened the draws. I just opened several draws and I saw a numerous number of the subject used. Because the Princeton Index reflects what is in the monuments. How much, how often, this subject was used throughout history. And I asked the question, why? So it was interesting for me to go through the sources and through the visual images and to understand that the image – the adoration of the Magi who brought silver and gold to Christ – were actually used as an advertisement, you know. The priests used this image in their ceremonies, like an advertisement. Please donate money for the church like the Magi did. That is what the Princeton Index actually encouraged me to do. Because the idea I got from the Princeton Index and I tried to actually help scholars always to find the information. Also, to use the information together with the photograph collection, because the images which were in the photograph collection were very high quality. For example, when I just came and I saw huge drawers with the photographs from the Byzantine Institute secondary file. And Charlotte Burke told me, "Well, these are the photographs which we use for sale." You can sort of resell them when the requests come, and I look at them and I said, "No. We will keep them." And I think I was right, because these were done on the fiber based paper, which give a really good depth and quality of the image. It is hard right now – virtually impossible – to produce such images. So we have some seconds. That is good.
JWC: That's pretty comprehensive. Can you talk more about the digitalization? You mentioned some of the difficulties in updating it and putting them in the computer.
NT: Yes. I can tell you more about the difficulty. The difficulty was, for example, to digitize the slide collection. Because we had to take the film from each slide, rehouse it in a different frame, number it to provide orientation, create the list, and give it to the image collection – the company called – when we got the slides back, we had to put them again in archival frames, print new labels, provide all the new catalogue number, and so on. So, it was absolutely incredible job, as you imagine. Fifty thousand slides rehoused twice, practically, to create constant lists and so on, and to create the records, and file after that. Fortunately, when we moved to a new library, it was big planning of course, we planned to get the new refrigerators, which include most of our important slides and color transparences and we did, but we had to take them out several times because there was flood. We put slides on the lower level, than we move them. Then there was flood, you know. Those things happen quite often. We had several floods during my time. For example, when I just acquired the new fieldwork archive tubes and put them in the folders, we had terrible flood and some of the drawings got wet. So, me, Astrid Williams, we came at that time, it was Saturday or Sunday. We rescue them. We just open everything and spread them all out. So, then we have to put everything back. These accidents, of course, happened I'm sure elsewhere in the building. The building was old and we had to deal with that quite often, but because of that the collection suffered. When we already prepared the black and white collection for moving to a new space in the new library, another flood happened. Lots of people from the building came to the rescue and helped us to open up all the boxes and to spread the photographs on boards. So, there was a mixture of everything. Even until now, I think there were probably some mixed somewhere but hopefully one day everything will be straightened out. We straightened out, but it was a big job. Now, when we moved to a new library, I had to create a new system of displaying of these materials. And I have to tell you an important fact that the collection was always open to scholars. At the beginning, it was open any time. Even if I work late, scholars were able to still work there. But when I came, the collection was completely open and there was no security at all. All the doors, even my office, were all opened for many, many days. And I tried very hard to make the collection closed and to get keys and everything. Finally, this happened. Of course, it was not in my favor because people got used to having easy access and actually take things. Not because they really wanted to steal, no, but they get used to take some negatives, maybe bring them back, maybe they will forget. But I notice of course that many things were missing. This was a time the collection continued to be open for scholars and used. When we closed the doors, scholars were able to come and work by themselves on the collection. Open the door to take any board with a photograph or a slide. But they had – the only rule was to put the replacement card. When we moved to a new library, I was told that it will be a similar system. I had to organize the collection and archive in such a way that scholars would be able to work by themselves. I created the system of labels. I bought the new boxes with the plastic sleeves and typed the labels and inserted them in the sleeve. The labels give information about media, country, city, and so on and so forth and the catalogue number. That way, if we added new materials to the collection, we can always shift the collection, print new labels, and insert – not retype – but insert in the sleeves. So, that was an easy way – an easier way – of doing that. Of course, perhaps it was – I actually went to the Getty archive and I saw that in a similar way materials were displayed there, only some materials were stored in special storages and were taken when scholars had a special request. But practically scholars had a self-service. Of course, this was my time and I hope that materials we provided, and at least some system which I introduced were useful for the new staff who, of course, introduced new archival system of the cataloguing, perhaps useful for and it should probably provide consistency with other archives. From the point of view of content of archives and shape of the archive, I hope that during my time myself and my staff were able to contribute to Dumbarton Oaks and to scholars who used it.
JWC: Do you have any stories about individual scholars who would come in and use it? Maybe some of the bigger, more important – either catalogues or exhibitions that were made using the Dumbarton Oaks material that maybe wouldn't have gotten done if the collection hadn't been organized the way it was?
NT: Well, I think that a lot – in my time, we had a lot of scholars. Of course, Internet was not available at the beginning. And I remember scholars like Doula Mouriki, she was a very famous Greek scholar who used to come here on a regular basis. She would stay in the collection until ten at night. I'm sorry – I stay in and work on my own things, but I let her work because I understood how important it was for her to have these materials. And she worked on the mosaics of Naouminea at that time and published two volumes – wonderful two volumes. Well, I'm sure every book you open includes materials from Dumbarton Oaks. Just recently, I just check one book in my own library written by John Meyendorff. It's about imperial unity during Justinianic times. And the book all illustrated from Dumbarton Oaks. Of course he thanked me for the illustrations, but they were Dumbarton Oaks. It's so funny because it was so long ago. It was early 1990s and most of the photographs just came from Dumbarton Oaks. For me, it was very pleasant to see such great photographs. At the beginning, I just look at the photographs, but when I saw them, I say "oh, what wonderful photographs," but when I look at the credit I realize that these are our photographs, so that is really beneficial for me. And I must say I am also grateful for the current staff because whenever I come, people are very helpful. When I come for the – although I knew of course the fieldwork archive, but you need to go many times if you work for different projects. I was able to get more materials for the article I submitted to Dumbarton Oaks, which will be published next year – in a year – on the south vestibule of Hagia Sophia. I'm working on the book on Hagia Sophia. I'm just polishing it. I got most of my materials from Dumbarton Oaks, from the – the staff was very helpful to me. The Byzantine Collection; the samples, you know some of the materials are in the Byzantine Collection – the samples of mosaic, tesserae, and the plaster. They are there. I work on them, and that is extraordinary material, without this material I would not be able to do, I would say, complete work for what I am doing now.
JWC: Outside of the other Princeton Index sites, are there any other collections that you know of that are as comprehensive where you can do the same type of work?
NT: Yes. Well, there are other collections which I included, actually, in the manual for the fieldwork archives. I went to study the archives at Harvard: the Bliss Collection, also, the Whittemore collection. There are sixty-seven boxes of the Bliss Collection. Of course, we have the basis. They have more historical secondary materials. Very important for Dumbarton Oaks? Not specifically, but I learned a lot about the background, the role of Harvard, and the role of some individuals with whom the Blisses were in touch. Actually, when I look at the website on Dumbarton Oaks on Wikipedia, I noticed a wonderful article about Dumbarton Oaks, about the Blisses actually. But one important thing was missing. It was the Blisses roles in their help to restore Christian monuments in Istanbul. Also they gave money for exploration and restoration elsewhere. They help the Red Cross in Europe in 1915. That's how they met Whittemore, who actually went to Europe to help refugees, and Whittemore went to Russia and so on and met people. So, the role of Blisses is enormous because they understood the significance of – it was not just simply a charity, they understood the significance. Of course, they helped people. They were very helpful, but also they work also to restore important monuments – and Kariye Djami and Hagia Sophia the monuments which you can find in any book. I think their role in this is very important. And also Dumbarton Oaks's role in this was extraordinarily important because Dumbarton Oaks after Thomas Whittemore died in 1950, Dumbarton Oaks took over the project and continued to restore both Hagia Sophia and Kariye Djami. There were other projects, but this site is not actually – is omitted from the article like I read, and this was one of the important parts, and the Blisses', of course, role of helping people. I've found some notes, in Harvard archives, that lots of people came, especially during the war and asked for money and they always gave $50, $25, you know. Just for people who came to them asking for help.
JWC: That about does it for me. If there are any other important things you think we haven't covered or if there are any other questions?
NT: Well, I will think about it and will probably will tell Rona tomorrow.
JWC: Well, thank you very much for coming in today. We appreciate it.
NT: My pleasure. Thank you.]]>
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.]]>
Drawing on material in the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Photograph and Fieldwork Archives, this catalogue records two periods of work that uncovered the mosaics of Hagia Sophia, hidden by whitewash and plaster for 400 years. The photographs and drawings record the procedures used in the restoration and the results of these projects carried out in 1848–49 by the architects Gaspare and Giuseppe Fossati and later in 1931–49 by the Byzantine Institute.]]>
In 1847–48 St. Sophia underwent a thorough restoration by the Swiss architect Gaspare Fossati. In the course of this work the Byzantine mosaics, which had previously been obscured with plaster and whitewash, were temporarily revealed. Having made a record of them, Fossati was compelled to cover again all the mosaics representing Christian subjects.
In this volume the Fossati papers relating to the mosaics of St. Sophia are for the first time made the object of a comprehensive publication and discussion. This material is supplemented from other sources, namely the hitherto unpublished drawings of Cornelius Loos 91710) and excerpts from the accounts of travelers who visited Istanbul after the Turkish conquest.
Dumbarton Oaks Studies 8]]>
IK: Thank you, also, for having me here.
JC: Our pleasure.
IK: Actually, we decided to call this sort of semester where a faculty member from Harvard comes down here as the Harvard Professor in Residence, or something like that, to remind us a little bit of the old times when there were faculty members here, residing at Harvard, so that's a little bit—sort of a memory blast, I guess.
JC: Great.
IK: So, I came here, yes, as you said, as a Junior Fellow, in the year '74–'75. It was a year when we were quite a number of Fellows, and we all sat together, which was very, very nice, in the old building, or the Main Building, as we call it, in the reading room upstairs, a beautiful room with a lot of sunlight, books all around, beautiful woods surrounding us, you know, a place where you could sort of feel like you were becoming a scholar from being a graduate student somewhere at a university. So there was a very nice atmosphere. And we all got to know each other, we could look at each other across the room, having questions we could exchange with each other, so it was very pleasant, I thought, to study in a room with other people – not tight, you know, next to each other, but far apart. We had our own desks, lights, beautiful tables. Anyway, it was a very nice – nice time. I always remember how I was figuring out things, you know, getting all excited, and then having someone sitting behind me, and going back and telling them what I found, what I read, you know, so there were nice moments of discovery most of the time.
JC: What people do you remember from your Junior Fellowship here?
IK: Well actually I remember you. We had Kathleen Shelton; Lowell Clucas – those unfortunately are people we lost in subsequent years – Kenneth Snipe? Snipes?; Paul Magdalino; a very tall fellow from Michigan, which I have a hard time remembering his name, who was doing visiting Islamic connections; Stephen Hill from New Castle; Tom Brown, also from England. So we were quite a mixed group of Fellows, quite a number, actually, from overseas – Ruth Kolarik from Harvard. And you know, interestingly enough, when I was told about this Fellowship that existed for Junior Fellows in the Byzantine field, by my advisor, who was David Wright in Berkeley – at that time I had as a co-advisor Paul Alexander in the history department in Berkley – and so he [David Wright] said to me, "Go and ask Paul to write the letter of recommendation for you," and so I went to Paul Alexander – you know, he knew me and so on – and I said, "I would like to get a letter from you, if possible, because I would like to apply to Dumbarton Oaks," and he said to me, "Oh, you know, I'll write the letter for you, but don't hope you're ever going to get a Fellowship there, because this is the place where graduate students from Harvard go down, and they're the ones who get the Fellowships." And, to my surprise, first of all I got the Fellowship, but also to my surprise: it was that that particular year there were very few people from Harvard. Most of the people were from England, from other places, which was very nice. So this perception of Dumbarton Oaks being just a sort of deposit for the graduate students from Harvard no longer was true, at least not then. So I was very happy to be part of this new group, at least, that was there? And there were very many different American universities, plus the Europeans that had come. So that was very nice.
JC: You were working on Byzantine steatites at that time, right? For your dissertation?
IK: I had wanted to work on ivories, but I was told that perhaps that was not a wise move at the time, because that would sort of mean shaking up some things, if I wanted to have a different way of looking at them, so the closest to ivories was the steatite material, which was carving, again, icons, small, for private use, and they had not been studied, not this whole group of sort of a medium, individually. Some of them are in Russia and so Alice Bank had published a few of them. So, it took a long time to get the material together, to find out where it is, or – wrote a lot of museums and so on, and got photographs from them. So that was the first year that I had started my dissertation doing the research in Berkeley. But then I came here with almost not knowing yet what this dissertation was going to be about, or how I am going to develop the whole topic. And all of that was done here, which gave me a fantastic library to work with, right away from the beginning of my dissertation, so the actual research, not just gathering the material but to be able to sort of read, you know, private devotion, popular sayings, all kinds of other things that needed to be sort of worked with, to figure out how these things were going to date or how they're going to – not just the iconography and the style but also, you know, the context, this kind of thing. And so, I think any person who starts a dissertation should come to Dumbarton Oaks early on in their dissertation research, because it makes it much faster and more complete, I would say, in terms of research. You can spend less time, you know, going to libraries, not finding some, getting books from other libraries sent to you, and perhaps you don't ever find everything. Here, the shelves at that time were also above the reading room, which was really nice, you know. We could go immediately find something and then, once you looked at the shelves, they were so close, thematically organized, you could find other things right next to it. So, it was almost like, you had one book in your hand; with that you could go to the right, to the left, and figure out other things you might not have run across in a bibliography, you know, that were on the shelves. So that was a very nice, sort of a fast way of uncovering things.
JC: Were there Senior Scholars here, and, if so, were they helpful to you?
IK: Oh yes, it was – Hugo Buchthal was here visiting that year. I think he was here for the whole year, if I'm not mistaken. And Otto Demus used to come at that time to work on the St. Mark material. So every spring semester Demus would come and occupy one of the big offices up on the top floor. And they were very good with us, you know. We could go always with questions, and I remember Hugo Buchthal was always – he knew everybody's dissertation. He was very involved with all of that. And he had us very often for dinner, in this low, tiny cottage in the Fellows Building, the East Cottage, which was not as big as the West Cottage. And I remember the stove being in the corridor or something, and poor Mrs. Buchthal would cook right there, you know, and we had very nice discussions at these dinners. They were fun. Very exciting for all of us to be part of that sort of group, to go and talk to him.
JC: Carlo Bertelli was here at some point…
IK: Yeah, he was! He came for a month or so, perhaps even longer, I'm not sure, but he came for the symposium, which, I have to admit, I don't remember exactly which symposium it was then, but it used to be also that the main contributors to the symposium would visit at least a week or ten days or so before, so people got to know each other, that are participating in the symposium that was organized by the symposiarc, so he might have been the symposiarc, I'm not sure, but he was around, and he – it was a completely different sort of atmosphere, in the whole way Italian, I guess, and very sort of fun. He had brought also his companion with him, which was – remember? – a nice woman that he would bring around. He was fun. Yeah, so we had a lot of activity. At the same time, people say nowadays that there is a lot of activities, but we had also ours, perhaps not as structured, but a lot of events. And we had very nice sort of gatherings in this particular room here, for coffee after lunch. Coffee was served in this room and not at the tables, when you eat and you get your mug and sit in the same place, so people mixed after lunch, you know, and exchanged some ideas. We also had sherry Tuesdays. Every Tuesday we had sherry before lunch. So it meant that the Tuesday afternoons were probably not the most productive ones for the Junior Fellows.
MM: And that was in here?
IK: It was also in this room, yes. Gathering here and then everyone would go and sit and eat afterwards, yes. We took walks, usually on Tuesdays, down to M Street and up again, you know, just to wear off the sherry – a little bit.
JC: Margaret has remarked that that period in the '70s was sort of a transitional period between the less structured way of doing things and the, maybe, more Harvard way of doing things, once Giles Constable became Director, and I think the sherry was the last stage of that old guard's style.
IK: That's right, and coffee's also in the room now that is called the – what is it called nowadays? the room at the end of the –
JC and MM: Founders Room.
IK: – the Founders Room. But we used to call it something different.
MM: The Outside Readers' Room.
IK :Outside Read – no, no, no, that was an in-between. We had there still the furniture, the big white couches, remember? that you sat in, sank in them, and we had coffee in the afternoon there. So it was part of this lifestyle that Dumbarton Oaks had from the earlier sort of decades. Yes. That was part of that. So things did change, but when Giles became Director I wasn't actually here anymore, you know. So I was here before with Tyler, the last sort of family-connected director. He was a nephew, I think, of Mrs. Bliss.
JC: Godson.
IK: Godson, oh, godson. Not related, huh? Let's see…
JC: The son of her very close friend Royall Tyler.
IK: Royall Tyler, who published quite a number of the objects that are in the collection, yes – some of the ivories that I was interested in. Yes, so he was there, and he was not very much sort of – he wasn't very visible. He had his study, which is the study that we now have our meetings, and there was this oval room, the one that you enter from the corridor, sort of. And this secret door that opens with the books. And then you could go and visit him, in his office. So he had a kind of processional entry, you know, to a big office, which was – yeah. So these were times that cannot exist nowadays, obviously, you know, so I'm not trying to say that we have to have the past here. It's just that these are nice memories to have of the period that had to go, you know.
JC: Do you remember going to Seka Allen's house and dressing up as Byzantine emperors and empresses?
IK: Yes. Seka Allen had a fantastic collection of, I would say probably, Islamic sort of robes and garments, beautiful silks and brocades, you know, and a lot of wonderful things like that. And so she wanted to have them photographed one time, right? And so she had asked us all, all the Fellows, the Junior Fellows, and we came, and everyone wore something, and then there was photography, and we dressed up and pretended to be these royal figures. It was very, very nice. But she was another person at Dumbarton Oaks that added sort of another dimension of what is – I don't know how I would call it – perhaps court-life of the past, or something like that, you know. She was an aristocrat, a Serbian aristocrat. She had certain ways, you know, of talking to you, inviting you and various things. She had another sort of lifestyle, too, that sort of belonged in this past world. And I know I've seen photographs in this room of dressing up as Theodore Metochites and Theodora and Justinian, and parties of the previous faculty that was here: Underwood, I remember, with this big hat. I've seen the pictures, you know. They must be in some archive here. But they were all in this room. But the library in general, and I think Seka being one of the people that had to do with the publications and all of that, had a group of people working there from, I thought at least, various parts of the world to deal with different languages that were needed for the cataloguing, because at that time we did not have – Dumbarton Oaks had its own cataloguing system. It did not have the Library of Congress one, so it needed specialized people to understand exactly where the books had to go. And so there was a German woman, I forget her name now, who was coming and – so, since I had lived also in Germany and so on, I always liked to go and talk to her in German. It was nice. Then there was Seka. There were various people. But also the – Fanny Bonajuto, Italian, working in the publications department, was another sort of European old school figure that was around.
JC: She was a stickler, as I remember, for footnotes in those publications –
IK: Yes, yes!
JC: – if you didn't research your own, she would research for you.
IK: Yes, she would research them and point out to you, you know, what you missed, the page number, you know, or date…oh yes. They really went through all of this very, very carefully. Mm?
MM: You published very early.
IK: Yes, yes. I submitted my Masters thesis at that time to Loerke, and he sent it – I don't what they did at that time for the publications. Anyway, so that was, you know, I really liked what I had done with it, so I thought I'll try it. And they sent it to Julia Warner and Fanny, and here was this beginning graduate student trying to write a dissertation, trying to publish in the Dumbarton Oaks papers. That was not so agreeable to their mind, I think, so they sent me off to prove everything I was saying in this, everything! Every day I had to bring something else to show that this is it. But anyway –
JC: It got published.
IK: It got published, and I was very happy, you know. It was very nice, yes. And you know, I've gotten quite a lot of responses on this article, and a lot of people say, when they teach, that they use that as an example. It's nice, yeah.
JC: So, when you were here, there was a Director of Byzantine Studies, William Loerke, but when –
IK: When Giles came, as far as I remember, Loerke retired, and so Giles had supervision as the Director of Dumbarton Oaks, for the whole of Dumbarton Oaks, but also of the Byzantine part, or segment, which at that time started also not to be the only one that had Fellows. I mean, they had started already to have some garden scholars, pre-Columbian – I thought there was Elizabeth –
JC: Benson.
IK: Benson, yes, with a young woman who was her assistant. These were the two, actually, the first year, that we were here, because, you see, my Fellowship was also renewed for a second year. This option existed then, so when I'm talking it's a longer time I spent here, not just one year. So then the pre-Columbian Fellows started to come. So, it started to grow, and I think, you know, the Director took – Giles, decided to have in his sort of responsibility the Byzantine field, but then the other ones were growing on their own, separately. And when Robert Thomson took over afterwards, he decided that he did want to have someone in that position, and specifically for art history, because at that time, at least, many art historians were part of the Fellows that were at Dumbarton Oaks, more than history or philologists. So, he said he wanted to have someone, and so he asked me if I wanted to do that for a year – then it was only for a year. It would rotate, because you can't get too many years off a university, and you have to be part of it. And then we had Nancy Sevcenko the next year, and the third year – I can't remember now. Perhaps – who would be the other person? Perhaps Alice-Mary, then. Or is that possible?
JC: It may have been Alice-Mary.
IK: Yeah, so it was not an art historian anymore, but then, yeah, so it was Alice-Mary. And perhaps when Thomson retired, because I don't think he stayed too many years as Director of Dumbarton –
JC: Five.
IK: Five? Well, the first he did on his own, then there were these three years with someone, and then perhaps Alice-Mary stayed. I don't know how it happened afterwards. And then I think Angeliki followed after that, right? So many, many changes. The Director's House has become the dining hall or dining space. I don't like to call it the Refectory, I have to admit, because it reminds me of monasteries, and it – we shouldn't be identified with that around here.
MM: Giles Constable made a lot of changes, too, in the space – the use of space. Can you talk about that?
IK: Yes, but I'm not sure I can recall exactly what he did, you know. His office was changed; was it, possibly?
MM: So, the study became a seminar room.
IK: Yes, that's what the office would have been, yes. He moved to what used to be the dining room, where the regular Fellows used to have their desks, because I remember there Danny –
JC: Curcic.
IK: Curcic was in there one time.
MM: Judy Siggins, was she there?
IK: Perhaps not when I was there, but probably at – Tony Cutler were there one time, as a Fellow. I mean, there were four desks, so that's the grown-ups, we thought. Yes.
MM: Mango and Sevenko had both gone…
IK: Yeah, gone. When we arrived they were no longer here – but Oxford for the one and Harvard for Ševčenko. But Ševčenko used to come once in a while down here, you know, for short periods. And then Alexander Kazhdan came. Yeah.
JC: Kitzinger was here for a while, and wasn't he still considered a Professor at Dumbarton Oaks?
IK: Well, the same way that also Ihor Ševčenko was considered a Professor.
JC: But once he went to Harvard Ševčenko eventually became a Dumbarton Oaks Professor there, if I remember correctly.
IK: So, there was a distinction between Kitzinger, you mean, and Ihor Ševčenko?
JC: Well, once the professorships ceased here there were named Dumbarton Oaks Professors at Harvard. But earlier there had been Dumbarton Oaks Professors here.
IK: Yes, like Der Nersessian, who was here. And I don't know about Father Dvornik, who I don't think was a Professor, who was here too.
JC: Certainly Mango and Ševčenko.
IK: Mango and Ševčenko. But they were all not around except as visiting, sort of coming at times here, and not Mango, though. It was only Kitzinger and Ihor, who were up at Harvard. So…
JC: So it was the last gasp of that era.
IK: Yes, and when Alexander came, he had a different title. He was like an Associate or something like this, a Dumbarton Research Associate, I think, of Dumbarton Oaks, yes. This was a nice time when new projects were begun: the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, which was a big project under his supervision. We're all very happy to have contributed to that, and saw it being published.
MM: Hagiography?
IK: Hagiography. Typika. So these are big projects, and most useful for all Byzantinists, but even for Western Medievalists, I think, they can look now to Typika and see what it's all about.
JC: Can you think of anything about fieldwork or archaeology?
IK: Oh yes, I do remember the years when I was a Junior Fellow here, Robert Van Nice here with his staff. He would come to the lunches, and we all loved to hear about all of his years at Hagia Sophia. He had so much to tell us, very exciting. So I liked to always go and sit at the table if I could find, you know, a place, because he spent twenty-seven years, if I'm not mistaken, there.
MM: And Dumbarton Oaks had an apartment there.
IK: For him.
MM: Before him?
IK: No, for him, right? Yeah. But twenty-seven years, and he had his daughter also. During the summers his daughter would go and help him out, and so one of the projects he gave to his daughter was to record all the graffiti in Hagia Sophia, so she went over the whole building for a whole summer doing, you know, – what you call it? with the –
JC: Rubbing.
IK: Rubbing, yeah. Rubbings. And we have an archive of all of these graffiti. And one year when – now I have a blank – Oh! Dimitri Obolensky was here. He wanted to look through it, and we found one thing that had a bit of an art-historical interest, and so we published one of these little graffiti. But they also did a lot with latex, the big ones, you know, bigger letters and deeper indentations, so all of that is there. So, it was his daughter, though, who did it, which was nice. Yes, and so that group of architects and designers and I don't know exactly who all these people were, but they were working all in the basement of the Main House, big tables, I remember, with drawings and maps and things. It was nice to go and look what they were doing. And that big folio was published afterwards. Unfortunately, not quite complete – the text is not quite there. But he recorded just about everything that you can record, even how the floor has been slightly dented in certain areas in Hagia Sophia, what nails exist, big whole nails, smaller ones, you know, where they are – everything has been taken and recorded. Do you know the unfortunate thing is, two years ago, perhaps – this has nothing to do with Dumbarton Oaks, but – it's sad in that I went there, tried to find the graffito that I had published, and it's gone, because everything was nicely stripped and cleaned, down to the base of the column or whatever, so it's no longer there. It's no longer there. So, the archive that we have is quite important. Yes. With a lot of other things that are here, like the Weitzman Archive that came, and the films, the negatives, that are now all being digitized slowly, perhaps not exactly that right now, but to digitize all of this visual material is another big project that Dumbarton Oaks now has time to take. So, it's becoming sort of a more up-to-date institution, you know, with all of the modern facilities, and so…
MM: How many other excavators came through at that time?
IK: You know, actually I don't remember other people. I never met any of the other ones, that we had on Cypress, you know, yeah…
MM: Megaw and Richard Anderson?
IK: But they were not physically here. They were actually where they were. So, I don't think I've met them. Demus is the one, if you call it an archive, you know, a field project. And Irina Andreescu, his assistant was here, you know, actively sort of making sure that things get done. That was during the years when we were Junior Fellows, right? Yeah. And who else was around? Scholars that came through – well, Kitzinger was coming, as I said, and Ihor was coming down. Weitzmann was here to give some lectures. For example, he gave a big lecture when the icon of St. Peter was acquired. Remember that big, big lecture he gave in the music room introducing that icon? It was a very nice event. But he didn't come here very often, himself.
JC: He was down when the first Met exhibition –
IK: Oh yes, the '77 one, yes. That's right.
JC: He was down periodically to talk to the catalogue writers. Otherwise, I don't remember him either.
IK: Yeah that's right, so, I'm trying to think of other scholars that were coming in as, you know – I remember the Dean of Harvard came down once for lunch. We were all quite, you know, proper, when informed that the Dean was coming. Even the President came one time. Bok came for lunch right here in the Fellows Building. And then we had various exchanges with the Hellenic Center where they would come – every week there was somebody else coming, visiting, and we would go and eat there, so that was a nice exchange also. And from the National Gallery, I remember sometimes people visiting, art historians, or some – that was nice. It was before CASVA existed as a research center. I feel this was a thing developed afterwards. Perhaps that's why they were coming, to find how research institutes like this and fellowships work.
JC: In the late '80s you became a Senior Fellow.
IK: Yes, late late '80's. Fall of '89. It's really the end. It's the academic year '89-'90 when I was hired at Harvard. So, this goes along with that particular post – that position. So I was chosen because I became a Dumbarton Oaks Professor at Harvard. And Angeliki Laiou was still here the director at the time. Ihor, though, was, now that I think of it, not on the board of Senior Fellows. Not at the time. So, I've been, you know, with quite a lot of individuals, famous people from famous universities, here, from Europe, and the very nice meetings, especially the ones where you select the Fellows.
JC: Has there been any change in that procedure or any difference – ?
IK : Yes, I think perhaps it was Giles who – I'm not sure, because that happened before – I have to just think for a second. When the interviews were introduced – the interviews were introduced I think during Giles's directorship. So, I don't know of a different system, but I know when I was a Junior Fellow there were no interviews, so there's a difference there. The interviews, in my opinion, have changed slightly. What I was talking about earlier: the level of the PhD candidate or student who comes here – and I know that also Alice-Mary at one point discussed it with me because she said to me, "They come here and they spend most of their time writing applications for jobs or other fellowships," which takes a lot of time because you have to write a project of work, you have to – so a lot of their time is not really spent doing research in the library, but sort of writing applications. Perhaps it's no longer quite the same, I don't know. It varies probably from year to year. But there have been years where half of their time they go to job talks, preparing, you know. So, if it is their final year. And that happens because during the interview, if you ask people, the best answers are given by people who are very far along in their dissertation. They know the subject, they can make it more interesting. They have answers to the questions. So, obviously they do much better than someone who is starting and doesn't exactly know how to proceed or answer. That's why it has shifted to the further-along graduate students, where I felt – and that's a very personal opinion at least – I felt I gained a lot by being here the first years of the real research, not finding out what I was going to work with. That I could do before because I had to travel, I had to write letters, do all of that gathering stuff. So people should come for their second year, or whenever that year is that they start to do serious research. That's my feeling.
MM: Would you change it in a way that Fellows are selected by years or have that taken into account?
IK: From these twenty-something years that I've been on the Board, there have been fewer art-historical fellowships given and that – you know I'm an art historian. Perhaps I didn't fight enough with them, I'm not sure. I think it has to do with the composition of the board and it's interesting in that we all read, or used to read, all of the applications. So musicology, philology, everybody read. But we art historians are used to reading history and other things because we needed to be able to do our interpretations. But people from these other fields, and that perhaps is a slight criticism here to the fields, perhaps not so much of philology – the historians started to look at art, but most of them are not looking at art-historical papers. They don't read it. They don't really read them. They're not knowledgeable too much about the art. People that are not in art history, I'm talking about. They would always in the discussion say, "I'm not an art historian. I can't judge." So with that, the evaluations I think a lot of times didn't go very well. Because if the art historian wouldn't fight – and I'm not a fighter, really – perhaps its my fault that I didn't push so much. I don't know. I've changed lately. I speak more out loud what I think. It might help to give the art-historical fellowships back into the lot instead of dropping out. I mean, that's what I felt, very often. Not saying negative things about other people. It's a general feeling, not particular people. I'm not talking about that.
JC: In your time at Dumbarton Oaks, that is between now and when you were a Junior Fellow in the '70s, the museum has changed a good amount.
IK: Yes, that is right. We had the new enclosure under Robert Thomson. The museum first of all changed in terms of size, physical space too – the Byzantine one – so that was very nice to get. I regret the courtyard – it was so beautiful – had to be closed in. But at least for the museum, it gave it opportunities to display things much better. I really enjoy the new ways of displaying things, the colors that were added. So, it was a little pale – I don't know how to put it – before, with the heavy wooden cases. Now it's much lighter. The objects show better. That helps.
JC: As an art historian, I know you used the collection occasionally for teaching purposes.
IK: Yeah, I do come down here. It is very nice to bring students from Harvard down here.
JC: And you think it serves that purpose well? It's representative enough?
IK: Yes, it does. I've had the chance to ask for certain things and they've taken them out of the cases specifically for us when we come down to take a look at them. We usually work with the objects right at a table where we can gather around and have them pass around. It's a great chance for students. I take all the medievalists, not just the Byzantinists, but the medievalist students come here too, and Jeffery Hamburger, my colleague, accompanies us. Together we figure out what we want to do. Just about the last four years or so I've done it, which has been really a very nice experience for them. They remember it afterwards. Most young people don't touch anymore works of art. They don't know if you hold something in your hand how heavy it is. That even is important to realize the little piece of ivory is actually heavy, not just a light thing. That is a great experience. With Jan's directorship here, it's been very generous to bring students down. They put us wherever they have space, even in the hotel.
JC: It works well with this new January Term, I suppose.
IK: Oh, no. I don't think – and I don't know what they're going to do, but I'm not for it at all. This is a time where we had reading time for the students and another week of a break, and so on, which now people are being asked to do things. I'm not going to bring students during the mid-sections of January. I'm not going to do that. I'll do it during the semester. Because I've always felt this was the good time we had to do some work between one semester and the next. This new system doesn't quite do it.
MM: How about the library? You were here at a time when there was a realization that they were running out of space.
IK: Yes, it was under Robert Thomson, and when I was here, it was that one particular year that the plans were made to have the underground library building, which took some complicated digging and working because Dumbarton Oaks didn't close. They were working underneath the building that everyone was on top. So it was quite a bit of a distraction: noise, vibrations, and all of that. They put these stacks, these compact stacks down in the basement and a cage for the rare books, I remember, and that gave it a lot of space, I believe. I don't know when it was decided that that was not good enough anymore.
MM: Were there thoughts of moving the library and everything up to Cambridge?
IK: Yes, but that was during Giles Constable's time, if I remember correctly, and if it's true or not I don't know, but we at that time were quite upset about all of this, and we heard things like they are measuring shelf spaces in the Widener, you know, how much of that library it would fit, but these are sort of rumors that perhaps were not quite true.
MM: Where were you then?
IK: I was here – well, I was here, though I don't know as what. I used to come for the symposia and various things like that, so there were times where we – and I remember, for example, some big meeting that Constable had in the Music Room. Were you there for that?
JC: I was.
IK: He called everybody, everybody. It was all the staff, from the gardeners to the Junior Fellows, and he talked about Harvard and the new policies and democratization and equality. It became a kind of – I don't know what to call it – a new air about Dumbarton Oaks. This old hierarchical, possibly, lifestyle in the Main House, with the nice couches and the tea-serving sort of things were going to be –
JC: It was the time when the staff were allowed to come to this building then called the Fellows Building to have lunch.
IK: Yes, but that was introduced after that big speech about equality for everyone at Dumbarton Oaks and democracy and, you know, openness. Perhaps that word was not popular then. There were other words, but this is more modern: "openness."
MM: Giles spoke of a tradeoff, and this is in his annual report just after the time you were here as a Junior Fellow – a tradeoff between openness and intimacy, and that the second might have to be sacrificed for the first.
IK: Intimacy was lost? Yes – well, we never had intimacy. Friendship? I don't know what to call it. Perhaps intimacy is too tight a word. A feeling of being welcome, being part of a group of people that had much to exchange and speak – I mean, I'm talking about the staff, the librarians; everybody was becoming a big family. I don't like that word, but anyway, that's the idea. You felt you had something in common – common interest, common ideas, and we all participated in that. That, I think, is not there so much anymore. That's a bit sad. It has to do, I think, possibly with everyone being in their cubicles, separate. We hardly talk to each other, or very few times, unless we get a Byzantinist like Margaret who in the mornings on Tuesday or Wednesday, whenever it is, gets people to discuss topics together, either from a talk that was given or something else that is there. That doesn't come so automatically as it used to. And it's not the numbers. I don't think it has to do with the numbers of Fellows. There were quite a lot of us, you know. And still that feeling was there.
MM: Architecture in the new library?
IK: Architecture. I think the physical space divided people, separated people more.
JC: Earlier you mentioned the Reading Room –
IK: Yes. I love the Reading Room.
JC: – which was open and communal.
IK: Yes. You can exchange glances with another person without having to talk. You can show your enthusiasm about something or depression or whatever it was, and they felt with you. There was a kind of understanding. I remember Clucas, you know – he didn't like the Washington water, for example. You remember this? And he had this case of water bottles that he had bought, and he had it under his table in the reading room. Little secrets like that, no one should know. Very, very sort of family ideas – sort of together. And I remember Tyler invited me for Thanksgiving because I didn't have – Thanksgiving is not a traditional feast for me and I didn't have family around here, so Tyler invited Lowell Clucas and me to the Cosmos Club for Thanksgiving, which was very nice of him. He was, I think, a nephew of his – Lowell – I think he was a relative. If not a relative, Lowell's father was an ambassador, or some diplomatic connection, possibly.
JC: Let me ask you a couple of global questions. Do you think Dumbarton Oaks has contributed to furthering interest in Byzantine studies and bettered the landscape in your profession?
IK: Well, Dumbarton Oaks is probably nowadays more known to the outside world than when I was here as a Junior Fellow, for example, I think. When you mention that you are at this research institute in Washington, any person who has to do with the Middle Ages or art history knows about the museum, also the pre-Columbian museum, that has also added to the knowledge, you know, of Dumbarton Oaks becoming known outside. And then the publications that are coming out of Dumbarton Oaks clearly, clearly have done what one expects of this kind of thing. The Dumbarton Oaks Papers are everywhere to be found, but obviously, in libraries where this kind of research is done. It's not in every place as a periodical. Why should they, you know? Now with these new translations that perhaps – the texts that are being now produced, not only the one that Jan has started, the new library, but I mean the Dumbarton Oaks ones. These kind of publications are the ones that are going to help, I think more, the knowledge of what Byzantium is about. Because the Germans early on, when they were doing their publications, they were never translated. Theirs were just these careful editions with careful notes and all of that, but there were not any translations with the publications, so they still remained inaccessible to art historians, for example, whose Greek…. So, art history is a field that has changed in its way of looking at art, not just only stylistic or iconographic discussions and doing contextual studies where you need these texts. Art historians are really looking for these kinds of publications and I think we see that happening. I would say anything like that would help further. But also, you know, the exhibitions that have taken place since the '77 one in the Met with the early Christian material, then the '97 one, and then Paris, London, all of these together have done a great job. The visual material really does promote the culture. The texts are fine once you know a little bit about that culture, so you read more and you can understand. But the visual is the first sort of approach to get to know something. The museum hopefully – that's there, but it would be nice to see more of these exhibitions that they did, for example, that are more topic specific. There was processional crosses, I remember one; something with textiles was another small one, but still. And now somewhere people get interested – or the crosses that we had more recently.
JC: Do you think there is something that Dumbarton Oaks could do differently or could expand the field of Byzantine studies?
IK: That's a big question to answer. A good one, but I don't really know how much more one can do. Dumbarton Oaks has done this fantastic thing that I'm profiting from, to give these three positions at Harvard, to make sure the Byzantine field is taught. With three people in place so that you have literature, history, and art so someone can understand the whole culture. Also, with these support of positions in the neighborhood with the various universities – giving them the chance to have someone who can teach that. And we have tried it over the years in various combinations even further away, and people have to – but it probably was not the best for the people who had to move out in Minnesota – I remember that was one of them – and then come here for another year or so, so it was a little difficult for their own life, their own everyday life for themselves. For the field, perhaps, it was very good, but I don't know what happened with all of these positions. Not always necessarily successful.
JC: They rarely led to tenure.
IK: Yeah, even Columbia didn't do it. What Robert Thomson did, now that I think of it, is he sent people out to lecture – what the Onassis Foundation does nowadays. The Onassis Foundation sends people out, but Dumbarton Oaks did the same thing. You could send an art historian or philologist or somebody to talk to some university, but it had to be to different groups of people, not just university people, so that they made known more of the field, that it exists, or the culture, to a broader audience. I went to Kansas City – for four days? I can't remember how many days – but they had to find a sponsor over there, a sponsor meaning not money-wise, but someone who would organize it. There was a person there who was interested in Byzantium, and he picked me up. I gave seven different talks which were very interesting. One was at the university, Okay. So, that's the more normal one. Another one was at a luncheon of businessmen. Now, this was at a hotel. A big hall where they were having lunch, and there was this big table and I talked about Byzantium. I don't remember my lecture at this point, but it was a lecture for people who had never heard what Byzantium is about. I had slides also, obviously, behind me. Then I gave another talk, which I really liked, to parents who teach their children at home, so not elementary school, but homeschooling. And they brought their children there too. So, I talked to them about architecture, about building, about culture, about religion, about a lot of things. These kids were sitting all in front, different ages, little ones, big ones. They were drawing with the slides. At the end, they gave me gifts of the things they had got excited about. To me, this was one of the best ways of communicating. These parents wouldn't let me go at the end. They would ask questions. They would want more. What books, what things? So, if you have a lecture that can capture their interest that was very good. Then I talked on the radio for half an hour or an hour – I can't remember – the interview was at the studio. Then to a Russian church group and the lecture was in a beautiful Russian church and one of my carousels tipped and I lost all the slides on the floor and I had to tell them I have to put them back – anyway, they all waited nicely. They all wanted to find out. These were all groups of people that were interested in hearing about Byzantium. I don't know what other people did, but my experience was very exciting to me, because you had people listening to you because – it's like when you have graduate students that come, or students in general that are slightly older, and they want to know. You had that feeling of not just sitting there because you have to lecture, but that they wanted to know more. And that sense from trying to get Byzantium across to Kansas City – I don't know if they have anything Byzantine in their museum or not. I don't even know that. It was very exciting. I don't know what happened, right? But at least the word "Byzantium" went out, the Byzantine culture, some slides. They might remember things like that. This was something I felt was a good start at least.
JC: Do you know how many years that continued, by any chance?
IK: Perhaps all the time that Thomson – perhaps three years. People were sending – not to Harvard to lecture, not to places like that. They were sent to places where you knew possibly very few people had any idea of what this is. I had totally forgotten it. But this interview made me think of it. Very nice. Oh, I get all excited when I speak about it. Because I remember these parents, you know, discovering a new area that they wanted to get interested in. So, I don't know what other things Dumbarton Oaks can do as an institution. It's very difficult, very difficult to promote a settled place, when you have a library here, you have everything here. Just make sure that people come here and have the opportunity to spend some time here, to do whatever it is they want to look up or get to know other people. And it has opened up to many more – many more students come here before their exams or the final stages of a dissertation or something that they need to do. So, Dumbarton Oaks has opened up their doors for all types of people, whereas, before, you know, when I was told you couldn't even get there because you're not a Harvard student. So it's a completely different place.
JC: The web has helped in that. A lot of our –
IK: Yes, and these exhibits that they put on now, with the coins going up on the web that just went up – the Byzantine coins; the seals, the project of the seals.
JC: And that's just the beginning probably. So that will grow – not that it will be popular, necessarily, but at least more available.
JC: Margaret, do you have any additional questions?
MM: I don't think so. It's a treat.
IK: Well, good. It was fun, actually. Thank you. No, I enjoyed it too. I didn't know exactly what was coming when I – Thanks very much.
JC: Thank you very much!]]>
EE: Yes, twenty-second.
GB: 2009. And we sit here together in the Fellows Building with former Fellows here in our Guest House. And we have a wonderful special guest here, Elizabeth Ettinghausen, former Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in 1945, '44–'45. So we were just about to talk about your, at that time, not-yet-husband, Richard Ettinghausen.
EE: Yes, for the opening of Dumbarton Oaks, Mrs. Bliss had a special invitation, the note, whatever it was. And my husband, I mean Richard Ettinghausen, and others were invited, among them Weitzmann, Kurt Weitzmann. And the question was: who would sit to the right of Mrs. Bliss? And I don't remember the details anymore. I think Kurt Weitzmann was a little older. At first she wanted Richard Ettinghausen to be to her right and then she realized or was told that Kurt Weitzmann was older and therefore he should be to the right, her right. And Richard Ettinghausen was to her left.
GB: Ah. Do you know –
EE: Of course, I wasn't here.
GB: You weren't here. And you knew about, of course, the event through your husband.
EE: Yes.
GB: Do you know where this took place?
EE: No.
GB: I guess it was the Music Room, but I'm not sure about that.
EE: I really don't know.
GB: Yeah. That's nice – choosing who's first according to seniority, that's interesting. Now, Elizabeth, we would be very interested in learning more about your first visit, when you arrived here to come as a Junior Fellow –
EE: Yes.
GB: – and how this came about.
EE: I was told that I should go to Harvard and ask them about it, because somebody had suggested that I go to – that maybe that would be a possibility, to become a Fellow here. So I went to Harvard University, and I was given the names, whom I should interview with. It was, first of all, Professor–Director Paul Sachs, and then Koehler, and also one other person, one other professor. And I'm not sure whether I met Blake there, too, Richard Blake. I did meet him here and I was very much – everyone was very much impressed by him. He was very, very nice, really, and very kind to all the Fellows. What was so exciting about him: he was married to a Georgian princess. But we were told there were a lot of princesses in Georgia.
GB: So you went to Paul Sachs and to Koehler up in Cambridge.
EE: Yes, that's right, and it was a very nice interview. He was very friendly and I don't remember anymore what he asked or anything like that. I just told him what I had done and where I had been before, which was in Istanbul.
GB: So, what had you done by then? What was your kind of scholarly –
EE: Well, I had done my MA, which I did on Byzantine tiles from a certain site, which had been excavated by the department where I worked, but it was before me so I never saw the excavation. But I was asked to work on the tiles from – Byzantine tiles from that site. Now, hardly any Byzantine tiles were known or had been excavated before that. At that time, there was a great deal of freedom in the Museum, the Topkapi Sarayi Museum in Istanbul, and I could go, which would be impossible now, of course, to go through big stacks of material – whatever it was; I mean, of course the tiles, but also look, I could find other tiles or anything like that and nobody supervised me. I felt actually a bit – I was a little bit scared, really, but of course I didn't do anything wrong; but how could I prove it? Well, it was very nice. I even was then told by the chemist connected with the Museum how to clean them, which I did, not too much, I hope. And then I worked on that and the drawing, the pictures and everything, and then for my PhD thesis I did something quite different. And then later on, many years later, I was asked by André Grabar to write an article on that for the Cahiers archéologiques, which I did. I was – I wrote that when I was, when my elder son was four months old. And I wrote it all, worked on it and wrote it all at night.
GB: And that was later, as you said.
EE: That was in – he was born in '52, so I worked on it, beginning of '53. I think it was published a few years later.
GB: Yes. So, if you'll allow me, we may come back to the interview you had with Paul Sachs and Koehler and to introduce yourself, to present yourself as a young Byzantine art historian and eager, I guess, to continue and to take the opportunity to study at Dumbarton Oaks. What did you know at that time about the Dumbarton Oaks institute?
EE: Nothing.
GB: Nothing. So, soon after you learned that you had been accepted, you arrived. And how was this, kind of, arriving time for you? How, yeah, did you get the whole institute to understand and how was the set-up at that time?
EE: Well there were three other Fellows besides me; we lived upstairs here in this building. Paul Underwood, who was married, lived outside so I met him at the library and for meals here, for lunch here. In fact, he asked me, always, to translate anything in Italian for him, which I didn't know well. I knew Latin well enough, but somehow I could always satisfy him – it wasn't too much, but still. They were all very nice, the Fellows.
GB: And you were a Junior Fellow –
EE: I was a Junior Fellow.
GB: – at that time, having finished the Ph.D.
EE: Yes.
GB: And you were a Fellow here, which meant something different from the work the Fellows, Junior Fellows, nowadays do and –
EE: Well, there was one exception. One person didn't have a Ph.D. yet and worked on this, her thesis, but she had already quite a lot of experience. It just happened that she hadn't done it yet.
GB: Do you remember her name?
EE: Margaret Ames – Alexander.
GB: Margaret Alexander.
EE: Well, Ames. Ames was her name at that time. She wasn't married.
GB: Okay, thank you. That's important. And your co-Fellows: you remember three.
EE: Well, she was one of them.
GB: She was one of them.
EE: And Rosalie Green and Josephine Harris.
GB: And Josephine Harris.
EE: Yes and, of course, we saw – there was a sensation – that we had a nun here, also.
GB: And that is Sister Monica.
EE: Sister Monica Wagner, yes. That's right. She came a little bit later. She came, I think, in spring.
GB: Aha. So you were –
EE: And she was here, of course, for meals. She was here only for lunchtime, of course. And she had to answer some unusual questions, I would feel, but she was always of good humor and she didn't mind that, because one person asked, for instance, "Well, which church do you like to go to especially? I mean, one church versus another church," and she said, of course being Catholic, "They're all alike." Actually it was Professor Vasiliev who asked that question.
GB: You were four, five – five young scholars. Young women, which is quite amazing.
EE: Not so amazing during the war. It was still war.
GB: Wow. Okay. That is interesting.
EE: I would say that's the reason.
GB: Was that a topic of this being, kind of, discussed or mentioned, wanting to work here? Or was that such a, kind of, just everyday life fact that it was not even remarked on?
EE: No, it wasn't remarked on. And the advantage was – so we were four women upstairs. At that time we couldn't have had a man there to – now of course this is a different situation.
GB: Yeah, yeah, this is very interesting indeed. Yeah. So Paul Underwood was not living here in this building; it was just the five of you – four of you.
EE: Four, yes. And of course Monica – Sister Monica, of course, didn't live here.
GB: Oh, she didn't live here?
EE: Oh, she couldn't have.
GB: No, she couldn't have. So she was here in a –
EE: The same way as Paul Underwood, coming to the library to do her work.
GB: That's interesting. Now, your work when you were here as a Junior Fellow – can you describe this a little bit, what you did, what you researched, and what kind of – what your scholarly life as a Junior Fellow was at the time?
EE: Yes. One was supposed to divide one's time half, really half and half, for research, one's own research on the one hand, and working for the archives for Dumbarton Oaks – archives of monuments, all the publications of monuments – and all details, everything within the monuments – of different regions. And each person was assigned to a different region and I, of course, was assigned to where I had been before: to Istanbul, Constantinople.
GB: So you were looking into photos, our photos of –
EE: Not just photos.
GB: Archival material.
EE: The articles, all articles that were published, all photos that were published. And also I had some photos, which I had taken, and I also contributed some of those.
GB: What was the goal of this work? Do you remember having been told a certain project mission or goal, doing this type of archival – how would we describe it nowadays? – maybe a kind of database, to set it up, on Byzantine monuments all over the eastern world, or maybe not just eastern but Byzantine world.
EE: The Byzantine world, yes, because one was doing it for Tunisia, for instance. And it could have been expanded, of course, to all regions. Rosalie Green did it, for instance – she did it for Jerusalem. And Josephine Harris did Egypt, I believe. Yes, definitely she did Egypt.
GB: So you were told to just look into what we had collected already at that time or was there a system?
EE: No, go through it – get the bibliography and except the – what was published. It is a kind of index, like the Index of Christian Art, but with more detail.
GB: Yeah, indeed with all the monuments.
EE: Which one could have updated, of course, if one had continued.
GB: Yes, indeed. Where were you placed? Where was your office and the office of the other Fellows? Where did you work?
EE: We didn't have offices. We were in the library, on the big table in the center of the library, which was on the second floor of the main building.
GB: The books around you –
EE: Yes, and sometimes one needed interlibrary loan books, which one could get. I remember, for my own research I did some of that. Maybe also otherwise; that I don't remember. But I remember specifically that I did for my own research.
GB: Mentioning the library, who were the librarians at that time?
EE: I see her in front of me and I can't think of her name now. She was very good and very nice. Actually, the person really in charge was Barbara Sessions, but the one who was active, you know, helping you with getting the particular book or something like that was the person whose name I can't think of. She had blonde hair, she was very slim and very nice, very fast always. Everybody was very cooperative. Oh yes, and there, of course, if you had something, for instance, in Russian, there was Mrs. Scheffer. And I did something absolutely terrible by having a Bulgarian book – asking her. And she said – she didn't see the cover, and I didn't think of it. Of course, Bulgarian is not Russian. It's similar. And she first said, "Oh but that's terrible Russian. That's not proper Russian." And then, but she was kind enough and she was able to – I didn't need too much, but I needed a few things.
GB: So there was one librarian. Is that correct? She was the librarian and she was –
EE: Mrs. Scheffer was just – this other – well there were more than one but I don't remember the others.
GB: What do you remember about the acquisition policy? How many books – what was the policy of acquiring books for the Dumbarton Oaks Library? Was there, kind of, a "we would get all books we know of," or what was the policy?
EE: I don't know about the policy, but I think certainly all the main books. And every week, and possibly more often, maybe twice a week, books came from the Library of Congress, also.
GB: Aha, so there was an exchange with the Library of Congress.
EE: But also with other libraries, of course.
GB: With other libraries, of course, yes.
EE: But this was more regular. Of course, this was not just for us. This was for the professors as well, or more so, perhaps.
GB: When you found any book, which was not in the library, you would have told the librarian and she would have looked into either first looking into acquiring it, purchasing it, or first looking into where we could get it from a different library?
EE: I only had the experience that she was getting it from interlibrary loan, but there may have been cases when she'd ordered the book – that's possible, too.
GB: So that was your work for hire, so to speak, and that was half-day. And then there was the other side of your research, and maybe you want to talk a little bit about the research part you conducted at that time and how it was perceived here at Dumbarton Oaks.
EE: Well, I tried to find out more about the, for instance, the representations – I mean the art of designs one finds of tiles and collectibles, where else you find them, and comparisons and so on and how it came about that one had tiles at all. I have developed more interpretations since then, of course.
GB: And was the library and the environment of help – adequate for your study and research? How did you communicate with your co-Fellows about your research? Did this happen at all or was there, kind of, everybody quietly researching?
EE: More or less it was everybody for himself or herself. I mean, you could, of course, if you wanted to especially discuss something, but basically it was each one for himself or herself, while that had been very different before, because there were seminars every week while Professor Koehler was in charge here and in residence here, which was the year before I came here. There were these seminars and working together and reporting about one's work and one's questions and interchange. And that was not the case while I was here the first year, not at all, because the professors in residence were not in the field at all. I mean, they were historians and not really interested in art history. And the second year it was Professor Friend, formerly from Princeton. He was interested in some projects – if that fitted in, fine, and if it didn't fit in then it wasn't of much interest to him. There was one person who worked with him; it was Rosalie Green, because he was interested in that project, but that was it, really.
GB: So, compared to what we have now: every week a research report; the fellows have to present and the interest, of course, not only in exchanging research ideas and topics; but presenting it to the community is very much, of course, in the foreground today. At least – correct me if I'm wrong. And I'm trying to explain this with my mind. In those years, the primary interest point in Dumbarton Oaks, having you here, was to get to develop a database and to, yeah, get this built up, and to, of course, provide the opportunity, the outstanding opportunity to, beyond that, do research in your specific area. It was more the kind of, almost a position, which – actually I say "position" because I know this structure similarly from the German Archaeological Institute, where I actually was at a time one of those – that's not the term they use – but a hired staff person to do half-day work for the Institute and half-day I had to do my research, but in a way nobody cared about that research because that was kind of an add-on to the proper hired work. Is that something, that picture I –
EE: Well, I would say it simply was not structured at all. There was no structure. You were here on your own. You could hook up with anybody else if you wanted to and if you felt it would do, it would advance your project or help somebody else to advance his or her project, but otherwise there was no structure, really.
GB: And were there meetings to follow up on the database work, on your proper assignment?
EE: No, none whatsoever.
GB: And how did this kind of –
EE: You simply did what you did and when each project – let's say working on such-and-such a church – was finished, you handed it over to be typed, because you just – there were no computers, of course. You wrote it by hand, really, and then it was formalized.
GB: I have on this list of 1944–45 another category and that's "Fellows," and Fellows here listed are Milton Anastos –
EE: Oh yes, of course. Anastasios. Anastasis, Anastasis. I'm sorry, of course. How could I say that?
GB: Yes, I see it is incorrectly spelled. And Peter Charanis.
EE: Yes, that's right and he was married to a Belgian.
GB: Can you explain a little bit where the position of being Fellows – what they contributed to the Dumbarton Oaks Harvard community?
EE: Well, they were much more advanced scholars. While the Junior Fellows were at the beginning of any career, Peter and Milton were both in the midst of their career, more or less in their midst. They gave papers at symposia; they worked on the more advanced projects. I remember Mr. Friend asked Peter Charanis to work on a special project of a church that doesn't exist anymore, but there were some records about it, a poem actually it was, a longer poem, and he worked on that, for instance.
GB: So they had similar assignments to do specific research, the Fellows, Milton and Peter.
EE: Well they – I don't think it was obligatory for them to do it, but once they were Fellows they were asked and they could agree or maybe they could also disagree. It was a special project, though, what Mr. Friend was interested in, so he asked about that. But I don't think it was, so to say, the bylaws that he had to designate a particular topic or anything like that. It was just a personal matter.
GB: And they were studying with you in the reader room in the second level of the main house?
EE: No, I think they were somewhere else, because there wasn't enough space.
GB: So they might have had offices or –
EE: I think there were some other rooms where they could be, but basically there were no offices in that sense and certainly not that everybody had an office to him or herself.
GB: What do you remember about the main house first level at that time? Was the library –
EE: No, no, there was no library. Well, there may have been some books. Yes there were books, of course. In one room downstairs, there were books. But I think there were also more general books, not just something about the early Christian, Byzantine art, but the Blisses' collection, for a private collection, some of it, I think.
GB: Do you remember the term "Founders' Room" at that time? And this place—do you remember what was going on in that space or was that a library space? Were there books in there?
EE: Yes. But it was also a kind of reception room.
GB: We will come back to the receptions and the more, kind of, social life, but let me ask you now a little bit about the other scholars, resident scholars at that time now that we have learned about the Junior Fellows, the Fellows, and you have mentioned already Albert Friend. And there were more professors in residence.
EE: Yes, there were Mr. and Mrs. Young, Sirarpie Der Nersessian, who had been professor at Wellesley before.
GB: How was the relationship with Sirarpie, she being a young woman as well –
EE: Not so young.
GB: Yeah. Right. Yes.
EE: It was fine and we usually had arranged for dinner – there was no dinner on Sundays here, so we made our own dinner and Miss Der Nersessian usually joined in. We did it together.
GB: Albert Friend – how was – he seemed to have had a major impact regarding the suggestions, regarding the research part. Is that right?
EE: Not for the Junior Fellows. Well, except for he was interested in what Rosalie Green did, but otherwise no. I mean one could, of course, ask him or get advice but one had to specially go and ask for it. He never asked you about it.
GB: And then we have at that time Edward Kennard Rand and Alexander Vasiliev.
EE: Well yes, they were professors in 1944 already and they were not art historians. Professor Rand was particularly interested in Carolingian manuscripts and he did a lot of work – not the pictures, the miniatures, but the text – and he was very much interested in all of the signs, the pinpricks and so on and that he continued to talk about time and again when I was in residence.
GB: And Alexander Vasiliev.
EE: He came a bit later. I don't remember exactly when. I would say he loosened things up and made it much more lively and interesting, because he was a very interesting person of course and very Russian in a very pleasant way.
GB: Do you remember specific – or specifically –
EE: No, he was interested in, much more interested in music, I mean also in music and so on. Actually Koehler had started that. He got us a record player and records so we could have music, also.
GB: He and the Fellows.
EE: Yes, here. It was right here.
GB: You were listening to records together?
EE: Oh, of course, yes, yes. It might have been right after lunch, for instance, or in the evening, so we could do that. That's how I got to know some music very well.
GB: Lunch is a good topic.
EE: That was on the big table, and the two professors – La Piana and Rand – were at the ends and the Fellows in between.
GB: So you had to appear, to have lunch and dinner together.
EE: I suppose so. I don't remember about dinner, but there must have been dinner. And of course, there were servants and one was served. One never got up or anything.
GB: Was there communication going on over lunch? How was that?
EE: Yes. Well it was particularly Professor Rand who spoke and you listened.
GB: Scholarly exchange or everyday small talk?
EE: Well, it wasn't very scholarly. It was not very exciting. Well, I'm sorry, but Mr. Rand was not his former brilliance anymore, and that was the reason.
GB: I see.
EE: And La Piana also talked, but always trying to be very, very nice to Mr. Rand and taking him as the head of it all.
GB: At that time who was the director of Dumbarton Oaks? It was kind of –
EE: It was – oh my God.
GB: It must have been Thacher.
EE: Thacher, yes. He came once in a while. I mean, of course you saw him at the main building.
GB: Why that? You saw him at the main building?
EE: No, well sometimes, because that's where he was, that's where his office was, too.
GB: Mhm. Do you remember where his office was? In the main house on the first level, where it is now?
EE: Yes.
GB: And, he being the director of the Dumbarton Oaks institute, filling the specific role, what did you understand of that role at that time? How did you feel about the overall mission if we want to use this word, which is of course not the word you would have used at the time, but what was the, kind of, general mission of the Dumbarton Oaks institute?
EE: Well, he was a very good go-between – the Blisses and the institute, Dumbarton Oaks, and you saw him a great deal with the Blisses. And he understood very well to implement also what Mrs. Bliss really hoped the institute would be like and he was, of course, director of the museum, which was in storage then.
GB: Which was packed, indeed.
EE: Yes, because of the war.
GB: Yes. So you did not get to see an object while you were here – is that correct?
EE: No. Some pictures I saw.
GB: Oh yes, some pictures, but no –
EE: No, it was impossible. And one understood very well why.
GB: Yeah? Why?
EE: Well because of the war, the danger of possibly some problems.
GB: Did you feel this – I mean, being here, I mean, sure we know that at that time there was quite some realistic fear or reason to be afraid. What was the situation in Washington and Dumbarton Oaks besides that the collection was stored, protected, and downstairs in storage, in the basement.
EE: Well I didn't know. I didn't know. I did know that the downstairs, the basement, was taboo for anybody in Dumbarton Oaks, at least the Fellows, because there were government projects going on. Well it was really – in fact the president of Harvard was intimately connected with that, and he came for visits from time to time. So I met him that way also because he came to lunch sometimes.
GB: The president of Harvard University?
EE: Yes. Well, it was the Manhattan Project, as I now know, but not then, of course.
GB: The Byzantine galleries being closed, because of the collection being stored – did you ever enter that space? Was it just closed because it was empty, or was there anything – I mean, thinking of the Barberini sarcophagus, for example, which was certainly –
EE: There were a few pieces I knew. I don't remember details anymore, I must admit.
GB: Well, it was a closed-off area, so it was not of any interest and, of course, it was not really a happy story, to be not up but in protection, in storage. So, Thacher was, well, trying to do the best, to make the best out of the situation and to, of course, as you said, to work with the Blisses closely.
EE: Yes, and also he was very good, I suppose, in spreading the news of Dumbarton Oaks, I assume. I mean, he was very good at parties and so on, so he knew – he met a lot of people and knew a lot of people in Washington. And I'm sure from that point of view he was very useful for spreading the word – what Dumbarton Oaks was.
GB: So there was some interest in connecting to the social life of Washington?
EE: Absolutely. But that was he alone.
GB: But not the Blisses?
EE: Oh, the Blisses, of course, were. Oh yes. But I mean not the people for, not the Fellows or the professors or so.
GB: So let's talk a little about receptions and the Blisses. At first maybe about your – as a Fellow – your meetings or whenever you had a chance to meet and talk with Robert and Mildred Bliss. Did this happen on a regular basis?
EE: She came to tea. I don't know whether there still is tea being served, probably not, but then it was de rigueur, one could almost say, to come to tea, and Mrs. Bliss appeared a great many times – not every time, not every day, but most days, or often, let's say.
GB: Was it once a week, the tea, or –
EE: No, no, every day. I mean, except for weekends. There was tea and cookies or anything. I think rather fancy, too.
GB: So that was kind of a break in the afternoon. Is that what I am to understand?
EE: Yes.
GB: Yeah. Nice. So that everybody came together for a short time I guess – an hour maximum or even two of them.
EE: Probably not as long as that. And Mrs. Bliss talked also to, of course, to the professors and to Fellows, but also to the Junior Fellows.
GB: Was she curious about finding out what you were up to, regarding your research, or was she curious about hearing your opinion about Dumbarton Oaks institute, or –
EE: No, never, no. It was rather what you were doing.
GB: Researching.
EE: What work you were doing.
GB: And do you remember being asked – Mildred Bliss asking you about what your research, what she kind of asked?
EE: No, I must admit I don't remember, but she did ask, yes. I don't know how interested she really was in the specifics. She was, I think, more interested in the general and what went on in general. And the sort of policy and strategy.
GB: When she was present, did you talk or did she mention any kind of objects in the sense of collecting, of her passion of collecting art, which we, as we see now, is quite a major part.
EE: Oh yes, yes.
GB: Did she mention this? Did she talk about, "Oh, I have seen recently something coming up?"
EE: No, no I don't remember that. I don't think that; it could have happened that she talked about such a thing to somebody, but certainly not to, so to say, everybody present.
GB: Another point which is, of course, very related to Mildred Bliss is the garden. Was that a topic or how did you –
EE: Oh yes, and I do remember, also, for instance, I once looked and said, "Well, I don't see – whatever it was, a tree or shrub or what and I was told, "No, Mrs. Bliss had changed her mind. She wanted it to be changed." She was very active in helping with the design for the garden. Of course she had a very well known garden architect.
GB: Beatrix Farrand.
EE: Yes, that's right. Who also did some work at Princeton, Princeton University, but on a very small scale there.
GB: I do not know, I cannot remember if Beatrix Farrand was – no, she was no more around. She had to agree, setting it up in the very beginning, the twenties, and by the forties, she, I think, was no more around Dumbarton Oaks, but she was certainly –
EE: No, she definitely wasn't around when I was here. And I think in some cases that Mrs. Bliss did it on her own, and I wouldn't be surprised, because Mrs. Bliss was extraordinarily intelligent and clever and just as her range of knowledge was amazing, so I'm sure she had learned a great deal from Beatrix –
GB: Farrand.
EE: Farrand, yes. And could design things on her own, too.
GB: Yeah, yeah. We know of many projects where she was really the designer and participated in all kinds of different things with a high interest in every little detail. Do you know how the gardens were administered at that time? How were they maintained? What about the gardeners and the staff?
EE: Well, I don't remember the name of the head gardener anymore, but he was an important person, of course. We always – we talked to him and so on. And the associate gardeners – I suppose they were the two who lived in this house at the corner there.
GB: The double cottage.
EE: Yes, the double cottage
GB: Which is nowadays security.
EE: And at night I understand there was somebody, a guard; there was a dog going around. I've never seen him but that doesn't mean that he wasn't there, of course.
GB: Could you enter the main house at any time? Was it, so to speak, open to go back to the office or to study?
EE: That I don't know. I only heard that, you see, and I don't know anything more about that.
GB: There was one important feature attached to the gardens at that time, as nowadays, and that's the pool.
EE: Oh yes.
GB: You used the pool? You were allowed to use the pool?
EE: Yes, oh yes, yes.
GB: And everybody shared the pool?
EE: All the members of the – the Fellows and professors, yes.
GB: Was there kind of a senior Fellows hour or –
EE: No, no it was simply whoever wanted to go, whenever, could go there and, I mean, not normally during work hours.
GB: And at that time the pool is – of course the public came to visit the gardens or were the gardens closed as well – I mean specifically in this year were the gardens open to the public? Do you remember?
EE: There were times when they were open, yes. I think it was from two to four or something like that. I think we usually went, you see, after work, so it was a little bit later except for weekends, and I don't remember how that worked with the public and the – because we certainly couldn't be there when the public came and there were – and guests could come, too. I mean if they had permission from, I suppose, the director. My – Richard Ettinghausen, for instance, was a friend of the director and therefore he could go and use the pool.
GB: And you met your husband –
EE: I met him, yes. I didn't meet him at the pool, but I met him at the library and I asked him for some advice. And also it was the head of the library, Barbara Sessions, who was a friend of my future husband, and we were good friends. She was very, very friendly and very nice and, of course, she was a friend of the Blisses, so – and so we went on some outings because she liked to walk, and we both liked to walk, too.
GB: That means, mentioning your future husband, that there were – visiting scholars, we would say nowadays – there were scholars who stopped by, who had a specific period of study time they spent here at Dumbarton Oaks. Is that what I understand?
EE: Yes, there were some.
GB: And they were sitting, then, again, in the library and next to you and the other Junior Fellows or were they at any kind of specific place?
EE: They were in various places, I think.
GB: Various places. And that must have been, then, on that second level, which –
EE: I would think so.
GB: – I understand was at that time the main library research space.
EE: I assume that's where they were.
GB: Talking about receptions, or the Blisses, Mildred Bliss especially being present in the afternoon for the tea hour or the tea gathering: were there any kind of other specific events you had been invited to?
EE: Lectures.
GB: Lectures. Public lectures? Were they open to the public, as it is nowadays, or was it –
EE: I doubt whether they were open to the public, but to, I suppose, to scholars or friends, of course, of the Blisses.
GB: In the Music Room?
EE: Yes, in the Music Room and those were always very nice events, of course, and then there were concerts also and those were special events and the finest event was, of course, the symposium. Always.
GB: Yes, the annual Byzantine Spring Symposium.
EE: Yes.
GB: Do you remember the symposia you have attended – was it something very outstanding compared to the symposia of the recent past, which you have, of course, attended on some occasions?
EE: Well, I'm –
GB: Can you describe the sort of atmosphere, the set-up, and, of course, the scholarly contributions?
EE: I suppose it would be very hard for me to judge, really, because I was, after all, at the beginning, and it all seemed marvelous, so insofar – perhaps I would say later on it was perhaps not as marvelous, but because I knew more, so no, I don't think there's any conference ever which is all tops – I mean every scholar absolutely perfect and so on. And I could, of course, discriminate much more and notice the differences much more than I could at the beginning.
GB: What was the –
EE: But it was – there were outstanding scholars who came.
GB: What was the general atmosphere compared to a nowadays symposium, where we have a lot of discussions and open the floor, of course, and ask the public – nowadays it's indeed the public – of course, the interested public, who is invited to attend the symposium. What do you remember about that aspect when – the years you were here?
EE: I'm not quite sure how I should answer that.
GB: Was it more – I mean, I, looking at the pictures we have of the symposia and the speakers, it looks to me much more formal and going of course by the appearance of the gentlemen, the speakers, and it's just that the only way, incorrectly, I guess, you project that into the audience or into the place where it took place and you think that this was probably more, kind of, formal, overall formal event.
EE: Oh, absolutely.
GB: Yeah, we talked about the symposia at that time.
EE: Yes, well, I think especially we Junior Fellows felt that way – that was the apex of the whole year. And the great scholars came and they discussed matters, and that was very interesting, of course, to hear them sometimes agree and sometimes not agree. These semi-gods acting like that, that meant something very special, of course. And the lunches and the dinners and everything – that was wonderful and speaking with those special scholars. And they were all very nice and open. Well, and otherwise you wouldn't encounter them quite so much, all that easily.
GB: Kurt Weitzmann and Hugo Buchthal, for example, both – did you meet them here at Dumbarton Oaks?
EE: Yes, I met them here first, for the first time. Later on they became friends, but that was when I wasn't a Fellow anymore.
GB: But you got introduced to Kurt Weitzmann while you were here.
EE: Yes, absolutely. Oh, yes. It was a very nice encounter. He was always very, very jovial and very nice, easy to talk to.
GB: Ernst Kitzinger?
EE: Of course, yes, I met him. Well, I'd met him before because he came once in a while. I mean, he was working for the O.S.S. at that time, Office of Strategic Services, but he came sometimes as a, just, visitor to see the people, and so I met him. And then there was the famous dance, also, yes. And I wasn't prepared for anything like that. I didn't have a formal dress, so I had to buy that, and actually the other fellows helped me with that, because I didn't know where to go or what to do, so – and that was a very nice occasion, too, and of course there were people from outside who came. Oh, yes, there was one other person, who was – he had been a fellow here. He was Greek and so was his wife, and he worked at the embassy, at the Greek embassy.
GB: It was not Milton, no?
EE: No, no, not Milton. Milton was American.
GB: Yeah. Maybe Pelopidas Stephanou?
EE: No.
GB: Um –
EE: I think it was something with "A", but I'm not quite sure. Very nice person, whom I met that way, also. Now, maybe he hadn't been a Fellow here, but he was coming to lectures and whatnot, and thus Margaret had met him. That's all I can think of. There were a number of people who came to the lectures who were not directly connected but were very much interested in early Christian, Byzantine art, I suppose, and that's how they came here—for lectures and so on.
GB: When you were here, something very specific and nowadays a rare historical moment or, actually, event took place and that is what we would call nowadays the United Nations Conversations.
EE: Well, yes, that happened during the summer and therefore we couldn't be here. Of course, we didn't know what was going on, but it was something government, we were told, or so – so we had to leave.
GB: So you were not informed in any detail about that – of course, for security reasons.
EE: Exactly, oh absolutely, and also it wasn't yet certain what was going to happen – I mean what the result would be. So many people, when one said, "I work in Dumbarton Oaks" – "Oh, you're connected with the UN." And I had to inform them, "No, no, no, that happened to take place here, but it had nothing to do with Dumbarton Oaks; it's just the place that was handed over to them for the summer."
GB: And as far as I remember from what I have read about it, it was indeed that the start of the fellowship term had to be postponed, I think. You had to leave, of course, for several – it was, kind of, already booked but then extended – it got into more rounds and additional discussions. And I don't know if you remember that, but that's, I think, what I gather from the reports: that the fellows had to be a little bit late, in fact.
EE: Yes, I think, I don't remember specifically but just very vaguely I remember something for me that was lucky, actually, because I had gotten sick – I had had a very severe case of infectious hepatitis while I was in Turkey and it was a sad thing, because I was told Iran has just a more liquid yogurt, and I didn't know that it was mixed with water. If I had known that – I was told it's just more liquid. If I had known that it was mixed with water, I would never have taken it. And I got very sick from that, and I had a relapse at that time. So it was good that it started later. I had to be on a diet for quite a while.
GB: One point I had noted down is about Koehler, and although you said that Koehler was not here – you have heard about that – the event or the years before, about his role –
EE: Yes, and I missed that very much, really.
GB: That is my interest, actually, when you say you missed it: so, is that in retrospect or is it that you had known already at the time when you were here that the earlier years starting in 1940, until 1943, were under a different guidance because of Koehler and how he thought that Fellows at the institute could be built up – was it that you knew?
EE: No, I didn't know about it at all. I didn't know that – how it worked before. Koehler had not told me.
GB: How'd you learn about that – do you remember?
EE: It was from, especially, Margaret Ames and also Josephine Harris, who told me.
GB: So, your co-Fellows told you.
EE: Yes, they told me.
GB: And how did they talk about that time? That was a really interesting time.
EE: They loved it. They all thought it was wonderful.
GB: Can you explain what they thought and what it was?
EE: Well, it was a collaboration. I mean, one's work was being discussed and helped by discussing it not only with Professor Koehler but with the other Fellows also, in an informal but formal way – I mean, by getting together.
GB: And that's what they called seminars.
EE: Yes.
GB: Was it on a regular basis?
EE: It was on a regular basis, yes. And that – I realized I felt a little bit footloose as a result of it, having heard what it was, because when Professor Koehler came, it was for – oh, I don't know – two days or something like that, so really he couldn't do much and you couldn't get much from that, because he came for other, mainly other purposes.
GB: But he came to visit Dumbarton Oaks when you were here. But, he did not –
EE: He didn't stay.
GB: And were there any kind of discussions between you and the other Fellows, how to, maybe, get back to this, or why this had stopped, or was there any kind of understanding –
EE: No, it was – that was never being discussed, and I didn't have the initiative at that time, at all. I was too junior, really. I mean I had to adjust to a new life. Today, yes, I would do something –
GB: It seems –
EE: – or try to do something.
GB: – as if there was a common sense that this was very much appreciated –
EE: But it was something of the past.
GB: Yeah. It was something of the past, which was not – no more the everyday life of the institute. Yeah, that is very interesting. That is very –
EE: And I would say that Margaret Ames and Josephine Harris had gotten all the groundwork done this way, and they had found all the right directions and it wasn't so important for them to get any help or further directives. But, as far as I am concerned, it would have been a great help.
GB: Were they conducting – no, actually, you had said they all had their Ph.Ds already.
EE: Well, Margaret Ames didn't.
GB: Margaret Ames didn't, so she – but you said she was on her own track, so to speak. She did not necessarily need any more guidance –
EE: Well, I suppose she was getting it also when she – where did she get her Ph.D? I forget where she got it, really. But, well, it was – for her, at that stage, it was more cumulative. You see, she had to explore more, other sites, also. But the basic part was already there – of basic directives or direction.
GB: You weren't able to take that into the next, following year, actually, or following years. I see that both of you left after that year and only Rosalie Beth Green continued to stay so that the only one to benefit was her, I think, she is listed under this '45-'46 fellowship year. You came to the end of your term – of your years at some point and you – did you know where to go and did you get any kind of support or advice from the co-Fellows –?
EE: Oh no, nothing whatsoever.
GB: – or was it just a, kind of, natural coming-to-the-end of the fellowship?
EE: That was it, yes.
GB: And when you left, what was your, kind of –
EE: Well that was – in May I got engaged, so before I left – not that I told anybody, though.
GB: Oh, yeah? No?
EE: No. Well, Barbara Sessions, I think, knew. But otherwise, no, nobody. And I got married in the fall, September of '45. And then I helped my husband.
GB: And you moved – well, you lived –
EE: First in Washington, D.C. and then we moved to outside Vienna, Virginia, to the country. And there we did a lot of work for the house, something I'd never done before – but everything. I was a contractor and I did painting and I did woodwork and I did everything. Oh, and garden work.
GB: And while you were here, in Vienna, which is not far away, by – no, actually, it's –
EE: No, it's in northwestern Virginia.
GB: Did you come back to Dumbarton Oaks? Sure, I guess, as you continued –
EE: Yes, I did. Not very much.
GB: And your husband was still working here, I mean researching, conducting research here at Dumbarton Oaks?
EE: Here? I don't think so. I mean, he came before maybe once for research but mainly for just visiting Thacher or some other friends he had.
GB: So when you decided to stay here in D.C., was this because of –
EE: Because my husband was curator at the Freer Gallery, in charge of the Islamic department.
GB: Until when?
EE: Until '65
GB: So that's a long time.
EE: Yes. Well, we had moved back then, to Washington. I was very much – I wanted very much to go back, because it was difficult, really, always that long drive and so on.
GB: And I guess you connected, then – through the professional relationship and work relationship – you connected more to the Freer-Sackler Gallery and the landscape at that time – of course, such institutions stood in a different all-around shape, I think, an organization, than nowadays – but particularly your focus shifted toward that.
EE: Well yes, one year we went to the Middle East. That was nineteen fifty-fi – well, oh, before that, one year before that, I worked at the State Department, which was actually a very interesting experience. It was in the research department on the Middle East. The only problem was that I didn't dare to discuss anything about the Middle East because I wasn't sure whether I'd read it at documents in the State Department or in the press. So I kept quiet. But I read about some friends of ours, also, who were in the Middle East. It was broadening my experience, I would say. And then, of course, when we went to the Middle East, for one year – actually it was even fourteen months – we went over Europe to the Middle East to countries I'd never been – my husband had never been – to. He knew a great deal about it, but he had never visited there. And we started, from Italy we went to – we flew, for me it was my first flight, to Egypt and the Patriarch, the Patriarch of Cairo, was on the same plane, and it was his first flight and my first flight. There were very few passengers. It was an Alitalia plane. And he would say, "Oh look down here! No look down there!" So we were like two children, really. It was very exciting.
GB: Speaking of this makes me realize that you came, of course, from Europe to America for your fellowship by boat.
EE: By boat.
GB: And not at all by airplane.
EE: No, by boat. It was, it took a month to get here, and my parents and I were the only passengers. It was on a freighter, an American freighter. And it was – well, we saw something; nothing happened, but we saw something of what – of the war, of course. First of all, it was all darkened – or blackened. And it was interesting to learn about the experience of the sailors. They were informed that I was a – well, a fairly young person, of course. They'd have to behave, so to say. So they treated me like a sister, and they told me all kinds of stories of their lives.
GB: How old were you?
EE: Pardon?
GB: How old were you at the time?
EE: I was twenty-four, I think. So it was quite an experience being exposed to American life, not of exactly the type of person I would normally meet. But there were also some, of course, who went rather into the Merchant Marine than joining the regular forces.
GB: How did it come that you were on that boat, on that carrier, as the only family, you said?
EE: Yes. Well, my father had connections, all kinds of connections. He had connections from Istanbul with the British and the Americans.
GB: And you came from Istanbul? That's where you –
EE: From Istanbul we went to Cairo and from Cairo, then, to – on the boat, on the Liberty Ship.
GB: And you lived in Istanbul.
EE: For almost five years.
GB: Five years.
EE: At first I didn't continue my studies there, and then I was advised that I could do that and I did. And I learned. I took courses in four languages: in Turkish, in German, French, and English.
GB: At the university?
EE: Yes, Istanbul University. I mean, it was professors from different countries. Of course, it was all translated into Turkish, but I took the original. One of my teachers was Runciman and he taught, of course, history, but also art – Byzantine art.
GB: Was that how you got started, the interest –
EE: Pardon?
GB: Is that how your interest got started or piqued in –
EE: Well, it was, I mean – in Istanbul you can't avoid it, almost.
GB: Well, you could have had an interest in later, Ottoman art and –
EE: I developed that there, actually, but I was extremely lucky in Vienna, because I – Sedelmeier was the chief of the art history department. He had just come in when I started. And the last term I had with him – he not only did the general history of art course (he did it over four years), but also then special courses in whatever interested him or he had worked on. And that was on St. Sophia. So I knew quite a bit about it, as a result of it. And when I saw it for the first time, in Istanbul then, the amazing thing was, I noticed the chandeliers so much and they bothered me so much that I couldn't really enjoy and understand the space and the greatness of the church. And I went out again, quite disappointed and went another day, again, and then I didn't see the chandeliers, but I saw the space and ever since then I've seen the space – and of course all the details.
GB: That is amazing to think of Sedelmeier giving a lecture, or a seminar, on Hagia Sophia.
EE: No. He had worked on that.
GB: He had worked on it?
EE: Yes.
GB: I didn't know that. That's interesting.
EE: On the baldacchino system, especially, yes.
GB: An architectural component.
EE: Yes, well the domes and the semi-domes and so on. And that's how he got to it. And that was always very interesting for me, then. I mean, I saw things differently from, probably, what – people who really know structures and so on, of course, too, but for me it was the essence or the most important part. So I saw it differently, probably, from others.
GB: And before Istanbul, you lived in Vienna.
EE: Oh yes, yes I was born in Vienna and went to school in Vienna.
GB: Now of course, you, what – that your life would be directed in quite a – by a marriage of course, and coming – something very important, that you would have, you would have never thought of that, that this was going to be life altering, so to speak, which is of course not true, but one – at the end of the fellowship, so to speak, that was quite amazing to see that you continued your professional interest and found a wonderful husband and together you could manage to work in the area of architecture, and that's what you do, up to today, which is amazing to think. And looking back and seeing this –
EE: Well, I think, actually, it was very lucky for me that in Istanbul, for instance, the emphasis was really on Near Eastern archaeology, so I also – I mean I took also history of art but also Near Eastern archaeology – so I got a broader vision, which actually Sedelmeier had started for me, because he was very much interested in the broader vision. I know some of my fellow students in Vienna criticized him: "Oh, some details are not right." But it meant a great deal to me. There were other professors who went into details. So I saw the advantages of the one and the other. But you know there are some who never see the broader picture, which is a pity.
GB: How would you characterize the Dumbarton Oaks tenure and your fellowship here, with this respect, regarding the overall scholarly interest and what you just formulated – you mentioned the broader picture – and cross-cultural exchanges and –
EE: Except for, I would say, except for the lectures and more so the symposium, it didn't further that. But I think things have changed. I mean, everything has changed. Not here. Life has changed; everything has changed. It's much more open to other cultures in general. And so, of course it would be also in Dumbarton Oaks.
GB: Yeah, indeed. Very much so and I think that is – it's good to look at this change.
EE: The broader picture.
GB: Not only the different disciplines, which at that time didn't even exist here at Dumbarton Oaks. There was no Pre-Columbian Department. There was no Garden-Landscape Department. And not only having these two other – so important – other branches or disciplines at Dumbarton Oaks, but to connect them, to exchange and to see the Fellows exchanging ideas freely across the aisle, so to speak, which is really quite nice. And I understand that this was, indeed – if we again apply this term, which is not correct, because there was no talk about a mission at that time – but if we think of the mission of a research institute, that has very much changed, you know, from an institute which was, at that time, I understand, driven by establishing at such a – I forget the term. There was a term at the time, how they called this database work. I can't remember, but I read it somewhere. But this was a kind of major point of activity of the institution, to develop this pool of material culture, evidence, records, and with that, of course, to facilitate research and to offer this to other Byzantine scholars and to everybody who's interested –
EE: I remember Kitzinger once mentioned to me that it was quite helpful for some work he did.
GB: He did. So he took advantage of that.
EE: Yes, because he knew about it, of course. And he took advantage of it.
GB: That's interesting. Yeah.
EE: If I may say one other thing, I think Mrs. Bliss would be really delighted that the broader vision has been reached, because she was that kind of – just as that quotation –
GB: Yes, indeed. Yeah, that's interesting, because, I mean, I see this, I read this out of what I know of correspondence we now know about and so on, but that you say this – that is, of course, you with your knowledge of her as a person. You have experience; you have encounters. How would you – why do you – can you expand on this? Can you – when you think of her and how you perceived her, was it because she was just the kind of lady walking into this place and embracing this place by nature of being the owner, previous owner, at least, of that place? That's what I see – what she has really created, an all-over Bliss creation, the collection they collected, the gardens they built up from scratch, the house they bought but very much remodeled, rebuilt – was that what I – was that what she, kind of – was that her realm when you –
EE: Well, she may not have known it then, but I have the feeling she would be pleased. Sometimes, you don't know exactly what you want, that is, how you can realize or what you can realize, but I think it would be – not only for Mrs. Bliss but also for Mr. Bliss.
GB: How do you remember the proper introduction? How were they introduced or were you introduced to the Blisses? Like, "This is Mildred and Robert Bliss," or, "These are the founders of the institution," or how was that, kind of –?
EE: I don't know. I only know that I just met them, and I don't think anything was said, because I was probably told beforehand, so: "May I introduce –"
GB: Because I ask – we know and we learned from various sources that they were very modest, indeed, about their donations, about participating, about funding projects, about supporting artists; often it was done anonymously. They didn't want to be named on all sorts – so, that's in a way what I, kind of, – just, you know, from being told or having read, I think that is very much confirmed through what you – you can't remember what you, basically –
EE: Of course, times were very different. So, and she was used to – both of them were used to being in certain circles and that there were certain behaviors and formalities and all that – that would be different. And I'm sure, I have the feeling they would understand the difference.
GB: They were very much open-minded regarding the avant-garde. I mean, they were very much – well, it's maybe wrong to say they were contemporary regarding their living taste of, the set-up of houses – it was very, I think, traditional and very much, of course, according to the Zeitgeist of the time.
EE: Yes, that's right.
GB: But at the same time we know – not only because they, as I said, supported artists, contemporary artists, but, of course, music – and by the way, which reminds me that you had heard Stravinsky – that you attended the premiere of Stravinsky's concerto.
EE: Yes. That's right. I heard it the other day, by the way, on the radio again.
GB: But not conducted by Stravinsky, I guess.
EE: I guess not.
GB: So that was indeed –
EE: Oh yes, indeed.
GB: Do you remember the occasion? It was while you were here on your fellowship?
EE: Yes, I think so.
GB: And you met him. You were introduced to him.
EE: Well yes, I somehow met him. I mean I didn't talk to him at length.
GB: And you may know – I don't know if you know – that later on they commissioned a piece by Copland, so again a contemporary.
EE: No, I didn't know that.
GB: And later on, late, very late, Dumbarton Oaks commissioned a piece for their—well, on the anniversary for the Blisses, 100th anniversary, and by coincidence it would just be the year we had premiered here at Dumbarton Oaks – it was indeed the year of the opening of the reinstalling there in 2008, which was the 100th wedding anniversary of the Blisses. It was a kind of nice –
EE: And, uh?
GB: Oh, Joan Tower, the composer, an American contemporary composer—she's quite known and it's –
EE: Great, wonderful.
GB: With Stravinsky, the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, Copland's piece, and Joan Tower's piece, which is, I've forgot the title; it's Dumbarton Oaks Quintet, or something like that – no, actually that's – I think, the Dumbarton Quintet, if I'm not wrong. And we had all the three pieces.
EE: Wonderful.
GB: And it's just wonderful to see and to hear the three different pieces and to know about the three different musicians and composers and to link all these to the Blisses as the one couple, who connected so many arts and so many visionary ideas in their life.
EE: I should, perhaps, say something that I was told, true or false – that Mrs. Bliss expected that all the scholars would just go to the garden and they would discuss things like in ancient Athens or so. And, well, we shook our heads over that – that it was not – it doesn't work that way. But, I think she would have understood that it doesn't work that way. I mean, it was understandable with her background, her upbringing, and so on – and the time was different – and it has changed and as through scholarly discussions and so on, this was, perhaps, more forward-looking, I mean different, already, formally. And she didn't know that. But I still think – I mean it's wonderful what she has done, really. I appreciate it much more now than I did then, to be quite frank.
GB: Yeah, it is again a nice confirmation of what I know only by reading letters and other articles, which have been written in the meantime about the Blisses. She very much understood the gardens as an essential part of the Dumbarton Oaks research institute and she liked the idea of the scholars walking and getting inspired and talking and exchanging ideas by walking and encountering this landscape, this extraordinary space she created, which is kind of an ideal, like, locus amoenus. And it was maybe a paradise, even, what we may call an ivory tower, but the ivory tower very much with an extension, which is indeed this kind of muse temple of thought-provoking ideas – inspiring. And it's very much what she expressed in her last will, that this scholarship and the lives of the scholars at Dumbarton Oaks should never be de-attached from the gardens and from the trees, not just a nice, green landscape around the house, which is the library and collection. It's really a part of it and that's quite interesting.
EE: I didn't realize that, but I must say, personally, I went through the garden a great deal. I mean, instead of going over the street, I went through the garden, through what then was called the Fellows Building. And, well the gardens meant a great deal to me. So, in being unaware of that, it did help me.
GB: Did you see changes? Did you see changes over the past recent years? Have you looked into the gardens? Is it still the same or is it changed?
EE: No, it's very different, of course, because of the new buildings – for me, new buildings.
GB: And the public part of the gardens – the rose terrace and the fountain.
EE: There was a fountain before.
GB: Mhm, yeah, I know that. It's the setting and the park-scape parts that are totally the same, unchanged, but one should not forget that the gardens, the trees, of course, change. So, I say this because only over the past two years we have fought and had many losses, many trees lost to lightning.
EE: Oh, that also. Well, you have those ancient white oaks.
GB: Yeah. They would be interesting to – and I guess you haven't had a chance to walk –
EE: No, unfortunately not. I mean, I walked in that part [points to her left, east of the Fellows Building/Guest House] and that is, of course, entirely different, because they're, so to say, formal walks now. Paths, I should say. But that's, of course, necessary under the circumstances.
GB: That's so wonderful that you – to have you sharing all these memories with us and –
EE: Well, I hope I contributed something, at least.
GB: Oh yeah, oh yeah, indeed. It is a very, very specific year, or years, here and it's – yes – a treasure of recollections.
EE: I mean it's, of course, personal recollections and objectively it may be different, slightly different.
GB: That's exactly what we all have: personal recollections. And they each piece together, so to speak, and there's history at the end – it's history. And that's very much appreciated. Do you remember the – you remember quite well the year that was your arrival and – because I'm not sure if we are even correct in our documents. When you arrived – and you said in May – your marriage was in the fall of '45, yeah? And you –
EE: No, no. Yes.
GB: Was it '45?
EE: No, you see, I was here in '43-'44 to '45.
GB: So you arrived in '43, in fall of '43?
EE: Yes, in late fall. I didn't get here at the beginning of the year, because I wasn't here yet. I mean I wasn't here yet in this country.
GB: You arrived in this country in '43.
EE: Yes.
GB: So you were pretty new to the country.
EE: I was quite new. I also experienced Ellis Island for three days, which for me was an interesting experience. It wasn't the same for my father, of course. But I was young, you know. I could take things like that. I just observed. And actually it's very good for everybody to once experience being confined. One understands things better, certain things much better that way – [laughs] Well.
GB: Thank you so much. That was really wonderful.
EE: Well it's a pleasure to be here. And if I can contribute anything, I'm delighted, of course.
GB: Well, whatever memories and recollections you have, please continue to send us an email and share them and maybe some memories will come up and –
EE: Sometimes. It could happen, yes.
GB: This was wonderful, wonderful.
EE: Now perhaps I should say one thing about Professor Friend, because the way I put it sounds, actually, negative, I think, and I don't want that to be the case. He just was interested in certain things in a, perhaps, different way.
GB: Yeah. So I think that we have covered quite a lot: various aspects, Fellows, research, professors, social life, dancing –
EE: [Laughs] Oh yes.
GB: –lunches, the Blisses, the United Nations –
EE: Perhaps I should – I don't think that came up, actually, that we were invited also at the Blisses. I mean we Fellows. That may have been at the end of the year, but I don't remember. Maybe in connection with a symposium or something, which was very nice, of course. So I saw their house and –
GB: Their house in Georgetown. So they really cared. I mean it was – they were present and they were engaged. They were really active.
EE: It was their children.
GB: Yeah, yeah indeed. Yep. Yep. Wonderful.
EE: Well, thank you very much.
GB: Oh, I would – it's my pleasure.
EE: Do you know how to turn it off?]]>
INT: I'm Anne Steptoe.
INT: I'm Elizabeth Gettinger.
INT: We have the honor today to interview Helen Evans and Angela Hero. We are here in New York City at the Metropolitan Art Museum. Good afternoon to both of you.
AH: Good afternoon.
HE: Good afternoon.
INT: Now we can get going. So, Dr. Hero, can you tell us something about your work in editing monastic documents at Dumbarton Oaks?
AH: Well, Professor Constable thought that the entire range of monasticism, both eastern and western, could not be studied properly until sources for eastern monasticism were made available, collected and made available. And he assigned that project to John Philip Thomas, whom he had known from Harvard. John was at that time on a joint appointment at Dumbarton Oaks and Georgetown. He was putting the final touches on his dissertation at Harvard, which was published a couple of years after that—I think it was the early eighties—and very, very well received. It was an excellent study of private religious foundations in Byzantium, so it was related, you see. And he became – he took over the project. And I was appointed—this was all started in '81—I was appointed philological editor for the Greek, because when we got a grant from the Foundation for the Humanities, they said that they wanted also a Greek editor, since these were translations. And we got together a group of translators. It was a problem, because these documents were written in various registers of the Greek language, ranging from the classicizing Hochsprache to the vernacular. And there weren't many scholars, many Byzantinists, who wanted to take on such a task. It was very difficult, because there were—to give you an idea—in the so-called inventories, the brevia, there were words that were not found in any dictionaries, so the two of us worked together – it was a very harmonious collaboration between John and me. We were very lucky finally in getting together a group of international scholars that – some of them were from England, others from Belgium, from Italy. And there's also a – very satisfactory, really. It was a very fine work, my favorite. I mean, it's there in five volumes; you can see it. It was published in 2000, the year 2000. It's the index. This is the part that I value very much, because it was, it is research-friendly. You see, if I – can you bring down volume five, please? That whole volume is the index.
INT: Wow.
AH: Yes so it gives you an idea. If you look under "monks", you have so many entries. [Flipping through the book]
HE: Do you use this in your research at all?
INT: I work in Syriac sources more and I didn't – I know what a tremendous contribution this has been to the field. I work more in the earlier period.
HE: What period are you working in?
INT: Late Antique.
HE: Up to about the seventh century, or –?
INT: Up to about the seventh century.
HE: I'm working on an exhibition on the transition from Byzantium to Islam. We should discuss that at some point.
AH: I'll read it to you so you get an idea. For instance, you start: "Monks, appointment of, assignment to fix duties, attempted assassination of, care of aged, conspiring to flee, contract workers, definition of, dietary concessions for, documents offered by, expulsion of, esthete of the community, electoral college, foundation of." You know, you have, on monks you have how many pages, yes? Monks continued, monks, you have four to five pages. But it followed the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium in the format – what it means is that we wanted to produce something that was research-friendly. Now, the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium is unique. I mean, Alice-Mary Talbot, who was the executive editor – of course the idea was Kazhdan's, Alexander Kazhdan. There you have a dictionary, an encyclopedia practically of Byzantine life in all its aspects: politics, not just as before, you know, the great, important events, people who took part in these events, patriarchs, kings, emperors; but you have also: sports, food, clothing, footwear. The entry on women in the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, it's cross-referenced to Eve, the Virgin Mary, birth of women, girls, you know, education of, marriage, fertility, divorce, concubinage, prostitution, empresses, nuns, so it is – these are extraordinary reference books, standard reference books. That's all I can tell you.
INT: This was a long labor of love for you, these volumes. You worked twenty years and I understand that there were some difficulties at times.
AH: Well, there was, because, as I said, the grant ran out of money, and John and I carried on, on our own expenses. And of course he, fortunately, was – of course we are talking now twenty-five, thirty years ago – he was a master of the computer. He was a computer whiz. And the word processing – he turned in a manuscript over 5,000 pages in '96 to Dumbarton Oaks. And that was all done, you know. I couldn't help there, because my first computer I bought in 1990. And still I use it because it has an excellent Greek font. My Macintosh, the one there, has access to the Internet. I google, now. But I still miss my nice Greek font. In this Macintosh that I have, the Greek font leaves a lot to be desired, especially the accents, the iota subscript – forget it. It's a mess.
INT: Well, while we're on the subject of publications, you were also involved in the Dumbarton Oaks Holy Women of Byzantium series.
AH: Well, I am on the advisory committee on hagiography, yes.
INT: And contributed the life of St. Theoktiste of Lesbos –
AH: Yes, but my dissertation, which was published by Dumbarton Oaks, was – at that time, Alice-Mary and I were doing correspondence, you see, where I did fifty-nine letters of Gregory Akindynos, who was condemned as a heretic, because he was involved in the Hesychast controversy. And then I edited – to give you an idea of my background, it was Professor Ševčenko who introduced me to the study of manuscripts and suggested that I do – both Alice-Mary and myself; we were his students – that we focus on unpublished sources of the fourteenth century. So, she did Patriarch Athanasius; I did Akindynos, and then I edited and translated the only surviving correspondence by a Byzantine woman, the letters of Irene Choumnaina Palaiologina and out of that the correspondence of her spiritual advisor, Theoleptos of Philadelphia.
INT: You were working on sources on the history of women –
AH: They're all fourteenth century.
INT: -- before a lot of people were doing that, really. You were at the beginning of that.
AH: Yes, we were. It was the beginning of the study – you know, gender studies and all that. But, and then of course, you know, in Byzantine Hagiography and Theoktiste of Philadelphia, er, Theoktiste of Lesbos.
INT: When did you first come to visit Dumbarton Oaks? When was that, and what were your first impressions of the place?
AH: Well, originally I was very impressed, because I felt that it was an ideal place for scholarly research. At that time, I think in '66, Mrs. Bliss was still alive.
INT: She was still there.
AH: And during the symposia they had a beautiful buffet, as you know, and the table set out with the best china and silver, and it was something to see. And of course the gardens – the symposia were always during the spring and outdoors. And the opportunity offered of interacting with other scholars – I met some of the world's top Byzantinists there: Robert Browning, oh so many – Romilly Jenkins, Trypanis, Laourdas, Vryonis, Sir Steven Runciman, so many, Anastos from California – my friends, yeah; and Alice-Mary, with whom I feel like, you know, like a sibling, like sisters. We were very close and we still continue to be. But our mentor is sick.
INT: Doing better, though, I understand.
AH: And Meyendorff passed away fourteen years ago.
INT: Can you talk about Father Meyendorff, what he was like, since we don't have the opportunity to interview him?
AH: No, no, he died in '92 and he died – it was so sudden, because I had seen him at Dumbarton Oaks two months before he passed away. He was a real man of God. Bickerman, my other teacher at Columbia—he was of course a classicist—said once that Meyendorff was the last intelligent man to believe in God, which shocked me, of course, because I was still very innocent and very not used to that kind of talk. He said to me, "Are you with Meyendorff?" I said, "Yes." Ha! Last intelligent – I couldn't believe it. Yes, Father Meyendorff was a true believer. He was a pioneer, an intelligent man, despite what Bickerman said, and very erudite, a very learned man. And easy, kind to work with – you know, very congenial, very – I found him. He was exceptionally good to his students. And he had a lot to give. It's a shame that he died. He was in his – sixty-two years old when he died. He died of pancreatic cancer. And fortunately he didn't suffer. As I said, I'd seen him two months before his death. I couldn't believe it when I opened up the New York Times and saw the obituary – because he had then retired from Fordham and had gone to the Institute for Advanced Study.
INT: Right, Princeton.
AH: Yeah, Princeton. They had built a house that summer and everything. He died, and she had to sell the house, Mrs. Meyendorff.
HE: Did he just not know he was ill at all until it was just the very end?
AH: No, no, no, no. All of a sudden he died in Canada. He used to spend the summers there, at a retreat.
INT: Do you remember, as a student, hearing about Dumbarton Oaks from him or did you get a sense – he was quite a giant at Dumbarton Oaks. Did you get a sense of his opinions on the place as a place of study for scholars?
AH: You mean from Father Meyendorff?
INT: Yes.
AH: Oh yes. Well, he thought he was – I think they considered him for director, but he didn't want to accept that job, because he was at St. Vladimir's. He was very active at St. Vladimir's with Schmemann, Father Schmemann.
INT: They made Byzantine theology accessible, I think, to the West in a way that few have replicated. They opened that world up to a lot of people in the West – English-speaking.
AH: Yes, yes. Schmemann's son is a journalist. He's, I think, one of the senior editors – not editors; what do you call them? Correspondents – he was a correspondent for the Times and the head of the Times bureau in, I think, in Moscow for a while. But he went back, you know, to Russia and visited the estates of the family, because these were princely families in Russia – the Meyendorffs, yeah. Meyendorff didn't use the title himself, but it was a princely – again, they were titled people, going all the way back to the first German pope in Rome, before the schism, before 1054. There was a Bavarian pope, a Meyen –
HE: A Meyendorff.
AH: They were Germans, yeah.
HE: And you tell me he came with –
AH: And they went from Germany with Catherine the Great. They married into an Orthodox family in Russia. And that's why he was no longer a Catholic; he was a Russian, he was an Orthodox. But, I asked him – before, of course, the reform of communism, he visited Russia – and I asked him if he went to see their property there, their estates. And he said, "No, my home in St. Petersburg is in the museum." The estates – but Schmemann's son went there and wrote a book. I think it's Echoes from a Native Land – something like that. I don't – I'm not sure, but it's something – yes, Echoes. It's brilliant. And Schmemann's wife was related to another of those, you know, white Russian families, the Trubetskoys, Franz Trubetskoy, so she was the headmistress at Chapin, I think, or Brearley, one of those schools for years. She taught French and Russian, because you see Meyendorff and Schmemann were, of course, refugees from the revolution and they settled in Paris, so they both had doctorates from the Sorbonne. And they were bilingual – more than that.
INT: Multilingual.
INT: It seems that an entire generation of scholars at Dumbarton Oaks had a similar story – Kazhdan.
AH: Kazhdan, yes.
INT: It must have had a very European feel in those first years.
AH: It did. But then after a while, they started, you know, one by one – well, you're the future! [Laughter] It's up to you, now.
INT: Well, I wonder, along the lines of these early years and even later – and you've attended so many Dumbarton Oaks symposia – there must have been some quite memorable experiences among those; I understand there were quite heated debates.
AH: Mm, no. Of course, Professor Ševčenko was always asking a series of questions, you know, but –
INT: How was he as a teacher? How was it having him as your mentor?
AH: Well, I owe everything to him. I'll tell you why: because I went there not knowing what my strengths were, what I wanted to do, my strengths and my weaknesses. And he said to me, "You know the Greek language. You like the written word, don't you?" I said yes. "Well," he said, "continue that." He gave me, when I went to his seminar – he opened up Patrologia Graeca and gave me a passage to translate and I did. He said, "You've seen that before." "No, sir."
HE: It's not my bedside reading.
AH: I said, "I've studied the classics, which I admire, but I never studied the fathers of the church. He said, "Hm. Well. Alright," he says. "You'll be my student. You can take my courses." And I remember: there was another woman, who was – she was also from Europe. And he said to her that she had to take the test. And she said, "Over my dead body." She says, "I have a degree." And he said, "Then, you're not my student." Well, he could be – I'll tell you. I mean, Meyendorff was, by nature, a very gentle, very mild person. The other one – you've known Ševčenko, haven't you? But, I'll say something else for Ševčenko. Ševčenko would go to bat for his students. Yes. He was there for us all the time. And knowing how demanding he was, we worked hard. You couldn't produce for Ševčenko something that was substandard; he'd throw it in your face! Sure. So, I – he was – for me, he was the guiding light. Afterwards, I wanted to continue with him but he left Columbia and went to Dumbarton Oaks, as acting director, interim director. And he told me to go to Meyendorff, because Father Meyendorff had come to Columbia as a visiting professor for a year. And when I told him that I wanted to continue for a doctorate, he said, "You have to come to Fordham. I'm leaving. I can't accept a position here, and I'm offered something at Fordham." And that's it. That's the story of my life, girls. I've got to go now, because –
HE: -- because you think you're going to get rained on.
AH: So, of course, I was going to – I didn't know if you had interviewed Alice-Mary.
INT: We're planning to.
INT: In August.
AH: Yes. And I was going to suggest that you go to her, because she is Dumbarton Oaks. She's been there from '65 all the way to last, this past year.
HE: This year.
AH: She retired. And we are now – in fact, I'm writing an article for her Festschrift. So, she is phenomenal, as far as I'm concerned, because not only is she a superb scholar, but she's also an excellent administrator. I envy this, as far as administration goes. I can't, I hate it, I dread it – administration. Don't give me such duties, no, in my white tower there, ivory tower.
INT: You were quite involved with the Byzantine Center here at Queens.
AH: Well, yes, I was there, yes, but not in the administration, yeah. Right. And it was a small center. We started it with, you know, Professor Psomiadis, who was the founder of the center, and I helped him out. It's – I cannot dismiss – I'll tell you why: because I cannot fire anybody. [Laughter] I can't! I would die before I had to fire somebody, before I tell somebody, because I can't use you anymore. I have a cleaning lady and the poor thing now is getting older, and I do more work than she does. [Laughter] My sons tell me, "This is absurd." I can't, I can't tell anybody, "I don't need you anymore." I can't. But Alice-Mary is fantastic. And then, like Helen – they can juggle, as I said, fifty different projects, here, there. I hate traveling – that's another thing.
HE: She still goes to Greece.
AH: Not anymore. And I can't travel because I've got problems with my back and sitting is not good for me. So, if you'll excuse me – I'm eighty-three years old.
INT: Thank you.
INT: Thank you, that's amazing.
HE: Do you want me to get somebody to get you out to a taxi?
INT: I can walk you out.
HE: Do you need to do your introduction or do we just keep going?
INT: I think we can just keep going.
INT: This is part two and now we will be speaking with Helen Evans at the Metropolitan Art Museum. We're so honored to talk with you today. Thank you so much. So, we understand that you were a summer fellow in 1981. Was that how you first came to work at Dumbarton Oaks, or were you involved earlier than that?
HE: No, it's not how I first came and – I can't remember. I remember being at the symposium that was the first symposium that Robert Thomson from Harvard attended. And I spoke at the symposium "East of Byzantium," and I had not even, really, picked Byzantine studies as my dissertation topic at that time, and so it was a paper I had given for Tom Matthews, and he was one of the co-higher-ups of the symposium. And I remember giving the paper and being so stunned that I was giving it, and my mother had just almost died, so I'd come from the hospital to the conference, and I'd re-written the paper in the hospital so that I hadn't – the research wasn't good enough. I had no access to the books to do anything about it. And I was so nervous that when I finished speaking – and people were very, very positive about it – I essentially tore off the platform and had not unclipped the mic. So, I remember that, mercifully, somebody gasped, I stopped, and the mic cord was as tight as it could have gotten. One more step and I could have discovered whether I fell down or the platform turned over. [Laughter] So that's one of my first great memories of Dumbarton Oaks. But then in '81, as I began my dissertation, I had a fellowship. I started graduate school to do Japanese art history. I think I'm the only Byzantinist that went on the Silk Road backwards, from your point of view. We had lived in Tokyo for several years, when my husband set up a merger venture there. And I began studying at Sophia University, the Jesuit school in Tokyo, and then ended up studying Hagia Sophia, so it was a reverse. And when the man I went to the Institute of Fine Arts to study with retired, himself –
INT: Was that Krakow? [?]
HE: No, I went to study with Alexander Soper, who was the Pelican History of Arts author of art and architecture of China and art and architecture of Japan and was a grand old man. It led me to tell everybody who asked me for advice on dissertations to be sure that your advisor is either tenured, or you have time to finish before they come up for tenure and is young enough not to retire before you finish, which used to infuriate Tom Matthews as a set of basic advice, but it was highly relevant to my life. Soper was a wonderful person to study with. I just had no intelligence that would lead me to have figured out how old he was. I knew he was old, but I didn't know that he would retire, himself. And Tom Matthews, whom – I'd taken every course that Tom had taught at the Institute. I arrived just before, er, just after he did – then let me become a Byzantinist. So I, overnight, left Japan and went to the other end of the Silk Road. And I had published my talk in the Dumbarton Oaks "East of Byzantium" series. It was on an Armenian topic. And the Byzantine topic, Greek topic I thought would be a dissertation topic I couldn't get the permissions I would need to do it. Tom told me that if I would answer a question for him on a book he was working on, then it would be a perfect topic for me, because the manuscript I was studying would be in the States and I would be able to cope with two children and the husband I had—have, too, now. So, I suddenly became an Armenologist and went and took courses in Armenian and have backed up the Silk Road ever since then. So, I have the advantage of – or disadvantage, depending on your point of view of my scholarship – of having skipped classical Greece – took one course. I think the advantage is that I studied Al Gandhara a good deal in college with Soper and it makes you ask two questions that I don't think you always think to ask when you come out of the great western classical tradition. And so one of them is, "Did the motif travel?" but the second question is, "Did the meaning travel?" And we assume a transmission of meaning that I don't think we should always assume, and that's been a part of what I've always thought that you had to prove was how – even when the image is as simple as a Christian symbol, does the community that continues to use it receive it in the way the community that produced it thinks of it. And it may be a subtle difference, or it may be a very big one. For Gandhara it was usually very big. If you go to the Afghan gold show that we have on right now – if you haven't seen it – there's a wonderful necklace that has a cameo, and it's a classical god—I think its Mercury—but it's one of the classical gods and its hung sideways. Clearly the man who had to put it in the necklace did not care that he had a male figure. He could not have missed the head and the feet, so it's not like, "I don't know it's a human being." It just meant nothing to him. To him, it meant, "I've got an exotic rock from the other end of the earth that proves how powerful and wealthy I am." And then in the catalogue, of course, they do it upright so you have no idea that it's a total other meaning to whoever in the world owned it in the vast past.
INT: So, it was through Tom Matthews that you came to know Dumbarton Oaks.
HE: Through Tom Matthews – Tom Matthews encouraging his students to go to Dumbarton Oaks symposia. I went to graduate school, like Angela did, later than you all are. I had returned to – I had come to New York – I grew up in Tennessee – from having studied in Tokyo, and the person I studied with, Julia Meech, had written the letters that got me into the Institute of Fine Arts as an Asian student. And I had been interested in medieval art in college, and so I took all the medieval courses that were of interest to me and that was everything Tom taught, so I had all of Tom's courses, I had all of Soper's courses, and I had, like, three other courses by the time I was taking my orals, but I turned in a qualifying paper for Tom and a qualifying paper for Soper and used Japanese answers for some of the issues that I took my orals on – on Byzantine for Tom – a year and a half later. It was several years before I felt like I really knew Byzantium.
INT: Have you worked at all – or perhaps you could comment on the importance of the collection, Byzantine Collection, at Dumbarton Oaks as you see it as a scholar of art history, of Byzantine art history, and also from your point of view here in New York, vis-à-vis the collection here of the Metropolitan – and the relationship.
HE: My predecessor Margaret Frazer was actually at one point offered the job as the head of the collection at Dumbarton Oaks. And I think that the Met and Dumbarton Oaks in varying ways have not precisely collaborated or cooperated, but also have been respectful of each other's collections. They're the two great collections in this country. I was charged when I was hired here to make the Met's collection better than Dumbarton Oaks – you know, that was fully said to me. And whether you think I've done it or not, that is what I have been certainly trying to ensure – that we were as comprehensive and as important. I think that what the Dumbarton Oaks collection did in – for many decades – was to offer a place where, in this country, you could see a collection brought together and identified as Byzantine. When I renamed our collections – and now my title is the Mary and Michael Jaharis Curator of Byzantine art, I changed the focus of what this museum did. And our collection is built on the 1880s theory that the great northern tradition took a little bit from the Mediterranean Christianity and infused it with the noble people of the north to create Gothic art. And the early installation of the Museum, actually up until 2000, was origins of European art. And what we had done with the installation here in 2000, which Dumbarton Oaks already had, was to see it as the art of the Byzantine world, which as one of its aspects influences European art, but does not exist only for having influenced European art. So that it is a change that was very important here and with the exhibitions I did. And I think it is relevant, in that Anastasia Tourta, who just retired as the director of the museum in Thessaloniki, said it was the first collection in a major museum that used the word Byzantine. So Dumbarton Oaks was always this beacon that understood Byzantine, but what we added was Byzantine in a larger context, because of the breadth of our collections. The summer I was at D.O., I – which would have been when I should have spent all my time looking at the collection – I never meant to be a museum curator, so it wasn't the way I particularly thought of my life. I actually spent the summer working at the Freer, because the manuscript I was doing my dissertation on was at the Freer, so it was really in their store rooms, looking at all of their Christian objects because they let me look at them all, and they have this amazing collection of Christian material that never goes on display that I remember as more influential on me than actually the D.O. collection.
INT: Do you remember from that time – I think you were also working with a piece at the Walters; am I right about that? Maybe that's wrong in the record. During your summer fellowship?
HE: I went to visit the Walters that summer. I spent some time – I was looking at the Armenian manuscripts at the Walters, maybe that's what it was, if you have notes. I was supposed to do my dissertation on a manuscript in the Freer that had not been fully studied and was filled with illuminations. It was, in theory, by the artist Toros Roslin and was therefore connected to the one by Roslin that is signed that's at the Walters. And in the end, I turned in a dissertation that discussed the western influence on Armenian illumination in the kingdom of Cilicia, which was pretty much every image that Sirarpie der Nersessian had said was a native Armenian tradition. It was a very traumatic dissertation, to disagree with a woman that was as wonderful as she was when I met her and who was canonized in the Armenian community. And some people still don't speak to me because of it; some people do. But at the time I turned it in, my first and second reader had not expected that dissertation, so it was not the dissertation that was supposed to be fast and dirty that I was sent out to do, where I was supposed to agree with her. But I think that has to be it, because I'd go up to the Walters and look at those manuscripts and then I would spend most of my time during the week in the Freer, going through the actual manuscript and then spend half the day at Dumbarton Oaks. And to me what was wonderful about Dumbarton Oaks was that I went in early in the morning and I left about ten or eleven at night and I had my children in camp and my husband in New York and I just read and looked at books all day. I had relatively little interaction with the people there. I was there the summer that the Fellows Building was closed down for something they were doing to it so we did not have the fellows' lunch where we all talked together. And I stayed at night to use the library.
INT: So you were probably in the Wisconsin Avenue apartments.
HE: Yes. I was there the summer Prince Charles got married. This is the way I can remember it. And the Washington newspaper, afternoon paper, was going bankrupt. And they devoted the entire summer to wonderfully snarky articles on the wedding, which I would pick up the paper on the way up the hill, read all these kind of Vanity Fair articles on the wedding and then the next morning go back to Dumbarton Oaks and return to Byzantium. And when they got married – there were several Greeks there the summer I was there and they invited me – they rented a television and we all went and looked at the wedding, and they devoted the whole discussion to how the English had learned from the Greek wedding not to have flowers because that was what drove King Constantine off the throne. And any effort to say, "Well, actually we think it's an incredibly expensive wedding in which flowers would have looked busy on TV," was met with "No, no. They knew." And I learned of everybody who was unacceptable to the Greeks at the wedding, starting with King Constantine. So that was the other thing I learned that summer: I learned more about Greek politics and Prince Charles' wedding – and really remarkably useful and lovely access to the library.
INT: Could you get a chance from your time at D.O. to get a sense of the, I guess – an active relationship between institutions like the Freer, with which you were working closely, and Dumbarton Oaks?
HE: At the time I was there, the relationship was close to zero – largely from Dumbarton Oaks, then. I was welcomed extremely well at the Freer but not because of Dumbarton Oaks. And I made some use of the Library of Congress, where there may have been a little bit more of a connection than I ever perceived, but Dumbarton Oaks viewed itself as a self-enclosed entity. And the only thing I really remember is somebody unacceptable went swimming in the swimming pool and so there were large notes that you – it didn't matter if you were on the board of trustees of Harvard – you were not allowed to swim in the swimming pool. I remember looking at that and thinking, that's just really weird. But I don't even know who it was that insisted that they should be allowed to swim in the D.O. pool.
INT: Was Giles Constable the director?
HE: Constable was the director and it either was the first summer that they had summer fellows or one of the first summers. I did not know that, but later I learned. So I, of course, appreciated very much the fact that he had opened it up in the summer. It was clear that summer that not all the staff was fond of the fact, but I didn't know what they were un-fond of. I just – you could tell from their tone of voice. I think that it depends on where you stand. I came to Dumbarton Oaks late. I have no firsthand knowledge of when Mrs. Bliss had footmen seating people. The fanciest symposium I went to – we were in the Orangery, and the tables did have white tablecloths; maybe the food was served. What happened was that it was a weird moment in time where using red clay flowerpots was very chic for serving chocolate mousse, which would look like dirt and you'd stick some flowers in the middle of it and that was – those were the centerpieces on the table and my table of course was the young nobodies in the back – no matter what our age was. And so we didn't realize that the waiters would serve us the mousse. And I do still remember the look of disgust on the waiter's face when he got to us, having served like three other tables, and realized we had served ourselves our dessert. That's the closest I ever was to the high Bliss years. There was, the summer I was there, a young man, who Giles had allowed to go through the Bliss archives, and his mother had been there before him and he put up a little exhibition on the Blisses and I remember that to me it was just interesting, and to an older generation at D.O. it was horrific. Mr. Bliss made very bad grades at Harvard, so I remember this guy saying to me, "But I found one where he didn't have any Fs and that was very hard." It was all Cs and Ds. But there they were – I think maybe even on the label. But someone was telling me that when you were there in Mrs. Bliss' years you took her for a walk, told her what you wanted money for, and if she liked it, she'd pull the money out of a little purse between her breasts. So, then of course she dies and somebody writes—probably Ševčenko—and says "I want x money for next year," and Harvard writes back, "Fill in the forms." And these are people that have told amusing anecdotes to Mrs. Bliss; they haven't filled in, "I'm going to spend $50 for transportation and $10 for food." So I know there was a great deal of tension in the transition, and that Constable was one of the people that got the pressure of the transition. But for me he was always an extremely helpful person that was someone that I saw. I don't remember particularly talking to anybody my summer there; I remember reading books.
INT: Have you been involved in symposia or colloquia or any of the conferences since your time as a summer fellow?
HE: I've gone to a number of the symposia. I have not been to the symposia for the last four years because I've been the editor – oh no, the head of the editorial board of the Art Bulletin, which unfortunately has its major annual meeting the same weekend as Dumbarton Oaks. So I have been fulfilling that thing and missing each and every one of the Dumbarton Oaks symposia as a result. I have used a number of people involved with Dumbarton Oaks in the writing of the catalogues for my two shows. I didn't actually go to Dumbarton Oaks to do any major amount of research of my own. There are very few books, if any, at Dumbarton Oaks that are not in New York City – just a little bit more irritating how many different physical places you may have to go to to get them, but the getting of them is just as possible.
INT: You've also written on pieces from the D.O. collection for, I think, for catalogues here and in other aspects of your position here. Unless again, I'm –
HE: You may be right. Maybe for "Glory of Byzantium", although I don't know. For "Glory of Byzantium," I was very intent that I would prove that American scholars were on par with Byzantinists in other countries, because if you look at the arc of Byzantine exhibitions, the ones in the generations right before it had been very much Byzantine art in France by French, Byzantine art in England by English. And it seemed reasonable to, in a way, prove that America had come of age in scholars. And I thought very hard at that time against having entries for catalogues written by scholars from other countries or from lending institutions, not that I won every one of them, but overall I won that I should get people who were involved in the object rather than the institution for authors. And then for "Byzantium: Faith and Power," where actually Europe is ahead of American scholarship in looking at the late Byzantine, post-Byzantine period – or was at that time – we went in the other direction and drew on a much more international body of authors. I think Gudrun Bühl is an excellent head for the collection at Dumbarton Oaks, in part because she's able to stand back from the pattern of Dumbarton Oaks and look at it from a perspective that comes out of, in part, the Bode Museum, which is so important in its collection because all the German scholars that were writing on Byzantine and early Christian art were looking at the Bode collection to define that for them. In a way, to me, if you look at collections, what you need to extend to is who's using them. And that's what, in a way, makes the Byzantine collection at Dumbarton Oaks important – is the variety of scholars who, whether they looked at any individual object by the hour or walked past them and to a degree defined themselves by them. I don't know if you've looked at the collections here at the Met, but if you go to the Cloisters, everything's big. Mr. Rockefeller bought a collection of a sculptor and it's what that sculptor bought that drives that collection. Mr. Morgan, which is the core of our collection downtown, liked little things. So, if you take their big things and our little things, you've got some chance of knowing what people had in the Middle Ages. But one looks like nobody had any furniture and there are large stones, and we look like all they had was tchotchkas and no place to put a roof over them. It has nothing to do with the taste of the time; it's the taste of the collector right around 1900, because they were both built up then. Now, Julie Jones is very interested in the pre-Columbian collection, for the fact that it's, in her mind, accumulated largely in terms of aesthetics. And the Byzantine collection is increasingly interesting in the degree to which it ignored religion. The Blisses were not that interested in things that were Orthodoxy. Icons come in after them, and there's a whole body of literature, of which I now have two shelves, of research on – beginning of the twentieth century – you begin to get the argument that modern art will be based on Byzantine art, that they both avoid looking at realism. And to a certain extent the Blisses fit into that – that you are looking at something or an aesthetic that doesn't care about the religious meaning. And now we're in a period where we're going back to a focus on the religious meaning.
INT: They did have scholarly advisors, though, I think.
HE: Oh no, they had very, very good ones, and there was that one exhibition that was done in Athens, Georgia at the University of Georgia, on the Blisses' collectors – no, and she broke off an engagement with Tyler –
INT: Royall Tyler.
HE: They had very, very good advisors, but they turned down works that they thought were too religious. There's a lovely work in the V&A that they did not buy. They were not collecting orthodoxy. Then you can get into the argument—Rob Nelson enjoys it—whether they were collecting Royall Tyler's taste or not. I think it's actually and ultimately fairly irrelevant. They built up this collection and then supported the scholars. They could have just had this collection in their home and not brought in the scholars to research it. What puts their collection into a larger framework is all the Bliss scholars that came through – you now – if they had just seen it as Hillwood, the Marjorie Merriweather Post collection. Have you been to Hillwood? Have any of you been to Hillwood? Oh, you have to go to Hillwood. It's in Washington, D.C., and you have to make an appointment ahead, but Marjorie Merriweather Post and her husband, Mr. Davis, bought a lot of things in Russia. Stalin was selling them, and Davis was the American ambassador to Russia. And so you have this house that makes Dumbarton Oaks look like a small, tiny little servants' quarters, splaying across the hill, filled with things that are being studied more now, but if she had put the amount of money into paying for scholars to come out of Russia in those times of trouble and be around Hillwood and look at her pieces as the Blisses did to theirs, we would have a different understanding of Hillwood. It's really the Blisses' great gift that they understood the need to have things studied and to get them looked at from – what we may now go back and look at differently; but we go back and look at Syriac studies differently than 1900, when there's several translations I like to quote. What else can I tell you that is any use?
INT: I wonder if you might comment on – one of the great contributions of your exhibits that you've done here at the Met was really to open up Byzantine art to just a tremendous amount of people, I think, who never thought about it. And just the amount of people who visited – it's wonderful – the exhibits that you had. And Dumbarton Oaks still, despite the choices of its Byzantine art collection, doesn't – there's still a tremendous amount of people who don't know about it. We don't get the visitors, I don't think.
HE: Keenan did not want visitors. Keenan told me he did not want visitors. I think that what the Met offers the opportunity to do – and it's doing it right now with a show called "Pen and Parchment" – is to look at things from a new point of view. I study – I come from the periphery. I come out of Japan through Armenia to Constantinople. I think that the important thing about Byzantium to do in this generation was to knock down the idea that there was a unicum Byzantium that had only great art; it was only Constantinople. Everything else was bad to the margins. But in Europe every single town had a different style. If every town in Europe has a different style, then there are lots of different centers of wealth in the larger Byzantine sphere, and they need to be looked at with a certain amount of interest, at least in what they're trying to say – so, how they receive Byzantium, how they turn it around, how they define themselves in relationship to it. And that's what I tried to do in the Byzantine show and to show that this is an empire that for many, many centuries sets a standard for people, even if they don't know what it looks like. They know it exists. So in "The Glory of Byzantium" we used a lot of quotations, because I also wanted people to know that they could read and write. And one of my favorite – the people coming to the Met don't necessarily know that – in fact that's why they don't go to Dumbarton Oaks. My least amusing memory of "The Glory of Byzantium" was standing halfway through the show in a gallery of ivories, in which every single image had Christ – maybe a baby, maybe a dead man – every image had Christ – and listening to some man turn to his wife and say, "Who are these Byzantines—did they live before or after Christ?" I have no idea who he was. I thought, I'm just not going to be able to say politely: everything in this room has Christ on it. But that's the audience. For all I know that man has a Nobel Prize. But he certainly was well dressed and sophisticated. I sought in the show at the lowest level to have – in both shows but certainly in the first one – to have people walk through the galleries and, if they read no label, to say, "I don't know who those people were, where they were, but they certainly did interesting things. I should go back and read a label." And then at the highest level to say, "I've always been interested in this issue, and she's brought together the works that allow me to come to some conclusions." So I wanted an Alice-Mary Talbot to gain what she could, but also to make people realize it's really a great empire. In the second show a Russian scholar writing on an icon I borrowed – where I only borrowed it so that I could say that the style of the Palaiologan period continues on in Russia until past the end of the empire – her entry on it was that in the fifteenth century in Russia there's a cult that believes that the world is going to end in the 1490s and it's how they count the dates of the apocalypse. And months after the show was over I realized that they were right: the world ended at the date they said because it's almost exactly the same year that the Portuguese break the eastern Mediterranean's monopoly on the spice routes and that there will – it doesn't matter who's going to rule the eastern Mediterranean or Russia. No one will ever have a monopoly as they have had throughout all of history until that date. So, fire and brimstone didn't occur, but a seismic shift in world power. And by the time we have academic institutions in the model that we think of, the eastern Mediterranean has already become relatively dead. Sinai—and I spent a lot of time studying it—looks like it's at the other end of the earth. That's our favorite opening sentence: Sinai at the other end of the earth. Well, Sinai's actually right dead center on the most important trade route until the Portuguese find another route. It's a balance that shifts, and we don't even think about it because once we are doing academic scholarship, it's already shifted so far we have trouble recreating it. So, I think what the shows here have done to a degree is to open it up again. And not everyone is happy with it. But I was quite appalled when I studied Byzantine history at Columbia with Nina Garcoian that I was the only person in the classes that was not from the Byzantine world, that every other student would say they were studying it because of their contact—through a grandparent or a great grandparent—with some aspect, whether it was Russia or Syria. And I think it's – that Byzantium is too important to – what Suger thought at the abbey of St. Denis he built to compete with the church of Hagia Sophia. He didn't build to compete with another church. He writes that he wants to know that his liturgical objects are as great as those the crusaders have seen. But my favorite quote before you end up is Harold the Bluetooth – do you know this wonderful –?, great fun – we borrowed for "The Glory of Byzantium" several objects from Scandinavia, and I wanted to show that the Varangian Guard were Scandinavians, that there was this northern route to Constantinople that we tend to forget, that exists by the ninth century, if not earlier. So first I go to Denmark to borrow, and the director of the Danish National Museum takes me into a special room, tells me it's the office of the first director of the museum, and we have this long conversation in which I cannot figure out what's happening, but I know I'm supposed to be incredibly appreciative that I'm there. And it turns out, which I don't actually learn until the show opens, that in borrowing the Dagmar cross, which to me was a small, cloisonné enamel cross hanging in a case with several other things in the Danish National Museum, I had borrowed the liberty bell of Denmark, and that he has actually had to have a meeting of all of his staff to justify sending it to the show. It is Dagmar, who may or may not have ever owned it because it may have belonged to her sister-in-law or her mother-in-law, became a symbol of Danish nationalism from Germany in, like, the seventeenth century. She was buried next to her sister-in-law and mother-in-law in a church from which the tombs were removed and moved to a fancier burial church for the kings. And the women's jewelry was commingled, so we don't actually know which woman was wearing it. Her mother-in-law was from Kiev, and it led on one hand to a reappraisal of the cross from those who had wanted it to be from Thessaloniki, because it makes no sense for it to be from Thessaloniki. On the other hand, it made the Danes quite pleased to lend it. And I got this quote where Harold the Bluetooth, as he is raising money to go invade England, brings out all of his riches that he's gotten from being a guard, a mercenary in the Varangian Guard, and shows it compared to the man who's just been pillaging the British isles. And Harold has more loot. So Harold leads the next invasion of the British isles, which might have been a great success except that it's the same year that William the Conqueror invades, so Harold ends up quite dead and Harold's army ends up dead, but you have this saga in which Harold of the Blue – and therefore one expects dead – tooth is talking about having served in Constantinople, and I find that whole question of how you go north and what you go through quite fascinating.
INT: Fascinating.
INT: That story reminds me to ask about the different pieces and the story of getting things for exhibitions. In your experience for these exhibits or just in general, what is the accessibility of the D.O. collection, from the point of view of a curator at another institution? – for exhibitions and so forth?
HE: Well, I would preface it with saying that my borrowing was before Gudrun. Dumbarton Oaks liked to be exceptionally difficult, and it's noteworthy for the degree to which it's exceptionally difficult. I borrowed for both of my exhibitions the works that mattered to me from Dumbarton Oaks, and I found my relations with Sue Boyd and Stephen Zwirn to be, on one level, very comfortable and on another level – Sue Boyd, in particular, felt, I think quite accurately, that she was not respected – and one way to try to forge respect was to be difficult – loans – and so it was a circular pattern. Gudrun lent probably less than the Royal Academy would like to have borrowed, but since the Royal Academy asked me for four pieces, and I don't think I sent five, because we opened our new galleries at the same time they opened. The problem for Dumbarton Oaks and its collection – the problem for me and my collection – is, if you're getting ready to do a show, we are both fairly well published and so you pick up a book and you say, "Well, now, I'd like two thirds of their collection and that will solve all my loans." And you just can't borrow the entire Dumbarton Oaks collection and still have it seen at D.O. I think D.O.'s problem, which will be highly related to the attitude of the current director and Margaret Mullett and Gudrun, is – and maybe Georgetown's neighbors – how much it wishes to do an aggressive outreach and try to get people to come. And historically it has not sought to do that. And under Keenan it actively sought not to do that.
INT: I know it's been burned a little bit in the past with things getting stolen or lost. We hadn't heard too many details about that, but we heard some talk of that. I don't know if that's a very old story or –
HE: Nobody kept records like we keep now. The first thing that happened to me when I came here was a very nice woman asked for the return of an object, I returned it to her, and she said, "That's not what it looked like." Mercifully, the woman took photographs herself of the piece when it had been installed in the gallery, so that we could point out to her that it, in fact, did look just like the piece when it was on display in the gallery. But our letter – first of all it was on nice lady stationery: thank you very much for the loan of your boxwood cross with the lapis lazuli pieces attached to it – which were blue glass. We sent a letter that was essentially, "You're wearing purple, so it could have been a ball gown or a cotton smock." We now – Dumbarton Oaks, I'm sure, now also – anything that comes in this building is photographed in every conceivable way. But it wasn't what you used to do. And I don't know how much documentation the Blisses kept of their purchases. They have to have done better than Mr. Walters, who burned all of his documentation, so there is no documentation for anything the Walters owned before the day Mr. Walters opened it in the museum. We've changed tremendously both how objects have to be kept in a building, how they have to be recorded. I don't know what D.O. does but I assume they do something like what the Met does and our registrars office, once a year, comes into every department's area and pulls a card out and says, "Show me that object," and you're supposed to be able to do it within five minutes, so that every work catalogued in this department, all 10,000, we're supposed to know where they are at every section. And for the things that are mainstream, you normally do. It's when they pull out something really weird that you've been hiding in a corner for forever, because you kind of don't want it. So one time I watched the arms and armor people freaking out because they'd pulled out a card for a large wrought iron gate, and it took a great deal of trouble to figure out where over the years that gate had been moved over and over to get it out of the way. It was found. We had it, but it wasn't in five minutes. So, I never know whether things are actually lost – that you used to be more comfortable, in Mrs. Bliss' time I'm sure, with giving something, so you might have a record, but Mrs. Bliss might have given it to someone. Or maybe not. But the packing it up, moving it around – none of that is acceptable and hasn't been acceptable for several decades by museum standards. But you went from being a large house, which people inhabited with objects in it, to being an institutional museum. And I suspect that the transition was awkward in the same way that it was awkward for people who expected to go ask Mrs. Bliss for money and suddenly had to fill out forms. Well I assume those same people had felt comfortable, as all the curators in the Hermitage used to feel comfortable, in taking the work they were studying to their office to study it. I've never seen anything in the Hermitage that was not on display that wasn't sitting in somebody's drawer, often for a long time, because they had to blow the dust off it to show it to me. Now that they've had this woman who was stealing things and then dropped dead on them before there was any chance to hide her thefts, they have all sorts of new rules. But, essentially they assumed that their curators were honorable people. I'm sure Dumbarton Oaks and the Met have always assumed that people are honorable. Now we have lots more security, and I do not bring things to my office to study them as I'm writing up purchase papers or considering where to put them, but Margaret would have. And the Museum would have thought it was reasonable for Margaret to have done it.
INT: Well, shall we wrap things up, maybe?
INT: Sure, I guess. Maybe, just generally, what do you see as the role that Dumbarton Oaks plays in Byzantine Studies, as someone from another institution, another city, and how do you see that role changing in the future?
HE: Well, I think that Dumbarton Oaks was for a very long time the only game in town and that that gave it the ability not to have to reconsider its role. And the Byzantine Studies Conference – I don't know the whole warzones—but the Byzantine Studies Conference started as a war with Dumbarton Oaks, so if you have not interviewed somebody about that you should find somebody that knows its warzones. I came in after the Byzantine Studies Conference was so well established, I was stunned to discover there was actually a war. What's happened now, which I think is for everybody's good, is – you asked Angela about the program at Queens; Rob Nelson is building a strong program at Yale; Ioli's program at Harvard, I think, is a little different because it's tied to Dumbarton Oaks. We now have every year at least one, and in some years four, fellows that are doing Byzantine studies at the Met. Often they're people that in another year do it at Dumbarton Oaks, so that it's not like we do and you don't take or vice versa, but there's a greater diversity of places where you can go consider it. And I think that is making Dumbarton Oaks think about what it wants to be. Obviously there's a greater pressure to have all three parts of Dumbarton Oaks more coequal, and for the Byzantinists, of course, that is not something that we ever recognized as appropriate. Now, for me and probably for you, we came in late enough that it doesn't seem such a shock. But I assume when the will was read and it was recognized that they had left their money equally to all three parts, that that was a shock, that the generation who were there for the reading of the will had expected two thirds to Byzantine studies and to divide the rest to the other two. Pre-Columbian studies have been doing some incredibly impressive things, so it's – I think back then there was a huge shock when garden studies went from formal garden design to social history. So, all those things, I think, move the institution forward and that one part of the institution will continue to do the very necessary translations that – it's easy to fail to appreciate the amount that Angela's text lets you look up aspects, for an art historian or for any other type of scholar, that were utterly inaccessible before and that all of those need to be made accessible and Alice-Mary is doing more translations in retirement. I don't know whether Dumbarton Oaks will ever want to be extremely accessible. Keenan believed that his neighbors in Georgetown who were mad at D.O. for many reasons did not want lots of children coming through D.O. And it was in fact the pre-Columbianists that – who I talked to – that were the most upset, because there is no other good collection of that material in Washington as an alternative. I am hoping that the exhibitions we have done here not only have paid off in more Byzantine exhibitions—certainly Norman Rosenthal at the Royal Academy told me he did Robin Cormack's show because we got such good attendance here – but that it will also make people look at the larger geographical sphere that you can include within the – sphere of influence isn't quite right – but you can easily go from Slavic studies and Russia and the Balkans to Ethiopia and look at that material, I think, with a new interest. And Syriac studies, I think, is an important aspect of that. If Syria could just get off the terrorist list, my show would be so much happier. I have plans for an exhibition, and I clearly now am going to have to get real and drop the Syrian pieces and go for photographs. So, if you can get the U.S. government to drop Syria from the terrorist list, that would be my favorite choice at the moment. Syria's willing to lend; it's the U.S. government's rule that is the problem. The other thing that I – either just because anybody who's really angry doesn't talk to me or because it's actually changed – is there seems to be a greater willingness, except among some Greeks, to think of the Byzantine sphere in a broader circle. Now there are a certain number of Greeks that don't speak to me so I do know about them, because they tell me so. But I think Dumbarton Oaks had a Coptic symposium a few years ago, which was a first for them. I think that none of this is brand new, but I think we're moving toward a more elastic definition. And Constable may very well have been the beginning of that. He was the director who didn't come from the inner circle.
INT: Well thank you very much –
HE: Thank you.
INT: – for your time.]]>
MM: My name's Margaret Mullett. The date is the eighteenth of April, 2011, and I'm interviewing Professor Robin Cormack in the guest house of Dumbarton Oaks. Also present, Shalimar Fojas White, Günder Varinlioğlu, and Rona Razon, who's going to ask questions about field work later on in the interview. Robin, do we have your permission to record?
RC: You do have my permission to record.
MM: Perhaps we could start with your career before you came to Dumbarton Oaks. Can you give us some highlights?
RC: The question I've often been asked—and I've never answered—is why I came into Byzantine studies at all. And, in a way, I'd like to give the long answer, which I've never given before, because so many other Byzantinists seem to have had an easier answer, like "I was born in Istanbul," or "I had an inspiration when I went to Trebizond when I was three, and I did this ever since," and this is not how it worked for me. And I more or less came into Byzantine studies by chance and happenstance, so could I just say how that happened? I was born in 1938 and I went to a school in the UK of a kind which no longer exists, although people are always trying to bring it back because it was thought to be such an academically successful system. So I went to what was called a grammar school in Bristol, which was a direct grant school and entry to that school was entirely by examination and for those who couldn't afford the very low fees there were scholarships. And I went to that school when I was seven. When I was eight, I started learning Latin and when I was nine, I started learning Greek. And my Greek teacher was a very unhappy, dissatisfied schoolmaster called Philip Sherrard who subsequently I became a colleague of in King's College, London and continually met after he moved to Greece and worked on Byzantine spirituality. And Philip, I suppose, was somebody who introduced me to Greece. In this school, at the age of twelve, you made a choice about your future examination subjects and I entered the Classics form with twenty-three other boys—it was a boys' school and from the age of twelve to fourteen we did a few other subjects—we dropped all subjects at the age of fourteen, in my case, because I was young in the class and then took university entrance at eighteen. So I was with a group and we were an exceptional group in the school, because all twenty-two of the twenty-three got scholarships to Oxford University to read Classics. What was good about the school was, first of all, it was by academic ability only—so you can see it was full of very bright boys—and secondly the schoolteachers at that time were quite exceptional. Every single Classics teacher had a first in Classics from Oxford University. In another generation these guys would not have gone to school teaching; they would have been university teachers. And indeed one of them still is—David Raven is still a lecturer in Classics in Oxford University now. So we had an exceptional teaching at school and we, for example, read the whole of Virgil and Homer in the original language at school. We were trained to do verse, we were trained in accents—we had a very great Classics training, with the result that when I went to Oxford to read Classics, I and all my fellow students from this school were incredibly disappointed. We thought that the dons at Oxford were self-indulgent and lazy and we all wanted to leave Classics. And all of us except one did so. The only one that remained in classics was W.V. Harris, who went to Columbia and is still there. All the rest of us said, "We must get out of this subject with no future," about which we were quite wrong probably but that's what we all decided. And I applied to go to the Courtauld Institute of Art in London to work in history of art—I wanted to move into modern art history, that was my aim, and I had to wait for a year before going there and I had my first job in the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, where they told me that I would be the only student at the Courtauld who knew how to hang a painting because every month I had to hang an exhibition. And my bosses were Roland Penrose and Herbert Read, who were quite famous critics and collectors at the time, and I learned a great deal from being at the ICA. I went to the Courtauld, after, for a second degree—a two-year degree—to do modern art. The system at the Courtauld was that your first year was spent in learning about the Renaissance and what art history was—this is the 1960s; what art history was in the 1960s was how to attribute, date, and find a provenance for a painting or any other work of art and that's what art history was. You didn't do any more than that; it was an un-theoretical, empirical subject extremely well taught at the Courtauld. And second year, I applied for the modern course but was taken aside by a medievalist, George Zarnecki, who suggested that with the language background I had, I would be much smarter to work in Byzantium or the Middle Ages. And he was extremely persuasive and so I moved, my second year of the Courtauld, to do a survey course on Byzantine art. My teacher was in the Warburg, another part of London University, Hugo Buchthal, and I went for my first class and he explained how the course worked. On paper, you did everything in Byzantium—architecture, arts, all periods. He said, "What happens on this course is that I teach you about manuscripts and you do the rest yourself." A very, I'm sure, typical way of learning in that period. Hugo Buchthal was an amazing art historian who had a complete photographic memory of every manuscript he'd ever looked at. And so as you discussed manuscripts and you would mention an image, you could see him turning over the pages in his mind until he said we've got the folio, 89 recto—that's the picture you mentioned. It was an extraordinary art experience. After that first degree at the Courtauld, I then started to work on a Ph.D. and I was interested in iconoclasm because André Grabar's book had come out, which was a very influential book on my years, and I wanted to work on Thessaloniki after iconoclasm. By this time, Hugo Buchthal, who'd been extremely disappointed not to become director of the Warburg Institute—the post went to Ernst Gombrich instead—in anger left the UK and went to New York to teach, which was a very good decision for him because the Ph.Ds in London, before me, he only had two Ph.D. students—Paul Hetherington, who was interested in Rome, and Cecelia Meredith, who worked on Codex Ebnerianus in Oxford and wrote an extremely good thesis on that subject. And I was the only other advanced student he had. Since he was leaving London, he explained he wouldn't be able to supervise me but by chance Cyril Mango had just been appointed to King's College so they were my two supervisors for my Ph.D. And the happenstance now is, why am I in Byzantine studies? Because Hugo Buchthal went to New York and the Courtauld decided to make an appointment in Byzantine art. It was a new appointment at the Courtauld—not at the Warburg—and it was a joint appointment in the University of London between the Slavic School and the post was advertised and I was the first person at the Courtauld ever to apply for a job rather than be appointed and there was a shortlist and the condition of the post was that you taught Slavonic, east European, and other art in two parts of London University and that the first year of the post you would learn Russian—it was an extremely useful thing to have done; very pleased with that. And so that's how my career began at the Courtauld Institute. I was appointed in 1966 and, apart from some years of leave, I then remained at the Courtauld until retirement in around 2004, when I went to the Getty and currently I do have a full-time lecturing post in Cambridge, in the Classics faculty, so I've gone back to the texts which I first learned.
MM: Let's look at it from the other end. How did you hear of Dumbarton Oaks, first, and what was its reputation in the world of Byzantine studies?
RC: The answer's quite easy. I heard of Dumbarton Oaks through Dumbarton Oaks Papers and Dumbarton Oaks Papers, when they came out, recorded the annual conferences. They were fantastically important volumes and one would rush to read them and that gave you the names of people who were either on the faculty at Dumbarton Oaks or who spoke at the conferences. In addition to that, Sirarpie Der Nersessian gave lectures in London in the sixties on Armenian art and by that time I believe she'd left Dumbarton Oaks and moved to Paris. She was an extremely charismatic lecturer, persuaded me that Toros Roslin was the greatest artist of the Middle Ages—a view I still hold, really. And so Dumbarton Oaks one knew through the papers and then I knew because Cyril Mango, who supervised me, had actually been at Dumbarton Oaks and then soon went back to Dumbarton Oaks.
MM: Great. So you were a Fellow, a Visiting Fellow, 1972-3, is that correct?
RC: That's correct.
MM: And you hadn't worked with D.O. before that; that was your first experience.
RC: That was my first experience with Dumbarton Oaks.
MM: So how did that come about? Someone suggested you apply? What was your project? Why did you decide to come?
RC: Okay. Positive and negative reasons. Cyril had suggested that at some point I should go to work at Dumbarton Oaks. In London that didn't seem the immediately obvious thing to do because the Warburg library is quite superb in Byzantine studies and certainly at that time, one felt, probably matched Dumbarton Oaks in terms of resources. But what was happening at the Courtauld was that the post I had turned out to be quite unsatisfactory, because a joint post turned out to be two full-time posts in two different parts of the University of London, teaching Russian art on a syllabus which couldn't be matched—I couldn't combine any teaching and so I was doing a phenomenal amount of teaching, going to meetings, and not getting any research done. So the attraction of Dumbarton Oaks was to get away from teaching and to have a year of research. And I actually gave in notice to the Courtauld and went to Dumbarton Oaks but was reappointed to the Courtauld singly, leaving the Slavonic school, when I came back, so I suppose you could say it was slight leverage also to go to Dumbarton Oaks in my personal career. But the main aim was to have unlimited time on research, partly because in my Ph.D.—I was appointed in the second year of my Ph.D., so I wrote my Ph.D. while teaching and without much research time. I'd spent one year in Greece and then just a few months in the library. And then I had to write the thesis in between teaching and learning Russian and going to Russia. I kind of needed a bit of space and Dumbarton Oaks certainly gave that space.
MM: And the project was Thessaloniki still, was it?
RC: I think so; basically to write up Thessaloniki, though in the end I never felt my thesis could turn into a book and so I published it as chapters and not as a book.
MM: And exhibitions, too?
RC: Yes, I started. I started doing exhibitions. My first exhibition was also in the seventies, an exhibition of Bulgarian icons which I did in Edinburgh. So I did my first experience of curating an exhibition around that time, as well.
MM: Can you remember your initial or first impressions of Dumbarton Oaks? Are they still fresh? Can you do that?
RC: I think they're pretty fresh. There's various layers of impressions—there's the good things and there's the bad things. And it was clearly a time of transition when I came to Dumbarton Oaks—absolutely obvious that things were changing, which actually was also true in the U.K. Universities changed an enormous amount in the early seventies, as university expanded and teaching and accountability became a major aspect of being a university teacher. And that was quite traumatic for a generation before mine, for whom university teaching had virtually no accountability, with the result that it always looked rather self-indulgent. And there were no projects. All research was individually motivated; one never cooperated with other people. And so that transition from what I would call self-indulgent to a greater accountability was beginning to happen in 1970. It was happening in London; it was clearly happening in Dumbarton Oaks. So my initial impressions were the formality of Dumbarton Oaks, the slight oddity that all the best offices were by the administrative faculty and visiting fellows were quite lucky—I was one of the last to get an office, a very small office—I was very, very pleased to have that. But there was obviously a difficulty of space and it was difficult to see how decisions about priority for space had actually been made. The good side was the book library; the way it was organized with art history at the center was quite amusing and there was a runner to the Library of Congress so any book not here, you simply filled in a list and they were brought by a runner the next day. And that was important for me because I was interested in interdisciplinary aspects of Byzantine studies and that could be fulfilled—the system, that was excellent.
MM: I wanted to ask about daily life—where you worked, where you ate, where you slept, and that kind of thing.
RC: Yes. There was a problem about daily life, because I had a wife and two small children and my wife gave up her job in mathematics teaching to come to Dumbarton Oaks and we were housed in McLean Gardens, up by the Cathedral in the apartment which in previous years had been occupied by Henry Maguire and his family, who had fully briefed us, in fact to enormous details like the fact that there were no egg cups for eating boiled eggs out of, a detail which never really worried us. McLean Gardens was quite a walk and we were advised not to walk. And we didn't have transport and there was no doubt that in that period spouses were excluded from participation in institute; they were not expected ever to appear or to be invited to any social occasions. And this was deeply resented by my wife, who spent the year being very angry, and our children, who were age four and five, went to excellent schools—one to a Montessori school—and so they, the children, were extremely happy, but my wife, who was after all a fellow academic but in mathematics, felt that the treatment of spouses was most regrettable and, in a way, my wife never forgave me for taking her to Dumbarton Oaks for a year. I'm no longer married to my first wife.
MM: So there were social events in Dumbarton Oaks, to which spouses were not invited as well as work. Did the tea still exist? Daily tea?
RC: Daily tea still existed. The problem with Dumbarton Oaks, in my time, was there'd been a major change: that Mildred Bliss had died fairly recently, that Ernst Kitzinger had decided he wished to go to Harvard to undertake teaching and therefore had to be replaced as director of studies, and there was a small faculty—Meyendorff I assume was on the faculty, certainly around. But Ihor Ševčenko and Cyril Mango were essentially the faculty and they made it quite clear that they were opposed to the appointment of William Loerke as Director of Studies, causing a pretty unpleasant atmosphere throughout my year. And this was exhibited by lunches where they generally spoke in languages not understood by William Loerke. And there was definitely a stand-off between the faculty and William Loerke, which I—all of us—felt was unnecessary, but we had to live with it and one of the things that William Loerke initiated was a seminar for the visiting fellows and Cyril Mango was asked to do a seminar and, perversely it seemed to me, he chose that we would work on a manuscript which was of such extraordinary difficulty and obscurity that it would hardly bring a group together. This was the letters of Ignatius the Deacon and the seminar consisted of translating those letters, which we found very, very difficult, all of us, and some discussion of the context of those letters. It's quite interesting that, years later, Cyril did publish an edition of those and our names are recorded as being in that seminar. It wasn't really an ideal subject to bring people together, though we certainly got more benefit out of that than had there not been a seminar at all. Otherwise, fellows—the Byzantine Fellows—gave a talk about their work and the seminars for the Pre-Columbians and Garden Fellows were separate. Having said that, I don't think there were any Garden Fellows. Betty MacDougall was in charge of the garden department, an extremely open and useful person to talk to. And I did go to some seminars for the Pre-Columbians. At that time the main interest was understanding language—it was a lot about language transcription and archaeology—extremely interesting to go to.
MM: But it was clearly a crucial time in D.O. and it was also the Golden Age, wasn't it? It was a time when archaeology seemed to be very dominant. Was that your impression?
RC: Yes. I mean, all the faculty were extremely positivist and empirical and that's the tradition I had been trained in. I haven't mentioned it, but before I went to university, in my gap year, I was trained in archaeology by a medieval archaeologist, Philip Rahtz, an absolutely brilliant English archaeologist of the same ability of Martin Harrison, whom I also knew. And so yes, positivism was absolutely—and empiricism—was the order of the day.
MM: If you look at the staff list for that period, it's extraordinary, the way resources were put into the material side of things. Were they around? Were they part of daily life or were they out in the field and occasionally came through?
RC: Well, the person who was working in the building was Robert Van Nice, and he was in the basement and was fascinating. I spent quite a number of visits going to ask Robert Van Nice about the work on St. Sophia. By this time it was supposedly drawing to an end, and he was obsessed by the paper that was going to be used in the printing, because he believed it was going to expand seasonally—it'd be larger in the winter and the summer and therefore his drawings would be inaccurate. He was also very angry that he'd been stopped by Paul Underwood and was not allowed to measure the minarets of St. Sophia. He was stopped one meter, I think, from the building because someone realized, no doubt quite correctly, that he would never finish if he really did what he wanted to; those drawings and talking to him about them were quite extraordinary, seeing the mason's mark on slabs, the detailed drawings. He was criticized by Ernest Hawkins for not asking any questions, and I don't know if that's an aspect or not. At that time, it was mooted that Rowland Mainstone should cooperate with him to write a joint book. And Rowland Mainstone did ask many questions, but they were entirely limited to the statics of the dome. Rowland Mainstone had no interest in Hagia Sophia except why the dome fell at various points. And they didn't get on, and that joint publication never happened. So, certainly Robert Van Nice was very much here. Peter Megaw came during the year and was present, and obviously William Loerke had to consider what the future of the field program would be, although this was already the period when permits for Turkey had come to an end because of the purchase of the Sion Treasure—and that was obviously an element at the time. Another big discussion at the time was whether Dumbarton Oaks should move to Harvard—that the whole place should move and become part of the Harvard campus. That was a very big, well-discussed issue in that year.
MM: So it wasn't just the library, it was actually the whole institute?
RC: The whole institution.
MM: Interesting.
RC: And one of the most exciting things that year was the concert of Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks Concerto in the Music Room because I think there's nothing more exciting than going to a performance of a piece of music in a place for which it was written—and that's an experience I've only really had repeated in San Marco in Venice, going to a concert of music composed for San Marco. I think that should be regular, though I do remember the permanent faculty—this had obviously happened before—they said that it was a tedious, inferior piece of music, which shouldn't be played. It was actually – Stravinsky being one of my favorite composers anyway, I thought it was a great thing to do. I hope it's often done.
MM: I was very fortunate to hear it when the Bliss symposium happened a couple of years ago. And it stood up extremely well.
RC: There were very few Bliss stories, but the one that I always remember—and I guess it's been recorded elsewhere—is that Mildred Bliss, on the whole, didn't have much interest in the Byzantine center but that to their surprise she turned up to one of the symposiums which was never published, which was the reconstruction of Holy Apostles in Constantinople. And it was noticed, I was told, that Mildred Bliss came to Underwood's reconstruction of the ground plan of the church and at the end asked him if she could have a copy of his plan. He went around to her place a few days later to give her a copy and asked her why she wanted a copy of the ground plan of Holy Apostles in Constantinople and the answer she gave was, "It looks as if it would be a great plan for a garden."
MM: Interesting. So, did you work with, did you have interactions with the collection when you were here? Was the museum – interactions with scholars?
RC: Yes. The curator was employed, and she was in the basement and I discussed various objects with her. I was particularly interested in the provenance of where things had come from. And in the seventies there was a general concern among all museum curators about how much information on file should be made public. And so that was some difficulty and Sue was uncertain what the correct protocol would be, but we did look at some files and noticed that the number of works that came through George Zakos documented as coming from the Lebanon, and obviously that was interesting for anybody who knew that George Zakos had a shop in Istanbul, in the bazaar, and that, therefore, provenance from the Lebanon from George Zakos was obviously an interesting provenance. This was the time when a book was written about George Zakos and other dealers; it's a book—I now can't remember the author and I haven't seen it since, but all dealers were given pseudonyms and George Zakos was called Gregory Omega. So I ought to find this description of George Zakos. So it was easy to see the museum. I was not allowed to see the Sion Treasure, which was not accessible for viewing by anybody—and anyway it was no doubt in desperate need of conservation. But otherwise any question to Sue Boyd, she would answer as well as possible and also comment on the inadequacies, as she saw it, of the Ross catalogue, which, on the whole, there was a feeling that it was good to have it, but it could have been done better.
MM: And she produced another –
RC: Of course. It was improved.
MM: How about photo collections. Was Marlia around here at that time?
RC: Yes, Marlia Mundell was in charge of photographic collections, and they were accessible and easy to use. In the course of that year, Marlia decided to leave Dumbarton Oaks and applied to the Courtauld to do an MA with me, the following year, so the next year Marlia Mango and Lucy-Anne Hunt and a third person did a course on Syrian and eastern Byzantine art, as part of the MA.
MM: And a lot came of that.
RC: Yes.
MM: How about publications? Did you see anything of Julia Warner at that time?
RC: One saw Julia Warner, but I had not much contact with publications.
MM: What about the Director of Studies? Did you have daily interaction with Loerke? What did the Director of Studies actually do in those days?
RC: Well, it was William Loerke's first year; there were all these big issues about the future of fieldwork, of Dumbarton Oaks, which I'm sure he was very concerned with. He certainly had an open door – his study. But obviously, the seminar chosen was one to which he, with no Greek, would never have come. It was carefully chosen to exclude William Loerke. He was very sociable, so we all went to William Loerke's house for Thanksgiving and met his wife and his family. I guess I didn't have very close relations with William Loerke because I was a Cyril Mango student and since all the tensions were between individuals, he would have assumed that I would be on the other side, I guess, though I gave him no reason to think that. And in the course of that year, he agreed that I could work with Ernest Hawkins on a project we had to publish the southwest rooms of St. Sophia. So, that was something for which I asked his permission and permission was given that that should be done. I guess that he was also very concerned with setting up the San Marco project, because Irina Andreescu was in her second year as a junior fellow, finishing her Ph.D. for Grabar in Paris, and she also had initiated the San Marco project, which was supported by Peter Megaw when he was here with Loerke and was to be headed by Otto Demus with whom Irina met. So in a way, the big discussions were setting up that project, which was obviously a complicated and difficult project to set up because it was essentially a photographic project, not in any way an examination project, and of course the ultimate difficulties about the project, was that Otto Demus had decided the answer to all the questions in the 1930s and just wanted to photograph in the 1970s, and when scaffolding went up, there then did become questions of how far you could recognize Byzantine and later restorations in San Marco.
MM: I'm not sure which way to go, whether to say, to ask – let's think about the intellectual life. You talked about the seminar and you all gave talks. And occasionally people would come in and give talks. What happened?
RC: There were very few talks from outside. I only remember one, which was a German scholar who talked about the bronze horse, and I only remember this occasion because of what I'd felt at the time was the outrageous introduction by Ihor Ševčenko, who introduced the visiting scholar with an introduction that took one hour and ten minutes and covered all the aspects that were going to be covered by the speaker, who had rather little to say when it finally came to speak. It was a very odd experience. So I don't remember many seminars. What was good was that in the second term, the speakers at the conference arrived, so Kurt Weitzmann came, who was speaking, and Hans Belting came, and others – and so one had the interaction with them to discuss their papers before the symposium, and that – it was the first time I had melt Hans Belting, and that was a very good interaction, and we also traveled together, both to Cleveland to see objects there and to New York. So, it became very, very useful for meeting researchers in the field from outside, as well as from inside.
MM: That was the provinces symposium?
RC: That was the provinces, yes.
MM: And they were there for what, a month beforehand?
RC: Two months, at least.
MM: Two months?
RC: I think Weitzmann came soon after Christmas. It was extremely interesting to meet Weitzmann, with whom I had a slightly difficult issue, because, not knowing I was going to meet him and being young, I had written an extremely hostile review of his latest book in Burlington Magazine. This was his publication of the Sacra Parallela, Paris Greek 923, and I'd written a long review attacking his methodology, his questions, the results, in fact every single thing about what he said, which I felt rather strongly, and still do, is a striking example of how not to study a manuscript. And I met him and he had read the review and he was very generous and said, "I'm perfectly happy with your criticism, but beware my students." And it's a prediction which turned out to be correct, that his teaching of his Ph.D. students was so extraordinarily thorough that, although Weitzmann's work I think had always been criticized in Europe—and not only by me; also, about the same time, by Christopher Walter, who, both of us said that his methodology of treating pictures as if they were text was inappropriate and seriously wrong and misleading and that the reconstruction of lost manuscripts was a cul-de-sac which we didn't like—but I think in the States, critiques of Weitzmann have only very recently emerged and his initial students maintained that methodology right up to the nineties. So it was extremely interesting to meet Weitzmann. He was not an easy person because he didn't like children and I happened to have children. He didn't like children because he thought they were full of germs, which is obviously quite correct, and he had always felt his health had been wrecked by his visits to St. Catherine's on Sinai and that he needed to be looked after, as indeed he was very well looked after by his wife. He retired that year, which was wonderful for me because Gary Vikan put on an excellent exhibition at Princeton of Princeton manuscripts, and there was a symposium at Princeton, and that was really one of the many important things I did while I was in the States during that year.
MM: So you traveled quite a bit – with Dumbarton Oaks people?
RC: I only traveled with Hans Belting or, to Princeton with Dumbarton Oaks people, though in my year there were two other English fellows, Elizabeth Jeffreys and Michael Jeffreys, who took it in turns—I can't remember which one was Fellow that year and which one was fellow the next year. And unlike us, they had a car, and so we did travel places in the region with them.
MM: Was Tyler a distant figure?
RC: Tyler was an extremely distant figure who maybe one met at the Christmas party in the distance. I had no contact with him at all.
MM: You were aware of the administrative structure; I mean it's something you have an eye for. Did you, at that time, see how the place was run, think about it, have ideas about it?
RC: I was aware of it. The big issues I think I've already mentioned, and there were all sorts of ways in which one could see that the Byzantine section was felt to be over-privileged by other sections, so there were certainly tensions in the place.
MM: Could Pre-Columbians come to lunch at that time?
RC: Yes.
MM: They did.
RC: Pre-Columbians were extremely extroverted and a good group in my year, but there was clearly a feeling that resources weren't necessarily allocated fairly. I wasn't privy to those conversations, but that was clearly thought to be so. I haven't mentioned: the Ševčenkos had an open house quite frequently; one used to go for drinks in their house and Ševčenko would show the latest books that he – or off-prints that he'd been sent. And so that was a way of keeping up. Ševčenko was very prominent. I remember an announcement he made at lunch one day, which was that he was sad to announce that the only other Byzantinist with a sense of humor had just died, Anatole Frolow, a rather typical Ševčenko announcement at that time. And the faculty – one thing I definitely remember with Ševčenko and how the library worked was that we had the system of taking out the tabs so you knew who had the book. I wanted a book on the inscriptions of Palestine. It was out to Ševčenko, so I went to his office and asked if I could use it and he graciously said, "You can have it for thirty minutes." When I got it to my office, I saw he'd already had it out for 25 years, so you can see that there were kind of hierarchies in Dumbarton Oaks.
MM: What about the fabled Mango-Ševčenko relationship?
RC: Actually, one was very unaware of the Mango-Ševčenko relationship. They were so united in their hostility to William Loerke that their personal relationship was on a high that year.
MM: What can you tell us about the library? I mean, apart from the plan to move it. Irene Vaslef, I think, comes in just about this time?
RC: Yes, she was certainly there. Yes. The problematic of the library – in terms of art history it was brilliant; it really had everything you needed. Finding texts was somewhat more difficult. And that was exaggerated by one of the fellows in my year, Mr. Stephen Gero, who for some reason only worked at night and had an office, which was locked during the day. But he removed all the Bonn Corpus, for example, to his office, and so we all had a bit of a problem with texts because they weren't easy to find and they'd all moved to Mr. Gero's room. Mr. Gero had a very difficult year because, although he'd recently finished his thesis with Ševčenko, Ševčenko made it quite clear that he thought the thesis was a waste of space, really, and that looking for eastern sources of iconoclasm had been a fruitless pursuit. So I think that Stephen Gero was not a particularly happy man, that year. But he certainly didn't make life easy for us. But the combination of the Library of Congress and the art history made the library excellent. However, it was very slow in acquiring books, particularly from Greece. And also, binding meant that the books that had come in the previous year were now all the way at the binder. In a rather bizarre way, I lost out on, in my year at Dumbarton Oaks, on recent literature. It took me some years to catch up, because the one thing that you couldn't read here was the recent literature, unless you went around to Ševčenko's office, who, of course, was being sent every offprint that was ever written and had a full-time secretary to acknowledge his off-print collection.
MM: But presumably if the scholars were in the attic, in the third floor, the periodicals were not up there and art history was not up there at that time?
RC: I don't remember where the periodicals were. I simply don't remember.
MM: But there was still a sense that books were all over the house?
RC: Yes, absolutely. Yes.
MM: All over.
RC: Yes, you collected. But, I mean, I guess that you collected a lot of books at the beginning of your year and thereafter you basically – most people seemed to have in their rooms what they needed.
MM: I think I probably want to ask you your comparative reactions now. You've been back as a visiting scholar for almost a month. How do you feel about similarities and differences?
RC: Since the seventies, I've called in on Dumbarton Oaks while Giles Constable was director and later, and so I met Kazhdan here, but this is certainly the most substantial amount of time I've spent since – it's a long time ago, isn't it? And, I mean, everything about the place is very different, even though physically the front door may be the same. There's a feeling of access and openness and friendliness, which certainly was not what one felt back in the 1970s. My initial feeling about the library was that it was absolutely brilliant compared to what it was before. I have in the course of the month had some misgivings about the way the library works and I'm sure it will have to evolve further. What one notices is the expansion of the Museum and the expansion of the Museum offices—and the combination of Pre-Columbian and Byzantine in the Museum. But there's a very much greater feel of activities and interaction – I mean it is a very different place, both physically and socially and intellectually. It's active in a different way, which, as I said, you would expect because there's been a change from personal scholarship to projects. And that has been such a phenomenal change in the way academics have worked between then and now. But certainly Dumbarton Oaks has participated in that revolution.
MM: And you could argue that it was actually quite early in the game, through the big fieldwork projects, which were so much a part of that Golden Age period.
RC: Yes, except the big fieldwork projects were actually begun by Whittemore and inherited by Dumbarton Oaks. So they didn't actually initiate; they made the decision to continue and I think that the fieldwork done, when taken over by Dumbarton Oaks, in Cyprus and in Istanbul, particularly, was the highlight – or one felt that was the importance of Dumbarton Oaks, that whereas other places were letting material decay, decline, that Dumbarton Oaks was in the forefront of preservation, conservation, and study. And certainly when I came, that was my picture of Dumbarton Oaks. My picture of Dumbarton Oaks was the extraordinary importance of its activities, but I would, as I say, modify that by saying they made the decision to continue rather than to start those activities. And from the beginning, it seems to me, Dumbarton Oaks was an academic-centered institution.
MM: I ought to link a little bit to the fieldwork questions that Rona's going to ask you, I think, and ask you about your own participation. So you talked, during your year here, and then you did the work. I was trying to figure out whether it was before or after you did the room over the southwest ramp. It was afterwards.
RC: It was after that. That was initiated while I was here and, while I was looking at materials in the photographic library, I was also in touch with Ernest Hawkins and he, who I'd met before—and it's conceivable that we'd talked about this project before, but certainly it came together by an agreement with Ernest that we could handle the permit difficulties—because it would be impossible to be officially working for Dumbarton Oaks; at the same time, William Loerke agreed that the work could be published by Dumbarton Oaks but by this time Dumbarton Oaks was forbidden to work in Turkey as a result of purchasing the Sion Treasure. That had caused a great deal of concern, particularly among British archaeologists. And Martin Harrison came to Dumbarton Oaks to beg Dumbarton Oaks to give back the Sion Treasure and not to continue with this. And I met Martin Harrison and Nezih Firatlh, the director of the archaeological museum, and they felt very strongly that Dumbarton Oaks would always be punished until the treasure was returned.
MM: So, you spent that summer in Istanbul.
RC: That's right.
MM: And I seem to remember you were very kind to young scholars who were visiting at that time. You entertained us in the Dumbarton Oaks apartment.
RC: The Dumbarton Oaks apartment was really useful. And it was not only a base for others working in Istanbul, but it had a library there and it was absolutely invaluable being there. Yes, all sorts of people came, and I obviously remember that Lee Striker was working at Kalenderhane and Martin Harrison was working—I guess it must have been finishing off on Sarachane, on St. Polyeuktos—and seeing those two operations going on was extremely exciting.
MM: How long had D.O. had that space?
RC: I don't know, because Ernest, until that time, had had an apartment at Moda on the other side of the Bosporus and so, because he had been required to retire by William Loerke that year—something about which he had a considerable anger and bad feelings—and so as he retired he gave up his apartment in Moda, and therefore he was also staying in the Dumbarton Oaks flat, which he hadn't done before. I simply don't know—Michael Hendy was there. I just don't know how long it had been or how long it went on for, but for that year it was really important.
MM: Did Richard Anderson come through?
RC: Yeah. Yes.
MM: Was he – did he come through often in Georgetown, as well?
RC: No.
MM: So he was basically in the field.
RC: Yes.
MM: That was quite a commitment, in a sense, to have an architect on staff all the time.
RC: Yes, but we didn't – I mean, we only knew him socially. He wasn't any part of the projects. And I will perhaps come back to the other things I did with Ernest later on.
MM: Before I hand over, is there anything else that you remember from the D.O., the academic side of it, that you haven't talked about?
RC: I haven't talked about some of the personality clashes, which in a way should be on record. And an obvious personality clash was between Cyril Mango and Ernst Kitzinger. I don't know how far this has been recorded but—this might take a few minutes, but the – because of my age I was able to meet: Buchthal was my supervisor, Cyril was my supervisor and Kurt Weitzmann, who again like Buchthal had a phenomenal photographic memory for images—and as much as I disagree with his methodology, I've never disagreed with his datings and re-datings of material, in which I think he's always been great. I met Otto Demus, who also had a phenomenal eye and was the most, probably the most generous art historian. I mean he never wrote a review which wasn't positive. And his book on mosaics in Norman Sicily I think every student should continue to read. And I've mentioned Nersessian and I met André Grabar in Paris but not here. But I didn't meet Kitzinger until after I'd been to Dumbarton Oaks. Because he had personally appointed William Loerke, his name came up quite often when I was here. And the most surprising episode for me was the review by Cyril Mango in the Times Literary Supplement, TLS, of the collected papers of Kitzinger, edited by Eugene Kleinbauer, when a devastatingly hostile review came out in, I guess, the eighties, which was both unfair and, I thought, mean-minded but embarrassingly often correct, in that he had seen the problematic in some of the philosophical thoughts of Kitzinger. And so I think that that publication probably did shift perceptions of the importance of Kitzinger in art historical work and began to undermine his theoretical interest. But when I did read Kitzinger, he seemed to be the most generous of that generation in sharing ideas. Whereas Weitzmann would tell you what he thought, Kitzinger would ask you what you thought and it seemed to me that partly lay in his different career, because when he left Germany he had to write his Ph.D. thesis in three months. When he left Germany, he left of his own will and came to London without any employment and he made his living by writing reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, for which he was paid, and that was enough to keep him going. And he wrote his book on the collection of the British Museum. And, he explained, that's how he survived. And when war broke out he was sent to Australia, and on the boat to Australia he learned Russian, spent his time learning Russian. When he arrived in Australia, a telegram came from Dumbarton Oaks, inviting him to Dumbarton Oaks, so he then went from Australia to Dumbarton Oaks, where he then remained until just before I came. And he invited Cyril Mango to Dumbarton Oaks, having read Cyril's thesis on the Brazen House. So when he arrived, Kitzinger said, "You're fully untrained in art history; you should go on some courses." Cyril resented this, and it began a kind of mission against art historians who were trained but impractical. And he always quoted Kitzinger being in his house in Dumbarton Oaks, unable to work out how to use a hedge trimmer and somehow this became Cyril's metaphor for the incompetence of art historians. And they were obviously completely conceptually ill-matched for each other, and Cyril, when I talked about this review, said, basically said, "I wanted to put on paper why art historians are so bad at doing Byzantine studies." Kitzinger, I tried to—they were both at Oxford—I tried to invite them to meet each other and they both told me they would never be in the same room as each other again. So their feelings were very strong, and recently in the Getty I read the Kitzinger archive and the letters he wrote at this time – [pause to change AV tape]
RC: I want just to finish this important episode, I think, in, really, in intellectual history. I read the archive of Ernst Kitzinger, which is complete in boxes at the Getty and the correspondence that he received after the review—he wrote to various people saying, what should he do about this review by Cyril Mango—and the few replies he got all said the same, which is what advice I would have given too: don't do anything. Don't write a letter, complaining, because if you do, it will give Cyril Mango the chance to write yet another devastating comment. Unfortunately, Ernst did not take the advice he was given, wrote a letter, and got an even more unpleasant follow-up letter from Cyril Mango. As I said, I think that it was written in an unpleasant way. Intellectually, I think it's a very important critique and it's something that – you now can't look at Kitzinger's attempts to explain stylistic evolution without taking the caveats of Cyril into account. But what you see is one man who had no interest in theory, Cyril Mango, I would say, and one who had enormous interest in theory and was always struggling to find new theory. So that is important. And I did talk to Cyril about theory, because I wrote a book, Writing in Gold, in the mid-eighties, which was a complete change of approach for me from positivistic art history into theoretical art history—the main impetus was Michel Foucault's work. And I asked Cyril, since he could have gone to Foucault's lectures in Paris and could have read the works, what the influence of Foucault was on him and he simply said, "I don't have time to read books like that." As just one final footnote on my personal career, I do think that the change and the move into theory in Byzantine art history and other subjects has been a really exciting thing. For me, because I was trained in Classics and came to Byzantium—from the ancient world to the modern—my theoretical frameworks have always come from Classics. And Foucault and post-structuralism permeated Classics in the early eighties, and that's where I came from. And I've always found that there's a difference of mentality between those who come into Byzantium from the Classics—those who find it at the end, as it were, of the sequence—and those who come in from the modern, looking back, and find it rather at the beginning of the sequence. And I think there is a healthy disconnection between approaches of people from where they've come at the subject.
MM: Alright, thank you very much. This is the point we'll move to fieldwork questions.
RR: Hello. Thank you, again. My name is Rona Razon. I'm here on behalf of the Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives. First let's talk about Ernest Hawkins. So, specifically, when did you meet him and what was your relationship with Hawkins?
RC: Okay. I think it's well stated by Steven Runciman in his autobiography that people who went to Istanbul in the fifties and sixties – they all seemed to have an introduction to Ernest Hawkins. They somehow managed to find him somewhere, and he would take them around the city. Ernest Hawkins also lived in London in the winter. And I met – I was introduced to Ernest Hawkins by Hugo Buchthal in the winter of 1963-1964 in London. He explained that—have I got the years correct?—he explained that he would be putting up a scaffold in St. Sophia in the summer and that I would be welcome to go, but actually as a student I didn't have the funding to go. But as far as I can see, every other Byzantinist went and went up the scaffolding to see the apse Virgin. And when Ernest came back in the winter he did explain to me what had happened. The only person who didn't go was Ernst Kitzinger. And the scheme of that work—they had permission to put up a scaffolding in the apse because Ernest always felt that the Whittemore job in the 1930s had been inadequate and that the dispute about the date of the virgin could be solved with a reexamination. And the plan was for Cyril Mango and Ernest Hawkins to look at the archaeology and for Kitzinger to write on the iconography of the virgin. It was well known that Ernst Kitzinger had vertigo and had never been up a scaffolding in Sicily, so that all his work in Sicily was done from photographs. They constructed a very special scaffolding for St. Sophia, which was—apparently it was just like a staircase, a covered staircase from the gallery. And it was constructed so that Ernst wouldn't even know he'd done anything to go up a staircase into an area. Even so, it was a step further than Ernst took and so the iconography was never published. But Kurt Weitzmann, for example, went up the scaffolding and informed Ernest that the mosaic was definitely fourteenth century, and Ernest was very pleased that when he went down the scaffolding he agreed it was ninth century, and that was one of Ernest's triumphs in his view. To me, the archaeology and the subsequent report by Cyril Mango and Ernest is absolutely convincing that the mosaic as we see it is the mosaic uncovered by—inaugurated by Photius in Lent, 867. And I think it's slightly unfortunate that Dumbarton Oaks, later on, even published an article by Nicolas Oikonomides, incompetently, from the archaeological point of view, attacking this view. And I was a lot less angry than Ernest Hawkins was, though. And he was hopping mad about the publication by Oikonomides. And I think it hasn't helped the subject for it to be published in such a prestigious journal, such an ill thought-out contribution to the subject, but there you are, that's a bit of my prejudice, but I'm reporting Ernest Hawkins' very strong feelings that the question was solved by the archaeology and that work was done for Dumbarton Oaks.
RR: So did you meet him before your fellowship, or...?
RC: Yes, so I met him in the winter 1963-4 and I subsequently was in Greece for a year, for my research in 1965, and then went to Istanbul and visited the monuments he was working on. So, at that time he was not doing much on Sophia, he was working on Fethiye Djami, work was being finished on Fethiye Djami, and he was working the Kariye Djami, and what was important to learn from Ernest was his methodology, because what was utterly striking about Ernest, since he was trained as a sculptor and not as a Byzantinist, and went to Istanbul in 1938 as part of Whittemore's team to conserve—so he always looked at Byzantium with a sculptor's and a painter's eye and the question he always asked in building was, "What did it look like before the artist began work? What were the problems that the artist faced when he worked, and how did he solve them?" And that was his systematic method. And the outcome of that was, he revolutionized the description of how mosaics were made. He worked out that the current view, which you'll see expressed by Underwood and Kitzinger and many others before Ernest changed it, was that mosaics were made in the studio with a cartoon, carried down to the church and fixed on. He showed how that was completely impossible, because the effects of light position and curvature were taken into account and this meant that the mosaics could only have been made in situ. And that gradually shifted the way that Underwood and Kitzinger wrote. That also came out in the important article by Underwood in the Dumbarton Oaks Papers on the Nicaea mosaics. That was a paper completely initiated by Ernest, because Ernst Kitzinger, in his paper on art between Justinian and iconoclasm, had argued a nonsensical analysis that the Nicaea mosaics – Ernest went through with Underwood how you should actually read the evidence of sutures and how the work was done and that – nobody's ever doubted that we understand the secrets of work in Nicaea, as published in Dumbarton Oaks, a very important paper.
RR: Well let's go back a little bit, to when he started in Hagia Sophia, in 1938. When we talked before, you mentioned that he was recruited by Thomas Whittemore. So, what were the challenges that he encountered with Whittemore and other fieldworkers at that time?
RC: Well the work had begun earlier. Apparently, Whittemore, when he needed more workers, would go during the recession in England and advertise and pick people up. Alwyn Green was one of the other people that were picked up, who did the work of the facsimiles; I think, in Dumbarton Oaks, they're done by Alwyn Green. And I think that they worked together but they were highly temperamental artists and they disagreed with each other and Ernest Hawkins had a sneaking admiration for Whittemore, although he was a class of diplomatic American completely outside his experience. And he had a sneaking admiration because, of course, Whittemore did delegate everything—not only the work but even the writing, the so-called, the preliminary reports; the work on Hagia Sophia, published under the name of Whittemore, are attributed by Ernest and others to Anatole Frolow, who wrote them in Paris and they were not written by Whittemore at all. And so there were obviously tensions, but he gave them work and Ernest never went back to being an artist, except, in his later years he went back to life drawing classes, but he never – it ended his belief that he was going to be an important British sculptor. He changed into a conservator and Byzantinist, so Whittemore changed his life and he was very happy with that change, though his wife was never very happy, because she just wanted him to live in London and be a sculptor. She was never comfortable with his nomadic life between Cyprus, Istanbul, and Chios. So I think that he was a critical part of the team. He claims that it was he that persuaded Whittemore to start work in the Kariye Djami, because Whittemore only had permission from Ataturk to work in Hagia Sophia. So I think Ernest must have been quite a nuisance, even, to Whittemore, but that's kind of – they got along with each other.
RR: Was he close to any other fieldworkers in Hagia Sophia?
RC: Alwyn Green was the person he was closest to and he corresponded with Alwyn Green right up to – so, he was still writing in the nineties – so, up to both their deaths, they were in close contact. And when I asked questions about the thirties, I used to write to Alwyn Green to ask if he could remember things which Ernest couldn't remember.
RR: Let's talk about your relationship with Ernest when you started working with him at Hagia Sophia, between '72 and '73, is that correct?
RC: Yes.
RR: So when you started, here in Dumbarton, you also started working with Ernest Hawkins?
RC: We discussed what possibly I could do. It was agreed in Dumbarton Oaks that we could go there. The problem – so I worked with Ernest, and although previously when I'd seen Ernest he was officially working for Dumbarton Oaks, everything was organized so that there were problems in the Fethiye Djami in that when he asked the Turkish laborers to rebuild a wall, they would rebuild it in Ottoman style and not in Byzantine style and they had to take it down again and rebuild it. The problems with my work were quite different and so you have to contextualize this, that going to work in Hagia Sophia in the summer of 1973 meant we could not mention the word "Dumbarton Oaks." We were given permission to work and used Underwood's material, which I'd read, but in Istanbul we went to the director of Hagia Sophia and asked permission to look at the icons in the southwest rooms. We knew—Ernest knew—that the icons that were removed from Turkish immigrants in 1917 were stored in those rooms and that if we said that we were going to look at those, we'd actually confess what our plan really was. So I'm afraid it was a bit underhand. The director agreed we could work in the southwest rooms for two weeks and that we would be supervised by Şinasi Bey, who was an assistant, and that all our time would have to be with Şinasi as the commissar. We were perfectly happy with that except that Şinasi had a drink problem and tended to arrive late in the morning—we arrived at six in the morning and waited for him to arrive, any time between six and ten. And we also had to take him out to lunch. So Şinasi was both an essential part of our work but also made it slightly more difficult. We went into the southwest rooms, knowing that what we wanted to do was understand the sequence of the mosaics, describe them, and to clarify exactly what had happened to that part of St. Sophia, which was an addition to the building – of the original Justinian building. It was part of the picture of the palace. Şinasi was slightly surprised when we put up a scaffolding up to the height of the mosaics, but we said this was necessary to photograph the icons from the scaffolding—and of course we didn't actually look at the icons at all in the two weeks. But, we just managed, working fast, to take enough photographs and to look in detail at everything in those rooms and we both felt at the end of that time that we had solved the secrets of the work in those rooms. And that we published and we felt that publication was archaeologically accurate and I don't think it's been challenged since; that was good. We hoped in that time to do work in the southwest buttress. The chapel had been photographed, and Ernest thought it eleventh century. Şinasi was unable to find the key and we never got into the southwest buttress. I've been in it another time, but I never got in that time, so that work we didn't do.
RR: And this project was financed by Dumbarton Oaks, correct?
RC: I think it was financed by us. I may have got my fares to Istanbul, but we stayed in the apartment.
RR: The Dumbarton Oaks apartment?
RC: The Dumbarton Oaks apartment. So in that sense it was financed, but any costs I think we probably covered ourselves.
RR: What were the challenges working with – between Hawkins and Underwood. What did Hawkins think of Underwood?
RC: Okay. Yes. Can I just say two other things I didn't say and then come back to that, because that leads on to Kariye Djami.
RR: Sure.
RC: Subsequent to that work, in either the next year or the year after, having established a relationship with the director, we went out and we put scaffolding up in front of the Deësis mosaic, and we did about seven days on the Deësis mosaic, which we weren't quite comfortable about results – we thought we dated it – we weren't quite comfortable and so we kind of always published that in dribs and drabs. We've never done a full publication of our reasons for that. And we also – I have to say I can't remember when this happened, but I spent a month with Ernest in St. Sophia when the bronze doors of the vestibule were brought back. And maybe you know what year that was but I can't remember what year that was, but I do remember the quite extraordinary circumstance that the bronze doors had been taken down, left out in the atrium, the front of St. Sophia, had been robbed by thieves – enough of the bronze had been stolen that to – this has never really been confessed, but there were then conservationists from Rome—Madame Borrelli—did a remake of the lost bits of the bronze doors. And then – and I think they may even have been taken to Italy, but I don't know how that was done. Then, the doors had to be put back. And Ernest and I were there, because nobody knew how to get the doors back. They'd been taken off so many years before, even the floor had been filled in and there were no workers. And it seems, judging from the photographs here in the Archive, that the only workers we could find were an aged Armenian team, and they may have been the ones that took it down – took the doors down. And it was quite extraordinary having six aged Armenian laborers putting up these massively heavy doors. And we had to dig out a hole to put the base in. We had to put them up. And we worked at night, because we tried working during the daytime but there was no – people had to come through those doors. And Ernest used to get extremely angry, because instead of going into St. Sophia they would stop and watch us digging up a hole. And I remember Ernest saying, "You've come to see the greatest monument that man has ever put up and all you're doing is watching us digging a hole. Go away." So we worked at night, which – maybe sometimes slept – Ernest had a stove and two camp beds up in one of the rooms of the gallery of St. Sophia and I feel very fortunate to have been at night in St. Sophia, because it takes people a long time to appreciate the size and scale of St. Sophia, but you sure appreciate much quicker if you're there in the dark. So I did work with Ernest on the Deësis and on putting up those doors and obviously he was regarded by St. Sophia as an American worker from Dumbarton Oaks, but a person in his own right, as well. He played the ambiguity of his position to allow us to work there.
RR: Because when you worked with this door project, it was a secret project, right?
RC: Yes.
RR: And it was financed by –?
RC: It was financed by FIAT. For St. Sophia, though, obviously the monograms and so on are published in Dumbarton Oaks papers, so not only did I do the work in the dark, I can see my memories of it are rather obscure as well.
RR: Why was it a secret project?
RC: Because it was being covered up, that there had been damage done to the doors. And I don't know why they were ever taken off. I think the whole episode is obscure to me.
RR: Well, Hawkins – I believe you said before that Hawkins thought of Kitzinger and Underwood as armchair scholars?
RC: Yes. I've tried to write up something about Ernest's relationship in the recent publication of the Kariye Djami, under an article called "The Talented Mr. Hawkins," where I do try and portray him as a kind of extreme British 1930s artist, up against very professional American academics, and I tried to portray the views that Ernest had of Dumbarton Oaks, which were really, in the event, unjustified, but which he certainly felt very strongly. He felt that the fieldwork program – that he did, unrecognized, a great deal of work, that Underwood spent insufficient time in the field to be able to write the kind of report that Ernest would have preferred, and so there certainly was a tension between Ernest's work in the field and those people who came from the States.
RR: So, Hawkins also worked in Cyprus with Peter Megaw. First, I'm just curious: why, because Megaw's name is Arthur Hubert Stanley – so why Peter?
RC: I don't know. Everybody called him Peter, always. That was what you called him. I mean, Megaw was trained, I think, as an architect in England, or at least professionally trained. But he went out to the British School at Athens in around 1935, '36, and he wrote a phenomenally important article called "Some Notes on Some Little Byzantine Churches," which actually solved the chronology of most little Byzantine churches in a wonderfully understated way. This was a period at the British School when I knew many people who went there – it was kind of a Boy Scout era at the British School, where they literally wore shorts and tramped all over Greece and looked at monuments. And Megaw must have tramped to all these buildings he talked about; he must have been extremely energetic. And he—and this is the important contact with me—he began to look at the drawings of the British architects for the school made in the 1880s and 1890s, particularly on Thessaloniki, and his project was to publish a corpus of the monuments of Thessaloniki. And this I learned later on. But Megaw, in I think 1936, was appointed director of antiquities in Cyprus, as part of the British Civil Service. And he clearly did a fantastic job in giving, really, very good professional British attitudes, using them inside but without being colonial, so that the whole antiquities service in Cyprus, I think, owed a lot to his administration; he was a great administrator and that's where he worked with his Greek wife, Electra. And the problem with Electra was that for tax reasons, she couldn't – she had to be in Greece. And they both wanted to live in their house in Hampstead, but they only ever stayed there a month a year, for tax reasons. So, Megaw worked in Cyprus, and he worked with Ernest. Ernest started the project in Asinou with Peter Megaw – that was definitely a personal project of theirs. And they then recommended Dumbarton Oaks take it over. Megaw had to leave his post in Cyprus because of political changes and he became director of the British School at Athens in about 1964, which was lucky for me because that's when I went out as a research student to Greece, so he was the director there. And without that I had a problem, because I was living in Thessaloniki and that caused administrative problems in Greece because I was the first supported Greek government scholar who had not been in Athens and it was conditioned that you had to register as a student in Thessaloniki but they had no way you could register as a foreign student. And the Dean of Arts, faculty, Linos Polites, a wonderful Byzantinist, tried the whole year to get me registered but I failed to do that. And then, when I came to Athens to work in the British School library, I was told I wasn't allowed to work in it because their rules were: you had to live in Athens and not Thessaloniki to work in the library, so Peter somehow got me. So that was my contact and I think it must have been this time that Ernest and Peter recorded the work on Zeyrek Djami, on Pantokrator, which was a Dumbarton Oaks project but which they did together. So they were a kind of team, it seems to me, that came into Dumbarton Oaks. And obviously they published Kanakaria. The working was a team with each other on Cyprus—I'm never quite clear what the relation with Dumbarton Oaks was for Kanakaria. And I'm not sure what relation with Kiti, which has never been published and I'm not sure where the manuscript of that is.
RR: So, what year was this when Hawkins and Peter Megaw were together in Cyprus?
RC: In the sixties. I don't, I mean – Pantokrator is, the work is – I think one probably can work all that out from preliminary reports in D.O.P. And I'm not sure, not quite clear. And maybe not clear because Ernest probably wasn't. Ernest was completely hopeless in terms of secretarial organization and he kept getting things wrong, sending a card to the wrong places, so he would never be sure who he was working for, whether he was working for Peter or for himself or whatever. So that makes perfect sense that I'm not very clear, since I can see it partly through Ernest's eyes. I mean, basically I met Ernest and he showed me the various works they were doing in the sixties. I worked with him in the seventies. In the late seventies and eighties we traveled together because he wanted to have seen every Byzantine mosaic, so we went to Sicily, for example. We went to Poreč. So I traveled a lot with him and when he died he gave me all his papers and all his slides, and his slides are in the Courtauld and are being digitized; and the papers I still have and, although I've always wanted a student to work on them, there isn't very much new in his papers that isn't published so they're not of great value, but in the end a home needs to be found for Ernest's papers. He did not want his slides to be – he didn't give them to Dumbarton Oaks because he was not allowed to photograph on Dumbarton Oaks scaffolding; that was only official photographers who were allowed to. And he was extremely angry that he had to take all his own photographs surreptitiously and unofficially. So he didn't feel they should go to Dumbarton Oaks, since they had been – his work had been officially, kind of, banned.
RR: How was it traveling with him? How was that? How was he, as a person?
RC: Ernest was appallingly energetic, very fidgety, apparently required no sleep whatever; and so he was not an easy person to travel with. Even on our visit to Sicily, on which I learned a lot, because the great issue between Demus and Kitzinger is: what's original, and what is not? And we just spent a lot of time with binoculars, trying to find out a methodology of how you decide, in Monreale, what's original and what's not. And his methodology was: if you can see a part which looks absolutely 12th century, then you look for the sutures and outside the suture it will probably be later. But I think there still remains a difficulty of how much re-working has been done in Monreale—probably rather a lot. But that's what we worked on. But meanwhile, walking through the street, because he had his bag snatched and his binoculars snatched and so he wasn't a, kind of, easy person to travel with, except that intellectually he's very exciting to be with.
RR: You mentioned before that he was forced to retire from Dumbarton Oaks—is that correct? Can you tell us about that?
RC: That's how he put it. And I guess he was probably 70, but he could not see how any professional rules would apply to him, basically. And he certainly had so much – you could do anything in Istanbul under the name of Ernest Hawkins. He thought that Dumbarton Oaks, by giving up the fieldwork program and by not using him, was really wasting resources that had been so important.
RR: You mentioned a while ago that he thought that Thomas Whittemore's work was inadequate in the 1930s. How so? How?
RC: His word would be, a bit highfalutin. I mean, he did not think it was down to earth, practical, careful enough. And it's true. If you go through those enormously long descriptions of the mosaics – real flowery language and not very accurate. So, it looks – he felt that it's a façade: it looks like a highly careful piece of work but actually it's all a bit of a façade. And it wasn't quite as careful. And that's why redoing the apse mosaic was, for him, an absolutely major, important reworking of inadequately done work, he thought.
RR: You mentioned a while ago that you traveled with Hans Belting. Can you talk a little bit about Hans Belting and where you traveled with him? What was your relationship with him?
RC: Yes, alright. I met Hans Belting in Dumbarton Oaks and very much enjoyed traveling around places in the States, but that – we went, for example, to see the Cleveland marbles and the tapestry in Cleveland where Alice-Mary Talbot's husband was the curator at the time and took us in on a closed day and we spent a whole day with them. And obviously we were very interested in the question of whether the Cleveland marbles were fakes, which was a big issue in the seventies, to some extent still is, and what you could say about the tapestry. So we, on the whole, looked at works of art together. I think an interesting case of more separation from Hans Belting was over Fethiye Djami. When Cyril decided to publish the Fethiye Djami, he decided that he would do the history; Hans would do the style and would do the iconography. And Hans applied for scaffolding but that was refused because he applied through the name of Dumbarton Oaks, so that was inevitably refused. Ernest was very angry and said, "If you'd asked through Ernest, it would've gone up." And then Hans wrote his piece and subsequent to that, Ernest and I went back to Fethiye to analyze Hans' work and we both came to the conclusion that he'd gone seriously wrong in Fethiye. And I published a critique of that in an article, which actually came out in Greek, so not many people may have read it. Basically, Ernest and I looked at the mosaics and came to the conclusion that they were all done by one artist, whereas I think Belting had dozens of workshops in a church, you know, which you could hardly get two people into. So we criticized the notion of a series of three or four workshops, we criticized the notion of developing style. In particular, we criticized the notion that some parts of the mosaic had a mixture of fresco technique and mosaic technique and that this was a positive method of the artist, which could be picked up in Kiev and other places. The reason for that particular fact in Fethiye is because those mosaics are in very dark places where no light came and you can see that the artist has economized on materials where you could never see the mosaic. So we thought that – this is very much an Ernest Hawkins and in that case positivist Cormack view against the extraordinary formalist, abstract views of Belting. So, in that sense, I've always enjoyed being with Belting but I've always, kind of, disapproved of his formalist work. And when he was writing his big book on lightness, we talked on the telephone and he compared it with Writing in Gold, which he said was very trendy and he said his book was very traditional—and it's actually true; although people think Belting is trendy, he's incredibly traditional and working absolutely in the parameters of Otto Demus, as a stylistic – he's a stylistic formalist, I think, in many ways; does it very elegantly, in very, very difficult German.
RR: So, when did you meet him exactly?
RC: I met him at Dumbarton Oaks, when I came.
RR: So, seventies?
RC: Yeah.
RR: Let's go back to Cyril Mango. What was your relationship with him, besides – we know your relationship with him as an advisor. Did you work with any projects with him at all?
RC: No. Just, when he was in London he was working on Neophytos and—that's the hermitage in Cyprus—and we talked quite a lot about it, but he'd already done the work with Ernest. So, basically my relation was that he was my Ph.D. advisor and we met on infrequent, irregular occasions and talked about issues, and when I sent in written work, he was not the kind of supervisor that sent it back with any comments, except references you'd missed. I think I missed a reference on this about the iconography ascension in Ukrainian in 1892. And I would say, "Send me this one," on a postcard. I'd discovered that this reference was only available at Dumbarton Oaks. And I'm afraid I've never followed it up—so be it. So, the benefit of talking to Cyril Mango is his extraordinary clear mind, his ability to talk through a subject on his terms, giving the pros and the cons—very positivist, and this is the claim he makes in his critique of Kitzinger, that he's a naïve positivist, I think he calls himself. But he is extremely good at balancing facts, one against the other, and coming to a pragmatic conclusion. In the years that I was at Dumbarton Oaks, he was writing his book on Byzantine architecture and he appeared to write that between ten o'clock and midnight, regularly. I mean, he had his day completely organized, what was done, but between ten and midnight, he would be in Dumbarton Oaks, typing his manuscript and thinking it through and quite often, at lunchtimes here he might talk about what he was going to talk about, so putting his ideas together. And that book is an extremely careful, analytical balancing of facts with, of course, a subtext of extreme polemics against Krautheimer's work on Byzantine architecture, so it's a book with a purpose, because he particularly disapproved of the theoretical framework of Krautheimer, which he thought was inherited by Tom Matthews, and is polemic against functional architecture – it's extremely strong in that book. But that was – so I always found Cyril extremely good at just sitting down and giving you an opinion very well thought, usually ungenerous toward any critique but carefully thought through. And that has remained Cyril's strength. His extremely articulate and careful description of a city, particularly of Constantinople, where he grew up, was discovered by Ernest Hawkins when he was a schoolboy, fourteen. Ernest, actually, as far as I know, brought Cyril into the orbit of Byzantine studies by treating him—as me and others—to "please come and look at this. What do you think?" And so, Ernest, I believe, was as much a teacher of Cyril as he was of me.
RR: Do you still correspond with him today?
RC: With Cyril?
RR: Mhm.
RC: Not much. Cyril has felt that those who moved into theory have always taken a wrong turn. And he – we asked him to do the history for the Byzantium exhibition, which I was the curator for, at the Royal Academy, and he willingly did that but he did not so willingly come to the exhibition. He came to the opening, I think; I doubt he came again. So he's – Cyril is now somewhat of a recluse in the countryside outside Oxford. I last saw him at a really good day on Sinai, on the manuscripts at St. Catherine's on Sinai, which he chaired. He was a good chairman, but actually slightly misinformed on some of the literature, but he is – Cyril has never deviated in his methodology ever. And he's always used his own talents to the maximum ability. He drew his own ground plans for the architecture book, he takes his own photographs. He's an extremely practical person and an extremely precise scholar with an extremely good knowledge of Greek, but in some ways slightly too good, so that the book which most people use of Cyril Mango's, Sources and Documents, which he put together very quickly and had just done before I came to Dumbarton Oaks – he himself said it was a great pity that the Greek text could not be reproduced side by side with the English translations, and I have found, using his translations, that very often they're not translations, they're paraphrases. And I think his facility with Greek meant he sometimes didn't use a dictionary, when somebody who was less able might have realized there was a difference between Medieval Greek and Classical Greek. And he's made a number of mistranslations. But usually it's not mistranslation so much as paraphrases. And I think that book, in particular—it's so important in the subject—you should never use those passages without checking the Greek, and I'm sure Cyril would say exactly the same.
RR: You talked about how you became interested in Byzantine and Classical studies. So, why Thessaloniki in particular?
RC: Really because Grabar's book gives the materials from Thessaloniki and because it was rather clear to me that people had totally underestimated the materials in Thessaloniki. And I wasn't the only person that thought this. So when I arrived in Thessaloniki and went to Hagia Sophia, which was going to be the center of my thesis, I met two other research students who'd come to the same conclusion: Jean Spieser, who was also there to work on St. Sophia, and a German scholar who was also to work on St. Sophia. We kind of divided up the territory, and so the German scholar then worked on St. Irene in Constantinople, instead of St. Sophia, and Jean-Michel Spieser worked on St. Demetrios; and I worked on St. Sophia. So it became slightly awkward, a few years later, when I came across the W.S. George drawings of St. Demetrios, because it kind of wasn't my territory; I'd ceded St. Demetrios to Spieser. But I did publish that. So, it was striking when I went to spend a year in Thessaloniki how nobody ever visited the place—very few people there. Unlike my contemporary, Julian Gardner, who was in Rome, who was networking every single day of his life in the British School at Rome, in Thessaloniki I became the local guide for visiting British government ministers who had to go to Thessaloniki. And also there was a British Council office there so I went there but I was required to go to lectures in the university—even though I couldn't get registered—and I soon opted out of those. They were given by Stylianos Pelekanides, and they were a translation into Greek of Grabar's L'iconoclasme byzantin, which, good book though it was, I reckoned I didn't need to go to a rather long series of lectures which were no more than translation. And Pelekanides was a rather odd art historian; I did meet Chatzidakes and Xyngopoulos. I met them, had appointments to meet Xyngopoulos in Thessaloniki and these were very impressive scholars and I was very lucky to meet them. But it was absolutely clear that the monuments of Thessaloniki were not well known and that when you read people who talked about them, they hadn't been to the monuments; they used the old plans of Letourneau and Diehl or in the nineteenth century. So I was—I think it was a good place to go: I was able to get to Mt. Athos from there, I traveled to Cappadocia from there, which was very around-the-bend. But I got to know very well the monuments of north Greece and I still feel that people don't know them as well as they should—really a fantastically exciting place to be.
RR: And currently, your research interest is in the cultural history of the Monastery of St. Catherine at Sinai, is that correct?
RC: Yes. I first went to St. Catherine's in 1971 with a small group, which in retrospect was quite amusing. It was organized by Hugo Buchthal to see the manuscripts. And I went with Beat Brenk, Hans Belting, Hans L'Orange, Bezalel Narkiss, and me. And I went for a month to the monastery, which at that time was in Israel. And you fly to the Santa Catarina airstrip. The only obligation was to take food for a month with you. And so I spent a month in the monastery then and saw a lot of material. And over the years I've been back more and more frequently, and I've been fortunate enough to be inside most of the parts of the monastery, including the storerooms. And I – what I want to talk about in my book is not the art history, because the art history of Sinai is not going to be published for another 50 years, there's so much, but the feeling that you get in Sinai of: why do people want to live at the end of the world? So it's a kind of cultural history of the solitary – and partly how Sinai can both be the most exciting cultural center and also the most remote, so that's the paradox at the center of the book. But, simply trying to write down those bits of work I've done, but obviously one by one the icons, the manuscripts, and all the other objects and the architecture will be published by art historians, but that's going to take a long time.
RR: Is there anything else that you would like to add that I haven't asked you?
RC: Yeah. What I wanted to do in my first job was work in Russian and I learned Russian. And there was endless money in the sixties and seventies to work in Russia, basically as a spy. And since my boss was actually Blunt, all this was quite interesting, although when I first was going to Moscow I went to Anthony to ask if he'd got any advice on visiting Russia and he said, "I only visited Russia once, with Ellis Waterhouse, in the 1930s and it was a dreadful place and I never wanted to go back," which in retrospect, since he emerged as a spy for the Russians, was an interesting comment. I thought that visiting Novgorod, Pskov, other places for which I got visas in the Soviet Union, was immensely exciting. I was able to go to Georgia, to Armenia. I had money to go anywhere. But at that time the rules of access for foreign scholars were extremely strict so in the Lenin library in Moscow you could order a manuscript but you were not allowed to write notes or have a microfilm or take photographs. So I felt that the obstacles for working in Russia were too difficult, and actually I shifted into working in Turkey, at Aphrodisias, so I became the medieval consultant for Kenan Erim at Aphrodisias; we did publications of Aphrodisias. And then, I moved back into Greece and –
RR: So, around what year was this when you went to Russia?
RC: I went to Russia in every year from 1968—except the years in Dumbarton Oaks—for the next ten years. I saw – you know, I got quite an expertise in Russian material, but just felt the hazards. And what I would say for any person now is that there remains opportunity in Russia, and there's immense opportunities in the New York Public Library; the Slavonic holdings are unbelievably rich. I only discovered these about five years ago, when I was taken around, because Trotsky worked in the New York Public Library and in the twenties invited the librarians to purchase libraries and materials – quite unbelievable, the richness of the material in New York, including photographs of all the Russian monasteries as they were in the nineteenth century with the pieces which in 1917 were removed from them in situ. So, one thing I shall never do but think should be done is to work out the sources, the inventories, where things were in the nineteenth-century Russia, which are now in museums. So I regret not having worked in Russia, but there's so much to do in Byzantine studies – I mean it's just, it's still the fastest growing subject in art history, in my view.
RR: What are your future projects or lectures, besides the research project that you're doing now?
RC: Well I've just recently finished an article to be published in a conference on the Anglican cathedral at Khartoum, because I've been able to go to Sudan. And that article is about how the work of George and Weir Schultz in the late nineteenth century in Greece influenced their later work and in particular influenced the design of the new twentieth-century building in Khartoum, how it relates actually to St. Demetrios; the model is St. Demetrios. And how Demetrios is reinterpreted as primitive Christianity in Sudan. So I think that's one of the things I've published. And I'm also working on a book on Classicism, which is about continuity and discontinuities, but somehow that's got subsumed to Sinai, which is at the center of what I'm doing.
RR: Do you have any advice to future scholars, Byzantinists out there?
RC: We had a conference—and I'm sure Margaret Mullett was present at this in London—where we lined up every generation of Byzantinists, from Steven Runciman in his nineties—were you one of them, Margaret?
MM: I chaired it.
RC: You chaired it – where people were asked what the priority was and the younger you got, the less you thought Greek was a priority, it transpired. I think that the problem for Byzantinists is always going to remain languages. You can't but admire people like Cyril and Ihor, who already had about ten languages by the age of sixteen and learned a few more, but learning languages is absolutely essential in this subject; you've got to go on doing it. You have never learned enough, and languages do get easier. They get more difficult as you get older, but easier as you learn more, so my advice certainly is that in this subject you must use languages, you've got, somehow or other, to have a familiarity with Latin and Greek, but that wonderful things are written in nineteenth-century Tzarist Russian. They're not easy to read, but their nineteenth-century material is good. My own program is that what an art historian has to do is to be interdisciplinary and to balance empirical knowledge of the objects, the material objects, with methodologies and ways of looking at it; and that the challenge of art history, but particularly Byzantine art history, is how to balance theory and object-led art history. And, you know, I think some people have done it better than others, but it's the challenge for everybody.
RR: Well let's go back to the Byzantine Institute. If we could talk about Nicholas Kluge and his work –
RC: Yes, I mean, Ernest must have had some contact with Kluge, but basically Kluge was a photographer for the Russian Institute and also recorded in St. Demetrios and in Nicaea. And Kluge's work is basically held by Alicia Bank in the Hermitage—I think that's who it went to—and she gave a print of his records of Kiti to Ernest, which Ernest gave to me, in his will. So, Kluge's work is—and all the work done by the Russian Institute—is extremely important. Kluge was a recorder for them. I thought that his work was not as good as the work of W.S. George, when you could compare them. And it's slightly more colorful and less accurate, but it's quite atmospheric. Beyond that, Ernest certainly talked about the Russians: Karadakov, who went to Prague; Frolow and Kluge went to Paris. But they were an older generation, even than Ernest. So I know their importance but I know nothing about them personally.
RR: Did he mention anything about Kluge's death? Because I read in one of Hawkins' notebooks, where he states he was hospitalized all of a sudden, and then a few months later he dies, I believe in 1947. Do you know anything about that?
RC: No, no I know nothing about that. No. I mean, it does remind you: one of Ernest's complaints about fieldwork in Istanbul was that the – he wasn't allowed to photograph. The photographers came out and took photographs and then went back to Dumbarton Oaks, and they never knew what photographs were taken or whether they'd come out. I mean, you know, in Dumbarton Oaks they did, but Ernest actually didn't know what records had been taken – it was a kind of ignorance on the ground.
RR: Well, if you want to, Günder and Shalimar, do you have any more questions?
GV: Since you started to talk about Hawkins, may I ask a question about him?
RC: Yeah.
GV: You mentioned previously that it was possible to do any work under Ernest Hawkins, because he had built relationships with the Turkish authorities. And his relationship with Dumbarton Oaks was very clear. How was that possible? How did he manage to be in good contacts with Turkish authorities even after the Sion Treasure problem?
RC: Because he was a complete individual in his own right, extremely attractive person. He wined and dined everybody that mattered. He was, socially, extraordinarily expert and likable, so I think people just liked Ernest. His Turkish was bizarre in the extreme, as all his foreign languages were, but everybody kind of worked out the sort of thing he was saying without knowing exactly what he was saying. And so it was just immense good will and also the belief in Istanbul that he'd done a very good job and that he was the right expert. And he had made it quite clear that his expertise were different from Italian restorers, who would take mosaics off and redo them, so he had managed to sell his particular brand of scholarship and expertise—rightly—and that was how it worked.
GV: My second question is regarding Aphrodisias. How did you get involved with the project? Was it through Kenan Erim, or –?
RC: Yes. What's odd about Aphrodisias – when it started, with National Geographic money, it was the quickest dig that there ever was in Turkey, I suspect – I mean, they used bulldozers to get rid of the mosque and the Turkish village to get down to the Classical area – got rid of it very, very quickly. And also he wanted results for funding, because funding had to be done every year, with the result that—I guess the date would be about 1962—by the '80s, all that material had been got but nobody had studied it. Kenan didn't find it easy to get on with other scholars, but there was – a lot of expertise came from the UK, so Joyce Reynolds worked on the inscriptions, and then she trained Mary Beard and Charlotte Roueche to work on inscriptions. Mary decided that wasn't the direction she wanted to go, so Charlotte took those over. Michael Hendy came from England to work on coins. So, when Kenan thought that somebody ought to look at the medieval finds, it wasn't surprising that he asked advice from Joyce Reynolds and found somebody in the UK, so he asked me if I would look at the materials. It was a pretty severe shock to see the condition of the materials in Aphrodisias, because, while it's true that Kenan had kept the objects, as soon as he discovered that something was medieval, he stopped excavating it, so looking at medieval meant looking at churches, which had been abandoned as soon as it was discovered they were churches. Also, the medieval materials were not well recorded in the notebooks. Only ancient sculptures were recorded. And he had made the terrible mistake of – all the photography was done in Polaroids. So by the time I came, the Polaroids were faded, the notebooks were thin, and the labels on the objects had been eaten by mice. So, one was actually starting from first beginnings. That was possible in the temple, though actually the temple wasn't completely excavated. But tri-conch church was something that I worked on and I published a really important fragment of a sixth-century angel, Michael, which I put together, which I published but which has subsequently disappeared, I believe due to a fire in the storerooms. So, actually I had immense respect for Kenan Erim's ability to find things and his ability to reconstruct broken sculpture, which is a wonderful expertise. But as a social place to go, Aphrodisias was pretty hateful and no one was happy there. I happened to overlap with Martha Joukowsky, who was working on the prehistoric materials and Martha, who's a millionaire, used to order beer for us but it went into the kitchens and we were not allowed to go into the kitchens so she'd spent all this money on beer, which we were not allowed to go and get a beer during the hot afternoons; and it was very weird to work on a site with a treasure-hunting archaeologist, as he fully realized. And the annual visits, which I was at, between Hanfmann from Sardis—we went to Sardis and they came to us—you couldn't see two more different kinds of excavations. But all of us had a kind of sneaking admiration that Kenan Erim had got the funding for Aphrodisias – and the finds are just phenomenal. You know, it's a wonderful site to have worked on and I think that currently, through the work of Bert Smith and NYU and the digitizing of all the notebooks, that it's a much better place to work now. It's a very good site. But you had to have been there.
RR: You had briefly talked about Robert Van Nice a while ago. Would you like to add anything—more information about him? How was your relationship with him?
RC: Bob Van Nice would – any question you asked him, he would open his notebooks, his photographs, and he would submerge you in material. And you got the feeling that Bob Van Nice was submerged in a mass of material – graffiti, whatever it was, he had recorded it and he always said that he had a mortgage out on St. Sophia – if it went up for sale, he should have the first option on it. And, seeing him working in the building and seeing the accuracy of his methodology, it was very, very impressive. I mean, I think that is an absolute model, that book, for any architectural record—it's beautiful.
RR: Did you collaborate with him with any projects at all, small or large?
RC: No, I mean, I asked him questions about things. But he was a model thinker. Really, I think. I mean he just had too much material. He never got out from beneath it, it seemed to me.
RR: Did he have any help at all, or was he just working by himself?
RC: His family used to help him. I think he did have help, but basically –
RR: His family?
RC: I think his family did a bit. But basically he was a one-man band, definitely.
RR: His family helped him with his projects?
RC: I think his daughter – didn't his daughter used to go out to Istanbul? I don't remember this clearly at all, but that was – he was doing a project, but it was a one-man project. That's what academic studies were like until quite recently. People – you know, research was what you could do, yourself, not what you could do with a group. And except for archaeologists, who learned to work in teams, I think others didn't. Archaeologists were brilliant at working in teams.
RR: How about David?
RC: Yes. David Winfield's career is really important, I think. He, as he put it – he had a disastrous student career in Oxford, and the one thing they told him was he wasn't going to be an academic. And he left Oxford. I don't know why he got interested in wall painting— but he went to Yugoslavia, as it then was, and he was trained on Sopočani by Serbian restorers. And he was then discovered by David Talbot Rice, who'd got permission to work on St. Sophia at Trebizond and needed somebody to do the work and hired David to do the work. So David went out, and again we've got the position of the academic in the UK and the worker in the field, thinking he's carrying all the work. David took photographs, which were printed up, he said, locally in Trebizond, and would sell them to Talbot Rice, who thought – completely misunderstood them because they were so badly printed up. They were much better than that and then, the publication of Trebizond – he used these badly printed-up Turkish Trebizond photos, which is why the plates in the book are absolutely dreadful. The problem – problematic at Trebizond is what exactly the dating is and Winfield and Talbot Rice thought it dated to the 1260s. And the funny thing is it looks awfully like Sopočani and there's an awful lot of repainting there. And I asked David about the wall, and I said, "There's repainting there, isn't there?" and he said, "Look, I didn't do it. I think some of the Turkish assistants did it." But how did Turkish assistants manage to work in the style of Sopočani, I've always found slightly baffling. And so certainly what they found at Trebizond was extremely disappointing from the point of view that it was a funded project, which didn't look too good. And I think it was a bit enhanced, somehow. And obviously David has been attacked. He, at the same time, worked for Michael Gough on Eski Gumus, on the rock-cut church at Eski Gumus, and restored those works for the British Institute at Ankara. And of course there's a lot of repainting in Eski Gumus, as well. And it means that a number of people have criticized David Winfield's work at Asinou and Lagoudera, saying that there is repainting on it. I do not know the truth; I know that David says there's not repainting in those churches. But his early reputation has somehow clouded – what may be gossip or what may be accurate, I don't know. The important thing, it seemed to me, because I visited David at Lagoudera, is his cooperation with June Winfield, his wife. They worked extremely well together and she's more of an artist than him. And in some ways, he's followed the Ernest Hawkins principle of trying to work out exactly, from first principles, how the monument was painted. And that led to his article in Dumbarton Oaks Papers on methods, which is, I mean, exactly an Ernest Hawkins methodology. And Ernest read that article and approved of most of the things that are said – it says a lot of very good things. But David has always been kind of self-consciously anti-academic. And the feature of his writing, which is usually a bit verbose – but it's also aggressively simple – so, in his work on Georgia – he did important work in Akhtala, on Georgian buildings; when he reported those, he always described churches as being either square or rectangular or oblong or cross-shape. This was kind of anti-Krautheimer, to over-simplify things. So there's a kind of faux naïveté in Winfield that is perhaps, I think, intentional. But his work is exactly in the tradition of Ernest. They knew each other; they both worked together on Asinou to start with. And it's exactly the same principles of seeing how the artist worked on the spot and June then did a lot of reproduction—drawings and copies; and in Asinou she did a lot of copies of the frescos. And so he's a real hands-on, not angry anti-academic but just anti-academic, really. But not angry in the way that Ernest was. And after Lagoudera was finished, then David returned to England, where he surprisingly became a restorer-advisor for the National Trust, which is the state—I'm not sure if it's state or private, whether it's English Heritage or National Trust—anyway, a very official body for English country houses. David took a lot of very good photographs, of which the negatives for a number are in the Courtauld Institute in London, but I believe that his negatives and the photographs he took to the Hebridean island where he lives were lost in a fire. So I believe that it's very important to pick up on the copies that David had made both, I think, for Dumbarton Oaks and for the Courtauld, because I think the negatives don't exist anymore.
RR: Well thank you very much for your time and for sharing your story with us. Thank you.]]>