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ABF: I'm Anna Bonnell-Freidin and I have the pleasure of interviewing at Pembroke College, Oxford, emeritus professor – emeritus Calouste Gulbenkian Professor of Armenian Studies – Robert Thomson on August 1, 2009. So, let me begin by asking you about your first impressions at Dumbarton Oaks in 1960–61 when you became a Junior Fellow.
RWT: Well, that was my introduction to the United States and a very interesting year it was. My first impression – well, I hope that a fuller picture will emerge as we go along. The year was very influential for me. It certainly focused my career in Armenia much more than I had been focused on Armenia before, and in fact it led indirectly to a position at Harvard, where I was the first Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies, and then of course I went back twenty-odd years later as Director. I think I'm the first Director, perhaps still the only Director who was actually a Junior Fellow there and that, of course, actually colored my views of the institution as such when I went back later. Anyway, let's begin at the beginning. Now in those days the young, unmarried – well not necessarily young – the unmarried persons normally resided in the Fellows Building, which is no longer used for that purpose. Those who were married were given an apartment, usually up on Wisconsin Avenue. There were about half a dozen of us living in the building at the time, and we were treated very nicely. We were given full board, except on Sunday nights we had to go out and find our own dinners. And we had the advantage, of course, of visitors coming who were staying just for a few days and that way we met quite a lot of interesting scholars who came and went. The Fellows, the resident staff – there were a good number, half a dozen or more, I can remember many of them now – the resident staff came in for lunch every day, at least every weekday, one or two others would appear at the weekends occasionally, so we really got to know them pretty well, and there was a good deal of give and take and so forth. What's his name, Ernst Kitzinger, was the Director of Studies then in the Byzantine field and the Byzantine field was very much stronger relative to the other fields of studies in those days, so I really didn't come across the people who were interested in Pre-Columbian Studies or Landscape Architecture at that time; it wasn't really yet a fully fledged program like it was later.
ABF: So, did it feel like a Byzantine –?
RWT: It felt very much like a Byzantine institution, and the building was used pretty much entirely for the Byzantine program. The Junior Fellows, of which I was one, had a large desk up in the main room overlooking the front, which was acres of space; it was very spacious. Later on it became very much too crowded. Gradually the Byzantine program became more famous, more people applied, things got more crowded and, of course, that led to various expansions of the physical building. It was a pretty relaxed place. It was quite enjoyable socially. There were the, of course, the concerts, a regular feature, for which one had to dress up. We had to wear dinner jackets, and Junior Fellows had to sit in the back row, but that's wasn't a hardship. The Blisses were still alive and around. I didn't see very much of Mr. Bliss, though once a year towards the end of the year they gave a big lunch party in their house; they lived a few blocks away. Mrs. Bliss was there much more frequently in the garden, usually, but they had a room at the end of the Orangery, I mean at the end that looks over the Orangery, which was called the Founders Room, and that was where they went. Now, these famous teas that were mentioned – I don't remember it. There was tea served every day, but that's not what you had in mind. There were these special occasions. I don't really remember those. What I remember was that after the gardens had closed, then we were allowed – there was cheese served, and we went out into the Orangery. What should I say? Amongst the staff there, there were particular – the person who was the most influential in my personal career was Sirarpie Der Nersessian, a famous Armenian scholar, Armenian Byzantinist art historian. I had come to finish writing a thesis that I was doing for Cambridge University which was on Syriac and Armenian versions of the Greek, some of the Greek works of St. Athanasios of Alexandria, so I worked away at that, but Sirarpie Der Nersessian, knowing my interest in Armenia, got me working on other various non-related Armenian themes, which in the long run led me to concentrate on Armenian. The others, the other Senior Fellows, we met from time to time. Some of them were a bit more gregarious, as is natural in any group, some of them were more gregarious than others. Ihor Ševčenko, for example, always used to come out in the evenings with the Junior Fellows after the concerts, and we would go down and have a beer in one of the pubs down in Georgetown. Romilly Jenkins, who had arrived that year, wasn't living in the building, but he always appeared, and we went for long walks on Sunday morning in the better weather. So, one did get to know people, but I would say most of my social life, by good chance, was without, was with people outside Dumbarton Oaks. Now, you won't know the building of course, the old Fellows Building, but downstairs, and you went in the front door, you went straight into a very large sitting room, probably as big as this room we're sitting in now, and on the right was the dining room and the kitchen beyond. Now, there was a very old radio or some such there, and we told Ernst Kitzinger that we, the Fellows, needed – the Junior Fellows needed something a bit more up to date, and we got a good stereo system. I went out and I bought some extra-long wires, so we were able to use this stereo system in the lounge, put the wires under the carpets into the dining room where we could have dancing in the evenings. Now, I met in my earlier travels in Turkey, I met someone, I met several people at the British embassy, and he happened to be posted to Washington when I was there with his family. Now he had young children at the time, and he had an au pair girl, a Danish girl, and through her I met a large number of people my own age, and so we had a number of very pleasant evenings in the Fellows Building.
ABF: And you were about twenty-six years old?
RWT: Let me see, well, sixty years. That was a very good guess on your part, exactly. I'd spent a lot of time before going there, I must admit, after I finished my undergraduate degree in Classics. I wanted to go to Greece, and I applied for a traveling scholarship, and I couldn't get the traveling scholarship. It was given to someone who'd been to Greece before, which I thought was a bit unfair – never mind. It was much more influential, I was offered a chance to go to a Greek college in Istanbul, which was then flourishing, later, of course, the Turks closed it.
ABF: Was this the Halki?
RWT: Halki, yes, Halki Theological College. It's not just theology. They had a large number of orthodox who weren't necessarily Greek from all over the world, and many of the students did not intend to become priests or anything, but a number of them did. Anyway, I spent a year and there was able to travel very extensively in Turkey, going to the east. And I returned several summers later, I mean consecutively for several summers. I went to Trebizond and helped with the cleaning of the frescoes there at Saint Sophia in Trebizond, for example. I happened to know Talbot Rice because I lived in Edinburgh and he was professor of art at Edinburgh, so I got to know him, and also other people who, including Michael Gough, who later became the director of the British School there, in Ankara in Turkey.
ABF: Did you have any contact with Paul Underwood when you were there?
RWT: No. I knew Paul Underwood later on, when I became a Junior Fellow. I did have some contact with the Byzantine people who were working there, but that was rather by the way. I wasn't at all involved with it, but by good chance I did meet one young chap who was involved at Hagia Sophia, a young Russian, I've forgotten his name now, and he was able to me get up right onto the roof. And we got into Hagia Sophia, right up to the top, 'round that terrifying passageway under the dome, out onto the roof. I was young at the time. I've been up on the top of Hagia Sophia – very impressive place. So, I got sort of – I didn't know much about Byzantium before going there – so it got me greatly interested, and of course in the eastern part of the country I was introduced to the Armenian patriarch and various other people, so that sort of sets a scene. Later, when I was back in Cambridge, I was encouraged to study Armenian. I got my first lessons in Vienna, on my way back to Istanbul a couple of years later, so all this was, what should I say, not distracting, it was all very interesting but it meant that my years after being an undergraduate extended a little bit more than the usual three. So, when I got to Dumbarton Oaks, Sirarpie Der Nersessian knew of my interests in Armenian, but of course, I had already been studying it. I started in 1958 in Vienna, I took lessons with the lecturer in Armenian in London, there was already one position in this country then, and so I was able to work with the texts reasonably well. I also polished up a few other skills – well polished, not up, but polished a few other skills while I was at Dumbarton Oaks. Irfan Shahîd, whom you may have met, was there, and he, I believe he wasn't married then, so he wasn't living in the building, but he spent a lot of time there. He helped me with my Arabic, because I assisted him reading Syriac texts, so that helped. Anyway, I finished my basic work for the thesis and just had to put the finishing touches on when I went back to Cambridge. That would have been in the summer of '61, and so Sirarpie Der Nersessian encouraged me to go, to take a trip up to Harvard. I obviously was looking for possibilities of further research or perhaps an appointment or something in the field with my background of Classics, Syriac, and Armenian, and totally unbeknownst to me, there had been, for the last two or three years, an effort at Harvard to establish a position in Armenian Studies, basically founded and funded by an organization of the Armenian community there. Now, I didn't know anything about that.
ABF: The Armenian community in Cambridge?
RWT: In Cambridge and the larger Boston area, yes. So, they had already appointed a junior, a junior position, someone by the name of Avedis Sanjian, who later went to UCLA as a professor there. Now, when I went up to Harvard, it was a very interesting three or four days. I had some friends there from Cambridge and I should also explain that the director of studies that I'd had as a doctoral student was Robert Casey, and American Harvard product of the 1920s who died during the time that I was a graduate student, and he died in 1958. So, when I – he had many acquaintances, of course, and old friends back at Harvard – so when I went to Harvard I sort of followed these up, and met a large number of interesting people, and what was interesting was, since I didn't know anything about this Armenian position, first of all, I went to the Classics Department, and then, the then chairman of Classics Department said "Oh, this is all very interesting, but I don't know that we can help you. On the other hand, don't worry, you can get a good living teaching Latin and Greek in one of the good schools around here and you can continue your interests in Armenian on the side." That wasn't quite what I was looking for. Then I saw Robert Walsh in history. I went to the Middle East Center and I saw all sorts of other people, including Richard Frye, who is still alive, and he put me onto the Near Eastern Languages Department, and I went 'round there and I discovered that they were quite interested in Armenian, and at first the chairman thought I wanted to study Armenian. Well, I mean I wasn't averse to that, but then he realized that I was about to get my doctorate, so he said, "It would be interesting if you could do some post-graduate study with Professor Garitte in the University of Louvain, Belgium." They tried to get Garitte to come to Harvard and he wasn't having any of it, nor did Sirarpie Der Nersessian want to take up a position there. In fact, all of the senior people that they'd approached turned it down, so they packed me off and that was very nice. So, I had a year in Louvain, where I got a licence in doing the three Christian Oriental languages, Armenian, Arabic, now I was going to offer Syriac. But the man in charge of Syriac, whom I met before, was an old friend of my deceased supervisor. He said, "No, don't be silly, you've already done Syriac. You must do Georgian." So, I did, you had to offer three languages, so I offered those three, which was quite influential. And then I was – at the end of that – I was offered an instructorship back at Harvard, so there was a year's gap, but I got married then, and Judith and I came over to Harvard in '63. So, my time at Dumbarton Oaks was very productive, especially in guiding my interests into Armenian and, of course, making this connection with Harvard. So, I was appointed for a three-year instructorship. Well, somehow it dragged out to thirty – well, never mind!
ABF: So, can you tell me a bit more about how your intellectual relationship with people like Sirarpie Der Nersessian and Ernst Kitzinger influenced your growth in those years after first coming to Dumbarton Oaks?
RWT: Well, obviously, at that stage, pretty much a neophyte in Armenian, Sirarpie was very helpful – guided me. I mean, she wasn't a teacher in any way, but she guided me in various directions which one has to use one's own, what should I say, one's own mind. Ernst Kitzinger was, I mean, he didn't have any direct impact. He wasn't interested in the topic that I was doing for my thesis. In fact, some of the topics I discussed with visitors like André Grabar, who was visiting, and there were things that arose out of this particular text that I had, this very curious collection of Syriac translations that he was helpful with. And various other people that one talked about this or that problem, so Ernst was very supportive, and of course, later on, he was a great friend of ours in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after he'd retired, not retired, after he'd left Dumbarton Oaks. I met a number of people later, Milton Anastos for example. I met him in UCLA on a couple of occasions – still it's hard to say how they directly influenced one at the time, but they were all very encouraging and gave one all sorts of thoughts and ideas. Milton Anastos was a bit memorable because he had a Greek diary, or, not exactly a diary, it was a collection of funny stories, one for each day, which he got while he was in Greece, and he insisted at lunchtime reading us all the funny story of the day. Some of them were really not very funny. I remember groaning when he got up to tell us this funny story of the day. Now, I remember you asked or mentioned earlier the question of my relationship with the Director. Now that really didn't – there wasn't any. I don't remember him at all except what he looked like. I must have gone to a reception in his house, he lived in the house that we later lived in, but there was really no contact at all. The contact I had was with the people in the Byzantine program.
ABF: You have perceived, you must, when becoming Director later on, the way that the institutional character changed based on the directorship. So, I was interested if you had any impressions of the Director at the time when you first arrived in 1960?
RWT: Well, of course, I never met Jack Thacher again because by the time that I became a Senior Fellow he had died, and I didn't know his successor Bill Tyler until I went there in the '80s and he, Tyler, also had retired. I didn't see him very often, just two or three times socially. He was a bit reclusive, but we managed to persuade him to come have lunch with us one day, so the directorship was very different, I think, from what it was, at least in my immediate time, and probably in Giles's. Because Thacher was very much involved with the running of all these projects that Dumbarton Oaks had in Turkey, in Istanbul, in Cyprus, and elsewhere, so I got the impression. And that, of course, didn't affect me in my work at all. So, he was, he was doing things that I, as a Junior Fellow, never came across.
ABF: Because other people have talked about the fact that Thacher had a relationship with Mrs. Bliss, for example, and they were from the same social world.
RWT: Exactly. And he – it was Thacher who sort of ran the place from the beginning, and it was Mrs. Bliss who – and Mr. Bliss but especially Mrs. Bliss, a very strong-willed woman – who pretty much indicated what she wanted him doing.
ABF: My impression from listening and reading some of the interviews was that, whereas some of the later Directors such as yourself were very much primarily interested in being scholars, he once even told one professor at the institute, to a Junior, I guess, Fellow, he said "I am not a scholar," at one point, implying that perhaps –
RWT: Well, I think that he was certainly very well aware and informed of what was going on, indeed. But he wasn't involved in scholarship in the way that the people like Milton Anastos and Kitzinger and Cyril Mango and Ševčenko, and all those others, Glanville Downey, all these other people, not at all. So, that's, from my own personal point of view, they're pretty much blank.
ABF: So, let's move on to your years as a Senior Fellow after you'd been at Harvard.
RWT: Yes. I'd been at Harvard. I didn't really – I went to one or two of the annual symposia, early in the '60s – but I really didn't have much contact with Dumbarton Oaks for a long time. By chance, the last time I was in Trebizond with my wife, we happened to meet Giles Constable in a restaurant, and he thought that Judith and I were just going around in our usual fashion, taking the buses. We were going into the Soviet Union afterward and all the way up to Georgia, but we were at Trebizond. And he, Giles, and his wife had a car and chauffeur, so they very kindly took us along. He asked me to be his interpreter, not that my Turkish was brilliant, but I certainly had spent a long time in the country and was able to get around. And so we were able to go visit a number of Armenian sites, like Ani on the border and so on. And he went off, and we went on into the Soviet Union. So, he must have been aware of my interest in that part of the world and in the '70s, I presume, when he became Director, he thought of me as a possible Senior Fellow in that area. Anyway, I don't know who did it, but he was the director when I was appointed one of the Senior Fellows in, what was it, '78 or something like that, can't remember exactly. I remember, do you know Alice-Mary?
ABF: Yeah.
RWT: Alice-Mary Talbot. Well, we, she was a Senior Fellow at the same time, and her period, she only served about three years or something at the time, and I remember saying goodbye to her at National Airport even before I became the Director, thinking that was probably the last time we would ever meet. And it was kind of amusing to see her back at Dumbarton Oaks later on. So, there were several interesting collections of people, and we would meet twice a year, sometimes more often if there was something really urgent. Our main task, of course, was the selection of Fellows, junior and senior, from all the applications, so we would spend a weekend at the beginning of the year in January interviewing the junior ones and discussing the senior ones; that was interesting. Then we had to share discussions about projects that were going on and any other serious academic business because there was not a Director of Byzantine Studies. The great change came, I don't know whether you're going to interview Giles Constable –
ABF: We are, definitely.
RWT: The great change came with him from Bill Tyler, who took – continued the Thacher tradition, and having then someone there to run the Byzantine program. I think Bill Loerke was for a while, but I'm not sure about that – before my time. Then, there was quite a revolution, if that's the right word, because the Director was appointed from Harvard, an academic, and, in fact, Giles and then myself acted as the sort of chairman of the Senior Fellows in Byzantine Studies. I don't think you could have called us directors, not me certainly, Director of Studies, but simply we coordinated the efforts of the Byzantine program, the Fellows and the publications and all that.
ABF: What did you think of this new institutional arrangement?
RWT: Well, it seemed to me very sensible, not having of course – I didn't experience what it was like – whether Jack Thacher, in those days, needed any outside committee, I have no idea. I don't know – he had a whole bunch of people. How these senior people all got on together is a more tricky question. I don't really know. Of course, I had plenty of friends of my own I had to amuse myself with and wasn't involved with any of the problems of the institution.
ABF: How did you perceive the change between when you were there as a Junior Fellow and then as a Senior Fellow, some eighteen years later?
RWT: Yes, it must have been about eighteen years later.
ABF: Yes, sixteen, '79.
RWT: I don't know that I noticed particularly any great difference.
ABF: Well, the Blisses were gone.
RWT: No, the Blisses were gone, right. But really, they had not influenced the life of the Junior Fellows all that much. They were sort of talking points. They were no longer around. The Junior Fellows and the Byzantine Senior Fellows – the Byzantine Fellows would come and go just as they had done in my time. I thought that life for them was pretty much the same as it had been for me, so I didn't, from that point of view, notice any sort of difference. But it was apparent when I took over in '84 that there were still some dedicated but very long-serving staff there and that there had been quite dramatic changes from their point of view when an academic came in and also had to organize the place both financially and in other respects much more in conformity with the way universities are run. Not that the university interfered, but we didn't have control of our own funds, as perhaps you know. The Blisses' moneys became part of the Harvard endowment, and they – of course, it was like having a certain number of shares, if you like, in the funds. We had our budget, over which we had control, but thank goodness, I wasn't in charge of trying to invest or whatever the actual funds did. We just operated with a large budget that was done through the Harvard Financial Office.
ABF: So, when you became Director, what was it like to take over from Giles Constable, who had been something of a controversial figure?
RWT: Well, I think he was controversial because he'd had to introduce these changes. I mean, they were – he wasn't the ultimate boss. The ultimate boss was the president, and in those days – I think there's been a big change now – but in those days one reported directly to the president, there was no intermediary. My relationships with Derek Bok were very good, he left us pretty much alone, I must say. The only times I was ever worried was when he said, "Now, Robert, are you sure that you wouldn't like a little help?" And I always dreaded that and I thought, "No thank you! No thank you very much!"
ABF: What did he mean by that?
RWT: Well, I was never quite sure. Whether he meant that a little bit more direction from Harvard would be required I don't know. Anyway, nothing ever came of it, but he was supportive of the things we wanted to do and helpful if I had problems. The only thing that slightly worried me was that he did want to use Dumbarton Oaks as a place where he could meet people in the government. How much – my wife thinks I'm a paranoid about that. I didn't like – except on a social level, we had good relationships with a number of people in Washington, we'll come to that later – but I didn't like that. Now, so far as following on from Giles is concerned, I didn't notice any difficulty, because that was the system I was used to. I wasn't immediately aware that many of the staff had been disrupted or things had changed and they didn't like them, and so I must say, I felt my first year or two was very much a time to just be quiet and let things settle down and not do anything too dramatic and try to be as unobtrusive as possible. I don't know, I mean, I'm not the one to judge what it was like to be there when I was the Director, but I certainly was aware of that.
ABF: But did you feel that things had been unsettled when you came in?
RWT: No. I mean, the programs were running properly. No. I mean, one shouldn't exaggerate that. It's simply that I was aware that some of the staff who had been there a long time felt that changes had been made, changes which basically I certainly approved of, in the way of accountability, that was apparently one of the most extraordinary things about the way the budget was presented. Giles used to say, and then I can't speak to this except what I remember him saying that the budget used to consist of three lines, but I think that was an exaggeration. But there was much more accountability required, just as there is at a university these days. So, I'd been chairman of my department before going to Dumbarton Oaks for quite a long time, and Derek Bok and Rosovsky, Henry Rosovsky, the dean at the time, they had introduced a much more rigorous way of doing business. I suppose as you grow up you don't think about it, but if you live through a change like that some people do notice and regret it, as it were. No, I didn't have any serious problem with that. I didn't want to change the way things were run particularly much, no. But there's always a problem, and one has to be a bit tactful here because if you come in to run an institution and you aren't going to be there permanently – it's different if you're going to be permanent, I said to Derek Bok that I would to take it for five years, and I did; I didn't stay on. I mean, you can't just hire and fire everybody, especially at university, and sometimes people are not exactly the kind of person that you would want in that job if you were ultimately in charge of the whole proceedings, in other words, there were some very good people at Dumbarton Oaks, excellent, and there were some people that were very efficient but whose attitude toward life didn't exactly conform with mine and whose way of treating staff – that's some cheeky business – who treated the staff in a very offhand fashion. I don't mean the academic staff, there were a large number of people just running the place. There are about ninety or so on that list, I don't know whether they still produce a list of all the staff, do they, these days? We used to produce a card every year.
ABF: Yeah, I've seen them.
RWT: With all the staff. Now, of course, out of the ninety, about twenty, twenty-five, thirty might be academic in some way or another, but a lot of people are just keeping the place going, and they have to be happy, and so that was a problem. And it requires a certain amount of what I call emotional energy to deal with those problems.
ABF: Speaking of keeping people happy, what was your perception of the relationship and relative parity or lack of parity between the three programs?
RWT: What was my perception of it? Well, it's very interesting in different ways; it's quite clear though that Byzantine Studies had started with a big bang and had flourished. In fact, Dumbarton Oaks in that regard had made a great difference to the discipline the world over, the vast numbers of people from every country who wanted to come and be a Fellow are just a small indication of that. The Pre-Columbian program, in a much more modest fashion, was doing the same. It started later; they had that wonderful museum and collection, and that has probably attracted more visitors than the Byzantine museum as such. I don't know about scholars. Landscape Architecture was a bit more diffuse. It had been, of course, an interest of Mrs. Bliss's, hence those three subjects, so diverse. Nobody these days sitting down would think, "Oh, what a wonderful idea, let's have a research institution with these three subjects." It's a historic development. It didn't bother me. I sometimes wondered whether the people in the other programs were sort of jealous of the relative funding. If so, they never made it apparent, or they never said so overtly. There was never, on anybody's part, an effort to say, "Look, we've got three programs, we need to divide the kitty up exactly into three." No, no, no. No such suggestion, and I found it very interesting, especially the social side of it, there were significant differences between the Fellows, the Junior Fellows who came to do Pre-Columbian Studies, their backgrounds their interests, et cetera, were very different from those who were doing Byzantine Studies or Landscape Architecture, which was also very international. So, it was an intriguing thing, but it didn't bother me, and I hope that the people in the other programs thought that they were reasonable treated.
ABF: Did you, were you involved in changing any policies for the allocation of funding?
RWT: There wasn't much change, no. In my five years as director, we didn't make any significant difference there, no, not at all. Now, as I was involved in the programs, each of the three programs had its little committee of Senior Fellows, and the smaller programs, interestingly enough, had their Director of Studies, Elizabeth Boone for the Pre-Columbian and Elisabeth MacDougall for the Landscape Architecture, and when she retired John Hunt came. Now, they had in their small group of Senior Fellows, some of whom were very interesting. Some were in Washington – I met a number of people that way – and some of them came from further afield, so I was always a member of that group. Now, I don't think my name would appear on the card, but I went to the meetings of the Senior Fellows and joined in the discussion and so on. So, it was my job to try and mediate any difficulties that might arise. So, it is quite possible that, since space, for example, was limited, we couldn't have all the Fellows who wanted to come, junior or older, that we would have to have a little bit of give and take about how many we're going to have this year. I'd read all the applications in all the fields – that was quite interesting. I didn't get too much involved in the publications outside the Byzantine area, relying more on – that's very much a technical expertise, but I didn't myself, don't remember that being a difficult aspect of the job, no.
ABF: So, you had a relationship with people like Elizabeth Boone and Gordon McEwan and John Dixon Hunt?
RWT: John Dixon Hunt, yes, he was a Senior Fellow in that program, and then he took over for Elisabeth MacDougall. Yes, these were all colleagues and friends, yes.
ABF: So, can you tell me a little bit more about the relationship between Dumbarton Oaks and Harvard at that point, because you mention sort of in passing that you felt that Bok was trying to use –
RWT: No, well, don't say that he was – oh, I see, he was trying to use – yes, he was pretty standoffish about it, but he did, on occasion, want to have events at Dumbarton Oaks, which were to do with his relationship with various government bodies. A lot of funding comes to universities from the government, and so maybe I shouldn't have made too much of that. The relationship with Harvard in my time was remarkably easy. I would go up twice a year for a discussion about what was happening, I would present a report, of course. The budget had to go through the financial office, but I don't remember any problems about it. The lawyer for the president was occasionally involved in one or two things and he was very helpful. So, they had a small committee of advisers, the president, the dean, and somebody else I've forgotten, but I can't say that they really took much of a role. I think they thought the place was going along alright, and that was fine. The question that did arise was that of the library. That was an on-going thing which later directors had to deal with. It started – I can't remember exactly when it started. The problem of whether there should be an integrated catalog, which of course there is now, the union catalog, of all Harvard holdings and Dumbarton Oaks' included, like Villa I Tatti, I presume, and so on, and the Hellenic Center, and then, well, should all institutions have the books that they want or should the system only buy one or two books, the very expensive kinds. These were the sort of nitty gritty questions that the librarians would get all uptight about, but it's an interesting and serious problem. The costs of cataloging – for example, if Harvard doesn't use – does Harvard use the Library of Congress system or not? They certainly didn't in those days. These are sort of difficult problems and especially, I would say it falls into a category somewhat similar to the idea, Giles' idea, at least it came about in his time, that Dumbarton Oaks should sponsor university positions. Now, as you know, at Harvard there are three professorships that are partially funded by Dumbarton Oaks money. I don't know to what extent the system of junior positions in other universities, which are meant to be a kind of seed money to encourage that university, Johns Hopkins, The Catholic University, Georgetown University, and elsewhere. The idea was to encourage them to appoint somebody in Byzantine Studies on the understanding that that person would make good and be continued; that's always a bit of a risk – some worked out and some didn't. So, that was what you might called a diversion of Dumbarton Oaks money outside Dumbarton Oaks, that was always a rather tricky sort of question, different from a project which is a one-time thing: you go and restore the frescoes in such and such a church in Cyprus or what have you; but these were more ongoing things.
ABF: So, that brings me to another question that I hadn't thought of until this moment: Dumbarton Oaks had stopped funding excavations and projects in Turkey, for example. What was your opinion on that and that use of money?
RWT: Well, I mean, in the days when I was involved with the budget, the amount of money Dumbarton Oaks had was not all that great. You couldn't run down to the business men and say, "Well, we need an extra hundred thousand dollars." It certainly was a question of priorities. There was another point which was that permits for excavation were not always very easy to get, and there was a third point which is more of a psychological point, that not all of those projects had been published or published properly. That was a sore point with many people. They'd say we'd spent all this money and there's nothing very obvious to show for it, and that was a serious, I think, it was a serious problem, that people who had been supported to do projects, interesting, valuable, I'm not against that, did not come through and produce the reports and the final publications. That's why we had some trouble trying to persuade people that, people who shall be nameless, who had been ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty years behind them, sometimes they wanted money, sometimes they didn't, but it was very difficult – that I found a tiresome business.
ABF: So, was it for these reasons or is it something that should just be in the nature of the job to just take it for five years? What's your opinion on a term limit?
RWT: Oh, alright, just change the subject to that. Well, it's a very tricky question. It's a fairly small institution; it's run by the university. If the – let me start from the beginning. When Derek Bok first asked me – I was still at Harvard, I think I'd stopped being chairman, anyway, never mind – would I take on the job, I said, "Well, I'm interested in my academic work. I'm not sure. Maybe I'll do it for five years." I think five years came pretty much off the top of my head but it turns out to have been about right for me, I'll explain later. So, he said, "Well, you could always try it. I mean, you won't lose your position here. If you go down and you don't like it you can just come back." Now that of course is a kind of relationship that if you've had a permanent Director could not possibly work, because if for some reason or other the people at Harvard who are ultimately in charge and the Director did not get on then that Director would have to look for another job. Now for a man – oh I don't know how old a Director might be, but certainly Jan is reasonably young, and Jack Thacher of course was much older when he left – but shall we call him someone between the ages of about forty-five and sixty-five, it's not always very easy just to leave your job and find another one. I mean, even if you are a very respected scholar, not everybody is going to offer you a job, so I can see the advantages of that relationship and the reason why the president might not want to have somebody there too long. Now, I know the previous director, Ned Keenan, was there for ten years, which strikes me as quite a long time. So, what do I think about it? I don't know. It's a very tricky situation. I don't have any strong views. I think if it's going to be run as an academic institution there has to be a kind of lifeline for the Director, because I can imagine some people not enjoying it. On the other hand, see what happens if the chair does enjoy it? Some people do not, this hasn't happened to the Directors, but I'm just speaking in general of people I know in the universities here and at Harvard and elsewhere, who, after they've reached a certain age, have accomplished many of the academic things they've wanted to do, and are very interested in going into something more administrative. A fair amount of that goes on here at Oxford, and probably at Harvard, I don't know. So, I could easily imagine somebody who at the age I was – sort of middle of my life – went there, became very interested in Washington, one had an entree into all sorts of different fields – I'll come back to that later if you'd like – it could be very interesting and you might want to make a career out of it. But if you did, the people at Dumbarton Oaks might not be very happy with that. They might want you to concentrate more on what you're doing at home, I don't know, so I think there are pros and cons, and since I'm not in charge and I don't appoint the Directors I think that's as much as I can say.
ABF: So, why was five years right for you?
RWT: Well, I think if I'd stayed away longer I would have got further, even further away from my academic interests. I taught once a week, every Thursday afternoon I set aside, and I had classes in Armenian and sometimes in Georgian, and for any students who wanted to come, and I had them from Catholic University, from Georgetown, and elsewhere. And so that sort of kept me awake, that was good, and it led, in fact, to some interesting publications eventually.
ABF: Was it something that you missed? Teaching?
RWT: I like teaching, yes. I knew nobody else around there was going to do any teaching in Armenian, and once you got involved in the field you want other people to share it, so I enjoyed that and thought it was important. I suppose if you're in Byzantine Studies it's a much better known field. Armenian is very small and very few people know it, so I don't regret the five years. Of course, when I left I didn't know that I was going to be invited here. I mean, I always thought I would go back to Harvard, so for various personal reasons, if I had known – but who knows the future – if I had known that I would be offered this position here, I might have said, "Well, I'll stay seven years if that's alright with you. Then I'll go straight to Oxford." But of course you don't know the future. So, five years was fine.
ABF: So, your family came and lived with you in Dumbarton Oaks?
RWT: What do you mean came and lived with me? It was a family enterprise. We all moved there. Now, this was very important, and I don't understand why Ned Keenan moved out of the place, he has his own reasons if you ask him, but we lived right – it wasn't all that comfortable, it was fine for us – we lived there as a family and the boys had to share the attic. At least we had managed to get it air conditioned, can't live the whole year in Washington without some air conditioning in an attic.
ABF: You were in the Refectory?
RWT: Yes, they call it the Refectory now, I understand. It was quite a nice house. We did a lot of entertaining there, and with the garden in front, and of course the gardens. I felt that while I was living there, this was my institution. I would get up in the warmer weather very early, go out into the gardens before the gardeners – what, they arrived about six or seven – go for a swim, get to know everybody on the estate. I had to look after the estate. I'd go around regularly with the head gardener. I would be in charge of everything that was there, the music, the programs, the connections to people outside Dumbarton Oaks in Washington. It was like running your own little estate. I thought that was very enjoyable. I remember the very first party we gave at Christmas the first year, and we invited children, people's children, and we laid on various entertainments for them. One of the Junior Fellows came up – she was from Italy – and she said, "You know, we would never have a party like this in my country, where everybody from the Director to the doorman is all here." And I thought that was very sad. Whether I succeeded, I don't know, but that was the kind of place that I wanted to make it, and which made it enjoyable to sort of be right there and be involved with everything, get to know everyone.
ABF: How old were your children?
RWT: Jasper finished his high school, so he must have been fourteen, and his brother is three years younger, so he would have been eleven.
ABF: It must have been kind of magical to wake up and go out in these gardens. They probably didn't think that.
RWT: I don't know, you'll have to ask them. The elder boy still lives – he got bitten with the political bug while he was in Washington, as so often happens. In fact, he worked for a while on Capitol Hill and he still lives there. The other one is a free spirit, he's gone off to San Francisco. So anyway, it was a bit tricky, you haven't had children yet. When I first broached the subject to the children, that we were going to move from where we lived in Arlington, Massachusetts, right next to Cambridge, to Washington, Crispin, he didn't say very much, but Jasper said, "No, I'm not going. That's fine, you can go and I will stay here and I will live with my friends." And we said okay, and let's see, and he said no more about it. Then some months later, out of the blue, he said, "Father, when we go to Washington, will I be able to do this?" So, he'd obviously got around to it without too much prompting and he obviously had a good time, we found a very good school. The other one was a bit more difficult, I don't know. There are problems with having children, though. I'm afraid the local school is pretty terrible, so it's: can't send them to the local high school. It's not always easy to find the right school for the right child, that's the same anywhere, I guess, but it worked out very well.
ABF: Were there other families there with children, living on the property?
RWT: No, oh no, no. The head gardener, Don Smith, he had a little house down in the gardens. The Kazhdans lived – there was a house on the corner of S Street, at the end of S Street, there was a double house there – and the Kazhdans had one half of it and the other half, which is where Sirarpie Der Nersessian had lived when I was a Junior Fellow, was occupied by the assistant director, so they lived on property; there weren't any children though. I don't think that any of the other staff – we weren't that friendly, I mean that close to any of the other staff who might have had children, so their friends were all made through school or the boys' club. There's a good boys' club just down the road
ABF: Right, it's still there. The Boys' and Girls' Club.
RWT: It was called the Boys' Club then, I don't know whether they had girls, I don't remember. I remember Crispin breaking his leg there and just before we were going to have a big dinner party, and so Judith took him off to the hospital and I had to get Elizabeth Boone to stand in as the hostess for this big dinner party. She was a bit surprised, but it was very enjoyable and the staff there were very friendly, so it was, from that point of view, a very agreeable place. But also Washington was agreeable, it was a pretty dull place when I'd come there in 1960, well, I had a jolly good time, but that's by the way. By the time I went back, there were good relationships with the Hellenic Center, Zeph Stewart, a classicist, I don't know whether you ever met him before he died.
ABF: Harvard?
RWT: Yeah. He was very cooperative and we would, once a week, Fellows, some Fellows would come to lunch with us from over there and visa versa, so there was some give and take there. But the other institutions made, were involved in this sort of luncheon club, I don't know what else really to call it. Fairly regularly, Zeph Stewart and I and the directors of various institutions in Washington would meet for lunch and talk about things of common interest. Hank Millon, who ran the institute at the National Academy, was called the Research Institute, I've forgotten the exact name of it, where they had some program in the study of art. They had Fellows and visitors and things. They were very agreeable, so we had – and the people from the Smithsonian, in fact, the secretary of the Smithsonian, Adams, he was friendly, too, and some of the smallish institutions, the Library of Congress, I met Billington and the Boorstins were very friendly; they entertained us. And Billington, he was then in some Russian center, I've forgotten what, so I thought of other museums, too. I mean, Dumbarton Oaks counted as a museum, so when Mrs. Bush gave a big lunch for museum directors, I was included, which was the only time I've ever gone into the White House, actually, but one met all sorts of interesting people that way. I was invited to their opening shows, etc., so I went, and of course there are always connections one then made with people in government. So, I can imagine someone getting very involved in that and it's a very interesting life, but that's not really what I wanted to do with myself.
ABF: It sounds like a very interesting intellectual world.
RWT: Well, it could be, yes, absolutely it could be.
ABF: What about the symposia?
RWT: Well, they were a long fixed, established tradition. We had lots of them, we had the regular spring symposium, and all, in Byzantine Studies. Each of the programs had its annual symposium which was important for that program and the people in it. So, a very large number of people came to Pre-Columbian and so on. And we had a good number of smaller gatherings, some of them really quite small, and on occasion we would let a Harvard group or something, in which people I knew could come and have their own little gathering. For example, there was one on philosophy which someone in my own department was interested in, so Dumbarton Oaks was host, as it were, to quite a number of occasions, not just the annual symposia. When I was here, we had the great big international symposium for Byzantine, whatever you call it, that occurs every four, five years. It was in London recently, so that was very funny, especially towards the end of the Soviet Union.
ABF: Really?
RWT: So, anyway, never mind, because, I can't remember the names of all these people. Now, whether any of these were more valuable or more important that any of the others, I don't know. I can think of several that I attended, but I – and in which I also participated – but I think they are an important feature of life and we continued that. I wouldn't like to say that any one was better than any other, but I think that they were significant, and also these smaller gatherings.
ABF: Were there any papers that you delivered that were particularly interesting or memorable to you?
RWT: Did I give them? I don't remember giving a paper while I was Director, though I went to conferences outside Dumbarton Oaks, so I did continue with my work, so, no. When I was a Senior Fellow there was a big symposium on Syria and, it was called East of Byzantium: Syria and Armenia, and people like Marlia Mango and Tom Mathews, Nina Garsoian, myself, and others whom perhaps you don't know, published this work which is in the field of Armenian studies still to be quoted, still to be used. I presume that in other subjects the proceedings of the symposia, whether they were published as such or included in Dumbarton Oaks Papers, would play the same sort of role.
ABF: What about your relationship with Angeliki Laiou, because I know that you –
RWT: With Angeliki?
ABF: Yes.
RWT: I first met her soon after she became, soon after she came to Harvard. I don't remember exactly when the first time was, but there, before I went to Dumbarton Oaks, I'd been appointed Professor of Armenian, and as I've told you, the community played an important role in founding this position. The Gulbenkian Fund had given some money, but nothing like the relative amount they gave to Oxford, so I had important connections with the community at large, which most academics don't have. I mean, they don't have a constituency – the Ukrainians of course did, and they were very successful in raising a vast sum of money. Anyway, never mind. Now, at the beginning, I thought it would be a useful idea to have a kind of committee of Harvard people, partly, between us, partly for show, but partly to perhaps get some interesting ideas in a broader sphere, because my interests in Armenian are in the literature of the classical and medieval periods, but Armenian studies encompasses quite a broad area, including archaeology and art and linguistics and so on. So, I got together about four or five of my friends and for history I was a bit puzzled, but anyway, I asked Angeliki, and she said yes, and we had the chairman of the linguistics department, an old friend of mine, and a colleague in archaeology, basically we just had a few pleasant lunches together, but the plan was, and it did work up to a point, the point was to think of ways in which the Armenian program, in a broader sphere, could be fitted a) into the university – well it was part of the university – but how it could incubate things a bit better. So, that's when I first met her, but I can't say our relationship was particularly close. So, she was really just a Harvard colleague of which I had a large number, we weren't close friends or anything, and then when she took over I saw her once or twice, but not very often. So, I can't say that we were – I mean it was all very positive, but it wasn't very much. Why do you ask?
ABF: Oh, just because I was looking at your publications with DO and I saw that you published "The Crusaders through Armenian Eyes" in a volume.
RWT: Well, she published it with Roy Mottahedeh, and so they'd invited me and a whole host of other people to give papers. So, I gave a paper in it, that's right, sure. So, I went back and gave that paper, but as I said, it didn't really lead to any close relationship or anything like that.
ABF: She's somebody like you who's had a long history with the institution both scholarly and administratively.
RWT: I know when her appointment was announced and she came down for the day to talk to me and Judith about what went on and what was happening, she was concerned about the music. She said, "I don't know anything about the music." Well, I enjoyed that very much. I wasn't totally in charge. We had a woman who'd been at Dumbarton Oaks for a very very long time who would come up with the ideas but I would make suggestions and had to approve things and so on. I must say, I enjoyed that. One was able to make hints and I said that on occasions, well you know, looking through, we haven't had any Schumann in a long time, and then a month or so later we had an absolutely marvelous pianist who played the Symphonic Variations by Schumann. That's the sort of thing you can have input to, it's really very satisfying.
ABF: One more question about your directorship years. Since you were there through '89, and many people have talked about how Dumbarton Oaks had this European and also very East European feel.
RWT: East European feel?
ABF: At certain points. Ihor Ševčenko talked about it.
RWT: Well, there were lots of people there, I mean, from very early on, who came from Yugoslavia or Eastern Europe but that's not very Eastern, but still I wouldn't say this was anything very new. What did happen, of course, by '89, was that once the restrictions –
ABF: That was going to be my question.
RWT: Ah, now, you see, what happened then was that the possibility of people coming became so much greater and the pool of applicants, people who wanted to come, was enormous. So, I mean, the Bulgarians are very strong in Byzantine Studies, not to say that people from Russia too and the Ukraine and everywhere. So, that creates a problem, simply because you have an even larger pool of good people and you can't take them all – now that just has to be handled as best you can. I don't know that these days any special consideration would be given. It was pretty difficult up until then to find people coming as Junior Fellows. You did get some from Yugoslavia. I'd have to look at the list; I don't really remember how many Fellows or visitors we had from Eastern Europe. We had people from Poland, I remember, from Moscow, Leningrad. I don't particularly remember. On one occasion we hosted a visitor, a Russian museum director, Piotrovski, from the Hermitage, and various other people from Moscow. I was slightly amused; I laid out a little reception in the Orangery and I insisted that we serve them wine from the Russian River, you know, in California? You know that part of the world?
ABF: I'm from California.
RWT: Oh, you know it well. Good. Well, it's a very interesting part of the world, but I think the significance was lost.
ABF: It must have been interesting to see these, to watch Perestroika and Glasnost happen also through the eyes of people like Alexander Kazhdan, who must have felt very personally invested in the changes that were taking place in the Soviet Union – that just kind of embedded in the institution a story, the stories that I get about people like the librarian Natalia Scheffer Ihor Ševčenko talks about, so, I always wondered if there was a –
RWT: That was just happening by the time I left, so I must say that I personally wouldn't have been much involved in that. While I could see it was going to be a problem from the point of view of trying to help all these people, there were just so many more who couldn't easily come with no restrictions. That was a problem.
ABF: So, I guess we're sort of coming to the end of your time at Dumbarton Oaks, but I kind of wanted to ask a sort of big picture question, or you touched on almost all the questions that I had put together. So, I wanted to ask, what do you see as Dumbarton Oaks's role in the field of Byzantine Studies as a whole and do you see that role changing in the future?
RWT: Changing in the future. Well, it plays a very significant role, I think most of the prominent Byzantinists have had some connection with it and speak very highly of it as a place where one can go and do some quiet research. And that was my objective, too, as Director – was to make the atmosphere as relaxed as possible so that people could get on with their own work. Now, there are two ways to run, to think of an institution. One is to run an institution where the institution has objectives, and the objective is to produce this or that and the people who come are appointed to work on specific projects. Now, the other way of looking at it is to say this is a place where people can come, we provide the facilities and they can get on with their own works. Now, Dumbarton Oaks has been able to balance that somewhat, it's a tricky balance. The more people you have in the institution working on a large project of the institution's own making the less space and money there is for people coming to do their own thing; so I could imagine that balancing act continuing. I'm not sure that I would like to see it go one way or the other extreme; so I would hope that it does continue. Some of the projects in the last ten, fifteen years have been very interesting. They don't affect my own research in my own field – it isn't a corpus we see too much – but they're obviously very valuable, but it would be sad if that became such an important feature that the possibility of people just doing their own thing was no longer there. This was one little problem I had with the Byzantine Dictionary, the famous Oxford Byzantine Dictionary, which had been started by Alexander Kazhdan under Giles's time. The previous Director had wanted some of the academic staff to write the pieces and some of the Junior Fellows or especially those who had joint appointments, they were hard pressed because they had to get on with their own research, they had to teach for the institutions, and they had been assigned quite significant portions of work, and I thought that wasn't quite fair. So, we tried to relieve the junior people of that, but that isn't to say that an institutional undertaking like the Dictionary of Byzantium wasn't a wonderful thing to have done, that was just a minor detail in it. I'm not going to be in charge, but it would seem to me that there is a role for both sides – if bounds can be kept so much the better. In the old days, that's the way to put it, I mean forty, fifty years ago, the projects were mostly archaeological. These days the projects are mostly in the field of publication, that's, I mean, it's the same idea really, except that when you have people working on publications, things like dictionaries or the edition of texts can be done elsewhere, but there were quite a lot of things done in house, that does take up space and time and money, of course, so it's a balancing act. I mean, it's a balancing act, just as it is with the programs and, indeed, in the Byzantine world itself, how do you balance all the different areas in which Byzantium is of interest. It was often said that if somebody appeared, somebody made an application, especially a junior person, in a subject that the Senior Fellows didn't know anything about, they'd be much more likely to get the fellowship, otherwise the Fellows would be rather more critical, as they would know the subject. Well, you have to balance all these things. Should you support research in Byzantine music as opposed to some aspect of art history or should you do this or that? You just – my philosophy is rather pragmatic – you just have to deal with things as they turn up. You must have something in your mind of what you're doing, I don't mean to be entirely frivolous, but the role of Dumbarton Oaks in the future I hope will include both aspects of this: a place for personal study in a congenial atmosphere where you can interact with other people and get some good ideas, but also some specific projects that are going to be a benefit for the field at large, so we shall see what we shall see.
ABF: Is there anything else you'd like to add that we haven't touched on?
RWT: I don't think so. I suppose if I were to reminisce, one of the more amusing things that happened when I was a Junior Fellow was that we would have visitors coming to the Fellows Building, staying a few days. We would see them, on those occasions we would see them in the evening, because dinner was served and the regular staff didn't appear, just the Junior Fellows. One day Ernst Kantorowicz came and he brought some wine for dinner. He was absolutely shocked to discover that we did not serve wine with dinner in the Fellows Building. Well, it hadn't been a policy. So anyway, we decided that we should rectify that policy and I was appointed the steward, so I collected one dollar every week from all of the people resident in the building and I went out and I produced wine. My only complaint was that the cooks kept the red wine in the fridge all the time, but it altered the tone of our conversations in the evening for the better. So, a little initiative can improve things within larger parameters. I am no revolutionary.
ABF: Well, thank you very much.]]>
IS: I'm glad you started by asking me about that, because I have been dealing with this theme for half a century. So, I will speak with some detail about it, because it throws light on my stay at Dumbarton Oaks and the various periods of the development of the institute. I conceived of my project, which is Byzantium and the Arabs, when I was a student at Oxford, reading Literae Humaniores, that is, classics and Greek and Roman history. My tutor was a distinguished historian, Nicholas Sherwin-White, and I used to go to the lectures and hear the famous Sir Ronald Syme. I chose as a special subject not the early Greek history, but the one which involved Alexander the Great, because he came to the Near East, where I was born. I was born in the Holy Land; I left in 1946, long before the Arab-Israeli conflict.
So, I took that and I decided to deal with the history of Byzantium and the Arabs; not with the Arabs as such, but to deal with them as a force in Roman history. In other words, the traditional view of the fall of the Roman Empire was to the German tribes in the west in the fifth century, but in the east the Arabs attacked in the seventh century. So, the fall of Rome has to take care of the two thrusts, the German and the Arab. Gibbon in his book put between two stiff covers the two peoples, but then they parted company. The descendants of the Germans, distinguished German scholars nowadays in Germany and in the nineteenth century and the twentieth, have dealt with the German problem. No one has really dealt with the Arabs as part of Roman history. They dealt with it as Arab history or as Islamic history, but not as a theme in the larger theme, the fall of the Roman Empire. This is what I decided to do. And I thought that that would be a worthy theme. It would be both Arab and classical and would do justice to my training.
Then I came to Princeton for my Ph.D., where I did Islamic and Arabic studies. The distinguished Islamic historian Philip Hitti was in his last days, and I added Persian and Turkish to my Arabic, to surround Arabic with a new family of Islamic languages which Islam created. They are unrelated structurally to each other: the one is a Semitic language, the other is an Indo-European language, Persian, and Turkish is a Turkic language, but they are Islamic, united by Islam.
Then I met there the famous distinguished scholar Amerigo Castro, the Spanish scholar who has written important works on the Arab factor in Spain and its importance, and he asked me to help him on the Arabic words in his book on the structure of Spanish history. The atmosphere there was no longer Mohammed and Alexander; it became how the Arabs split the Mediterranean. Everybody was talking about Henri Pirenne and Mohammed and Charlemagne and how the Arabs made Western Europe by the conquest of North Africa and Andalusia.
So, when I received my Ph.D., the department sent me to the Institute for Advanced Study. Ernst Kantorowicz, the famous medievalist, was there. He had just left Berkeley, having quarreled with the administration there about swearing an oath which he didn't want to. So, he said, "You know, it's better for you now at this stage of your development to start with the East rather than with the West – with Andalusia." I wanted to do Arab-Spanish history and try to answer Pirenne's question. I thought then, as I still do, that Pirenne raised the right question, Mohammed and Charlemagne – the Arabs contributed to the rise of Western Europe and Charlemagne – but he may have given the wrong answer. So, I wanted to give the right answer from Arab history, which briefly is that the Arab wall on the Ebro in Andalusia prevented the Carolingians from invading the Mediterranean, and so they stayed in the landmass of Western Europe, and this is how partly Western Europe was created.
So, he said, "Well, you should really apply to Dumbarton Oaks, because then you can deal with the Arabs and the Umayyads in the homeland before you come to the province," which was Spain, and so I came to Dumbarton Oaks. That was in 1954, as a Junior Fellow. 1954-1955. I thought I would stay for a few years there, and then I became so involved in it. I decided that this is the more difficult theme to do, much more difficult than the Arabs, Spain, and Charlemagne, because it was possible to do only by one who had the two sets of sources, the classical as well as the Oriental. In my case, by the accident of birth, I had the Arabic and Islamic, and then by training, I did the classical course. So, I thought, well, this should be done and that it is more difficult than the other one, because it involved dealing with inscriptions and with the various languages – Arabic, Syriac, and Greek and Latin – and it had to do with seals and coins, which is very time-consuming. So, I decided to stay in this field, but I didn't realize it would take that long. However, I'm glad I did.
So, this set what my project would be: Byzantium and the Arabs, especially in the seventh century, the rise of Islam and the Arab attack. And then I said, "Well, how can I deal with this without dealing with the centuries before the rise of Islam?" This had been a blank, only a few references here and there. The German scholar Nöldeke has done a classic on one Arab group, the Ghassanids. So, I decided to do the centuries before the rise of Islam on all the Arab groups involved with Byzantium.
My project became tripartite; so I divided it into: Rome and the Arabs from the settlement of Pompeii until Constantine, and then the middle period, Byzantium and the Arabs from Constantine to Heraclius, and then the third part, which is the climax, the rise of Islam and the Arab conquest. So, far I have finished one and two in six volumes, and volume seven is being now prepared for publication, which will bring to a close part two. Byzantion in Belgium has published three volumes collecting my articles, which are collateral with the six volumes, so we have now almost ten volumes on these three centuries. These have their own identity as contributions to late antiquity, but they are more importantly prolegomena for the rise of Islam and the Arab conquest, the climax of my work, which I hope to finish in the next few years. I have done most of the researches; it is a matter of reflecting on it and writing it; and if it has one virtue, it will be because I'll be the first historian to have filled the gap of all these centuries with my gaze fixed on the seventh to know exactly what happened and why it happened the way it did. My work will be facilitated by the two important works which have appeared by Fred Donner and Walter Kaegi on the Arab conquest, but I will treat problems which have not been done by them and which have been left out. In my hands, I think, there are the answers to the big questions of the Arab conquest: one of them is the incomprehensible victory of the Arabs over not only one empire, but two empires: Byzantium and Sassanid Persia, which they challenged and defeated, both within two years. So, it is an incomprehensible victory. This is part of my job to elucidate.
So, much for my work, which has been done here. It could have been done only at Dumbarton Oaks, because here is the major center for Byzantine studies. I keep telling Junior Fellows who come here when they are bored sometimes, "Now, look here. Napoleon said, 'Ask me for anything except time,' and scholarship is energy and time. One hour's work here is worth five hours' work elsewhere." And I give them an example: when I was in Oxford in 2001 for my sabbatical, I think one of my volumes – the last volume was printed in 2002 – was being done by the copy editor, and he asked me about a reference; I couldn't find it. I ran from my college, St. John's, to Balliol to the Ashmolean and to the Bodleian – couldn't find it. So, I called Glenn Ruby, in Publications at D.O., and I told him, "Glenn, please go to the third floor of the Main Building and look it up for me." So, he did it in five minutes, and then it was done. Working in Dumbarton Oaks is a great privilege, and it is a great economy in time.
Well, I think I have given you now how my work is related to Dumbarton Oaks and how Dumbarton Oaks has made it possible. Now, you want to see how the administration reacted to my work: when I came here, Dumbarton Oaks was in the hands of art historians, and it was natural, because it started as a museum. The director, Mr. Thacher, was an art historian too – although he was not an academic, but he had a degree in art, I think Spanish art – painting. And Miss Der Nersessian, who was then acting director in '54 after the death of A. Friend, was an art historian, Armenian. And then E. Kitzinger was a distinguished art historian; he became the director. So, there was little interest in my work, and the other scholars who were not art historians were not interested in it. Then I had some trouble.
When I came in 1954, Dumbarton Oaks had asked a distinguished French scholar, Marius Canard, who had worked on Byzantium and the Arabs. So, I felt at home with him, he was a very good man, and very helpful, and he came to look at the Nachlass of a distinguished Russian scholar, Vasiliev, who had worked on Byzantium and the Arabs, and unfortunately for me, he had died before I came. In other words, if he had been here when I came to D.O., the administration would have been more understanding of what I was doing.
Marius Canard understood my work, and I contracted a friendship with him until the end of his life, as I did with Speros Vryonis, who was with me as a Junior Fellow, and we still correspond. In the second semester I felt in a vacuum. I worked with Mr. Downey, Glanville Downey, who was a scholar here, but who had no interest in the Arabs. He was a very competent scholar, but a very difficult man. I understand he used to see a psychiatrist. If you made a mistake with him, he became angry. Let me give you an example: there was a Fellow, Byron Tsangadis, who came to work with him. He had an appointment with him, and he came three minutes late, so he kicked him out; he told him, "I cannot waste three minutes of my short life on earth waiting for you, so come tomorrow at the exact time." So, the poor man came two or three minutes before, so he kicked him out again. He told him, "Come exactly at the same time, at the time I wanted you to come."
In any case, he had also difficulty with the most distinguished man in Dumbarton Oaks, the leading Byzantinist of his generation, Cyril Mango. He picked him up from Turkey, because he noticed that he was precocious: he had written an article when he was, I think, twenty-one years old, and Downey said, "Well, we must bring him to Dumbarton Oaks." Then he had the same trouble with him – I get this from both Mango and from Julia Warner, who was the editor of Dumbarton Oaks Papers: Mango corrected him on the translation of, I think, the word teleosis, and Downey thought it meant "perfection" and Mango thought it meant "death," the "dormition of Virgin Mary." He became very unfriendly to him. Julia Warner told me that he used to sing his praises and then all of a sudden he said, "We cannot have him here, because his German is not very good, and you must read German to be a good Byzantinist." So, nobody, of course, listened to him: Miss Der Nersessian and everybody knew that Mango was a distinguished young scholar, precocious, and came to his support.
Well, I had the same problem with him; I forgot what was the problem, and he became rather unpleasant. And I presented him with an essay on Procopius. Procopius, as you may know, is the main historian of the reign of Justinian, and I discovered many mendacities he said about the Arabs in his work, so I collected them and wrote an essay. He was negative towards it; it was very strange, and I said, "Fine." Then I had an appointment to go to UCLA to teach. I sent the same article, but with footnotes and appendices, to the BZ, the Byzantinische Zeitschrift, the foremost Byzantine periodical, and F. Dölger loved it, but the article I gave Downey was without footnotes then, because I wanted him to know the substance of my argument. It has been described by some of my friends as one of the most influential articles I have written, the one which Downey had reported negatively on. However, Downey was a decent man; he became very friendly later and he gave me every support writing recommendations.
When I was teaching at UCLA, Sir Hamilton left Oxford; he gave up his Laudian Professorship of Arabic and accepted the Jewett Professorship of Arabic at Harvard and became a University Professor. He was a giant in every sense, physically and otherwise. So, my fortunes with the administration improved. Since he was an Arabicist/Islamist, he could understand and so appreciate what I was doing, and he asked me to participate in the first symposium of 1963, Byzantium and the Arabs. That was truly exciting. Mrs. Bliss herself wrote me a letter; she said, "This is the only lecture I enjoyed. Will you please send me your lecture?" So, I sent it to her and she sent me a letter, which I still have, in which she thanked me for the lecture. And so I contracted a friendship with her since then, until she died in the late '60s. Unfortunately Sir Hamilton disappeared; he had a stroke and went back to England.
In the '60s I was a little diverted (not entirely) from Byzantium and the Arabs. The Teubner Classical Series asked me to do a speech by Themistius which survived only in an Arabic translation, so I had to prepare it for the Teubner, and it appeared in 1974 in volume three of Themistii Orationes.
Something more important happened: when I came again as a Senior Fellow when Gibb was still at Harvard, I discovered in the library of Dumbarton Oaks a reference to a most precious manuscript, Syriac manuscript – which has been ignored by all the South Arabian scholars and by all the Syrologists – on the persecution of the Christians in South Arabia before the rise of Islam. I immediately wrote to the patriarch in Jerusalem and then we got the manuscript from there. It turned out to be a translation into Arabic of the original Syriac, and we wanted the original Syriac, so he traced it to Damascus to Istanbul to Mardin and finally we found it; it had returned to Damascus and finally we got it. I translated it with an extensive commentary.
The Bollandistes, the Société des Bollandistes, asked me to submit it to them, and they published it as number 49 in their Subsidia Hagiographica as The Martyrs of Najrân. It is a very important volume, because it opened the dossier on the importance of Najrân as the major Christian center in Pre-Islamic Arabia, which was radiating Christianity to all the Peninsula. So, those who talk about Koranic Christology and how the Arabs got to know about what Christians call unorthodox views of Christianity depend on Najrân; and so the Najrân problem is now open, and everybody's talking about Najrân and its Martyrium Arethae from different perspectives.
In the '70s I was still dealing with Byzantium and the Arabs on the side, but these two volumes had taken most of my time in the '60s. In the '70s Giles Constable became the director. Now here for the first time the Director was not an art historian. Before him was Loerke, who was an art historian, and Kitzinger, and Der Nersessian had been an art historian. Giles Constable was a medievalist, a historian who had worked with the Islamicist, J. Kritzeck, so he had a clear conception of the importance of Islam. He looked at my work and he saw my publications, the Teubner and the Bollandistes, and what the BZ had published, and so he appointed me as an Associate Fellow. But since I came to Washington from UCLA and Indiana in 1963 as a professor at Georgetown University, there was no need to apply for fellowships, because I am here, and it's only a ten minutes' walk from Georgetown. And this is the big bargain of being at Georgetown, because Dumbarton Oaks is close. I do my other work there, Arabic poetry and Koranic studies at Georgetown, and I do Byzantino-arabica at D.O.
Giles Constable made me an Associate Fellow because he thought of me as a historian who is dealing with a major theme, Byzantium and the Arabs. I reverted to working on my theme now for volumes, not for articles. So, since then and for the last twenty-five years or so, I have been able to publish these six volumes: Rome and the Arabs, which dealt with the first part of my trilogy, and the second part, the Byzantine one, from Constantine to Heraclius, the five volumes which have appeared, and the sixth will appear, hopefully next summer. This was made possible because of working conditions here at Dumbarton Oaks.
A propos of Constable and me: in addition to my representing the Orient, Christian as well as Islamic, Giles Constable also felt that I was a liaison between Dumbarton Oaks and Georgetown. Why? Because there was that program of joint appointments between Dumbarton Oaks and various universities, which is still going on. I spoke very strongly with the administration at Georgetown for having Frank Trombley, who was there for three years, to be there.
When my last book comes out, then I will work on the climax of my work in two volumes, one on the rise of Islam, the big questions which only the Byzantine sources can give. And I have collected all the references. And then the second one – the Arab conquest, the incomprehensible victory of the Arabs both in Syria and in Egypt, which split the Mediterranean. So, this is then my work here, and I need your prayers to finish them. Do I have them? Because I crossed the Rubicon of longevity recently, so I am an octogenarian now!!
Well, so much then for my work. You said you wanted to know something about the directors and what I think of them. As you know, I have seen Der Nersessian, Ernst Kitzinger, Ihor Ševčenko, Romilly Jenkins, William Loerke, Giles Constable, Robert Thomson, Angeliki Laiou, and then Edward Keenan, and then our current director, Professor Jan Ziolkowski. Now, of all these people – and all these were distinguished scholars – the one who really attended to the problems of Dumbarton Oaks, the first one to do so, was Giles Constable. Let me tell you what he has done.
First of all, this building in which we are sitting was a scandal. In other words, it had one bathroom here and most of the people had to come to this one, and it was not even closed. So he renovated the building, made of it eight self-contained apartments upstairs, and so it became a place where scholars would come and live here. That's one thing he did.
Then he started the idea of summer fellowships. You know, these are very, very valuable. Many scholars in Europe and elsewhere may not be able to come during the term, and so the summer provides them with the time to come to Dumbarton Oaks, do what they want. And, as you know, Dumbarton Oaks has become a pilgrimage center, when you come to Dumbarton Oaks, especially from Europe. So, the summer fellowships are very important.
And then he restructured the administration of Dumbarton Oaks. Dumbarton Oaks used to be ruled by the director, then he instituted the Senior Fellows Committee, which includes scholars from various parts of the world, who get together and discuss problems.
Then even the gardens: he said those who visit the gardens should pay at least a nominal fee in order to pay for the upkeep; so like all people of a powerful mind, he had interest in details too, not only in the general problems.
I think there's something else which is his achievement – let me see [looks at notes]. The lunches used to be formal; they used to be sit-down lunches. He thought that was good, but you know, a buffet is better, when people can come not only precisely at 12:00 or half past 12, say, but between 12 and 1, and then they can serve themselves. So, he's the one who started the buffet.
Because of the five things he did for D.O., it renders utterly untrue the charge that Constable wanted to move D.O. to Harvard.
Robert Thomson did something very good. Where the museum is now had been open: there was no roof. He roofed it, and he started what has become D.O.'s splendid museum. So, this is to his credit. And before he retired as director, he recommended that D.O. cannot be run by a director only: you need a director for the entire establishment, which is tripartite in structure – Byzantine, Landscape Architecture, and Pre-Columbian – and you need a director of studies for each of these three divisions.
By the way, Giles Constable also paid attention to Pre-Columbian Studies, which was the Cinderella of the three, and he gave it prominence, and I think the Pre-Columbian scholars appreciated that. Elizabeth Boone was then the main figure there, and so that speaks well for him. Although he is a medieval historian, yet he was genuinely interested in other periods of history. I keep telling our Pre-Columbian friends, "We are not so distant from each other, the Byzantine and the Pre-Columbian, because both of us chronologically are Pre-Columbian, because Byzantium existed before 1492!"
Angeliki's contribution was to buy the La Quercia. Before, visitors to Dumbarton Oaks used to be housed in an apartment house on Wisconsin Avenue. It was not good at all; I mean, the conditions were bad. So, she decided to buy the apartment building. La Quercia, as you know, in Italian relates with Dumbarton Oaks: the same as the word "oaks," La Quercia. The only thing about La Quercia, which I gather from those who live in it, is its distance; because I have a car, I used to drive many of the Fellows, especially the ladies, in winter at night to it. It takes a good ten minutes' walk to reach it from the Main Building. So, I thought that in the future maybe Dumbarton Oaks can sell it and buy something close. S Street should all be Dumbarton Oaks. There are houses which are in the market for selling on the corner. It will be difficult, but I think Professor Keenan did well to buy one house at S St., because it is not only the director's house, it is useful for other functions and also for visiting scholars.
Director Edward Keenan, as you know, was a Russian scholar.
ABF: Yes.
IS: He was also understanding of my project, because he had done some Arabic, and he was the dean or the director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies at Harvard. So, he was very supportive. And he, of course, did the major part in creating Dumbarton Oaks as it is. He realized there is a big endowment for Dumbarton Oaks, and money's function is to be used, so instead of having it in banks, let it be used. And everybody first did not take kindly to the renovation, but now they are reconciled. They know it was a great achievement. Some think it lost its intimacy and closeness, but you know this is a research institute. It has many redeeming virtues, and I think that this is a great plus for Ned, the reconstruction of Dumbarton Oaks. Now everybody comes and wonders at it.
The present director, Jan Ziolkowski, has inherited what Giles Constable had done in administration and what Edward Keenan had done in the physical plant. And he is the ideal one now, because he is not an art historian. I don't mean to speak pejoratively about art historians; I mean, his sympathies are wider. Jan Ziolkowski is a classicist to start with; Ned was not a classicist, I think. He's a classicist and he is a medievalist, and of course Byzantium is part of medieval history, especially its relations with the West, with Western European history. He's open-minded, he takes an active part in the life and work of the Fellows, and he lunches quite often with them. He also has done some Arabic, so he appreciates my work and I feel that for writing the climax of my work, he is the ideal director. Let me give you an example of how he is aware of what can be done now for Dumbarton Oaks, and he discusses this with members of his academic community.
I spoke with him about the most important things that Dumbarton Oaks, as far as research is concerned, can do as an institute. I told him the most important project which Dumbarton Oaks has done started with Giles Constable when, under the direction of Alexander Kazhdan, Dumbarton Oaks did the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Although it's called the Oxford Dictionary, it's Dumbarton Oaks. These three volumes have done more for Byzantine history, for promoting Byzantine studies in the Anglo-Saxon world and elsewhere, than any other book. Better than the German Pauly-Wissowa, which is a great work, but you know it is so difficult to use it. There are many volumes, and the print is not so clear. But the ODB is so beautifully printed, clearly printed. I told him this was done in 1992, so it is utterly out of date. These are the most important three volumes which Dumbarton Oaks has done for the promotion of Byzantine studies. It needs a supplement, as even Pauly-Wissowa has a supplement, the new Pauly-Wissowa, even the smaller one is there. I told him what is needed is a supplement. Of the many fellowships you give, ten or whatever, give one or two to a scholar who will spend a year, either at home or doing it here, corresponding with all the authors who have written these articles asking them what new bibliographies have appeared, what new researches have been done. If they are dead, you can ask somebody else. Also, there are many mistakes in it. I have myself listed some of them, many of them. So, this is the first and the most important thing that should be done. I think the Senior Fellows Committee should attend to this.
Then I told him, "You know, Byzantine studies would not have prospered in this country had it not been for the Blisses." We made a joke about this. I told him, "Well, if Mrs. Bliss was more fertile and she had a child, maybe she would not have donated the estate to Harvard." We are not writing an essay in praise of sterility – no, no. We are very happy that this happened, so their memory should be perpetuated in a way which will keep their memory alive. You can have a bust for them in the entrance, you can have a picture of them in the Founders Room, but I suggest having a series called the Bliss Byzantine Library. Mr. Loeb – I think he was a banker or some such profession – endowed the publication of the famous Loeb Classical Series, and the Classics Department at Harvard operates it. And this has been a great success. I said, "The Bliss Byzantine Library would be the best 'thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Bliss, for what have you done,' because the people will use it all the time, and the word 'Bliss' will be very visible."
Now, of course the volumes which appeared in the Loeb Classical Library are more important in a sense than the Byzantine ones, more important in the sense that they have more popular appeal, but there is enough in Byzantine history to justify having a smaller number of books there, and the Loeb Classical Library has hijacked some of the works which belong to Byzantium. Let me give you an example. Ammianus Marcellinus is the first – his Res Gestae. He is Byzantine, he worked when Constantine and Constantius ruled. So, he should be re-done in the Byzantine Bliss series. Procopius: everybody would love Procopius! Everybody loves it: gossip – it's too human to be suppressed. So, the works of Procopius should be re-done, with so much scholarship now done on them, and published; there are other fragmentary historians. So you can have a perhaps smaller Byzantine Bliss Library.
Director Ziolkowski said a Medieval Bliss Library would be an alternative possibility, because in one of her inscriptions on the outer wall of D.O., Mrs. Bliss talks about the medieval humanities. She emphasized the word "medieval." So, he thought this one will perpetuate the memory of this couple who have given such an impetus – not only in America, but in the whole world – to Byzantine studies.
And then the third point I discussed with him concerned the symposia which are held. Sometimes these symposia deal with problems which may interest a member of the senior committee, but it should have a more universal appeal and a more important one. I gave him an example. There was a time when I think there was a symposium on Anatolia and Oriens. There is no relationship between the two of them – two dioceses. And then even Oriens, half of it was in the Byzantine period and half of it was in the Islamic. It was interesting, but the papers were not published, apparently, because it was not a successful symposium. Its conception was not a sound conception, as interesting as it was: either Oriens or Anatolia would have been much better. I said symposia should deal with major problems, and I gave him an example. I told him, to use that cliché, the mission civilisatrice of Byzantium, its civilizing mission, was the translation of the Bible to every new people that was converted to Christianity: the Slavs, Cyril and Methodios; the Goths, Ulfilas; the Armenians; the Georgians; the Copts; the Ethiopians. Whenever the Bible was translated (and Byzantium actively, positively, and aggressively favored the translation of the Bible), then a Christian literature exploded in all these literatures.
This is not unknown, but so much new research has been done on each of these translations that there is need for having a symposium on all of them to show the extent of the mission civilisatrice. When you bring them together, when you publish that in Dumbarton Oaks Papers, it would be a beautiful thing for an art historian to see the various scripts. You can take, for instance, a page from Genesis or a page from St. John in Old Slavonic, in Old Gothic, in Armenian, in Georgian, in Coptic, in Arabic, in Syriac, in Ethiopian, to display them. It is a theme which inspires so many areas of research. And then I told him, "What about Byzantium and Islam?" There are about eight centuries: four with the Arab-Byzantine conflict, from the seventh until the 11th, and then the Turkish one from the 11th until the 15th when Mohammed the Conqueror captured Constantinople in 1453. This is a theme which needs to be telescoped and to be freshly understood. This is not to say the themes which have been dealt with in previous symposia are not important; they are. But I feel that more attention should be paid to the Orient, because Byzantium is in the Pars Orientalis.
This, by the way, brings me also back to how Giles Constable, being a historian, understood my relevance here. He looked at me as representing the Orient. In other words, because of my knowledge of Arabic, Syriac, and Persian, I am here to write on this and also to help Fellows in their areas when they come. Invariably, whenever a Junior Fellow, or not only a Junior Fellow, scholars and Senior Fellows would come, they always have Arabic problems. Even last year I spent some time with one of the students of Angeliki Laiou, a Turkish gentleman, correcting his translations.
Perhaps you might like to hear how the outside world looks at Dumbarton Oaks as it used to be when you had about ten scholars and now after those have left.
CW: Yes.
IS: When I came here two or three times the first two decades, there was an impressive number of scholars who were working here. Cyril Mango was here, Ihor Ševčenko was here, Romilly Jenkins, Glanville Downey, Milton Anastos, Paul Underwood, and above all, there was Father Dvornik, the most colorful of all the scholars.
So, let me tell you something about Father Dvornik. Father Dvornik was a Czech ecclesiastical historian, and he used to live in this cottage here. It makes a lot of difference, especially for Junior Fellows, to come and be inspired by these people and talk to them. As far as Father Dvornik is concerned, he was at heart a peasant and remained a peasant until the end of his life here. Although he lived most of his life in an English-speaking country, he never mastered English. "Frankly say" – "frankly say," translating from French, was his favorite phrase. And then he was a great cook; he used to invite people for supper. And then he was fond of a whiskey, of a scotch, called VAT, and he used to say this was the telephone of the Vatican! And I told him once, "Father, someone called the other day and asked about you, but he thought your name was Father Dvořák," the composer. He laughed and said, "Well, fine, we are very proud of Dvořák." Many outsiders used to think that his name was Dvořák.
And then he used to tell us how surprised some of the saleswomen were. He had nieces in Czechoslovakia who would write to him to buy for them nylon stockings; the nylons had come into existence then. So, he would go to buy stockings, and then the girls would look at this priest who would buy stockings for women; it was very embarrassing for him.
However, we miss him; he used to go every year to Czechoslovakia, and he was lucky. The last time he went, he died in his village in his homeland in his bed. I think he had a heart attack. So this was Dumbarton Oaks as it used to be.
And then we used to have lunches here, sit-down lunches and dinners, served, and Miss Der Nersessian used to preside with a bell; she used to ring a bell and the waiters would come. And once I put a little piece of cloth in the bell and it didn't ring, so we all laughed at her. She had a sister called Araxie, and she was a good cook. And there were two Armenias: Armenia Maior and Armenia Minor, and we used to refer to Sirarpie as Armenia Maior and to Araxie as Armenia Minor, and we used to refer to Father Dvornik as Moravia – he was very fond of it. And he created a Slavic atmosphere in the house, especially when Father Meyendorff used to come here. And then, of course, when Alexander Kazhdan came, it was very Slavic, and we used to call the West Cottage the Slavic lodge, the Slavic cottage, because all the Slavs used to live here.
We must say something about Alexander Kazhdan a propos of resident senior scholars, when in the '70s it was decided to disband these scholars and spend the money on fellowships. This was justified up to a certain point, but as you see, the institute lost that scholarly weight it had by the concentration of talent. In any case, in my opinion, it did more good than harm, because when these scholars disappeared – for instance Downey to Indiana, Milton Anastos to UCLA, Cyril to Oxford – they created new centers for Byzantine studies in these universities. There wasn't anything in Indiana before Downey went there, there wasn't anything in UCLA before Anastos went, and Oxford was rather sleepy as far as Byzantine studies was concerned. Cyril's presence made the difference. So, I think that the dispersion of the scholars, and the diaspora – you could call it the diaspora of the scholars – was helpful in that sense.
When Alexander came in the '80s, he functioned more or less as a senior scholar with whom others could consult. And as I said, a most fruitful project was the dictionary, the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. The ODB is a product of both Constable's initiation and Kazhdan's writing most of its articles and acting as its editor.
You ask me about the Blisses. I am one of the people who remember the two Blisses, and as you know, she was the predominant partner as far as the Bliss visibility in Dumbarton Oaks was. She used to come to the teas and she used to talk to the Fellows.
By the way, there used to be teas, afternoon tea at 4:00, in the Founders' Room where the Study is. It was a very colorful room, and her formidable presence was felt; we enjoyed her conversation, she spoke perfect French, she was a highly cultured woman. And so she created a certain atmosphere, and it's interesting to see the books she used to read – old-fashioned now from our point of view – it will tell you what people of her age used to read so many years ago.
I must not forget to say that when William Tyler was here, he was of special interest to her, because his father, Royall Tyler, used to be Mrs. Bliss's boyfriend. And one saying has survived from Mr. Royall Tyler – I think it was his son William who told me. By the way, we got on very well, because he was a very talented linguist; he served as ambassador to Holland, and he went the length of learning Dutch. You know everyone in Holland speaks English, French, and German, but he decided to learn Dutch, which impressed the Dutch so much, who said, here is an American ambassador who learnt our language. His mother was an Italian contessa, so he was already bilingual. So, here is what his father said about marrying into money: "The bonds of love are never so strong as when the links are made of gold."
What else would you like to hear? Let's see whether I have left anything. I think we talked about the directors, the Blisses – oh yes! The Center for Hellenic Studies.
ABF: Yes.
IS: I have always been interested in curricular development. I don't like administration, I have no talent for numbers or the practical aspects of administration, but I like curricular development. So when I came here in '54, another family other than the Blisses wanted to do what the Blisses had done: they endowed some money for a center which was to be in Washington – I forgot the name of the family. So, what should the center be? I gave them, as my opinion, it should not be classical, it should not be Byzantine, it should be a Hellenistic center. If that became a Hellenistic center, then Harvard would have three centers which will take care of the entire Greek heritage: the pagan classical, the department in Cambridge; the Hellenistic, which came after the Hellenic, after the conquest of Alexander for three centuries of the Macedonian period and three centuries of the Roman until Constantine; and then Dumbarton Oaks, Byzantine. They will be complementary to one another.
And I said, "I do not know whether there is any Hellenistic center in the world just called 'Hellenistic'." It is usually lumped together with other periods of Greek history. And I remember none other than W. Jaeger, the distinguished refugee German scholar, who was interested in Arabic – I don't know why; I think because he taught Walzer, the Jewish refugee who went to Oxford and became the professor there of Arabic philosophy and who had been both a classical scholar and an Orientalist. So, he said to me, "You know, I agree with you, but Harvard doesn't seem to want this." However, it became a Hellenic center for the classical period. Not all its directors were distinguished. I think one of the most distinguished was – what was his name? the Yale man who wrote on Greek tragedy and who fought in the Guerra Civil in Spain; oh, what is his name? It's on the tip –
CW: Bernard Knox.
IS: Yes, yes, Bernard Knox. He was really a very good man, distinguished. But now it is also under another distinguished scholar, Gregory Nagy. Do you know why? – because he brings something new to the study of Greek poetry, because he is a trained linguist. I mean linguist in the strict sense of the science of linguistics, and he is abreast of all of the breakthroughs in the discipline of linguistics, so he's applying all this to the study of Greek classical poetry. And he's married to a lady who's an Iranist, Holly. She is also a very good scholar in Iranian studies; she wrote on the epic of the Persians, the Shāhnāmé.
So, Greg is a distinguished director, and I think he justifies that the center deals with classical Hellenism, although I hope that he will pay some attention to the Hellenistic period, because it is the child of classical Hellenism, after the torch of Hellenism was carried by Alexander.
As I told you, I have a great love for Alexander, because I did him as a special subject in Oxford, and I always read Arrian, his inspiring history of Alexander, in my study of Christian theology and its relations to the Koran. Few people realize that Alexander contributed one of the most important words for Christian theology, and no one I think has mentioned this: the word logos! You know, the word logos which appears in not the Synoptic Gospel, but the Gospel of St. John; we owe to Alexander. If Greek had not spread, the word logos would not have been at the disposal of Christian theologians for dealing with the mystery of the incarnation and the mystery of Christ's being the logos. When you translate it into English as "the word," it loses its meaning, it doesn't mean "the word," it means both "word" and "reason" only in Greek, and when you translate it into Arabic as kalimah, it spreads theological confusion.
CW: We should take a break, because the tape is about to run out.
IS: Yes, we are about finished now. I have been thinking of answering two problems about Alexander: the question of the brotherhood of man. I have no doubt that the old controversy between Professor Tarn and Professor Badian, our distinguished scholar, whether Alexander wanted the brotherhood to be between the Persians and the Greeks or whether he wanted a universal brotherhood. I had delivered a Mellon lecture called "Mohammed and Alexander" thinking that Badian was correct. Now after so many years, I have come to the conclusion that Tarn is correct and I will deliver a lecture on the brotherhood of man as conceived by Alexander by bringing several new points not mentioned before in this controversy.
The other problem is Alexander's sexual orientation. Many people have thought that Alexander was homosexual. I don't think so. I have now so many new points which have never been brought even by Mr. Cartledge, the Cambridge historian who wrote so well on Alexander; there are so many elements which I think support the view that his sexual orientation was heterosexual.
Well, thank you for having me, and I enjoyed it. I think that my six volumes, which will soon be seven, and my three volumes published by Byzantion, I owe to Dumbarton Oaks and to Mrs. Bliss and Mr. Bliss. Dumbarton Oaks's self-image has been "the most civilized square mile in America," and I truly believe in that. Thank you for having me reminiscing on it. "Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility," as Wordsworth said.
CW: Thank you.
ABF: Thank you very much. You answered all our questions.]]>
IU: You are welcome.
ABF: Can you tell us about how you and your husband, Paul Underwood, first came to Dumbarton Oaks and about your memories?
IU: My husband was teaching at Cornell, and I came down in advance to find an apartment here, when he was granted a fellowship as a Junior Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks. And he had written in advance to say I was coming to Washington. I had never been in the city before. It was 1943 – the war – and I found it rather overwhelming, but I went to Dumbarton Oaks and introduced myself, and John Thacher was very gracious. And his – maybe his secretary, I don't remember what position she held – turned out to be a classmate of mine in college. So, they were both very gracious, but they were not much help about apartment-hunting. But I finally found one in an apartment building and I went back to Ithaca, and my mother and husband and I came to Washington that fall, so it must have been September, probably, 1943. And my introduction to Mr. and Mrs. Bliss – by the way I had been rather impressed, even on my short interview with John Thacher, by the rather rarefied atmosphere at Dumbarton Oaks in those days. But when I came here my first introduction to the Blisses was a series of concerts that were held in the Music Room, and at that time open only to, of course, Mr. and Mrs. Bliss, and to the Fellows at Dumbarton Oaks and, of course, the Director of Studies also, and the head of the study of garden architecture and so on, and the Pre-Columbian, but no outside people. And they were wonderful concerts – really it was a great privilege to be there. I think probably Mrs. Bliss did most of the selection of the people who performed there. But I still remember my first meeting with her. Of course, we were advised that formal attire was rather expected. And we lived in Arlington and we had no car, so we had to travel by bus – we were rather poor too – we traveled by bus. You know, I had a long evening dress, and my husband was in formalwear. And we enjoyed the concert very much, and at the end Mr. and Mrs. Bliss were at the entrance to the Music Room, and we would make our way out and thank them for the concert. So, this was the first time we had met, and Mrs. Bliss looked at me and she said, "Oh, your dress is such a lovely color. I wonder if I might have it for cushions later." I looked at her; I thought, "How am I supposed to react to this?" you know? I thanked her very much. I don't know what I said – I really don't – but I was rather startled. So, that was not a very good beginning to our acquaintance. But she, you know, she thought she was – she didn't know how the other half lived. And she didn't quite know how to approach, so she wasn't very comfortable, I suppose. I assume. Anyway, that was my initial impression of her. And then after that I didn't have much contact with Dumbarton Oaks at first, because I was rather bored, and I wanted a job, so I applied to the Signal Corps and they were very interested at first because I had taken a course on crypto-analysis at Cornell that one of the professors was giving. It was just for his entertainment, really, but several of us took it – among the students too. And so when they heard that I had taken this course, my interviewer was very interested. Oh yes. But he asked me if I had any relatives abroad, and I said, "Yes, I'm French. I have relatives in France still." And he said, "Oh well then, I'm sorry. You're a security risk." And I said, "But they're on the right side!" He said, "No, I'm sorry, we can't consider you." And so I went home, and I was rather distressed, and in the same building was a young lady, a young woman – we had met at Cornell; she was in the Music Department – we were friendly with her there and we continued to be friendly here, and she said, "Well, try O.S.S.," and I said, "No, if the Signal Corps won't have me, O.S.S. isn't going to have me." O.S.S. – you're too young to know – is the predecessor to C.I.A. She said, "Try; I know they're looking for people." So I went to O.S.S., and they took me. So I had a job, and that was fine. And then the next thing you'll be interested in – well, my husband was happy at the change at Dumbarton Oaks, and the Director of Studies was Koehler at the time, Wilhelm Koehler; I think his first name was Wilhelm . I was rather sorry at that, because being French, I would have loved it if I had been there when Focillon was the Director of Studies, but he was gone, and it was a German instead. And I knew that Mrs. Bliss was very much of a Francophile. Anyway...what was I saying?
CW: You got a job at O.S.S.
IU: O.S.S., yeah. So, my husband was getting accustomed to Dumbarton Oaks, and he was quite happy. And he had studied publications of Koehler at Princeton, so he knew all about him, and so on, and it was very nice, very comfortable. And then, what happened next? Oh, there came the Conference –
CW: The Dumbarton Oaks Conference in '44.
IU: Yes, that was set up preliminary to the San Francisco.
CW: Right.
IU: And at that time we lived on the estate. We lived in the villa that had been originally the kennels for the dogs parading through the estate, when it was under the Blisses.
ABF: Was this by the garden? Were you right nearby the garden?
IU: It's in a hollow of the estate, and when it was turned over to Harvard, they changed it – no, before that, they changed it into a villa for Mrs. Clark, I think her name was, who was the curator, the librarian of Mrs. Bliss's rare books collection. And at that time, as I said, our apartment was in Arlington, and it was very hot. No air conditioning, of course, at that time. And I was working long hours too, at O.S.S. sometimes, when we had a report to get out. So, she said, "I'm going away for the summer for two months. Why don't you come and stay in the villa?" So we thought, "Well, fine." She had no kind of air conditioning, but it was in the hollow. In fact it was a little bit dank, but it was cool, it was cool, and there was room for my mother and Paul and me. And that's where we lived during the Conference. And it was an amusing time, because I can still remember our laundry man coming to the villa with our laundry, furious, angry. He said, "I'm an American citizen, and I have to come here under armed guard to deliver your laundry."
CW: Because the Conference was still going on.
IU: Oh yeah, oh yeah. And my husband said to me, "You know, Irène, I go up in the elevator, and there is the Secretary of State, and he greets me, and I know he thinks I'm one of his young men," you know. "Every morning, we go up and we greet each other." So, it was a really amusing time. I remember he called me once and he said, "I forgot to pick up our eggs;" – which were delivered at the front entrance – "do you mind picking them up when you come home?" So, I said, "Okay," so I rang the bell, and of course it was after working hours at Dumbarton Oaks, and I don't know who it was who answered, but it was one of the bright young men still there, and I said, "I'm sorry, but I'm Mrs. Underwood," and he said, "Oh yes, the Underwood eggs," and he got them for me.
ABF: Did you meet any big political personalities while you were there?
IU: Not political, but we met the President of Harvard, because he was part of the Conference, and he lived in one of the suites, I don't know whether it was the east end or the west end of the Fellows Building. Are you familiar with the Fellows Building?
CW: We live there, yes.
IU: Oh, you live there. I think it was probably the east little apartment there. And so we would spend evenings with him. It was very interesting. But other than that we didn't meet any of the others, no, no. But the scholars were still permitted to use their studies, which by the way were still under the roof where the domestics lived before it was given to Harvard. You know, I used to tease my husband and say he was in an ivory tower during the war, but he said, "No, you don't know what the offices, our studies, are like, under the roof, with no air conditioning."
CW: Right, it must have been hot.
IU: It was very hot. But that changed shortly thereafter, and then they were moved down, and they each had their little offices, and it was very nice. So, what else? Well, that was about it during the war, yeah. And then I left O.S.S., I went to the State Department briefly, when they were going to divide O.S.S. into the C.I.A. and part of it went to the State Department, and I was going to the State Department to hold the French desk until the rest of it came over there, and they wanted to be sure, because the man was leaving who was on the French desk at that time in biographical intelligence. So, I went there briefly, and I hated it. I really hated the State Department. It had a lot of red tape, which we never had in O.S.S., because they were mostly from the academic world, or refugees, and we were free spirits, but not in the State Department. So, I decided to leave. And anyway we wanted a child, and my doctor said, "You have to rest. You can't work these long hours." So, I had worked at the French Supply Mission, which was an easy, easy job, and then my daughter was born.
ABF: That was 1947?
IU: She was born, yeah. How did you know that?
ABF: We did our research.
IU: And I had a difficult time adjusting to being at home, so Dumbarton Oaks was very paternalistic in some ways, and I had a job, a temporary job, with the Byzantinische Zeitschrift. Do you know anything about that?
CW: No.
IU: No. Well, it was a research tool set up for scholars, and we were – well, I'll let someone over there describe it for you – but anyway, I worked on that for a time. And then Mrs. Bliss had a collection of the letters of Franz Liszt, and she wasn't satisfied with the translation that she had had made, so she asked Libby Bland – do you know about Libby Bland?
ABF: No, who is that?
IU: She was – at that time I wasn't sure whether she was really the curator of the Byzantine collection or whether there was somebody above her; I've forgotten – but later she became curator of the Byzantine collection of art. And Mrs. Bliss asked her if she would do a new translation, and Libby asked me if I would help. So, I said yes, I realized it was a pretty bad translation. I don't know who did it, if it was just a student or what. So, we both worked on that, and that was a temporary job. And then after that, sometime later, I was in charge of photography at Dumbarton Oaks – not the taking of photographs, no no, but the collection, organizing it and getting into the files and so on.
CW: Photographs of the collection or the gardens, or everything?
IU: Everything, pretty much – mostly of the artwork. No, actually, this was only of the artwork, the Byzantine Collection. But those were all temporary, part-time jobs, and then after that my husband went to Turkey for the first time I think in 1949, was it, or '50?
ABF: Well, in 1950, he took over Whittemore's position.
IU: Yeah, but before that he had gone. That was very amusing. Whittemore – you probably know about Thomas Whittemore – was getting on in age, and A.M. Friend, who was at the time Director of Studies at Dumbarton Oaks and who had been my husband's professor both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, thought, "Well, somebody has to take over the Byzantine Institute; why doesn't Dumbarton Oaks do it? And why doesn't somebody learn about the work while Whittemore is still there?" So he sent my husband over as a sort of a – casing the joint, to see how things were going. Whittemore was a fantastic character. He was really something.
ABF: When did you meet him?
IU: I never met him, but I heard all these stories about him. So my husband gets to Istanbul and he knows there's an Englishman on the staff of the fieldwork under Whittemore, and so he makes contact with – oh dear, what is his name? I've forgotten.
ABF: It wasn't Ernest Hawkins?
IU: Yes, it was Ernest Hawkins. And Whittemore was very possessive of anything to do with the work, so he gave my husband a tourist's introduction to the work, you know, but not in the way they actually did the work, and all that, but he took him around to see it. But my husband and Ernest would meet in coffeehouses, and Ernest would tell him more about what was going on. So, my husband had a pretty good idea by the time he had finished his first trip to Istanbul, and then when Whittemore died – in the State Department, actually, he collapsed – Dumbarton Oaks took over the Byzantine Institute, and my husband was sent there as the director of the fieldwork, to take Whittemore's place and to take over. And I think he – well, I know he really enjoyed it, but it was a tricky position, because I don't know how – Whittemore was a very persuasive character, and how he managed to get Atatürk to agree to change these churches which had been turned – well they were either not used at all, and nothing was done about them, or Hagia Sofia, the greatest church in Istanbul and the one that the Greeks still revere, had been turned into a mosque, and somehow Whittemore persuaded Atatürk to turn all the Byzantine churches back into not churches, but museums. And so that's how the work started, trying to preserve the mosaics and the wall paintings.
CW: Right.
IU: Yeah, I don't know what got me on that, but anyway. What else can I say?
ABF: Was your husband excited about taking this job which would take him away from D.C. to Istanbul for such a long period of time?
IU: Well, originally he went from April to I don't know, I don't remember the dates, but November, maybe, or maybe a little earlier than that. The rest of the time – you couldn't do it in the wintertime; it was too cold – no, he was all right with that. I mean, he didn't like to travel, that's true. But he stayed put in Istanbul, except when he went to Cyprus. Of course they started doing fieldwork in Cyprus too. And he had a young Turk who was on the faculty of Robert College become more or less his mouthpiece between the Turks and taking care of official documents he had to give and so on, except once Ercüment forgot about taxes, and my husband had to appear in court, I think, and it was rather iffy, but – so, I don't know how long he did that before we joined him. I think our first trip there – you probably have this down pat, but I don't.
ABF: Was it 1952?
IU: '52, I think, yes.
ABF: Yeah.
IU: Was it '52 or was it...?
ABF: Your first winter – he writes about your first winter as being in 1953 and it was so cold that you had to put on all the clothes you brought with you.
IU: That was the second trip we took. We went earlier than '53.
ABF: Okay.
IU: Yeah. We went – I think –
ABF: – would that have been '51, maybe?
IU: '51, I think, yes, '51 we went.
CW: You, and Sarah went with you?
IU: Yeah, she went the first time, yeah. And then we came back. And then we went again in '53. We came back in '52. I don't know have the dates pat, but anyway, we were there from '53 to '55.
ABF: Okay.
IU: Yeah. And our first trip – well, my husband had gone in '50, '51, and '52 – no, when did I say? – when did we first go there?
ABF: '51, I think.
IU: '51, yeah. But he had gone there in '50.
ABF: Yeah.
IU: And prior to that he had been there once before.
ABF: Right – because there's correspondence from that time.
IU: And then we decided we would go together, and we went for one season and came back to Dumbarton Oaks, and then we went in '53, again as a family, and stayed until we came back in '55, yeah. And from then on he commuted, without us. Sarah and I stayed here. But the first time we went, that was really quite exciting, because when we were on the plane, they told us that unfortunately they had to circle, because the landing gear was sort of iffy, and they didn't know. So, they had to lighten the load of the fuel, so they went round and round, and my daughter at the age of four had been very good, really, on the trip, but she got sick at that point from the circling, you know. And then they decided, well – this was in Ireland – we're going to land, we're going to dive, we're going to go up and dive, to see if that will loosen the landing gear, so they did that. It didn't work. So, they said, "Now we're going to land." And who was on the plane but Danny Kaye? And we thought, you know, while they were doing all this, we thought, "Well, he should come out and entertain us."
CW: To lighten the mood a little bit.
IU: He was in first class. But he didn't come out, and he had quite an entourage with him. But they went up and they dove, and the landing gear came out, but in landing they burnt one of the wheels, so they couldn't go on with that plane. I don't know. So we had to get off the plane, and they changed, but we went on finally. And when we got to London the next day, where we were changing planes, nothing was in the paper about the Underwoods being on the plane, but "Danny Kaye" – a banner headline – "In Near Crash." So that was my first experience in Turkey. And it was very pleasant, because we had rented a villa up the Bosporus, or Dumbarton Oaks had rented a villa up the Bosporus, in what had originally been, of course, a Greek village, and it was charming. And there were a Greek family who I think Alexander had worked for – Whittemore – anyway we became friendly with them, and it was very pleasant. And the head of Saucony-Vacuum, one of the big oil companies, for the whole of the Near East, had been a friend of Thomas Whittemore, and Whittemore had put him up whenever he came to Istanbul, and in fact when my husband came Whittemore put him up – I don't mean Whittemore, I mean what was his name, A.V. Walker. Walker was his name, the head of the oil company – and he was very – he liked us, and he liked Sarah too, my little girl. She was very good with him, and he was very good with her. Except he would invite us to lunch sometimes, and there would be the former Spanish ambassador, the former whatever, or the current somebody or other, you know, high up, and he would invite Sarah too, at the age of four, the first time we went there. And I would always wonder, "What are we going to go through this time?" I remember at one lunch, she was at his right hand, and she turned to him and said, "You put crumbs on my seat," and he laughed and he said, "Yes, I did." It was weird. And then the time he was at our house, and so was the head of Robert College, Dr. Black, and his wife, and there was Sarah – she always came, I mean – so in the middle of lunch she turned to A.V. Walker, she said to him, "Mr. Walker, you have a beautiful garden," and then somehow I could see her thinking, and she turned graciously to Dr. Black and Mrs. Black, and said, "Mrs. Black, you have a wonderful garden." So she handled that quite well. Actually, this was not her first trip. This was – no, it was her first trip, I think. Yeah.
ABF: If she was four, then it must have been the first trip, I think.
IU: It must have...well, I don't know, because when we went back I put her in a French school, Notre Dame de Sion, she hated that, although she knew a little French, because my mother and I spoke French, but I never attempted to speak French with Sarah, which was my mistake. I really should have. But my husband did not speak French; he understood it and he read it, but he didn't speak it. He had a few words, of course, but so – what did I start to say?
ABF: Your daughter, you put her in school.
IU: Oh yeah, I put her in that French school, and she hated it. And so I put her in the English High School for Girls. Each nationality that had trade relationships with Turkey – France, Italy, Germany, I don't know what else, but those were the big three – they each had their own schools. Of course, they had to teach Turkish, which my daughter flunked, and Turkish language and history, I think.
ABF: She was tiny, wasn't she?
IU: Yes. This was the second trip, not our final trip, when she was five, maybe. But she's small now, she still is. But I put her in the English High School. When we came back, Sirarpie der Nersessian was at Dumbarton Oaks. She had been my professor at Wellesley, and in fact I had done special honors with her at Wellesley, so when she greeted me in the library – I knew she was at Dumbarton Oaks, but the first time I saw her, I was in the Georgetown Library, and she came in with her sister, and you know, we embraced, we were friends. And her sister looked at her and she said, "Are you always this affectionate with your students?" "Oh," she said, "no, no, no, no, but this is special." So when we came back from Turkey I told Sirarpie that Sarah had been to her school, and Sarah was right there, and so Sirarpie turned to her and said, "You went to the English High School? That's where I went to school. Tell me, is the salon still to the right of the building? Do you have to curtsy before the mistress?" Sarah said, "Yes, yes." It's so funny, you know: my child and my professor going to the same school in Turkey. Well, Sirarpie, as you probably know, had to flee Turkey at the time of the massacre, and I remember when Jack Thacher asked her to attend a dinner he was giving for the Turkish ambassador, and Sirarpie was – really she didn't want to go. She thought, "I can't take this." She and her sister had both fled with nothing, nothing. And you know they had to work their way eventually to Paris, but first they had to work in Switzerland and so on, until they got to Paris, and they were finally able to establish themselves there. She went to the Sorbonne. But they had a brother who changed his name to a Turkish name, and for years they didn't speak, and we knew nothing about him, until finally – I think Sirarpie waited until the second time we went to Turkey to tell us that yes, she had a brother there; before that she had never mentioned him. So, it was very hard for her to attend this dinner with the Turkish ambassador, but she thought, "Well, I'm at Dumbarton Oaks. What else can I do?" So, that was that. What else can I tell you?
CW: So you lived in an apartment, or in a villa, that Dumbarton Oaks owned?
IU: Right.
CW: At first.
IU: They rented that the first time. But the second time we went my husband had rented a house – not a house, yes, a house – in the city itself, and it was an old Turkish house, and well, it was an unhappy time in our family, because I had a breakdown while he was away in Salonica, attending a conference, and it was a very bad time, but he came back and we eventually moved to an apartment building, which was better, because there was a French family there – in fact, there were two. One of them, he was the manager of the gasworks in Istanbul, and the other one was a man that my family – and oh, he was the one that Paul had come to know, because being manager of the gasworks for the city, he had to okay the pipe work and everything. When they laid new foundations for a new building or dug up an old building or whatever, he was involved. So, he had become interested in archaeology. And he became interested in the work of the Byzantine Institute, and so my husband and he were good friends, and so I already knew these people. I had met them before. And they were in the same building, and that made it much easier for me. And then I also did volunteer work at the Y, Y.W.C.A., teaching a very small group of young women English. And that was amusing. But I made the mistake of asking them, I said, "I love Turkish cooking. I want recipes." So, they gave me recipes, but unfortunately every time we had a meeting, they would say, "Did you try this? Did you try that?" And I never did, of course, because Turkish recipes, you have to prepare them in advance, everything is done in advance, so you're very relaxed at the time, but I wasn't going to do that when I had a maid; why should I? And they always wanted to talk about movies, and I didn't know about that. You know, movies weren't my great interest at the time. And when we had lived on the shore of the Bosporus before, in the villa, there was a very nice Turkish family next door with two grown daughters, and I think they were still going to Robert College at the time – yes they were – and they became very friendly with us, and they loved Sarah, and they were forever talking about movies and wanted to know all about the stars, and I couldn't help them very much, but – and I think we went once or twice to the movies together, but they were very nice. Unfortunately, when we came back I looked them up and the younger daughter had insisted on taking a job, and her parents would have nothing more to do with her. She would have stayed home, and they would have selected a husband for her, and it was very sad. And so my daughter went to this high school, and that was very pleasant. And then came the riots in fifty –
IU: I can't remember when they came.
CW: In September '55?
IU: Probably.
CW: Over Cyprus.
IU: Yes.
CW: Yes.
IU: And I remember I was visiting, spending the evening – I went from our apartment to another apartment building down the hill on the same street, where there was an English couple who had two sons, and the two sons went to the English High School for Girls, which was co-ed, never mind that the girls were still in the title, but – and our driver would take our three children, the two boys and Sarah, to school every day, and we became friends with this English – he was, I think, at the British Consulate. I don't remember what position he had there. So, I was spending the evening there, and we were having a very nice quiet time, and suddenly my husband came over, and I said, "What?" and he said, "You have to come home right away, right away." So, I said, "Okay. What's happened?" He said, "Well, there's rioting in the city, and you'd better come home," so we walked home – it was just down a few blocks – and as we walked home there was this group of men coming up from below with clubs, whatever they could grab, and they were coming up the hill looking very, very serious, and Paul said, "Hurry, hurry, we'll get home." So, we went home, our bell rang, and it was the janitor of our apartment building, looking very upset – he was Turkish. And he said, "Madame, do you have a Turkish flag?" And I said, "No, I don't have a Turkish flag." Well, the building was owned by Greeks, and he wanted to be sure that we had a sign that, you know, said, "We're okay; no, we're not Greek." But we didn't have it, so we said, "No, we can't help you. We'll just have to take our chances." Well, nothing happened, except down the street there was a little grocery shop, and they ruined that completely, and the main drag, all merchandise – the refrigerators, whatever – were in the streets. They totaled all the shops; the Greek and the Armenian and the Jewish shops were all totaled. And then we saw them the next day – but the next morning, my husband was worried, because on his staff he had both Turks and Greeks, and he thought, "I wonder how things are," and when his driver came in the morning, he said, "Alexander, you have to take me into the old city, because I don't know what's happening there." And so he agreed, and they drove into the Old City, and he found that the Turkish members of his staff had taken in the Greek members for the night, so they were safe. So that was good. But later in the day – oh, Sarah wasn't home: she had been spending the weekend at Robert College, because the president had a daughter, and they had just come – the Valentines became good friends with us – had just come that summer to take over the position of president of Robert College, and Sarah had been spending the weekend there with their daughter; she was a year or two older than Sarah. And I said to Paul, "I want to go up to Robert College and get Sarah. I want her to be home with us." And he said, "Yeah, I think you're right, maybe," and I said, "We'll take some bread with us," because we were sure that all the shops had been looted all the way up the Bosporus too. So we called, got hold of Alexander, and said, "You've got to take us up the Bosporus." And he said, "Oh, I really don't want to," because he was from Syria, I think, and he was a Christian, and of course nobody was supposed to know that, and he was afraid for his life, you know, if they discovered it. But he finally agreed to take us. And it was all right; we got there okay. Except for, when we got there we found that the Valentines had just received the day before their pictures and other things from the States, and they were busy hanging up pictures, very calmly. We entered their living room and said, "What are you doing? Do you know what's happening in town?" "No, no." They didn't know anything about it. And I said, "We've brought you some bread, because we were afraid you were running out of, you know, bread, anything." Oh, they were just amazed that anything had happened. So, we got Sarah; we got home okay. But a day or two later the World Bank was meeting in Istanbul at the time, and among the members of the Bank was Crainer T. Young, he was a friend of the Blisses, and they knew Jack Thacher, and they were interested in the art and so on. They were in Istanbul because of the meeting of the World Bank. Crainer was not familiar with the city so my husband asked me to accompany him to wherever he wished or I suggested he see. Unfortunately, I had not realized he was an avid photographer. He began to snap the all too evident signs of the recent rioting – merchandise strewn all over the main drag from all the Greek shops etc. I asked him to put away his camera, "In this tense atmosphere, we might be attacked." "You're right, he said." She wasn't with us; it was only Crainer. So, we got together, and he had his camera with him, and we went into the city, and the stupid man was taking pictures, and you know, the main street was filled with this merchandise; nothing had been cleaned up. And it was just horrible, and he was taking pictures. And I said, "Crainer, put away your camera; you know, they'll see you, and we'll be attacked if we continue." "Oh," he said, "you're right; you're right." So we got through all right, and it worked fine. In fact, as we were going home later that year, I mean going back to America, we met them in Naples and we had dinner together, and it was very pleasant. And Mrs. Young said to Sarah, "Would you like to see the kitchen?" She said, "Oh, yes!" So, they went off to the kitchen together, you see, which the Italians were always happy to have people do that in the hotels; you know, you could go and see whatever was being done. So, Sarah enjoyed that. But that meeting and the World Bank, and of course the Turks were ashamed to have the World Bank see all this destruction, but it was their doing. And then that fall – November, I think it was – we left – or maybe late October – we left for the States.
ABF: Did you see the Blisses in Istanbul?
IU: No, they didn't come out, but the – I never remember whether it's the Kress or the Kresge –
ABF: Yeah, the Kresses.
IU: Kress Foundation. They came out while we were there, and they were entertained.
ABF: It seems as if your husband was not only working on the restoration, but dealing with all these potential benefactors who were coming through, or handling all of the finances, and these letters make it seem like he –
IU: Well, I wasn't aware of all that he did. He didn't hide things from me, but I didn't think to ask very much. And unless I was personally involved – I didn't entertain the Kresses when they came, but I know there was a dinner for them at Robert College, and we were all together, and so I met them – but he probably saw many more people that he didn't tell me about, that I don't know, unless I was involved in some way.
ABF: It seems very remarkable, looking at his letters, all that he was managing to do while he was there.
IU: Yes. Well, as I say, he didn't tell me all that happened. He protected me, as it were, I think. But he enjoyed it, and we had this good friend who became his assistant, really, and he took care of the official part with the Turks – a very good friend – and he used to take us on sightseeing tours, and have us to his house, which was an old Turkish home with decorations of flowers, of course, because they could never have figurative decorations now. And it was really lovely; we enjoyed meeting, you know, the real Turks. And unfortunately, he's retired now from the faculty at Robert College, and he's not doing very well in old age, not accepting it very well, which is bad, and I haven't seen him. I saw him last – I don't remember when my last trip to Turkey was, in the '80s. I did see him then, but – we correspond at Christmas, but that's not great. So that's about it.
ABF: And do you remember seeing other Dumbarton Oaks scholars while you were there, like I know that Kitzinger came and stayed with you in October 1963?
IU: He did?
ABF: That's what the letter said.
IU: I'm going to see if I can see these letters, yeah.
ABF: They're there, at Dumbarton Oaks.
IU: I don't even know the name of the director. Joe, what's the name of the director?
ABF: Ziolkowski.
IU: Oh, yes, somebody told me that.
IU: Does he have a family?
ABF: Yes.
JM: He has a wife too; it's a very good addition to Dumbarton Oaks.
IU: Oh, good, I'm glad to hear that, because the one before that, I don't think – well no, well yeah, he's Director. But it's still Alice-Mary, right, who is Director of Byzantine Studies, but she's going to retire, isn't she?
ABF: Yeah, mhm.
JM: She's gonna stay one more year.
IU: One more year, yeah.
ABF: Yeah, Alice-Mary told us all about you.
IU: She did?
ABF: She did. She had very kind things to say.
IU: She did? I remember once Philip Grierson was giving a little cocktail party before dinner – and dinner too, I guess – outside, and I was early, and I didn't want to be early, so I was looking into this – there used to be a sort of an antique shop at the corner, I think – and I was looking in the window there, and so I was sauntering around, wasting time, and Alice-Mary came by, and she said, "What are you doing on a street corner, Mrs. Underwood?" So I said, "Well, I'm early, I'm early." Oh, dear.
ABF: I'm just wondering if we could go back for just a second to sort of the early days and if you could –
IU: Yes, you should have stopped me.
CW: No, no.
ABF: No, no, we wanted to hear it as you remember it before we asked questions. But do you remember going to teas with Mrs. Bliss or any of those other sort of rituals besides the music concerts?
IU: Oh, I meant to tell you about the teas. Yes, the teas were originally in the Music Room, which was not – they were too formal, really. It was cold, and I didn't enjoy that particularly. But then they moved to the Founders' Room – I hope it's still called that. It's on the right-hand side down the hall.
ABF: In the Main Building?
IU: Yes, yes. At the main entrance, the main entrance to the house, beyond that, when you still go down the hall, there's a relatively small room on the right, which has – I think it has bookcases; I've forgotten now – and it used to be called the Founders' Room, I think.
JM: I think it was called the Study, and the larger room was the Founders' Room.
IU: Oh, was it? The larger room, I know, is now called the Founders' Room, but I thought the other one was – well no, probably. I don't know, I don't know.
JM: I'm as confused as you are; I've only been here 33 years.
IU: No, but I've forgotten. My memory is not reliable. Anyway, you think it was called the Study. Well, that was a smaller room, and it was very nice, and Mrs. Bliss would occasionally appear, even though Harvard had had the gift for some time now, you know, of Dumbarton Oaks, and usually it was the scholars, and they didn't have to come – I don't think my husband ever came. I don't know whether he did or not. But the younger Fellows would certainly come, and Mrs. Bliss's maid, the maid who had been her personal maid – and I don't know whether she still had duties at their home in Georgetown – but she would be there at tea time, and she would make the most delicious butter sandwiches, just butter – they were so good – on very lovely bread. So, one day Sarah and I were walking in the gardens, and I had on a denim skirt, and she had on denim slacks, and she said, "Oh, let's go to tea." And I said, "Sarah, we can't go to tea. Look at us!" And she said, "Oh, come on, Mom. I know everybody there!" she said. So, I let myself be persuaded. And unfortunately it was one of the days when Mrs. Bliss had chosen to come. And we were sitting around having tea. And as I said, Mrs. Bliss, she always tried to be friendly, you know, but she didn't quite know, so she turned and she said, "And to whom does this belong?" pointing to Sarah. And I said, "She's mine, Mrs. Bliss! She's mine!" You know, our encounters were rather strange, Mrs. Bliss' and mine.
ABF: Do you remember Mr. Bliss as well?
IU: No, no. He didn't show up very much. Well, I knew him, of course, and one of the things I remember, when he died, Mrs. Bliss, who I think had a rather soft spot for my husband, who was quite handsome – they met in the hall, and she said, "Oh, Underwood" – everybody was by their surname; she never – "I wonder, you know, Mr. Bliss, we found that he had many shirts that he didn't wear, and I was wondering if you would like them." He was just as thunderstruck as I had been in my encounters. I said, "How did you handle that?" That's one encounter he told me about. And he said, "Well, I didn't quite know, but I finally said, 'You know, Mrs. Bliss, Mr. Bliss was a much taller man than I, and I'm afraid perhaps they wouldn't fit me.'" What else could he say? I thought it was such a strange suggestion, you know. But I knew who he was, of course. We shook hands, and I went through receiving line after receiving line, and there he was, so of course I knew him. But I remember their golden anniversary, they had a reception, and there was a line to go to greet them. It went from R Street all the way to the front bit, to the main entrance of the house, you know; people waited to see them. And we were in line, we were near the R Street entrance, actually; suddenly, the word came down the line, "Mrs. Bliss would like to see Underwood; Mrs. Bliss would like to see Underwood." My husband was very reserved, and finally it reached us. And Paul was looking at us, and I said, "Well, Paul, she wants to see you; you'd better go." So poor Paul, he had to walk all the way up to the front of the line; I don't know why she wanted to see him at that point. I never did learn why she called him. He probably told me, but it didn't stick. That was so funny. Oh dear. But I really didn't know Mr. Bliss. He seemed very nice, you know. He didn't spend much time at Dumbarton Oaks. She, of course – her great interest was the garden, and she still planned, she and her landscape architect – Farr –
ABF: Beatrix Farrand.
IU: Yeah. – planned a water garden, and I mean it was pebbles imported from Scotland, and I don't know what's happened to that part of –
ABF: It's still there.
CW: By the pool, yeah.
IU: Is it still a water garden? I mean, is there water on it?
CW: It's just pebbles now; it doesn't have water.
JM: The design was flawed and wouldn't hold the water, and they redid it at the cost of many tens of thousands of dollars, and they did it wrong, and it didn't hold again.
IU: Now it holds? It never held? Before that it was a tennis court. And I remember during the war diplomats would come there and play, you know, and there were also victory gardens on the grounds that the staff had, little plots where you could grow vegetables. We never had one; we were not gardeners. So, it was a great experience, really.
ABF: Did it seem as if there was a very clearly defined social hierarchy among the scholars who were working there?
IU: No.
ABF: With regard to who was invited to lunch there?
IU: When ambassadors were invited to dine at the Fellows Building, I don't know who hosted the dinner – Mrs. Bliss or Jack Thacher. When the French ambassador came, the Underwoods were invited – I assume because of me. And when the Turkish ambassador was invited, Sirarpie Der Nersessian, an Armenian scholar, was invited – because she was born in Istanbul? I don't really know whom Mrs. Bliss invited to their home from Dumbarton Oaks. I remember there was Fanny Bonajuto, for example. Have you heard of her? She was assistant to Julia Warner, who was in charge of publications at one time, and Fanny came from a very good family in Italy, and she had married a Sicilian prince, and so she was a principessa – how do you pronounce it in Italian? Principessa or whatever.
CW: Principessa.
IU: – And she was invited to Mrs. Bliss's for lunch. Mrs. Bliss never invited me. Oh, I didn't tell you about the Christmas – I've got to – Well, the Christmas party, the Blisses.
JM: I'd like to just put another tape in before you do this. We'll run out of tape. Just pause for a minute, please.
IU: But don't waste your tape; it's just going to be one story.
JM: Well, I only have three minutes. So let me just pause.
IU: The Blisses used to give – I remember one, but I think it was more than one time – a Christmas party at their house. The members of Dumbarton Oaks received pointsettias at Christmas time and flowering plants at Easter; Mr. Kearney, head of the grounds, would deliver them, also presents from Mrs. Bliss. One year, I remember the card that came with it. I don't know whether it was always to the wives or whether I just misread the card that came with it and thought it was addressed to me. And I looked at it and I couldn't make out what it was; it was a little case – I don't even remember what it was made of. So, I wrote a thank-you note – I don't know how I phrased it, because I didn't know what the object was, but I phrased it somehow – thanking Mrs. Bliss. It was meant for my husband. And she was, she really – I heard – gave Kearney a hard time for delivering the wrong thing, delivering it supposedly to me when it should have been to my husband. I don't know what happened. I was so embarrassed to have this whole thing here. But the one I was going to tell you about, the Christmas party that I remember, was at their home in their rumpus room, where there was a Picasso on the wall, and you name it, you know, but it was what they termed the "rumpus room." And it was just for the Dumbarton Oaks Fellows and wives. And 1952 was the first year that my husband was to be accompanied by our daughter and me for his yearly sixth-month directing of the work in Istanbul, and Mrs. Bliss had presents for everybody there at the party. And mine was a very nice fitted toilet case. And I thought that was so nice, really so very, you know, gracious and very thoughtful. Usually it was her social secretary who selected them. I'm sure she gave her a list and said, "Get something," you know, so that was very nice. But like everything that Mrs. Bliss did, there was always something. Children were not invited to this party. Now that was okay with us, because my mother lived with us, and so I had a live-in babysitter, you know, Sarah's grandmother. But the Van Nices did not have a mother living with them, and they kept their children in the car, in the street, all during this party. Now, really, I would not have done that. I'm sorry. But I thought that was so bad. But you know, Mrs. Bliss didn't think of the problems that parents have sometimes. So, that was sad. That was all I was going to say.
ABF: Well, we don't want to keep you any longer, but we'd love to keep going.
IU: No really, I must go.
ABF: Well, thank you very, very much.]]>
HK: No, I first came as an employee, assistant to Paul Underwood working on the Kariye Djami project, in the fateful summer of 1963.
JW: How did you first come to be involved with Dumbarton Oaks?
HK: Kurt Weitzmann, my professor at Princeton, also knew Paul Underwood and arranged for summer employment with Paul.
JW: Mr. Weitzmann says in a letter in your file that, when you applied for a Junior Fellowship with Dumbarton Oaks, you were not a Byzantinist "in the strict sense" of the word, but that you worked on the Touronian Bible and had gone deeply into Eastern manuscript recensions and Jewish sources. Even though you weren't a Byzantinist "in the strict sense," then, why did you decide that D.O. was going to be the place most conducive to bringing your dissertation to a conclusion?
HK: The library, primarily, which was as rich as any resource I had access to.
JW: Other than the richness of the library, what were your initial impressions of Dumbarton Oaks?
HK: Well, the year I was a Junior Fellow, the symposium on "Byzantium and the West" took place. In those years, the speakers were invited to spend the year at D.O. So, present at D.O. in addition to Ernst Kitzinger were Otto Demus, Jean Porcher, Hugo Buchthal, and others, with whom I became friendly and also to whom I owe a lot of mentoring.
JW: How would you characterize your relationship with Mr. Weitzmann?
HK: Well, he and I were extremely close. I ended up being the executor of his will, and he and I collaborated on two major books, both supported by Dumbarton Oaks. The second one is a monograph on the painting in the Dura-Europos synagogue, which D.O. published, and the first one became in those days called a project, a D.O. project, which sent us to England, to study that Cotton Genesis book. I was a Project Fellow working on that and supported for three years on that project. So, he and I collaborated after I finished my Ph.D. under his direction.
JW: How is working on a collaboration a unique process from working on something on your own?
HK: Oh, very complicated and difficult. The first project, the Cotton Genesis project, was basically finishing work that Weitzman had begun in the '40s and felt too old to complete. When he asked me to come onboard, I ended up writing every word of the published text, but using material that he gave me and working with him day after day on the analysis I provided. The second book, the Dura-Europos book, was actually in a way a criticism of Weitzmann. He gave me his text; I said, "You really can't publish this without supplementing your argument in a different way." He said, "Then you do it." So, I wrote about half the book, which was to complete or to fill in what I considered the lacunae in his study. But it was always congenial.
JW: In what ways did you make use of Dumbarton Oaks's resources in collaborating on those two projects?
HK: At the time of the first project, D.O. was also deeply involved with Otto Demus's publication on the mosaics of San Marco, which D.O. had photographed in a photo campaign. The photos were essential – still unpublished – essential to my work. So, I had special access to as-yet not available materials; that was important. The Index of Christian Art served me well; the library of course. Yep, those were the basic resources. The second project was fundamentally just a publication, and D.O.'s part was just publishing the book.
JW: As a Junior Fellow, Herb, did you ever have the opportunity to meet Mrs. Bliss?
HK: I did. I met her several times during my time as Junior Fellow. Mrs. Bliss would appear regularly at the Fellows' Tea in the Founders' Room, and also at the Spring Symposium, where all the Fellows were invited to dine with her. She would also occasionally come to the concerts. So, yes, I met her.
JW: Do you have any specific recollections of your interactions with her, during tea or after a symposium, say?
HK: Well, she was very enthusiastic about Byzantine art. She was at that moment very keen on a project on Mt. Sinai. She was very, let's say, aristocratic, in her reactions to the regular professors such as Kitzinger, and also then to the Junior Fellows. We were somehow – we were led to understand that we were in her service.
JW: Could you characterize Ernst Kitzinger's Directorship?
HK: Hmm. Yes, he was very involved in his own work at the time, of course, and interacted with the Fellows regularly, but from a distance, I'd say. So, he read my dissertation and called me into the office to discuss it. That was the most important interaction I had with him, I'd say.
JW: What did you discuss with him? What changes did you make to your dissertation as a result of that discussion?
HK: It was curious, in that he had taken voluminous notes – and these were the days when photocopy machines were new, and making photocopies rather expensive – and when I asked him for the notes afterwards to make a copy, he refused to give them to me, so I was not happy about that; but I remembered enough to incorporate – I understood that his criticisms, and they were criticisms, had to be taken into account before I published. So, they were useful. But I never fully understood why he didn't want to deliver the notes to me, even to make photocopies.
JW: It seems that collaboration with your superiors was a very important part of your experience at Dumbarton Oaks in refining the work that you were doing. As a Junior Fellow, did you have any like interactions with your peers?
HK: Umm – I'm trying to remember who my peers were. We were a socially very integrated group, but there were no other art historians, if I remember right, and no one working on material related to my project, so I think that was less useful, that is, my peers. But that was, I'd say, more an accident of who happened to be there at the time. As I said, the counter to that was that I was fortunate to be present when a symposium really up my alley was being organized, so the Senior Fellows, or whatever they were called, really helped me and became close friends in subsequent years, especially Demus and Buchthal.
JW: What was the symposium about which you found to be really up your alley?
HK: It was called "Byzantium and the West." Also, the presence of Jean Porcher, who was the retired Director of the Biblioteque – the Keeper of Manuscripts or something at the Bibliothèque Nationale – resulted in my having unrestricted access later to the holdings at the BN.
JWC: Would you mind just speaking a little bit louder? We can hear you fine, but just for the transcription it may be a little helpful.
HK: Okay.
JWC: Thank you.
JW: What was your role with "Byzantium and the West"? Or were you in the audience for that symposium?
HK: I was just in the audience for that symposium, but, as I said, the senior participants spent the year at D.O. It wasn't as, developed later, just a coming for the three-day weekend. So, I watched them work, I watched them collaborate, and had lots of time to talk to them during the course of the year.
JWC: Now, in an interview that was done with Oleg Grabar, he spoke at length about the type of symposium that you just talked about, where people would come and they would spend a long time working with each other, and the final product would be, you know, work that spanned a year or, you know, whatever the length was. And he mentioned that, as the symposia became more focused on giving individual papers and only spending a weekend here or a week here, there was a change in the feel of the symposia and what he thought was a less robust symposium experience. What are your thoughts on that?
HK: Well, I can go back to the moment of change, because I was a Senior Fellow at the time, and there was a perception – that is, on the Senior Fellows Committee, so I was privy to the discussions, I participated in them – and there was a feeling under Giles Constable that Dumbarton Oaks was too undemocratic, that having the old kind of symposium meant inviting people for a year, filling most of the slots with people that were selected by the Senior Fellows for a specific purpose, and that that should be changed. The result – I agree completely with what Oleg said – the result was a transformation not only of the end-product, which was always published as an issue of Dumbarton Oaks Papers – so it really was a complete package: think of a topic, invite the right people, get them to come, get them to collaborate, have a polished symposium in which there were no surprises, and publish at least the very – all of the good papers. Sometimes people were disinvited, I understand. But the result was a finished work, and that was spectacular. For the Junior Fellows at the time, what really impressed me was watching senior scholars working together, collaborating, and I witnessed nothing like that ever again in my career.
JW: Earlier you mentioned that the Junior Fellows were very much socially integrated. How did that come about?
HK: Well, in my year as a Junior Fellow, it was because the participants in the symposium came as bachelors, so we all went out to dinners a lot together, ate together. The swimming pool had its effect, creating an informal atmosphere for those who went down there. And, again, I was lucky that the topic my year was an art-historical topic, so it brought art historians. I'm not sure – I don't know one way or the other whether non-art historians had the same kind of experience.
JW: So, after your Junior Fellowship, Herb, you'd go on to have something of a lifelong relationship with Dumbarton Oaks, where you're an employee, a Project Fellow, a Senior Fellow. At a given stage in your relationship with D.O., how did your experience differ from that of the previous stage or stages?
HK: Well, Dumbarton Oaks itself had changed. When I was a Project Fellow, Giles Constable was trying to find ways to open D.O. up. He was much criticized as a non-Byzantinist, and he probably turned to me – well, first as a Project Fellow, he encouraged a project that cut East and West, so that was certainly part of his agenda. And then when he initiated my appointment as Senior Fellow, it was, I think again, to bridge gaps. I had been a member of the Byzantine Studies Conference, which, when Giles Constable was first appointed to D.O., was hostile – was somewhat hostile – and I think Giles was surprised to learn, when I was Project Fellow, that I was not hostile to his Directorship. And so he brought me on board. I was quite young at the time. So, Dumbarton Oaks was changing in many, many ways. I mean, he was, as Director, very much determined to open D.O. up, to break the stranglehold that a very small inner circle had had on the institution.
JW: Do you remember any initiatives in particular that Constable proposed to the end of opening D.O. up?
HK: Oh, sure. He began by democratizing the eating. So, when I was a Junior Fellow, only the faculty, which was almost exclusively male, were allowed to eat – and the Fellows, also mostly all men – in the Fellows' building. Giles sensed this and invited everyone to eat, but everyone had to pay; and this meant that members of the staff, like Susan Boyd, who never felt welcome to eat in the Fellows building before that, even though her assistants could eat there sometimes, felt free, integrated into the operation. That was one thing that Giles did. As I mentioned, again, he insisted that all fellowships be awarded on an application basis. I know that some scholars bridled at that. For example, Hugo Buchthal felt that there was no need for D.O. to get letters of recommendation about him, because his record was already well-known and his history with D.O. was established; and Giles in fact compromised in the end on such cases of truly renowned Fellows. But it was a move to open up a very closed institution. He also put a halt to ongoing projects by scholars who went, for example, every summer to, say, Istanbul year after year after year on D.O.'s nickel without having to account for it. Yes, in every way he breathed fresh air into the institution.
JWC: When a lot of people talk about Giles, they always use the word "democratization" and, oddly enough, the first thing that always seems to come up is, as you mention, the lunch. Why do you think that the institutions that were here before he came in had such a large effect on the minds of scholars – things like that versus the scholarship itself and policies relating to scholarship?
HK: Well, Giles came in at a low point in the history of D.O., a low point that was really the result of inbreeding, I would say. So, small groups seemed – well, certainly evinced control of large amounts of money. Harvard was not happy with the direction. Harvard – Derek Bok was trying ways to make Dumbarton Oaks flourish, but to become relevant to the American educational system. Independent, stand-alone research institutions like D.O. were rare in those days. They're a little more common now. And, of all things, a rather upper class Englishman was brought in to effect the transformation; and he did. He was of course – is, of course, a very distinguished scholar, so no one could impugn his credentials, though he wasn't a Byzantinist and was attacked, quite viciously, by people who stood to lose ground because of that. But he had a vision, and he had skills for implementing it. I think he saved D.O. this way. He also came in at a – it looked like D.O. was squandering its funds, and there was the famous Proctor Report – I suppose you've heard about that, that suggested that income would fall below expenditures very – I forget how many years, but like eight years; and Giles set about to change that. I can give you one example. D.O. had funded Otto Demus's San Marco project and the related Adriatic mosaics project with stipends to provide scholars and photographers, year after year, to study these very important mosaics, Byzantine-related mosaics. When Giles came in, Otto was finishing the project and to publish San Marco, which he had worked on for many, many years at D.O.'s expense. The Publications Department – Julia Warner – sent out the book for an estimate of cost, and it came in at something like a quarter of a million dollars, which in the early '80s was absolutely staggering; and Giles said, "We can't do it." Otto was crushed by this news. He couldn't believe it because he, like everyone else, had been accustomed to tapping D.O.'s largesse. I myself came to the rescue there by – I was close to people at the University of Chicago Press; I arranged for them to make a bid – I think it was about half the cost that had been given. There was a lot of tut-tutting, that it wouldn't be up to D.O. standards. I think everyone thinks it ended up being a spectacular publication, matching D.O.'s criteria, exceeding them perhaps, for half the price. But this gives you – my anecdote gives you some sense of what D.O. was like: no bids to spending the money, no thinking about costs. Related to that was the whole editorial process. They checked – Julia Warner and her crew who – they were wonderful – but they actually checked every footnote in D.O.P. against the holdings in the library to make sure there were no errors, so there was a staff doing that, and they used the most expensive printing operation without ever thinking about savings. And, of course, you've probably heard that one of Giles's radical innovations was to cut out the dust jacket and use shrink-wrap instead of dust jackets, which saved a lot of money, and to begin distributing D.O.P. through the Harvard University Press.
JWC: Why do you think that there was that attitude toward money? Do you think that maybe it was because of the way the Blisses lived, and things are still being run as a wealthy private estate? Or was it more a culture that had developed – you used the word "inbreeding," where people had a sense of entitlement. What do you think, you know, created the culture that you just spoke of?
HK: Absolutely entitlement. I know that Weitzmann felt – he was a Senior Fellow – he felt, and expressed to his students, that he had one Junior Fellowship per year in his gift at D.O. He could name one of his students Junior Fellow. There was a little jockeying, I know, once. He tells the story of how he played Richard Krautheimer into voting for his candidate, so there was a little of that. But there's no question that he conveyed to me that, if I wanted to go to D.O., he more or less could arrange that. So, it was absolutely a small circle. This is not really criticism; a lot was done in those days of this order, and the small circle named the outer circle.
JW: Would you discuss how Giles's democratization of Dumbarton Oaks affected the quality of the scholarship coming out of the institute?
HK: Well, it brought in the scholarship first of all. So, his point of view was that it need not be only Byzantium but could focus on Byzantium and its neighbors, and, if you look at some of the topics that were studied during his reign, they included Byzantium and the East, for example, as well as the West, or Armenia and the like. So, he went in that direction. Also, he included many new kinds of topics: so, Byzantium and medicine. I think the scholarship – I would argue, the level of scholarship rose – it did not decline. But I think that depends on the viewpoint of the person you talk to. I mean, the opinion will vary considerably, because it was a rather hot time for Giles and the rest of us as he effected this transition from the old guard to no guard. He really did democratize the processes.
JW: At what point did this "hot time" cool down, and what were the causes of that cool down?
HK: Well, Giles was succeeded by Robert Thomson, who in a way returned somewhat to the old traditions. I remember I was a Senior Fellow at the time and Robert said, with a little smile on his face, "I've been asked what my vision of D.O. is," meaning he was following Giles, so Giles had a vision, and he said, sarcastically, "my vision is that D.O. is a library." So, he brought the expansive projects in tighter, if he didn't disband them and returned to a much more sedate time at D.O. And then I sort of passed from the picture after that in the mid-1980s, except for coming back for symposia and the like.
JW: When you became a Senior Fellow, did your perspective of the Junior Fellowships change at all? Did you see it from a different perspective?
HK: Oh, sure. Again, there were controversies. In the old days, in my day as Junior Fellow, a Junior Fellow could expect automatic renewal. So, Kitzinger was quite surprised when I opted not to have second year at D.O. as a Junior Fellow, but to start teaching, whereas Giles favored – I'm not remembering exactly – but he certainly favored one year fellowships and not automatic renewal. So, that was certainly one difference. Ask me the question again. I forgot what you wanted to know.
JW: We were interested in how your perspective of the Junior Fellowship changed once you were in a senior position.
HK: Yeah. Well, we were very worried about standards – standards of applications. We had some bad experiences and so we kept fiddling with the criteria. Especially in those days, a lot of scholars, probably still true, young scholars would apply for D.O. as a place to park themselves while they were waiting to get jobs or trying to get one of the scarce jobs, so we certainly looked askance at young Ph.D.s who were trying to come to D.O. as a postdoc. We were worried that the postdocs, I guess Fellows, they were called "Fellows" without any modification, that they would simply be scholars who used it as a default. We didn't reject that out of hand, we again – Giles, a very Solomonic man said, "Everyone with a Ph.D. should be free to apply for a fellowship, but we would hold them to the criteria we applied to more advanced scholars." So, some people did succeed but others did not on the basis of that.
JW: Do you remember any specific changes to the selection criteria?
HK: It kept varying. What comes to my mind – yes, of course. There's one critical one. While I was Senior Fellow, we sacrificed one slot to pay for bringing the candidates in for interviews. This was a direct reaction to a series of problematic cohorts of Junior Fellows. So, we laid eyes on them. We were very concerned that one of them who had applied, of course, in the fall for a fellowship, ended up having a deferred degree at Oxford and that was egg on our face. We decided that if we could actually talk to people, press them, we would make better decisions. I think the judgment was we did. It was worth the price. But we kept evaluating the costs of bringing people in for interviews against the benefits.
JWC: Who do you, in your personal opinion, feel makes the best type of a Junior Fellow? Someone who's been around the block a little longer or someone who's sort of green and can use this chance to grow and see what their scholarly interests are?
HK: I would say maybe both types – D.O. would benefit from having both types and vice versa. It did create programs, maybe under Giles, I don't remember, for training people in Byzantine Greek and other disciplines at an early stage to nurture a cohort of American, I guess, mostly American scholars, who weren't getting this kind of training in their host institutions, but D.O.'s commitment to helping students finish dissertations is also extremely important. I don't know if you are going to ask me about this, but I'll tack this onto that question. Of course, the other thing Giles did was create joint appointments with neighboring institutions. Are you going to ask me about that or should I just talk?
JW: No, please. Go ahead.
HK: Okay. A part of Giles's mission to integrate D.O. with the American educational system was to create joint appointments in Byzantine subjects with local institutions – Georgetown, University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins, American University, various places. I happened to be a Senior Fellow and helped negotiate the joint appointment with my home institution at Johns Hopkins. This reflects on Giles's whole attitude. The pressure on the Senior Fellows and Director came from certain empowered old guard members of D.O. Giles said, "No, we're going to have an open search." The open search for Johns Hopkins resulted in the appointment of someone no one had ever heard of before, a man who was trained in Belgium, an American man called Michael McCormick, trained in Belgium. We all agreed he looked like the very best candidate, even better than Harvard's own Ph.Ds. This rankled, I can assure you. We brought Mike in for the interview and he impressed both sides – Hopkins and D.O. – and he was appointed. It rankled further because Mike was accused of not being a true Byzantinist, even though he has super Greek as well as super Latin. Anyway, the seed was planted at D.O. Mike eventually got tenure at Johns Hopkins and then he was stolen from Johns Hopkins by Harvard where he's now a named chair, got the Mellon lifetime achievement award of a million and a half bucks, and many other things. So, Giles's decision in that case was certainly proven to be a wise one. So, its just characteristic of Giles's openness, but also his vision to plant Byzantine Studies in America. And there are many, many other success stories. John Duffy went from Maryland to Harvard, and I'm sure you know better than I that part of the history.
JWC: I think it was also under Giles that there was a project where Dumbarton Oaks scholars and fellows would travel around to different cities in the U.S. and they would do a series of lectures on a topic of their interest, but the lectures weren't always given in academic settings. I think the idea was to share Byzantine Studies with a larger audience. Are you familiar with that? Did you ever have a role?
HK: I did it. I did it myself. I haven't thought of this in a long time. I went to Mt. Holyoke College and I gave a lecture that was open to the public.
JW: What was the lecture on?
HK: I can't remember. It was a long time ago.
JW: Do you remember at all how it was received by the general public?
HK: I liked it. I think it was received – you know, I don't know my particular lecture – but I think the event was very successful. I remember vaguely, now that you mention it, talking to students about Byzantium – students who had never heard the word before.
JW: Do you think D.O. has an academic duty or that it's in the best interests of Dumbarton Oaks to launch public outreach initiatives like that?
HK: Yes. Byzantine Studies, and with it Dumbarton Oaks, will die if the job is left just to a few scholars at a few universities. There is little doubt that when Giles started his initiatives, there were very, very few places, and increasingly fewer, that were willing to invest in Byzantine Studies. Giles also had the initiative of creating a troika of scholars at Harvard, this was controversial too – at least one university where there would be a critical mass of Byzantinists. Someone doing Byz. Lit., someone doing Byz. art history, and someone doing Byz. history to help train students.
JW: During and beyond your Senior Fellowship, which extended between 1980–86, if we're not mistaken, you served as the advisor to the Byzantine photograph collection. What were some of the important changes made with regard to that collection in that period?
HK: We hired a professional archivist, and then a second one. She retired. When I came on the scene, it was a rather private precinct used by in-house scholars. There were very unpleasant controls on some of the material – unpleasant in the sense that some scholars from the outside were allowed to use the materials and some were denied it on the basis of personal preference. So, we instituted a policy of openness, hired a professional archivist to put the materials together, and in general apply professional standards. Many of the very precious fieldwork materials were degrading because they were not being stored in archivally sound fashions – photo sleeves and the like. Indeed, one of the things we did was visit every office in Dumbarton Oaks and look under desks to retrieve boxes of photographic and other materials that scholars had just left randomly throughout the building. So, we put in an order and opened it up. A good case in point that concerns the San Marco material, which Dumbarton Oaks had almost exclusive rights to at the time: whereas Weitzman and I, as I mentioned, were allowed to have access to this material, and indeed to publish it, another eminent scholar was denied the same right because she, quote, "was not good enough as a scholar," end quote. The result was, she went to the newly founded Getty Institute in California, had them re-photograph the material she wanted, and ended up having another, even better set, actually the Norman mosaics of Sicily, which she then published. So, we put it on an open and professional foundation.
JW: We spoke recently with Dumbarton Oaks archivist and researcher Natalia Teteriatnikov. She mentioned that you recommended the Princeton Index be incorporated into the D.O. collections. Could you discuss the basis for that recommendation?
HK: That has to be a misunderstanding. D.O. always had a copy of the Index of Christian Art. She might – and they existed side by side – Princeton would never have allowed the integration of D.O.'s collection – the integration of the two. I guess what she must mean is that I thought D.O.'s materials might be entered into the Index of Christian Art, which at the time was rather weak in Byzantine. That must be what she meant. That was stopped on the grounds that the Princeton Index only includes, or in those days only included, published materials. So, there would be no gain in adding the unpublished D.O. material. That must be what she meant.
JW: To move to some more general questions, Herb, what do you think the greatest accomplishments of the Byzantine Studies Program were over your time at Dumbarton Oaks?
HK: I'd say first of all excavation and restoration. Beginning with the Byzantine Institute of America, which was subsumed by the D.O., D.O. went to Istanbul and restored monuments. My earliest work with Paul Underwood was on the Kariye Djami restoration, which is a perfect example of bringing a major work of art, preserving it, restoring it, bringing it to life, publishing it, and opening it up to the public. D.O. did that in many, many places – Sinai, Greece more generally, and eastern Turkey. So, that's historically its greatest accomplishment. You probably know about the episode about the silver treasure which put that in jeopardy. Again, Giles had to navigate through pretty heavy waters to rescue the relationship with the Turks and preserve the excavations, the access D.O. had to the monuments in Turkey.
JW: How did the social life, habitual activities associated with the program at Dumbarton Oaks change over your years here? – symposia, lectures, reports, dinners, teas, that sort of thing.
HK: So, totally – again, under the pressures of budget and democratization. When I was a Junior Fellow, participants by initiation, not by open application to the symposia were treated to extravagant lunches. Everyone remembers Mrs. Bliss's fondness for a poach salmon, an enormous salmon – probably ten pound poached salmon that had scales made of sliced cucumber out there for everyone to enjoy and other such delicacies. She herself had a private lunch for the Fellows and participants at her house on the final day of the symposium – at her house on 28th and P. That was part of it. The teas were served by her upstairs house maid with a French name. I forget what it was. They were pretty modest; they weren't extravagant. But the service was. It went then to – it went quite far at a certain point under Giles that the symposium lunches were boxed lunches that participants had to pay for. My last symposium seems to have struck a better balance between extravagance and the parsimonious middle period. So that was – you asked about food, what else was on your list?
JW: Teas, symposia, lectures…
HK: Yeah, I guess the symposia we already covered. They symposia were more serious, more productive, but vastly more expensive the way they took place in the past. I must say also in this context that the tradition of the old symposia had pretty much run the course. It was very hard to get scholars of a new generation to be able to come for a year. It was – the Senior Fellows looked around for topics. It was very hard to find topics, to manufacture topics that would suit the old format. So, that too should be noted. It wasn't just democratization, but a recognition of a new scholarly world.
JW: Do you have any memories, either positive or negative, that are especially salient about Dumbarton Oaks or that epitomize your time here?
HK: Yeah, when I first arrived in the summer of 1963, windows were thrown open. Everyone had access all the time. That is, I can't remember whether I had a key or just walked through the door. Hot summer nights I remember going in whenever I wanted. It was just a different kind of operation. One of the things sacrificed by all the changes is this sense that one was part of an inner group that had no control. So, people did take books out into the garden, took books over to the Fellows building. We knew the entire staff. There was a mingling between the staff. Of course, there were no black people on the staff at the time. It was still very southern. D.O. changed with that world. Mentioning that, of course – the summer of 1963, my being there as an employee meant that I could and did go to Martin Luther King's March on Washington. That was an index of the circumstances in which D.O. found itself during the first period I was associated with it.
JW: That's very interesting. Mike McCormick said that we needed to ask you about Joan Southcote-Aston – that you'd have some gossip for us.
HK: Oh my God. That wicked, wicked Michael putting that in your head. Well, here's what I was told. Joan rose to a very, very important position at D.O. What I was told was she had in fact come to the States as a housemaid to J. P. Morgan's daughter, who lived in Georgetown, and was found unsatisfactory. So, Ms. Morgan, whatever her name was, called Mildred Bliss and said, "Can you help me out, I don't want to have to send her back." So, Mrs. Bliss hired her. When I first knew Joan, she was a lovely, lovely person – truly kind and elegant. But she was in no way a housemaid. When I first met her, she was Ernst Kitzinger's secretary or research assistant, had a hyphenated name, and a British accent – that was, I guess, yes, when I was a Junior Fellow. When Giles became director, Joan was in some ways running Dumbarton Oaks. That is, she had the living memory – she could and did say, "Well, Mrs. Bliss would not have approved of that. Mrs. Bliss would have not allowed Fellows to come to concerts without ties." That was probably true – so, one listened to her. She was the oracle. She ran the concert series. She was doing various odd jobs. But the irony – and should be maybe on the subject of a novel – is that this person whom, I'm told, started out as a failed Georgetown maid ended up becoming the oracle of the founders of Dumbarton Oaks.
JW: Well Herb, we're coming close to the end of the interview. At this point, I wanted to ask whether there's anything we've neglected to question you about that you'd like to discuss with us.
HK: Yeah. One person you haven't mentioned was Bill Loerke, Giles predecessor as director. Well, he was director of studies. Bill Loerke was brought in in Derek Bok's first attempt to Americanize Dumbarton Oaks. He was the only – one of two people with sufficient administrative ability, sufficient American credentials, and sufficient Byzantine credentials. The other one was Jim Breckenridge at Northwestern University. And Bill was brought in to help transform Dumbarton Oaks. And he was brutally treated by the old guard. Ihor Ševčenko, Cyril Mango, had distain for him because he was not the kind of Byzantinist that they were. And that was certainly true. And he also in a funny way did not manage the transition very well, because he maintained that Dumbarton Oaks's mission was, as he explained to me, he said to Bok, "The green volumes of DOP and D.O. studies and the like." So, he didn't have quite the vision, we call it, that Giles did of outreach beyond the scholarly agenda. But he was brutally treated, scorned and shunned, and I got involved in this in the following way. His first year, he was Director Ihor and Cyril were supposed to run the symposium. To embarrass him, I gather – not absolutely certain of this – they cancelled their symposium. So, that meant that Bill had to face the embarrassment of having his first year without a symposium. And he quickly patched together a symposium of young scholars. I think that was in 1972, where I spoke and Alice-Mary Talbot spoke and Tom Matthews, a lot of young scholars were brought together. Of course, it was not the kind of symposium that would have been had Cyril and Mango [sic] gone ahead or that would have taken place. But Bill is, I think, unappreciated in the history of Dumbarton Oaks, and he was essentially pushed aside when Giles was brought in and spent the rest of his life quite marginalized within Dumbarton Oaks.
JW: Well, thank you so much for your time, Herb. We really appreciate you speaking with us today.
HK: My pleasure. Take care.
JW: You too, bye bye.
HK: Bye bye.]]>
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.]]>
AS: Anne Steptoe –
JNSL: and Jeanne-Nicole Saint-Laurent.
EG: And we are here today, it is the 16th of July, 2009, at the National Gallery of Art, and we have the honor of interviewing Therese O'Malley. To get things started, we were wondering how you first came to hear about Dumbarton Oaks, and how you came to work there, and what your first impressions were.
TO: I was a student at the University of Pennsylvania – art history major – when Elizabeth McDougall came as a guest professor to teach, and I took that course. I had not ever heard of it before that, but also it was also a somewhat new program, the garden history. So, it was with Betty that I started. I had been doing some landscape history on my own in Philadelphia, so I was intrigued by this professor from Harvard who was actually doing it full-time, because it really wasn't a very common specialty when I started.
AS: And it was from her you learned about the junior fellowship?
TO: Yeah.
AS: And then you were a Junior Fellow in '82?
TO: I guess so! Yes, I came as a reader first. '81-'82 I was a reader; we moved to Washington - my husband was at Georgetown doing his internship, and then I applied and then I was a Junior Fellow. Then after that I came here to the National Gallery as a research assistant, and never left.
JS: Who were some of the other Fellows of that time, both senior and junior? Who were some of the other figures at Dumbarton Oaks in the different fields?
TO: With me was Ann Friedman and Mary-Anne Ruggiero, two of the other Junior Fellows; in the other departments, Simon Ellis, Oliver Nicholson, Margaret, who's coming down as director –
JS: – Margaret Mullet! –
TO: – was a Fellow.
JS: She's Director of Byzantine Studies now.
TO: So, we were a very close group. It was a very nice interaction among the three departments; there was never any separation there.
AS: Could you talk a little bit about - we've heard many different things about the social side of Dumbarton Oaks, but it sounds like that was a particularly good time.
TO: It was a good time! We were already living in Washington, so we didn't live in the fellows' residence; we were in Georgetown. Maybe because of where we were located, which was right on P St. and Wisconsin Ave, our house became a very lively center gathering place; a lot of spontaneous parties. But Margaret was terrific, because she really had a sense of how to bring departments and people together. She set up a Thursday afternoon kind of – we didn't use the word happy hour, it was something, I forget – but it was really a great thing for the Fellows and Junior Fellows, and some of us were quite young. For me this was a very new experience, to be in a place like this, and it's true for most of us. It was so international, and learning about fields of endeavor that you'd never really heard about. One of the other Fellows was Gian Carlo – what's his name; you'll know him, he's a great linguist, I think he knew ten dead Ethiopian dialects or something, he's a fantastic guy, teaches in Parma, I believe. And archaeologists and historians and great, great scholars who would come through. Belting was there all the time, and the great coin specialist –
AS: – Grierson.
TO: Ševčenko, of course, was always there. Socially and intellectually it was a very important training period for people like me.
EG: Were there teas at that time or anything of that sort – regularly scheduled social functions?
TO: No, this was what Margaret did. There was a great Halloween party every year. Giles scared the living daylights out of us, because he would come totally in costume, and he was a rather imposing person. Anyway, I don't know if any of you know Giles Constable.
JS: They interviewed him last summer.
TO: He's about 6'10'' or something - he probably isn't, but he always seemed that way, looming. And he would come, I remember, completely bent over, shrouded in black, and move through the crowd and you had no idea who he was, and ugh. He did it a couple Halloweens in a row. But also his first wife was a very genteel, lovely woman, who really just added a wonderful kind of feminine, I don't know, warm feeling to the whole atmosphere. Judy Siggins was there then too, and Elizabeth Boone was great; the senior scholars – the way they reached out to the junior scholars, staff and senior Fellows, they reached out to the younger ones in a way that really, probably for the first time, for me certainly, you were treated as an equal, and encouraged, and they wanted to hear what you had to say. It was a terrific experience that way.
AS: Can you talk a little about what daily life was like? It sounds like there were many special occasions, but on a typical day as a Junior Fellow, what was your day like? What were your responsibilities?
TO: I was there before the whole renovation, so we had a very different area; we were quite separated down in the lower level, the basement. We got to work. We were usually there at the point where we're writing up our dissertations, so it was pretty serious work. I did a lot of work – being in Washington, this is like CASVA, too – Washington became a tremendous city for research in these years, and that's why it's so great today. But these are the years these things were building, and the Library of Congress was just a treasure trove. I'm an Americanist; I work on eighteenth and nineteenth century mostly colonial and early American topics, and my dissertation's on the Mall. So, I had my base at Dumbarton Oaks, and the library was great; it really was a terrific library even at that stage, for my topic. And also just to learn the discipline, to read outside your field, doing all this primary research but also learning how to write a dissertation in your field. My field was rather new and so we had everything, and we had Betty McDougall there, who was really pioneering, and then it's been followed by all these great leaders in the field. I myself was able to use the Library of Congress, the natural history, the botany library – not the National Gallery so much; it didn't have materials for me, but I used all the archives in Washington. Because of the planning of Washington – it was a federal program, so I worked in the White House. And of course, coming from Dumbarton Oaks, there was a certain entrée you got because of your affiliation. I really used the city. For someone else it might not be that way; maybe they're working on an Italian topic and they bring with them a lot of materials, but then the resource is there. Also because our field, landscape and garden history, is very interdisciplinary, and depending on what your training is, what your interests are, you'll need different kinds of library strengths. I was trained as an architectural historian, and Betty McDougall certainly had that direction, so the library had been built up very much to support that. Someone else interested in archaeology or in literary history of gardens would find other resources.
AS: At that point were there still runners to the Library of Congress from Dumbarton Oaks? At one point there were individuals who would go and get books for Junior Fellows and Fellows. Were you making trips?
TO: That's what we do here. I believe they were brought in. I'm trying to remember who that was; I don't remember who that would have been. But yeah, we did use – but I actually had a shelf there, too, so I would go there regularly and get books. In those days the Library of Congress was completely open; I could wander through the entire thing and just pull things off the shelves, and I had a desk up in the attic, so it was really nice access.
JS: Did you ever hear any interesting stories or anecdotes about Mrs. Bliss and Beatrix Farrand – perhaps from Betty McDougall or some of the older folks who worked in your field – about the gardens themselves and how Dumbarton Oaks developed as a center for this field, as a unique center, as I understand it, for garden and landscape studies?
TO: You know, I've written an article on that. It hasn't come out yet, but because I could – from your question, you didn't know a few things that I could tell you that would be useful for the history of D.O. Last April or the April before, there was a symposium at Dumbarton Oaks on the occasion of the reopening of the building, and all those papers are being prepared right now for publication. James is the editor. I wrote a history of the garden library. That might be useful for you to read. Yes, I've worked a lot on that topic, and it's a great history. It's a history not only of collecting, the history of the profession, history of the field, of architecture, history of intellectual activities in this country, history of Washington D.C. as it developed post-war, and the Blisses and Dumbarton Oaks played very, very key role in all of this. Actually I wanted to say that about one of your questions here, "there are physical changes, most notably the addition of the garden library." The garden library existed from the founding of Dumbarton Oaks.
AS: What was the building project in '64, then? Was that a reopening.
TO: It was a building, a physical building, at the same time as the Pre-Columbian pavilion. These things should be seen together, because you have two emerging areas of specialization in the history of art and the history of culture, which is the study of Pre-Columbian art and the study of gardens and landscapes, that the Blisses are very much supporting simultaneously. It's a very interesting contrast, because Philip Johnson designs this ultra-modern statement of a pavilion, and Mrs. Bliss is right there with him designing it – she's very much a key part about it, and if you read Philip Johnson's introduction to the book by Susan Tamulevich, which is a history of Dumbarton Oaks, he talks about his relationship with Mrs. Bliss. But at the same time she had commissioned Frederic Rhinelander King, who's a very old-fashioned architect, and he designs this very retro building that we have as the garden library, but it's absolutely simultaneous. What has not happened is the recognition of the history of landscape and garden interest in collecting as much as the Byzantine collecting, because that's always been very big, and with Harvard they made it the primary area of development, and also it has a much longer historiography and is just very much more an established field than other two, particularly garden history and landscape history, but Dumbarton Oaks really has been the cradle in this country of the field, a field which has now risen to be one of the more primary fields in art history. It's really seen with the new art history as being the kind of area of research that should be done. If you read Stephen Bann, he wrote an essay years and years ago about what the new art history will be, and one of the areas he identifies as the area to be looked at is garden history. This is long before his association with Dumbarton Oaks. So, Dumbarton Oaks, really beginning with Mrs. Bliss's own collecting interest – and that's a whole other angle: why was she interested in this, who else was interested in this? And there were a lot of very, very important women in America interested in collecting garden books, and they basically cornered the market and created a market for the collection of these kinds of material, Mrs. Mellon being one of the primary examples. Mrs. Hunt in Pittsburgh; in California there were a couple of women who were building these great collections. But anyway, I could go on and on about this. You'd better ask me another question.
EG: Did you get a sense of Mrs. Bliss's mission for the garden and architecture program?
TO: It's quite explicit. In the beginning, Beatrix Farrand had founded in Maine, at her own home, a small research center that had certain goals: the study of historic gardens, the training of gardeners and landscape designers, to become a resource center for information about local flora. She very much influenced Mrs. Bliss, but Mrs. Bliss already had an interesting collection; she had been collecting for a long time already. But they had been talking about the gardens and garden library since 1920. We have a 1922 letter which really lays out a lot of these goals that get carried through. The building of the garden is seen very much as a laboratory for the study of garden history. So, they're integral, and it took decades – things like the war. The Blisses, in all the years they owned it – I think a total of less than seven years, maybe, they lived there, is that what you've heard?
AS: They gifted it in '40.
TO: And all the time they were building it, the '20s and '30s, they weren't here, so it's something that from the very beginning of its purchase they identified as something that would have another life. But this is something that's happening in a lot of places in America. It has to be seen in the context of what Mr. du Pont is doing for Winterthur; he was building a center for the study of American culture. He was one of the first members of the board of the garden library for Dumbarton Oaks. There are very, very tight relationships between these people, and a lot of people in Europe. The whole Florentine expat community, the creation of Le Balze, La Pietra, I Tatti. That's all key and part of the social community they were dealing with; Beatrix Farrand's aunt is Edith Wharton, and she was very much a part of that whole Anglo-American community in Florence involved in building all these research centers, so it's not a unique situation, something that's happening. Also the Folgers were just giving that whole collection to Washington at the same time.
AS: The integration you that you talked about between the gardens and garden history that was sort of a Bliss legacy or goal, was that true when you were a Fellow? Was there some sort of integration between the fellowship program and the physical gardens? Of course, everyone is busy with their own studies, but you do have a great resource in that there are beautiful historical gardens right next to you.
TO: Well, for someone like me, who works on American gardens, you could see I was interested in the design of this garden from the beginning. My dissertation wasn't about it, but you work in one of the best-designed gardens in America, and Beatrix Farrand is one of our greatest designers, so for me it was part of my intellectual pursuit as well. In terms of the experience of being a Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, it was integral to our experience there, because we were there in the gardens as much as possible, and we were talking in the gardens, and meeting in the gardens, and using it for our communion with each other, so it was integral. In terms of the horticultural collections, I wasn't looking at horticulture at that point there. I was looking at horticulture in Washington in the eighteenth century, nineteenth century, not – this is something very different.
JNSL: What was the most exciting project through the years that you've been pleased to be a part of in terms of your associations with Dumbarton Oaks? – a symposium, or so on. Your fondest – ?
TO: That's hard to say. I was a Senior Fellow for I don't know how long –
AS: – about ten years, I think.
TO: Always picking the fellowships. There's a lot of responsibility there, because you're building the field. You're very conscious of the fact that you're building the field. That was great. You see what's out there and you get to choose who you think is the best, and then you get to meet them and encourage them and they become your colleagues, so that's always been a tremendous thing for me. But then I did the Downing Facsimile; that was a book – there's a facsimile series for the garden library, and there've been a couple, a half-dozen or so. This was a good experience for me for editorial reasons. What they do is they look for a notable book in the collection that's not widely available, and then they reprint it and someone writes an essay with it. So, that's what I did with Downing's treatise on the history of landscape gardening. This was around the 1840s. Dumbarton Oaks had a good edition of it but it was missing something. We were able to collaborate with the Library of Congress and get pages from theirs and insert them, so that what we actually published was a better edition than Dumbarton Oaks has. That was, for me – I learned so much in the process of doing that kind of publication, and it's stayed with me, because now that's what I primarily do here – our publications with CASVA. But the John Evelyn project was something that was very dear to my heart, because I was working on Evelyn – this was during John Hunt's time there, and he of course had worked on Evelyn. I was able to go look at the manuscript which was never published; it was this great work, this magnum opus that was never published; it was a comprehensive history of gardens. Parts of it have been published over the years so we know some things through published form, but the actual manuscript – people just never could see this thing because it's massive. It's a mess that has all these interleaved editions and everything. We did a big project to bring together a person from Wiliamsburg – and John Hunt was behind all of this – who had been working on a transcription of it, and we made the transcription available to a handful of scholars, who read it and then came and gave a symposium. Then we published the symposium papers and then John, through Pin Press, has published a facsimile of that book. So, this is a multi-year, long-term project involving lots of people, but it's a very key work that is now well-known by many, many people and used, and it's a very nice collaboration. So, that kind of thing that you can pull off, never as an individual – you need a team of people, you need cooperating institutions – you can really do something big and important. And I did appreciate very much one little detail, in that the garden symposia are very successful. Anytime you mention gardens you have at least two different audiences that come together, an amateur audience and a scholarly audience, and they mix up beautifully. We always have usually a sold-out crowd. John Evelyn was so esoteric; people came and didn't make it through the whole thing. What I appreciated at the end of it was – and it led to a lot of discussion – that, you know what, that's what Dumbarton Oaks can do; it can do a scholarly conference. We don't care who comes. We're not selling out; the point is not to be popular. That high point of quality for that place, I think should always be maintained.
AS: That was an unusual symposium, in that it wasn't only esoteric in subject, relatively speaking; it was also much more specific than most of the symposia topics. Is that fair to say?
TO: Yeah, probably true. I'm thinking of Loudon, the one on Loudon. We've done them on individuals; there was one on Downing, there was one on Loudon and the picturesque. But about one manuscript, I can't think of another parallel to that. Although what that manuscript represented, it was the history of the Royal Society, basically. It was the history of the foundations of garden history, actually. Really, on the face of it, it looked very narrow, but if you look at the papers, it was really quite broad. And that's the way we sliced it, basically, to blow it up, to make it a much more complicated and broad topic.
EG: Did you work on any interdisciplinary symposia with Pre-Columbian or Byzantine studies? Was there anything like that at the time?
TO: Interdisciplinary was always three departments. I know there have been; I've attended them, but did I work on them? I can't remember working on them.
EG: So, those are more rare than most?
TO: Oh, they're very rare. That was a big party trick, to come up with a topic that brings together the three fields. Joachim was able to do that at some point. What we have done, we've done programs with CASVA and Dumbarton Oaks, and we did one on sustainability in agriculture. That was quite interdisciplinary.
AS: How over the years have you interacted with the museum and its collections? The garden collection is a little bit different, we've gotten the sense, than maybe some of the other collections at Dumbarton Oaks.
TO: See, this is a particular – how should I put it. I'm always bothered by the fact that the library, the garden materials are never considered part of the museum. I just think that the objects that are in the garden library – we have a very important collection. And there's no one big catalog on the garden library, and there really should be. You know, they've just published that square one on the museum – great hits – there absolutely should be one on the library and the collection of prints and drawings and paintings that are in there. They're very important. But your question really was about – you mean the Byzantine and the Pre-Columbian materials, and my interactions with those?
AS: No, I think your interactions with the garden materials – did you interact a lot with the collection?
TO: The library collection?
AS: It's strange to talk about the collection, because it's not treated as maybe as official as the museum collection in Byzantine or Pre-Columbian, but is there a lot of interaction between Fellows and the collection in garden history?
TO: Absolutely. People write dissertations on things in that collection. They write books on them. The Downing book was about a book in the collection. I've just published a book called The Art of Natural History which is through here. I edited it with Amy Meyers, who is also a former Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks. We published an article on this great manuscript from Prague, and there's just so many examples of – this is this great manuscript that's in Dumbarton Oaks's collection that has never been really published. I also just recommended to an exhibition that's going on in England and at Yale the Mrs. Delaney manuscript that we have at Dumbarton Oaks that nobody ever really has looked at. But it was on display a year or two ago in the garden library, and I knew about it because I'd been reading all the correspondence about Mrs. Bliss's purchases for this article on building the collection, and I saw that they had bought this book by Mrs. Delaney and I didn't know they had it, so I tracked it down. It's going to be in this exhibition at Yale now and in London. So, I am constantly referring to the collection and have been since day one. It's a very important, very diverse collection there. There's a wonderful letter by Thomas Jefferson about slavery there. She collected a lot of first editions and a lot of manuscript letters from all fields. She had all these early Jane Austens. Fantastic collection. So yeah, I did use it a lot. Everyone used it a lot.
EG: Has there been any sort of exhibition at Dumbarton Oaks of documents or manuscripts or objects in landscape?
TO: Many, many exhibitions.
EG: Were you involved in them?
TO: No, I haven't done any exhibitions. No, that's something usually the Directors of Studies would do; that would be their role. But they always use those vitrines, you know, that are in the hallways outside? There are some great photographs of using the Music Room to display botanical books. Have you seen those?
EG: I don't think so.
TO: They just set up tables and put all the books out, for special occasions, when people come in. No, this was way before the symposia. They didn't start until pretty late, the symposia. But they would, in those vitrines, put out exhibits of objects when they related to the particular symposium.
JNSL: You're in a unique position, through your association here at CASVA and at Dumbarton Oaks to comment on the role of Dumbarton Oaks, both the gardens and the museum and the collection and the fellowship program, all of that together, as it sits in Washington. How do you see its place as opposed to a lot of other wonderful museums in the city and so on, in terms of public mission as well? That's a complicated question. How do you see the mission of Dumbarton Oaks in the city of Washington?
TO: Well, maybe I could approach that by talking about how the various research institutes see themselves as part of the network of them within the city. We're so fortunate to be in a city where museums are largely public, and there's a very, very keen awareness that the city belongs to the people. We're really – basically we're out sitting right here on the Mall. There are a lot of different kinds of audiences and Dumbarton Oaks, like we are here – we are very lucky to be able to serve multiple audiences at the same time. We can have, as we do, so many public programs and access, but we can also have closed programs so that we can address a professional audience. So, Dumbarton Oaks does the same thing. They have open hours, they have public lectures, they have publicity that reaches everybody, but they can have a meeting of five world experts on a very, very specific topic, thereby affording the advancement of knowledge. They're also a university-owned institution; they're private. They don't have nearly the burden we have, as a public institution, to maintain our public access. But we're very lucky because we have a huge department of education that does all kinds of public programs, all public programs, and we also have CASVA, which can do professional programs. I don't know the extent of the public programming at Dumbarton Oaks currently, but I do know that it exists, so I see them as fulfilling a very important mission to serve multiple audiences, and serve them really very, very richly. Does that answer that question?
JNSL: Yes, thank you.
TO: We have an organization we all belong to called – what do we call it. Well, we have a couple of organizations; we have ARIAH, which is the Association of Research Institutes in Art History, and Dumbarton Oaks and the gallery are two of the founding members of it, and there are now about twenty-two organizations in North American that have residential research fellowships, and we meet a couple times a year to discuss shared problems and things like that. Dumbarton Oaks is a very active part of that network, and then there's a Washington-based consortium – we call it the Collegium, actually – of I think there are probably about sixteen research institutes in Washington in the humanities that get together to do the same thing. So, it's a very important member of these things.
EG: You've spoken a little bit about this already, but I was wondering if you could tell us how you see Dumbarton Oaks's role in the field of garden and landscape studies as a whole, and if you see that role as having changed over the years.
TO: The role has always been – because it was so early and so constant a force of energy, it's absolutely critical to the development of the field, which you have to realize has really developed over the past thirty, forty years from almost nonexistent to a real powerhouse now of academic and scholarly activities, and Dumbarton Oaks has just pushed it all the way along. If you look at the alumni of Dumbarton Oaks, you're reading a list of all the major authors, professors, activists in the field. I'm biased, but I'm not completely biased, because I've been at a lot of other places that do support it regularly, but they're not as big a program, so dedicated. Institutes from all over the world look at it and try to participate with what Dumbarton Oaks does, in its publishing and its support through fellowships and its scholarly meetings. There are people who never miss the Dumbarton Oaks symposium; it just happens every year. Oh, there are people who take all kinds of sides, there's a lot of argument through all this and people have sides and opinions and they won't come for two years because they're mad at the topics, but they'll come back. And each Director has lent their own tone to it and their own particular interest and direction, which is so important. It really has changed that way, but art history is always changing too. It would be terrible if it was the same as it was forty years ago, it would be really terrible. So, you have to keep changing your direction; I think what's good about the board of advisors or the Senior Fellows is that you always bring in people from different areas. You don't want to have a board made up of people who don't argue. It's really important to have different points of view and methodologies represented among the board, so that they pick people who are constantly reflecting diversity of the field.
JNSL: Cross-fertilization!
TO: Yes.
AS: As far as your experience as a Senior Fellow, what were the major discussions and projects that you remember from that time?
TO: Well, projects, you mean dissertations topics? There actually are projects; there are a few projects that would come along. One was someone who was looking at, throughout the Middle East, lodges; they were very scattered, I remember that one. Scott Redford, I think. The garden at Pukler-Muskau, there was a request for support to help restore it; that's a garden that borders Germany and Poland, so when the walls came down there was a reunification of this garden, and so there's a great conservation effort there, and so we supported that. I'm trying to think. It was a long time ago. I do remember one project for someone who was looking at the idea of ruins in early eighteenth-century colonial development in Maryland, specifically, the idea of – you know, there's been a lot of bad literature about how Americans didn't really get to think about gardens until they were well-established, they weren't fighting the Indians anymore – that's a quotation. So, looking at early colonial material and understanding better the importance of gardens and landscape issues was a new way to – she was an archaeologist who was looking at physical evidence of this, but she wanted to look at the conceptual background of building ruins in a colonial plantation, what that might mean. That was a good one, I thought. There are lots.
AS: I think while you were a Senior Fellow, that was when – the famous 1944 conference at Dumbarton Oaks – I think there must have been an anniversary?
EG: An exhibition or something, at that time?
AS: It was a major project.
TO: Fifty-year anniversary.
AS: Do you remember anything about that?
TO: I just remember that it happened. I wasn't participating in that at all. Didn't Joachim do the show on that, and he wrote the essay on it and everything? That was wonderful. Anytime anyone gets time to look at the history of the institution, I think it's terrific. That's what I've been trying to do with the garden library, because it tells you a lot about the times.
JNSL: You mentioned the international character of Dumbarton Oaks, and I was wondering if you could comment how is – if in your field is Dumbarton Oaks is unique in that sense, in the types of people that it can bring together, in the United States, or what face does it present to the international community as an American institution to your field?
TO: Well, to have an institution that has a dedicated library and fellowship program and meetings and publication program in this field is unique, I think. I'm trying to think. At York they were trying to create a center for the study of the garden, and it's had ups and downs, but that was more of a training program. This is not a degree-granting institution, and that's very important to it. So, in many ways it's the only place to go. You can go to places to study particular cultural – if you have a focus on western America, for instance, the Huntington is fabulous, because you can do anything; their library is just incredibly rich for an exploration, western history and all that, plus a lot of other things, but it's not about landscape. It's about that cultural topic, through which you would focus in your own area. But to have a library that is dedicated so much to the approach or the topic of landscape and garden history, within which you would focus on American or French or Germany, that's really something. I can't think of anywhere else – has anyone come up with anywhere else that you could think of? I know there have been attempts, and it really hasn't happened.
JNSL: It struck me, too, how many of the Directors of Studies have not been Americans. We've had a handful in garden and landscape, but there have been several Europeans, too. I guess that's true of all the fields, though.
TO: I think that's true of art history, and history, and American academics. But maybe Dumbarton Oaks has always – the Blisses were diplomats, so there has always been a completely international community, surrounded and connected. It's where the UN was established.
AS: As far as the Directors of Study go, what were your interactions as a Junior Fellow and then a Senior Fellow with the different Directors of Study at the time? Were there a lot of interactions?
TO: Oh yeah, constantly. Giles was scary, because I was then just beginning, but he was just so important in terms of imbuing you with confidence, making you feel serious because he was serious with you. Robert Thomson – he was there part of the time I was on the board, and also Angeliki was part of the time, too. They preside over the meetings, so you have to convince them of what it is you want to have happen – so, you have that kind of exchange. Joachim I knew very well, and I continue – we're actually publishing a book together right now. We worked on one of the study volumes together at Dumbarton Oaks. So, he's someone that I have continued to see and work with. John I think is terrific because of his very different approach to things. I think this idea of having exhibitions in the gardens is brilliant, and I can't believe it hasn't been done before. But he's the one to really make it happen, because of all his experience with contemporary art. Michel I worked a lot with, because he's been here for the past ten years. He was always very good about bringing his Fellows here; we would try to mix up the Dumbarton Oaks and CASVA Fellows. We have a very important event at the opening of the academic year, where we invite the new Fellows in town to come together and meet each other, but I always try to get the garden Fellows over here as well, and make sure they get to use the library and that kind of thing. He was very keen in helping me to find a research project that's now actually being published, Keywords in American Landscape Design, because he had published a book like that on French landscape. Also his whole broadening globally the interest in landscape was extremely important to the field. You asked me about the international view of Dumbarton Oaks; no one could ever fault it for being elitist, European focused, or an old-fashioned art history bastion at all. He really blew it open with both the global expansion but also the look at contemporary design, which in fact harkens back very much to Mrs. Bliss's original intention, because the first group of Fellows were all architects, landscape architects. They weren't historians because there weren't historians yet. That was just really beginning. So I think John is just going to really advance it in that direction of contemporary design and the interaction of art in the garden. I think that's great.
AS: Did you notice any difference in tone between administrations – as far as the overall Dumbarton Oaks Director? Was it different to be a person at Dumbarton Oaks under a Constable administration as opposed to a Thomson or a Laiou administration?
TO: Yes, it was different. It always is different. But it is what it is.
JNSL: Were you there as a Junior Fellow when Elizabeth Taylor was living across the street – were you part of that? Did you ever see any fun glimpses?
TO: Just the buses that would slow down. They still slow down. But they would just slow down. I can't say I ever caught a glimpse.
EG: Just sort of broadly, have you noticed any changes in Dumbarton Oaks in the time that you've been there, from the '80s to the present, in terms of academic life or socially? That's sort of general but –
TO: Well, I guess you could say yes and no. Because there are always little differences, always changes, and there are changes in interest and in what's getting supported because of those interests changing. Changes like art in the garden is a very great change – things like that – and there are practical things that change too. The security has increased tremendously. There are shifts in authorities. But on the other hand, it's still the place you go to to get a certain kind of work done, and you know you can get it done there, and it still maintains a very important profile, not only in the individual fields, but in academic life in general. It has not slipped; it has only gotten greater. So yes and no.
AS: I think that's all the questions I had. Is there anything we left out?
JNSL: Any closing comments, or – ?
TO: No, let me see if I had anything here. We talked about the different direction. You didn't list Ned Keenan, but of course he was a very big innovator at Dumbarton Oaks. He loved to brag about how he hid the Pre-Columbian – you've heard this, I'm sure – he hid the Pre-Columbian card catalog for a year – this is the myth, anyway, who knows – before anyone ever mentioned that it was missing. He deserves some credit for updating digital scholarship in that regard. No, I think that's everything you had mentioned.
EG: All right, well, thank you for talking with us today.]]>
ABF: We are Anna Bonnell-Freiden and Clem Wood, and we are here with Henry and Eunice Maguire to talk about their involvement at Dumbarton Oaks over the years at their house in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 3, 2008. So, we'd like to start by asking you about your impressions of the social and intellectual atmosphere at Dumbarton Oaks when you first arrived, in 1971.
HM: Eunice…
EM: Oh, I shouldn't really be the one to start because you were the one who was the Junior Fellow – but maybe if that means I have less to say, I should go ahead.
HM: Well, you did more socializing.
EM: Well, we were both graduate students at that time, and I think even I – though I had not originally been an advisee of Professor Kitzinger's – was by that time. In fact, it was he who had first welcomed us to on our first visit, when we were still undergraduates; and Henry paid his first visit to America during the winter vacation of my senior year – and that turned out to be a very important visit, our visit to Dumbarton Oaks, and meeting him, and having his interest encourage us both in our directions. We were both interested in Byzantine art, but I was – no, we were also both interested in Western medieval art. And he encouraged both interests. So, I was, I think, still casting about, perhaps, either to narrow my thesis topic or to find a doable one for him, at the time you had your Junior Fellowship. So, it was a wonderful opportunity for me too, and I found all the staff and fellows very friendly and welcoming, and, of course, I was very excited to be given a seat in that fabulous library. The reading room was upstairs where, now, the Director of Studies office is and the outer office. It was all one big room with the long tables across; and I was lucky that I was given a seat near the window, so I had the sense of the garden being there. And I was sitting at the same table opposite Irina Andreescu, and behind me was Nancy Ševčenko, just to give you a sense of the atmosphere and the contemporaries. Also, the photographic resources…the photo collection, which was at that time under the care of Marlia Mundell – before she was married – and the other photo resources were very helpful to me because my work has always been quite visual; and I was looking for material which hadn't been published in the way in which I wished to approach it. So, that was very important, as were the museum collections, though I didn't know at the time that I would end up as a museum person. And there were many informal opportunities for stimulating conversations. The only disappointment was – and this maybe will come under one of your other questions, but – at that time, there was an official ban on inviting spouses to lunch in the Fellows Building. And, of course, a lot of the intellectual, informal intellectual conversation goes on – or used to – at those lunches, maybe even more than now, because I think people tended to go more all at the same time then, for lunch, because it was a smaller group. So, I did feel excluded in that sense and I felt that I was penalized for being a scholar, because scholars…scholarly colleagues were allowed to be invited, but if you happened to be a scholarly colleague and also a spouse, you couldn't; and I wasn't the only one who suffered in this way, among the various couples who were there over the years. The one who wasn't a spouse…I mean, the one who wasn't a Fellow, until that rule changed, couldn't mingle with colleagues in the Fellows Building; that was the only drawback, as far as the social and intellectual atmosphere goes.
HM: Although I would say that lunches were rather formal affairs and often were eaten in silence because the Junior Fellows were afraid to say anything because they would reveal their ignorance, and the senior faculty – and there were a fair number in those days – they often weren't on speaking terms with each other. So, they didn't speak either. So I'm not sure you missed an enormous amount, except for the food, which was quite good.
EM: Well, the other drawback for me, of course – and that was jumping ahead to your question about daily routine – that my time was really circumscribed by the challenge of finding affordable childcare, or childcare that was affordable to two graduate students. So, I remember that one Saturday, Irina Andreescu said, "I think it's outrageous that you can't come to lunch. I'm going to invite you and Gavin"; so, this was our son who turned two at the end of January that year. "And, because they might not approve of that, I'm going to do it on Saturday." So, I think…I don't remember whether lunch was served on Saturday, but I do remember we were the only people in the room. But she made a point of bringing me in to have lunch with her on Saturday to have lunch with her, with this tiny child on my lap.
HM: So, you asked about parties. There was one memorable…one party I remember that year was a Guy Fawkes party, which was organized by Charlotte Roueché, who was actually not officially a Fellow. She was somewhat in the same position as Eunice. She had a fellowship, I think, from Newnham, but she elected to spend it as D.O.; but since she wasn't officially a D.O. Fellow, she couldn't come to the lunches and this kind of thing. Anyway, she organized this Guy Fawkes party in the Fellows Building; and everyone was there, including Paul Lemerle, who was one of the senior visitors at that time. And I remember our son…he had some grandchildren, so he was very taken with our son, and our son was spreading marshmallows on his lapels. They were roasting marshmallows in the fire.
EM: Yes, and Lemerle was dressed very formally in a beautiful dark suit, and there were these sticky little fingers all over his suit [laughter].
CW: Where was this?
EM: In the Fellows Building, facing the fireplace. We actually roasted marshmallows and maybe even hotdogs in the fireplace.
HM: In those days, there were some interesting parties there. There was another party, which I think was on one of our later visits, when Seka Allen…I asked her for a recipe for a punch, and she came up with some sort of strawberry punch which she said was delicious, and it was, but it was actually very potent, and many people went away somewhat tipsy.
EM: What I remember was the Halloween party, when people came in costumes. And some of the Pre-Columbian Fellows wore, kind of, Day of the Dead masks; and it was wonderful to see them dancing in those, even with the mask of the back of the head, so the boots were pointing in the opposite way from what seemed to be the face. And I remember that the Magaws came as Justinian and Theodora and danced very elegantly in those costumes.
ABF: So did a lot of your social life revolve around the Fellows' Building at that time?
HM: Quite a lot of it, yes, because that was one place where you could have large gatherings, because the apartments that D.O. provided were very small. But, of course, we had a social life outside of Dumbarton Oaks as well. So, we knew some people in Washington
EM: But speaking of outside of Dumbarton Oaks, one thing I didn't mention that was amazing and, in those days, tremendously – a very useful privilege – was that they had runners to go to the Library of Congress to get books that were there but not at D.O. – which saved a lot of time. And later on, when the runners were stopped, they managed to get stacks privileges for us, so that we could go to the Library of Congress and find our own books. I think that lasted until the Library of Congress re-shelving system became so backlogged that it was impossible with a stack pass to find the books – which was too bad, but it was very – and I think, also, of course, it must continue with the Hellenic Center, the library. The cooperation between libraries was so facilitating. That was great.
ABF: Did you have a lot of contact with the Center for Hellenic Studies?
HM: No, not a great deal, no.
EM: I didn't, no. I think some people did who were dealing on philosophy topics, or something like that. But the art historians didn't, maybe because there weren't as many art history…
HM: The library is very not strong in art history, not nearly as strong as D.O., so we didn't really have much reason to D.O.
EM: The D.O. Byzantine library used to keep up with a very wide range of fields: lots of archaeological material, lots of ancient Greek and Roman, and lots of Western medieval, so it was very good for general research on Byzantine topics.
ABF: And so you often spent that year working in the library?
HM: Yes, essentially trying to finish my thesis. That's probably true of most Junior Fellows. You know, they arrive with an unfinished thesis and they struggle to get it done before the ax falls and they are ejected. I think that's a very typical experience. Usually, the first part of the year is more relaxed. I mean, I could tell when I was Director of Studies that there was a change in mood in the lunch room come about March. People would see the end of their fellowships and become much more serious.
ABF: So, in those first years, who were the scholars who had the greatest impact on you?
HM: Well, I mean, of course, my two supervisors – the supervisors of my thesis – had the greatest impact, though neither of them were at Dumbarton Oaks at the time; those would be Kitzinger and Ševčenko. But in later years, I came to know Alexander Kazhdan, and he had a very strong influence on my work; and perhaps also Robert Browning, in different ways. Kazhdan was very interested in social history, and obviously saints and saints' lives, and he also had a strong interest in Byzantine literature as literature, which in those days was somewhat unusual. Whereas, Browning was more of a philologist, but he was interested in Byzantine gardens, so I found a kindred spirit there; and he was also very, very kind in his advice. Even if you made horrible mistakes, he would point them out very kindly and set you straight, so I appreciated working with him.
ABF: And what was your thesis topic?
HM: The thesis topic…it was a slightly strange topic. It was about the ecphrases (which are descriptions of works of art) and specifically about one feature of them, which is that they often talk about the emotions of the figures in the scenes; and, in those days, sort of in the '60s, people didn't think of Byzantine painting as being emotional. It was connected with modernist painting and thought of as being abstract; and so, as a result, these ecphrases were thought of being essentially false, not giving a sort of correct impression of Byzantine painting. So, the thesis was partly, in a way, to exonerate the ecphrases and say that they did have something to say about what the Byzantines thought about painting and, secondly, to show that there was this strong emotional element in Byzantine art; and I focused on depictions of sorrow. And now, of course, this is absolutely perceived wisdom; I mean, people are very aware of this aspect of Byzantine art. But back then, you know when I told people the topic, they thought it was a sort of non-topic, because they didn't think there was such a thing as emotion in Byzantine art. Anyway, that was it.
ABF: But they believed in you.
HM: Well, eventually. Eventually, you know, I published it. Always with these things, you find that other people are working on the same lines. So, what you might imagine is a totally new and original direction that you are taking, you find that people at the same time in different places are doing the same thing. So, another scholar who worked on somewhat the same assumptions was Hans Belting, although in different ways. So, his work has been very influential. So, I think that yes now this is generally agreed that this is an important aspect of Byzantine painting.
ABF: Did you know Belting at D.O.?
HM: Belting – he came, yes.
EM: Yes, we met him there.
HM: Yes, we met him there on several occasions
EM: And there were other people too who were not officially posted or connected with DO over a period of time but who would come as readers or perhaps as speakers and stay for a few days; and one of those people who had a great influence on me, in encouraging me personally and helping me…giving me some courage with developing aspects of my work that were not simply visual, was Peter Brown, who was there for a whole semester reading everyday when he was teaching at Catholic University as a Mellon Professor – that was sometime before he was at Princeton. So, that was very helpful to me, because I was still working on my dissertation at that time, long-distance from my adviser. There were other people whose names you didn't mention, though all the ones you did mention were people who very much broadened my way of thinking and also gave personal encouragement, which is one of the wonderful things, I'm sure you would agree, about Dumbarton Oaks – people like Robert van Nice, who was there putting together the archival photographs and drawings, his amazing drawings of Hagia Sophia. His love for that one building really was inspiring; and I was working on a subject in architectural sculpture for my dissertation. And then I think I mentioned Megaw. Davis was another one of the great figures who was there off-and-on frequently; and John Meyendorff. And then, in the library, you mentioned Seka Allen. She was a bibliographer, as you probably know; but she did take a personal interest in everybody. She was a wonderful social pivot, really, because she knew – she and Irene Vaslef, the Byzantine librarian – knew what interests people had, more than we might discover by casual conversation among ourselves. And she would help – they both would help bring people together – as well as leading you to the right books, they would lead you to the right people to discuss some aspect that maybe you were just beginning to explore, which was another wonderful grace really, to have their attention to everyone. And ones' contemporaries – people slightly younger or slightly older – also had sometimes…quite by chance you would meet somebody in the stacks or you would see a book that somebody opposite you in the reading room was reading, and you would ask about it, and it would reinforce the direction you were just beginning to take or that you had been taking but you thought that no one in the field would approve of or encourage you to go in another way along a path that you were trying to follow. I remember conversations like that, for instance, with people like David Olster, who was working with antique texts when I was beginning to try to explore them in some unfamiliar directions – and Leslie MacCoull, when I was beginning to work with Coptic Egypt.
HM: I should mention that the second time I visited Dumbarton Oaks, when Ihor Ševčenko was still there; and he had been asked by Ernst Kitzinger if he could be the second superviser – reader – of my thesis; and he said, "Well, I'll have to examine this candidate first." So they flew me down from Cambridge to Dumbarton Oaks; and I met Ihor and Nancy for lunch. They gave me lunch in the building that is at the corner, where sort of S Street turns the corner – they had a house there. We had this long lunch, and he served two bottles of wine – I think we must have had the best part of one-and-a-half bottles of wine, between the three of us. So, at the end of this, he produced a couple of Byzantine epigrams and said, "Please translate these." Byzantine epigrams are not, you know, the easiest things to translate; but it just happened that I had already read these before. But I was able, in spite of my slightly inebriated state, to make sense of them.
EM: Maybe it helped.
HM: Maybe it helped, yes. So he said, "Okay, I'll take you on. I'll be your supervisor." So that was my exam [laughter].
CW: That's a great story; and was this when the library was still on the top floor of the Main House? You were working next to everyone?
HM: Yes, yes, yes. It was in those days it was before they even had air conditioning. So, yes, it was very hot up there in the summer. In fact, I think Dumbarton Oaks more or less sort of closed down in the summer. They didn't have summer fellowships. The faculty went off to the hills of Europe, and it was too hot to work.
EM: It was also very conducive to browsing because they had to extend the stacks underneath the eaves, so there were funny, kind of changes in level, which they carpeted over to make a little less hazardous. But, for me, it meant lots of places where I could sit, pull books off the shelf, spread them out, and see which ones I really wanted to take out and which ones I didn't. While I was doing that, I came across a number of very early, sometimes eighteenth- or nineteenth-century editions of books that I might or might not have heard of. And I started taking those down to Irene Vaslef, and that was the beginning of the rare book collection, which hadn't been separated from the other things at that time, as far as the Byzantine library went; and she asked me if I would continue to keep an eye out for things like that for her.
HM: It was very nice to be in the old library, sort of after hours, when it was more or less empty, and you could imagine yourself as a kind of French aristocrat in his chateau with all these books at your disposal, in strange places, in cupboards. It had a lot of character.
EM: I bet. There was that spooky closet behind the elevator, where some of the books were kept. When you went in there, you would hear the creaking of the elevator and somehow have the feeling that if somebody shut the door, you might never get out until someone else needed a book from there [laughter]
CW: So then after that year you went to Harvard right away?
HM: Actually, it was…Yes.
CW: Or was it after the second year?
HM: I had a year as a Fellow. Then I spent the year teaching at the University of Massachusetts and then to Harvard. And so then I had three years in teaching at Harvard and three years at Dumbarton Oaks.
CW: And were you…was that the first group of joint appointees?
HM: More or less, but there were joint appointees not only with Harvard but with other universities at more or less the same time. So, I think Rob Nelson, for example, had a joint appointment, I suppose, with Chicago, a little bit after mine. I'm not sure exactly what the chronology of them was, but there was a sort of a group of these joint appointments about the same time.
ABF: There was Michael McCormick as well.
HM: Yes, he was. I think maybe Ioli Kalavrezou had one as well, if I'm not mistaken.
CW: So, I guess you were at Harvard for the first three years, so that was really before the talk of moving Byzantine Studies there.
HM: Well, at Harvard there was really no talk of it. But as soon as I got to Dumbarton Oaks for the second three years, it was very much in the air. And it was a fairly tense time, actually, at Dumbarton Oaks, because the future was obviously very uncertain – especially that first semester or year, when, as you spoke of in your list of questions, the triumvirate was sort of taking over the duties of Director of Studies. That was a rather strange period.
EM: When was it that they lent highlights of the Dumbarton Oaks collection to the Fogg? I remember that we had a feeling that it was a kind of double-edged sword. Because, on one hand, it was very nice to see Byzantine things in Cambridge; but, on the other hand, we wondered, "Does that mean that they're thinking of moving the whole collection?" Because, if it does, it will mostly go underground, because, well, Harvard University Art Museums is now closed and planning an expansion, but they will always have to have a lot of wonderful things in storage because, unless they have everything out in study storage – in other words, storage rooms with everything visible to the public – there won't be room to display everything that they have; and clearly, a lot of the Byzantine things would go underground. And if that happened, then to some extent we saw that as emblematic as what would happen to Byzantine studies.
HM: Well, I think the main plan was to move the library and the fellowship program and, to be frank, the funds, up to Cambridge; and then to leave – obviously they couldn't move the gardens – and the gardens have their own endowment in any case, so they were going to leave them. And it seems they were seriously planning to do this, but then a number of alumni, powerful alumni, objected, so Harvard backed off. So it was people like Joseph Alsop, who kind of saved the – saved the intellectual aspect of Dumbarton Oaks for Washington
EM: Because he cared about Washington, as well as because he cared about Dumbarton Oaks
ABF: Who favored the move?
HM: I suppose, well – I think some of the professors at Harvard favored it because there would have been more money to spend there more broadly on the humanities, and it would have enriched the library at Harvard – and the books would all have been in one place. Because, it is true, that even today, there are gaps in the Widener Library that correspond to books that are at Dumbarton Oaks; so this is obviously irritating for Harvard professors. So – but I think it was mainly probably attractive to the administration because D.O. had a huge endowment (especially in those days it seemed very big), and it was being spent on what seemed like very esoteric subjects, and there was no teaching going on. So, I remember Bill Loerke, who was Director of Studies, you know, while this was all brewing up, had a visit from the Harvard – some people from Harvard, I don't know exactly who – he told me that they asked him what was going on at Dumbarton Oaks. He showed them all these books that had been published, shelves of them, and this made no impression on them at all – because, you know, what are sort of twenty feet of books compared to hundreds of students who could be supported with the same amount of money? So I think it was mainly the administration's scheme.
ABF: Was there talk among people at Dumbarton Oaks about the legacy of the Blisses, in so far as they had very specifically left the money for the Byzantine and Pre-Columbian programs?
HM: Yes, I mean, obviously that was one of the things people talked about. I think people were more worried about the future of Byzantine Studies; because, at that time, Dumbarton Oaks was – I don't want to go sort of into later questions – but it did at that time play a major role in the field because of its active fieldwork and the number of people who had been on the staff – Byzantinists who had been on staff at Dumbarton Oaks – and these joint appointments. So it was very important in promoting the field in America and abroad too. But, so, I think that was seen as being under threat; that, if they moved the endowment to Cambridge, then the money would have been spent just broadly on the humanities, so on Western medieval and on the Renaissance and history and all sorts of other fields as well. And the particular flavoring of Byzantium would have been lost. But, of course, it didn't turn out that way, so that was partly why, I think, we had this very strange situation of the three, sort of junior assistant professors playing the role of Director of Studies, which was strange, in a sense, because I was in charge of the publications; and so I was writing letters to senior scholars, you know, advising them on how they could improve their manuscripts, which probably didn't go down very well.
EM: How else was…I can't remember how else the responsibilities were divided up between John Duffy and…
HM: Irina Andreescu was in charge of fieldwork and John Duffy was in charge of the fellowship program.
EM: That's right.
ABF: And this is while you also had this joint appointment?
EM: Yes.
HM: This was, yes, when I'd moved down to Dumbarton Oaks. So, yes, I still had, officially, a joint appointment with Harvard, although I wasn't actually doing any teaching up there. I spent three years teaching at Harvard, and basically partly visited Dumbarton Oaks and then three years at Dumbarton Oaks.
ABF: And it was in those three years at Dumbarton Oaks when you began to pick up those responsibilities that had previously fallen upon the Director of Byzantine Studies?
HM: The Director of Byzantine Studies, yes. And then, at the end of the year, Giles Constable came as Director, and he assumed the responsibilities of Director of Studies himself. So, then we were sort of free to pursue our own research, so we had essentially two years of research fellowship – which was very nice.
ABF: So can you tell us more about that experience of working so closely with Irina Andreescu and John Duffy?
HM: Well, as far of the three of us were concerned, it went fairly smoothly. I actually, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed working with the publications. So, that worked fine. The uncomfortable part was the sort of political goings-on outside. For example, at the Byzantine Studies conference, we felt, I think, rather on the spot – people asking us questions: "What's going on, what's going to happen?" Which was really out of our hands. And, of course, people at Dumbarton Oaks were either nervous or angry or both, so.
ABF: And what were your responsibilities?
HM: Well, as I said, with the publications, it was mainly that I was in charge of the Dumbarton Oaks Papers. So, that would be, sort of, doing a first editing of manuscripts when they came in, finding readers for the manuscripts, sometimes suggesting ways that they could be clarified or improved, and, likewise, with the books.
EM: And putting pressure on authors who were taking a bit longer than expected.
HM: Yes, and on readers who were taking forever to read the manuscripts.
CW: And so then you were next directly involved with D.O., as a Senior Fellow in the '80s?
HM: Yes, yes, and that when was Angeliki Laiou was Director; and I think there was a feeling that they needed some kind of art history presence. So, what I basically did was to advise on matters of art history and read manuscripts or select books for the library and participate in seminars, and this kind of thing – and to some extent, to do some of my work
EM: That was when you were the Art History Adviser, you mean, which was different from when you were the Senior Fellow.
HM: Oh yes, that was when I was on the board of Senior Fellows, but that's a different…
CW: That was the Senior Research Associate?
HM: Well when I was at Dumbarton Oaks for that year, I was Senior Research Associate but I was also on the board of Senior Fellows, which means that we visited three times a year just for a day or two for meetings; but I wasn't in residence.
CW: Right, but you were for that year.
HM: For that year, yes.
CW: So you had been there at the end of the '70s, when the faculty…the permanent faculty, were disbanded?
HM: Well, I wouldn't say that they were exactly disbanded. They dwindled away. Under Giles Constable, they sort of dwindled. Then there was something of a revival under Laiou because she brought people in to work on various projects – but not with faculty status, but as research associates. So, the end of the faculty status, I suppose, would have been under Giles Constable; because, before his time, the Directors of Studies and many of the other people involved had the status of professors at Harvard University. And this, I think, actually was a fundamental change, especially as far as the Directors of Studies were concerned, because now the position of Director of Studies is a non-tenured position – it's for five years, which may be renewable. So, in effect, what that means is that you are not going to get anyone applying who already has tenure, unless they can make some sort of deal with their university to release them.
EM: And let them come back.
HM: And let them come back, which is what happened in my case, when I was Director of Studies – that I was able to get five years release from the University of Illinois; but it means that, for one thing, that person is unable to stay for more than five years, because no university is going to let you go for ten years, so. And, also, not all universities will do it; I mean, Harvard, for instance, won't let you go away for more than two years without losing your tenure. So effectively it means that now that candidates are restricted to people at the ends of their career – if they have five years left in their career, they spend it at Dumbarton Oaks – or younger scholars who maybe were unable to get tenure somewhere or are in some sort of unusual position where they don't have tenure; but it excludes, sort of people who are kind of in the most active portions of their career, who have tenure somewhere, unless they can make a sort of deal to leave short-term. So, it has very much weakened the position of Director of Studies, and it makes the Director of Studies much less active; because his position vis-à-vis – or her position vis-à-vis – the Director is much less strong than it would be if he or she had had tenure, so; but that was a major change.
EM: Had tenure at D.O., you mean?
HM: Well, at Harvard it would have been, effectively, because they had their tenure at Harvard, they were tenured professors. So, Kitzinger, for example, Loerke, were tenured Harvard professors.
ABF: Can you tell us about the publication of the Cypriot fieldwork that Alice Murray mentioned this to me at some point?
HM: Yes. Well, when I arrived as Director of Studies, I found all these unpublished projects, manly relating to fieldwork in Cyprus; and one of my, sort of, ambitions was to revive the fieldwork aspect of Dumbarton Oaks, and I thought this would be one way to do it. Because, one of the reasons that fieldwork had been abandoned was precisely because there was so much that hadn't been published, and so it was seen as sort of wasteful extravagance to do this fieldwork and not have it appear in print. So, that was my main motivation – and perhaps also because I'd visited many of these places in Cyprus and was interested in them. And it was mainly a matter of kind of fanning the embers of these various projects. I think the authors had become discouraged, and they received no encouragement from Dumbarton Oaks. It was just sort of finding ways to facilitate their taking up the projects again, finishing them; which sometimes meant bringing them physically to Dumbarton Oaks or sometimes it was just providing general encouragement and saying, "We really want to publish them." And, as you know, Alice-Mary has carried this on.
CW: So that was part of your agenda as Director?
HM: It was one part of it, yes. I think what I wanted to do as Director of Studies was to open the place up, because it had the reputation of being rather enclosed and elitist. So, I tried to bring more activity into the Byzantine area, which was also what Angeliki Laiou wanted to do – for the Byzantine Center to have a more active, as opposed to a passive role. So, the fieldwork was part of this; and I was able to institute one or two projects associated with fieldwork; for example, the materials analysis of Byzantine ceramics, where we had some of the ceramics at the Walters and at Dumbarton Oaks tested and then we had a small colloquium devoted to the subject. But I wasn't successful in starting any sort of major new fieldwork projects outside of the United States, and this was one of my regrets, I suppose. If I have one regret about my period as Director of Studies, is that we weren't able to sort of reestablish active fieldwork. All we did was we would give grants, small grants, to people. So, people would come to us and say they wanted to do X, and we would give them 5000 dollars; but we didn't initiate anything ourselves. And I think this is sort of a missed opportunity, considering what D.O. had done in the past. Actually, after I left Dumbarton Oaks, actually, I did do a project on the mosaics in Porec which was funded by the Kress and the University of Illinois; it's the kind of thing that I think should probably have been done by Dumbarton Oaks. But, that aside, there were various other ways that, umm, I tried to be more active. I introduced a museum fellowship. So, we would have someone come for a year and sort of plan a small exhibition. I think that was a valuable way to sort of bring together the Byzantine Studies Center and the collection and also to bring some variety into the collection, so it wasn't just a static display, but there was some change in the exhibitions in it. So, I think that was, on the whole, a success; and we tried to have colloquia and symposia that would interest, sort of, people in western medieval history and art, and even Renaissance and ancient. We tried to sort of integrate Byzantine topics into sort of a wider frame. For example, we had a colloquium on women's space in Byzantium and in the West. So, I suppose, efforts of that kind – also the fieldwork archives, I tried to get them properly looked after. And, I was even involved in sort of excavating Dumbarton Oaks itself. In the boiler room, we discovered these rolled up canvases which were the paintings of the frescos at the Kariye Camii – perhaps you've seen them. But they were exhibited, umm…
EM: At Columbia
HM: At Columbia, yes and then in Istanbul; but we found them sort of rolled up and shoved under the boilers. So we took them out, and then they were eventually restored at great expense and insured for thousands and thousands of dollars before they were sent off to Istanbul. But I think that Angeliki Laiou as Director – she was certainly able to kind of revivify the Byzantine area and make it more interesting and active than it had been before. I think it had slightly fallen into the doldrums before she arrived.
EM: Well, her encouraging you to set up both colloquia in areas that hadn't been explored before, such as the Byzantine gardens and her own intellectual interests extended the dialogues and the range of scholars who came, to some extent; because I don't remember very much before her on Byzantine economics as an aspect of cultural history or Byzantine law in relation also to the culture. And those were things that she continued to not only encourage herself with her own work but to bring scholars to present their work – that really opened up the fields for others who hadn't really thought about these areas, I think.
HM: Another thing we did was introduce the short-term graduate residencies. Now, as you may know, anyone who is working on their dissertation or general exams can apply to spend two weeks at Dumbarton Oaks, free of charge, to use the library. And that's been very popular.
EM: What about the summer fellowships? Did you start those?
HM: No, I think it was Giles who started that. After he'd air-conditioned the building, he started the summer fellowships, yes.
CW: The colloquium on Byzantine garden culture has been cited on several occasions as an example – perhaps the sole example – of interdisciplinary academic activity at D.O.; but it seems to have a positive enclave in there.
HM: Well, that was due to a number of factors coming together. One was Joachim who had a genuine interest in Byzantine culture and gardens. And the other factor, I suppose, is a sort of change in the nature of Byzantine archeology and art history; because, in the old days – in the days of empiricism – there was virtually nothing to say about Byzantine gardens, because none exist and none have been excavated. So, it was a sort of non-topic; but there are a lot of descriptions of real and imaginary gardens. So, once you move into the area of reception – etiology – there's quite a lot to say about Byzantine garden culture; and also you can make connections, then, with other fields of garden culture. So I think that helped make it possible.
EM: It was also under Joachim's directorship as Director of Studies for the Garden Center that Irene Vaslef proposed, successfully, that I do that inter-departmental exhibition, which I think was the first inter-departmental exhibition (though it was a library exhibition) called Roman Constantinople, with rare, illustrated books from the Garden Library and the Byzantine Library. And, then, in the process of working on that, I found and was able to display the Fossati prints of Hagia Sophia, which had been transferred for some reason, maybe because it was such a rare book. They were wonderful, large lithographs in full color of the interior of Hagia Sophia, published in, I can't remember what…was it the '60s or '70s of the nineteenth century? They had been transferred to the Garden Library and totally lost track of – there was no record that they existed anymore. The people researching in the Garden Library had no particular reason to be interested in them, and the Byzantinists didn't know they were there. So, I guess in a way, this was a kind of, in more ways than one, a groundbreaking collaboration, to mine the resources and bring them together. It was certainly very enjoyable, and well-received I think. One of the former Byzantine librarians at Dumbarton Oaks was then a librarian for the National Gallery, and she wanted to have the exhibition or another version of it there; and Irene got a grant for it, but somehow the three of us never had time to make that happen, unfortunately. But it shows you how Dumabrton Oaks collection – both book and other collections – and combined resources can really have an outreach; and Dumbarton Oaks has been able, while the collection was waiting for its new reinstallation, to lend things to exhibitions, as you know, in Georgia and here at The Walters, which I think had a great impact on not only Byzantinists but other people who saw them in those places, people who might not have visited Dumbarton Oaks to see the collections there. So, all that outreach is something that is still happening, I think, but started, sort of in the '80s or '90s – the '90s probably – so it's relatively recent. I can't remember what year that was. It must have been the early '90s.
CW: You've already – you've talked a little about Constable and Laiou, but do you have any other impressions of other Directors you've seen.
HM: Well, umm, when I was first arrived as Junior Fellow, Tyler was the Director, and he struck me very much as being a gentleman of the old school – very popular with the staff. Well, I remember, he gave a sort of interview with each of the Junior Fellows when they first arrived and he explained a little bit to me about the legacy of the Blisses. He said, "Well, they were wealthy, but not really very wealthy." It wasn't really very kind, but I think probably Dumbarton Oaks was beginning to feel the limits of its endowment; and there were, I think, some financial problems that were another reason, I should have mentioned, why Harvard may have wanted to move the operations north – you know, have them more closely supervised. But yes, he was a courtly gentleman. And then there was Giles Constable, who was really very controversial. And then Thomson, who – Robert Thomson, who kept a – steadied the ship and was a fiscal conservative Scotsman –
EM: – and a good listener, I think.
HM: And a good listener, yes, but he sort of calmed down under his tenure; and then Laiou, I said was active. And I see her tenure as a kind of second golden age almost for the Byzantine Center at Dumbarton Oaks. And that's really the extent of my personal experience with the directors of Dumbarton Oaks.
ABF: In summing up, if you could give us some general thoughts about how Dumabrton Oaks has changed, and how it's been important to you, and ultimately how you think it's changed the field, or responded to changes in the field.
HM: Okay, well that's a lot of questions [laughter]. So, first of all, how it has changed…I mean, in the old days, speaking of the Byzantine Center…was very much the dominant center at Dumbarton Oaks, and there were virtually no Fellows at all in Landscape Architecture or Pre-Columbian; and, on the other hand, in the '50s, I think there might have been up to eight permanent staff members in the Byzantine Center, many of whom would have been Harvard faculty. And over the years, there's been something approaching parity between the three programs; and the staff of the Byzantine program has really dwindled to the Director of Studies, in effect – and, of course, there are also the people associated with the Museum and the Archives. So, it's become much smaller. As far as the Library's concerned, because of the sort of huge expansion in the number of books being published, the Library's become much more focused. So, again, even when Eunice and I arrived there, as Eunice said, they were collecting book on western medieval art. Now, it's very much focused on Byzantium. So, it's become narrow in its focus. Finally, I would say that it's become much more passive, as opposed to the early days, when it was much more active. So, there are no fieldwork programs, at the moment I think there are very few projects. It's really a library, a place where people find fellowships, and a collection; but it's not a sort of center that actively promotes the field. So, I would see those as the main changes over the course of time. As far as the relationships with Harvard are concerned, I would say they are much closer now then they were. I mean, it was founded as an independent project of a wealthy couple; but, over the years, its ties with Harvard have become closer and closer: there are the three Harvard professors who are in Cambridge, not at Dumbarton Oaks; I believe there are some fellowships that are earmarked for Harvard students; the library catalog is integrated with HOLLIS. So, it's much more tightly bound to Harvard than it used to be. The Directors always come from Harvard. As far as its impact in the field is concerned, obviously it's much smaller. It was, you know, very important, in the early days. Now, you know, except as a place to go and find books or to have a fellowship or to look at some very important pieces, it's no more important than any number of other places where there are books and fellowships and some objects you could look it. So, it doesn't have that special importance it used to have. One way in which it probably still can have a very positive impact in the field in America is through joint appointments; which have been a little bit controversial, because sometimes the joint appointments don't work out. These are the appointments where they appoint a junior person, an Assistant Professor, at some university, and Dumbarton Oaks pays half of the salary for the first five or six years until that person gets tenure. And, in the past, this has been a very good way to persuade universities to take on Byzantinists, where otherwise, they might go for some other field. They haven't always worked out, because the person doesn't always get tenure; but, in those cases when it does work out (which may be about fifty percent of them), it's obviously very important, because a large number of the people who now have tenured positions in Byzantine Studies started out on these joint appointments. So, that's one way D.O. could continue to be every important in the field of Byzantine Studies here in America. Then as far as my own work is concerned, it's really been fundamental, you know, because, at all stages, I've been able to benefit from the library and from meeting people there. It's just a wonderful place for meeting other scholars and sort of getting ideas or exchanging ideas – especially, I would say, I'm afraid, more in the old days than now, when there were more people around, when it was more active, and there were more people to meet. But, you know, it's still a beautiful place, and still, especially for those of us who live in this area, it's a wonderful library to use.
EM: Well, there's still an active program of informal talks, which I'm sure are important for those who can give them and attend them; and that was another thing that was new, I think, in the '90s – which was very good, I think. And, unfortunately, because, as you see, it takes up a fair chunk of your day just to get between Washington and Baltimore, even though they're on the map very close, it hasn't been possible for us to attend those since we've been in Baltimore. So, maybe that sense of intellectual exchange is more present still than we've been able to appreciate since we've been here.
HM: Could be, could be, yes; and they certainly still have the symposia and colloquia, which are –
EM: – very good
HM: Very good, yes. I don't suppose it's possible, really, for the old days to return, because it was dependent on the largesse, in the first place, of the Blisses; and when the Blisses were no longer alive, obviously that font of fonts dried up, and D.O. had to live strictly within its means.
CW: It seems to be doing well for itself.
ABF: Yeah, financially, I think it's very stable, from what I understand.
HM: Well, I imagine with the sort of general decrease in the value of the Harvard endowment, Dumbarton Oaks has a prospect with that.
ABF: Is there anything else you'd like to add?
HM: No, just to thank you for coming and hearing our impressions of the past.
ABF: It was a pleasure.
CW: Yeah, thank you for having us. We're happy to hear them.
EM: We hope before you go, you'll tell us a little about yourselves.
ABF: Sure, we'll turn this off.]]>
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!]]>
EG: Elizabeth Gettinger.
AS: And Anne Steptoe.
JNSL: We have the honor today of interviewing James Carder. We are here at Dumbarton Oaks to speak with the Archivist. Do you guys want to start with a question?
EG: Sure. So, I guess just a sort of start up question – we see that you were a Junior Fellow here in the '70s?
JNC: Yes, I was.
EG: And so we wanted to hear how you first got involved with Dumbarton Oaks and what your initial impressions were.
JNC: I actually first got involved very modestly when I was an undergraduate. I was working on an excavation in Yugoslavia at the Palace of the emperor Diocletian and wanted to read an eighteenth-century description of the palace by Robert Adam, a rare volume of which the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine library had a copy. And I somewhat naively came to Washington to work in the library as an undergraduate and learned – then as now – that undergraduates don't have easy entree, but I did manage to get a photocopy of that book sent to me, which was otherwise hard to come by. I was on a Ford Foundation Archaeological Traineeship Grant, so there was money for doing that sort of thing. So, that was my first introduction in the later '60s, and then when I went to graduate school I applied for a Junior Fellowship and received it, as you said. It was a two-year – it turned into a two-year fellowship at that time and I finished my dissertation at Dumbarton Oaks.
EG: So, what was the fellowship program like when you first arrived here?
JNC: It was, I think, pretty much the same as it is today in many important aspects. Like today there were more Byzantine Fellows than Pre-Columbian or Garden and Landscape Architecture Fellows. One difference that I remember, and I think it might have been both a difference of chance and possibly a difference of design, was that there were more art historians in the mix of Fellows than there has been in subsequent periods. There were easily five if not six art historians in my group, which made for a very nice situation in terms of getting intellectual stimulation from your peers. Ioli Kalavrezou was a Junior Fellow as was Ruth Kolarik and Jeffrey Andrews and Kathleen Shelton. And Rob Nelson was a Junior Fellow in my second year. And besides that, Otto Demus and Hugo Buchthal and Carlo Bertelli were Fellows, and Ernst Kitzinger came occasionally from Harvard. And, of course, Bill Loerke was Director of Studies, so there were a lot of Byzantine and Early Christian art historians around. The other thing that I remember very much about my fellowship years was that there was a great camaraderie, and the Fellows themselves organized parties and all sorts of events, sometimes costume parties, where, for example, at Seka Allen's home, we put on elaborate silk and brocade clothes and masqueraded as some historical figure, real or imagined!
JNSL: What did you dress up like?
JNC: I think I was an emperor. It wasn't very – my costume wasn't particularly successful, as I remember, but I tried. Many of the staff, including Sue Boyd, who was assistant or associate Byzantine curator at the time, as well as Seka Allen – Jelisaveta Allen – a research librarian – were very conscientious in inviting Fellows to their houses or otherwise organizing events for them. There was a real spirit of being part of a group that was well taken care of.
AS: Did this social camaraderie extend between Byzantine and Pre-Columbian fellows, or was it more of a Byzantine community?
JNC: It did extend among all of the Fellows. I believe – and I really should check the archival record on this – that there couldn't have been more than two Pre-Columbian Fellows and maybe only two Landscape fellows, or possibly only one. The numbers in those junior programs – junior in the sense that they came later in the institutional chronology than the Byzantine Studies program – and really only began having Fellows in the early '70s. I remember Frank Alvarez in Garden and Landscape and Peter Joralemon in Pre-Columbian. But even though there were only three or four non-Byzantine Fellows, I think they were always included in the parties. Then occasionally there were Byzantine-specific activities, such as an exhibition at the Walters or something like that – then it was just the Byzantine group that went.
EG: How did you find the atmosphere here academically; was it an easy place to work on your dissertation? What resources were of the most value?
JNC: It was a dream. I didn't have too much to compare it to, though I'd had a Fulbright the year before I came here in Germany, and I was using primary material libraries in Wolfenbüttel and elsewhere and not necessarily so much using secondary resources. But I had that as a benchmark. But here, even before I came, I received communications asking what microfilms or -fiches I might need that I would be expecting to work on as they wanted to check whether they had them or not. And if they didn't have them, they'd do what they could to get them, which I just found wonderful and remarkable. I don't think I ever needed a secondary resource, a book or whatever, that they didn't have or couldn't get. And at that time there was a liaison person to the Library of Congress, and he had the wherewithal to make a weekly trip to the Library of Congress and bring back materials that Fellows and others had requested. I don't think that program lasted much longer, but it certainly was in effect the two years I was here and that, of course, just doubled the possibilities of doing research. So, I thought the resources at Dumbarton Oaks were terrific, as I believe people continue to think to this day.
AS: Were there any academic mentors that you met and became close with during those two years?
JNC: Yes. As you probably know from the history of Dumbarton Oaks, there actually were, in the early period, faculty members – permanent faculty members – here, and that was just being dissolved, in a way. But Ernst Kitzinger was still here – or at least occasionally – when I was a Junior Fellow. Although he was frankly more in Cambridge than at Dumbarton Oaks, though he did come to Dumbarton Oaks for several months and, so, he did have a presence. And he and I discussed many aspects of my dissertation. Hugo Buchthal, I don't think, had a professorship but he had an appointment of some sort while I was here, and he was invaluable. And then people like Kurt Weitzmann would come around, and he had asked me to write some catalogue entries for the "Age of Spirituality" exhibition that he was planning for the Met, so we knew each other in a way, and his advice was great. But I also think that my peers were terrific. We did the same thing that's done today, we gave progress reports on our dissertation topics or our research topics depending on our level. And it wasn't pro forma; people thought about them and critiqued them, and if there was some tangent that perhaps the speaker hadn't considered, someone in the group might say you should look at this book or you should consider this primary source of some ancient author and see what they have to say. I found it invaluable.
AS: How often did those occur?
JNC: Those research reports? I think on average once a week, as they do now, scattered throughout the academic term – followed incidentally by a sherry hour. There was also sherry served before lunch on Tuesdays, I think it was. I think Jan has now revived this and has it at his house, but that apparently was a tradition that Mildred Bliss had inaugurated before her death in 1969, and I don't know if it had continued unabated until my tenure here in the mid-'70s, but I think it then sort of fell off the board soon thereafter.
JNSL: Did you ever hear any anecdotes from the older, say, the older Fellows or older scholars about Dumbarton Oaks while you were here as a Junior Fellow or any stories about some of the early days that caught your ear or that stand out in your memory?
JNC: I didn't – I don't remember much, if I did, and so consequently I think I didn't. I heard innumerable times the story about climbing over the perimeter walls to swim illegally in the swimming pool. I must have heard that fifty times from fifty different people or people reporting on their best friends who had come over the wall at night to swim, and otherwise I don't remember anything either boring or juicy. I'm not sure how much I was really aware, too, of the institution and its institutional history. I don't know how much I was aware of the Blisses, although I did meet Jack Thacher who was still alive at the time. I had a friend at the Carnegie Museum of Art, David Owsley, a curator, who knew Jack Thacher, apparently fairly well, and he suggested, since he knew I was coming as a Junior Fellow, that I – that Jack Thacher invite me over for tea or something, which he did. He talked about the Blisses, and I remember now that you mention it, thinking that I should somehow know more about the Blisses. It's too bad I don't have a time machine and could go back, as I know a great deal more now. But he talked about Mildred Bliss at this tea.
JNSL: And how did you come into your current position today? What was the story behind that journey?
JNC: When I finished my dissertation and left Dumbarton Oaks, I started as an assistant professor, first at Case Western Reserve University while someone was on sabbatical, and then I came back to Washington where I was at Mount Vernon College and then at George Washington University at the Mount Vernon Campus. And in 1989, I received notification from Sue Boyd that there was a notice of a job position – but it was a part time job position – at Dumbarton Oaks for someone to advise on the objects that are now formally known as the House Collection. Apparently, the president of Harvard University had received some letters questioning whether some objects were in the best care, and the president had written to then director Angeliki Laiou, asking if there was curatorial responsibility for these prints and drawings that were hanging on walls and that sort of thing. And so she realized in a way that there wasn't – there was a Byzantine curator and a Pre-Columbian curator and so forth, but the so-called House Collection was not particularly well situated in anyone's sight lines. So, I interviewed with her and was offered this job, and the first element of it was to do an assessment, a condition assessment of things – especially things of value – and things that were possibly in harm's way. And I did that, and while I was doing that assessment I was also trying to get any information on these objects, because there were no dossier files and, really, no sort of curatorial management for this part of the Collection – the House Collection, as we know it today. So, I was bothering people asking where invoices might be kept or where conservation reports might be kept, and so forth. And that caught Angeliki Laiou's attention. So, she asked me to start putting together a complete dossier for the House Collection. You can see the snowball moving down the hill here!
EG: When was that?
JNC: This started in '89, as an advisor; and I became a staff member in '92. So, I was here during her entire tenure. When Ned Keenan came, early on he talked to me and said that he wanted to revisit the new library project and even revisit it situated under the North Vista – that very controversial location where it had started out in the 1970s. He said, "I need to find all the plans and all of the correspondence and documents from the '70s to see where things were left off." And so he went around looking for them, and of course there was no Archives at the time and things were where you might least likely think they should be. But since I had also taken this route trying to put together things for the House Collection dossiers and had literally looked in the attic and in the basement and in people's file drawers – really just any place – I had something of an unwritten road map of where things were. So, I was actually able to put my hands on these drawings which I knew to be rolled and stored under this building in not the best of circumstances, and I also was able to put my hands on the correspondence files. But there was no logic to it, and they were in cardboard boxes, and I think they were labeled but there wasn't any reason to know that they were there. So he was both horrified – Ned Keenan was – and relieved, and he said, "Would you be willing to take on the reorganization of the archives in much the same way as you took on the dossier building of the House Collection?" And I said, "Yes." So, that's how I came to be House Collection Manager and then later Archivist.
EG: So, what were some of the goals of the archives project and what was the organization of it?
JNC: The mission of the Dumbarton Oaks Archives is to retain and conserve in perpetuity any item that is of importance to the institutional history of Dumbarton Oaks. And that, of course, can be interpreted broadly or narrowly, and a caveat to that is to understand the physical limitations of space, at least in terms of hard copy or hard object storage. So, not every scrap of paper that happens to have survived is fair game for the Archives because it would overwhelm the real estate. So, the first objective was to find out what was still around that really was critical to retain and, if it was in deteriorating condition, what to do to make an analog copy of it somehow to keep its shelf-life going. Then, to find a way to organize it so that it could be easily accessed by people who would want to see this material in the future, and to weed out things – but not capriciously – weed out things that shouldn't be saved. And so I spent the first two years of my life as an archivist just interviewing people in their offices and seeing and telling them that I thought that it was very fair game if they were actively using files or materials that these files should continue to reside with them, as that was a very good use of institutional space and resources. But, if they had things that were just clogging their file cabinets that they themselves felt should be retained for the institutional memory, these should come to the Archives. And so, things began to flow in, and it was greatly interesting to me to make coherency out of all these disparate files and images and objects. And the system I devised now can be added to very easily. For example, when Alice-Mary Talbot retired recently – although she had been a very faithful contributor to the Archives – she did one final sweep of her office files and took things out that she didn't think Margaret Mullett would necessarily need and sent them down to the Archives, and that's how it's grown. And it works pretty well, as I think you can attest because you've been using files from the Archives.
AS: What role do you see the Archives playing at DO?
JNC: It has an absolutely critical role in that we've never written either a periodic history, other than the annual reports or biannual reports, or an official history of the institution. There are a number of history-like discussions – the Pre-Columbian Studies program has a good one and so forth. But, there's a lot of very important institutional activity from the past that hasn't been chronicled in a historical narrative, but it is captured in the correspondence and in the interim reports to the president of Harvard University and so forth, and this material sits waiting for someone to rediscover it. And this material really informs us as to what happened and what people thought they were doing and how they went about their business as they defined it at the time. And it shows that there were mistakes and how people learned from them and how the institution moved on. I think every institution needs an archives and it should use its archives to find out who it was. Here we also use the Archives to check when scholars propose things to us – either fellowship applications or research proposals or what have you. We can go back and see what they've done for the institution before, what we have on file. It's not always complete, but it's very useful. And unfortunately when a scholar dies we often use the preserved archival material for writing an obituary, because sometimes we're the institution that has the best knowledge of the contribution that that particular scholar has made to the field of Byzantine or Pre-Columbian or Garden and Landscape Studies
JNSL: Could you perhaps comment on the uniqueness of Dumbarton Oaks in terms of an institution and what its mission is – both the museum and the professional library, the fellowship program, and its sort of general position here in Washington?
JNC: In a certain sense, Dumbarton Oaks is not unique, in that it's a research institute. There are many research institutes, and they tend to have all of the same phenomena: they have libraries, they occasionally have collections that support the focus of the research, they have a fellowship apparatus, and so forth. But Dumbarton Oaks is, to a degree, unique, and part of its uniqueness is the mandate of its founders, the Blisses. They wanted the institute Dumbarton Oaks to be in Washington, D.C., and although it was to be administered in many ways through Harvard University, they did not want it at Harvard, and during their lifetime they were very clear on that point. They thought things that happened at Harvard were perfectly wonderful and that the student body and the faculty interaction with the student body and all of these good things were what a university of great standing such as Harvard should have. But, for them Dumbarton Oaks was something other, it was, in a way, a retreat, and although they wouldn't have used and didn't use the term "ivory tower," in a way it was just that. Dumbarton Oaks was something other than an urban campus, it was sixteen acres of beautiful gardens, it had an ambiance of sophistication and, to a degree, elegance in the architecture and appointments of that architecture. It allowed people the breathing space and the environment in which to be reflective in their studies. And then, of course, the studies programs themselves are not your average studies programs. You don't have a choice in Byzantine studies between twenty different research studies programs so that you might apply to them all and choose the best one that responds. If you're a Byzantinist and are going to go to a research institute in America, Dumbarton Oaks' Byzantine studies program is probably the first and, to a degree, only choice, and Pre-Columbian and Garden and Landscape Architecture are very similar. In a way, the narrow foci of this institute ensure its quality and ensure its ability to remain vibrant and relevant. If we did twelve other things from ancient to contemporary abstract expressionist studies programs, we would dilute ourselves. You have to be very wealthy to do that. CASVA is very successful because of its high level of funding and amazing resources. But to be a CASVA you have to be very wealthy and you also have to be very astute at what you collect as research materials and what mix of people you bring together in a far-ranging research institute. So the very small focal nature of Dumbarton Oaks makes it unique, I believe.
EG: Could you speak a little bit about the relationship between the Dumbarton Oaks Archives and the Bliss archives at Harvard which I believe were moved to Harvard in the '80s?
JNC: In 1982, right? In 1982. That was, of course, before my time. I believe from what I've read is that the Blisses themselves had deposited at Dumbarton Oaks a considerable collection of their correspondence and memorabilia. How well organized it was and how topically organized it was I can't say because I know it was completely rethought and re-catalogued at Harvard and wonderfully so. The woman who took that on as a six-year project – I don't believe she was working on it full time necessarily, but I think she was working on it consistently – she did a really remarkable job putting together a first rate finding aid and so forth. Anyway, Dumbarton Oaks had this on its premises, and it had other related things that the Blisses themselves had not accumulated. And the librarians here put this material into folders and boxes because they were, I think and rightfully, concerned about it: one, in terms of making sure that it didn't get lost or misused or thrown out or left to deterioration, and two, they were concerned that they didn't really have the physical room to store it. Until the new library was built, the Main House, as you well know, served as the complete campus with the exception of the Fellows Building, and that really wasn't used for much other than the purpose of feeding and housing Fellows. So, the Main House was really everything: it was library, it was research space, it was meeting space, it was museum space, it was everything, and as Ned Keenan was fond of saying, it was at two hundred percent capacity when he came as director, and that was very true. There were bookshelves in the hallways, and there were often bookshelves in people's closets. And, you know, if you said, "I have 125 linear feet of Blissiana memorabilia, where shall I put it?," there wasn't an easy answer. So in 1982 under Giles Constable, it was decided that everything sort of pre-1940, the date of the Blisses' gift of Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard, would be sent to Harvard which was willing to accept it to establish the Bliss Papers, and that was done. And everything 1940 and after would remain at Dumbarton Oaks. But as I've said, not much was done with this later material until the '90s. It was in boxes and filing cabinets, and I don't think anyone much cared about these archival materials. The problem with the decision was that there is now a segregation: there is a sort of Bliss family, residential pre-1940 group and a Dumbarton Oaks institutional, post-1940 group of documents. So, there is a segregation. But, there is in fact a seamless continuity between these two groups of documents, and anyone who is researching the origin or the early years of Dumbarton Oaks has to use the Bliss Papers at Harvard to get the complete picture. So, it's a little inconvenient. On the other hand, Harvard is a wonderful caretaker and curatorial manager of such things and they're in perfect storage conditions and housings. Although I personally would like to have the Bliss Papers closer to hand, but I don't think they need to be sent back here. I'm not going to compare them to the Elgin Marbles, because I don't think we would have lost this material, but they're at Harvard and well cared for in a way that perhaps historically Dumbarton Oaks wouldn't have had the physical space or the staff to look after them.
AS: After the Archives, you've had the opportunity to work on a number of publications, lots of cataloging projects. Can you talk a little bit about some of the most memorable projects?
JNC: Yes. I started using the Bliss Papers in order to complete the dossier files for the House Collection, learning, as I just explained, that many of the pre-1940 documents were at Harvard. And since many of the objects that the Blisses acquired that are now at Dumbarton Oaks were acquired before 1940 – in fact the vast majority of them were – much of their dealer correspondence and any other kind of ephemeral reference to an object that might be in the House Collection would be at Harvard rather than here. So, I was able periodically – usually yearly – to get a small budget line item to go to Cambridge and sit in the Archives for a week or so and just call up box after box after box of correspondence and either key-enter it into my laptop or get a Xerox of it and enter it into the dossier system. And that really allowed me to get a much better understanding of where the Blisses came by their Renaissance, Baroque, Western Medieval, Asian, and other collections, the documents for which didn't end up in the Byzantine Collection department because they weren't relevant. As you can imagine, for one good document you read five hundred that are very interesting but aren't relevant, so I also knew to a large degree what else was going on in the Bliss Papers, and I soon realized that there was a player out there in the Blisses' life, Royall Tyler, who was just absolutely instrumental in forming the Blisses'– that is the Dumbarton Oaks Collection. I mean, but for Royall Tyler, I think the collection as we know it today would not exist. And as it happens, the Royall Tyler Papers are also at the Harvard Archives. These are a long series of correspondence between 1902 and 1952 mostly from Royall Tyler to Mildred Bliss. And when I was asked to do some catalog entries and essays for an exhibition in Athens, Georgia – when Byzantine objects and American paintings from the House Collection were asked to go on loan there – I alerted Rob Nelson, then at the University of Chicago, now at Yale University – who had been asked to do the Byzantine Collection essay for that catalog – that he should look at both the Royall Tyler Papers and the Bliss Papers at Harvard. And he did, and it opened his eyes as it had mine, and so we then began to think about how useful this correspondence would be if it could be transcribed, annotated, and published in whatever format – hard copy or perhaps electronically, or both. And so, we wrote up a proposal, and the project was put into the works. And so, now when I go to Harvard, I'm also looking at the Bliss-Tyler correspondence. The correspondence starts in 1902 and ends roughly in 1953, the time of the death of Royall Tyler, and I'm through '35 on it. The '30s is the most voluminous part of the correspondence run, and '35-'39 is still a sizable chunk, but in the '40s and early '50s it drops off, so I'm about eighty percent done with the transcription. I've written an introductory essay to what will be the first chapter, and I've annotated the letters from that first chapter. I'm hoping soon to do the second chapter, and Rob is working on the '20s and '30s material – he's working on the '20s material now. And when the '30s' correspondence is transcribed, that will chronicle the meaty, Byzantine-centric part of their buying and corresponding. So, we hope in a year and a half time, if that's not too ambitious, to have this at least in a good draft form. It's going to be huge – that's the unfortunate part of it. It's – if you publish every letter, which I think we should, even the ones that say "Thank you very much, it was a delicious meal," and they occasionally do that, although these are intellectual people who take some time to write what they want the other person to know about life as they see it and art as they know it. I think if we publish it all, it's going to be very lengthy. If it's in hard copy format, it would certainly be two or more volumes, and there's cost implications there. If we publish it electronically, it'll be very usable by people in the future no matter how it ends up, because you can search it – if the spelling is correct, hopefully it will be. And, for example, I was talking with Gudrun – I don't know how anecdotal you want this interview to be, we can scrap this at the end if you like – who was interested in why the Blisses never acquired significant enamels, Byzantine enamels. And I said, "Oh well, you know, they really wanted to and they wrote to Tyler and Tyler to them about getting a significant enamel," and she said, "Oh, that's very interesting. I'd always wondered if they just didn't like enamels or what." And I said, "You know, once this document is done, you'll be able to, even in a Word format, type in the word enamel and just graze through their correspondence finding every time the world enamel is mentioned. It'll just be easy to sate your curiosity as to what the Blisses were doing with enamels, or icons, or manuscripts, or Stravinsky, for that matter. It's just going to be much easier to do research on the Blisses, if anyone is interested to do that. So, those were my two primary uses of the Harvard Archives, for the House Collection dossier files and this Bliss-Tyler project. And, in the interim, every time I've found something of interest to me about the Blisses or about Dumbarton Oaks, I've typed it in a document, a so-called chronology, called "master chronology," that is easily three hundred pages long now in Word format, and is just date, line item, and the source, taken both from primary materials such as the correspondence and secondary materials that tell the life of the Blisses and Dumbarton Oaks.
EG: Is that something you intend on publishing someday?
JNC: I don't at the moment, although I think a history of Dumbarton Oaks is long overdue. Certainly this chronology will remain at Dumbarton Oaks, and it can be migrated to whatever technology is used in the future.
EG: So, in terms of your role as the manager of the House Collection, could you speak a little bit about what your impressions were of the Blisses' mission in collecting the House Collection and about their acquisitions there?
JNC: Yes. If I could answer it slightly differently, I would say that when I came as a Junior Fellow to Dumbarton Oaks and long thereafter when I talked to people at Dumbarton Oaks or colleagues at Dumbarton Oaks I always had the strong impression that the Blisses collected Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art and rare landscape books and sometimes botanical prints and manuscripts, and that they had a focus of collecting that brought about the collections as they were then displayed. And then they had some household furnishings and some paintings and sculptures, but in a sense just as they had clothing and a wine cellar: these were part of the comme-il-faut nature of being a wealthy resident. Since I have taken on a curatorial role as House Collection manager, I realize that the Blisses were considerably broad in their collecting interests. And we tried to make this point in our first special exhibition, "The Collector's Microbe," where we talked about how the Blisses not only collected Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art, but also Asian and American and this, that, and the other. And I see my role as House Collection manager not only as a true curatorial position to protect and catalogue the collection as it has come down, but also as an advocacy position to make sure that the Blisses' vision for Dumbarton Oaks, in terms of art, isn't interpreted in as narrow a way as I understood it initially and I think others have understood it. And this is proven, I think, much beyond a shadow of a doubt, when you look at what they collected in the '37 through 1940 period when they knew that they were gifting the property and its collections to Harvard. That's when they bought a Degas and a Riemenschneider and a Rouault and other great paintings and sculptures knowing that they weren't going to ever really live with them, but believing that this "home of the humanities," the famous phrase that Mildred Bliss uses in the preamble to her will and testament and was used other times in her correspondence, needed to have these great things; that great art inspired great conversation which inspired great research. And the same was true with music. There is absolutely no reason to continue musical offerings at Dumbarton Oaks in a Harvard institutional fellowship arena, because it wasn't a music research institution. But the Blisses were adamant about that and really hoped Harvard would find the wherewithal to continue some kind of musical programming. And the Friends of Music series, which was inaugurated in 1946, was the result of that. All this they saw as being for the Fellows. The music was for the Fellows. The art was for the Fellows. The garden was for the Fellows. Yes, they eventually were opened to the greater and broader public, but that isn't the Blisses' initial interest. The uniqueness that we talked about earlier in the Blisses' vision was that this was for scholarship and fellowship enrichment. So, I see that also as part of my job description to try to make the House Collection a little bit more integral to the institutional wealth.
JNSL: What is the most exciting project that you have been a part of in your time at Dumbarton Oaks, of all these wonderful things, the one closest to your heart that brings back the happiest memories?
JNC: Had you not qualified your statement at the end, I'd have given you a couple. But, the most exciting event – clearly and without a doubt – was the planning for and all of the activities that ensued with the building of the new library and the renovation and rehabilitation of the Main House, including the Music Room. This would be the thing that is dearest to my heart and that makes me the happiest. But the whole renovation will stand out in my memory after I leave here as being my most important contribution. That said, it was arduous and it was painful and it was time consuming and often laborious, and I often thought I never, ever wanted to do that sort of thing again. There are the seemingly never-ending meetings over minutia on plans and the inevitable problems that come up when you're planning for new architecture and the renovation of historically significant architecture. But, it really was terrific; I learned enormously from it. I had great colleagues and superiors – Mike Steen, certainly, who was project manager on a consulting basis, and certainly the director Ned Keenan – and working with great architects, I really loved that. The renovation of the Music Room ceiling is probably my fondest part of the project, especially because the results were, to my mind, so stellar, and I worked with great people on that project as well. But the removal of a world class collection from its housing, the incredible amount of detail work of making sure you knew every object's condition and crate housing and shelf storage housing and this and that and then bringing it all back and making new mounts and new vitrines and designing all of that in the interim before it comes back…. Again, I never want to do it again, and probably won't have to, but those are once-in-a-lifetime curatorial opportunities that would probably be distasteful to many who are not curators, but I think are just the meat of what you do when you're in charge of a great collection.
AS: If we could go back a little bit to your curatorship of the House Collection, to what extent have acquisitions been active after the Bliss days?
JNC: The House Collection is not an actively acquiring collection. That said, we do still acquire, although not in the way or to the degree that the Byzantine or Pre-Columbian or rare book collections from the library might collect. They would want to collect great examples of their particular genres, if they can be acquired legally on the marketplace. That is their mission. Their collections are not necessarily static as they were deposited by the Blisses. The House Collection, on the other hand, is. What remains from the House Collection is a kind of finite collection of Blissiana material, some of which was sold off to increase revenue for collecting in Byzantine and Pre-Columbian. We don't do that any longer, but we do acquire for the House Collection occasionally. We acquire furnishings when things wear out, especially Middle Eastern carpets. We also – although we haven't done much of this in my tenure – we also buy Blissiana material, if it's relevant. We would certainly try to buy any portraits of the Blisses that came onto the market. And they had their portraits made many times – Mildred Bliss, in particular – but they didn't choose to retain them. The one painting of Mildred Bliss that hangs over the fireplace in the Refectory they actually gave away to a friend, who later gave it back to Dumbarton Oaks. If there was some significant object that the Blisses had owned that had left Dumbarton Oaks, we might try to get it back if it was relevant to us. There have been pieces that have come up for auction – furniture in particular – that we know the Blisses owned that we haven't tried for. We just don't need it.
JNSL: Was anything ever stolen? Was there ever any – as far as you know, were there any issues with that?
JNC: There have been a few thefts, particularly of things in the gardens. The Pan figure that sits in an arched bricked area pointing towards the Acadian pool that's called Lovers Lane Pool was stolen twice and returned once and not recovered the second time. The artist who did that sculpture was Francis Sedgwick. A cast of it had been acquired or given to his daughter, and she still had it. So, after much convincing and effort, the daughter agreed to make a new mold from her sculpture from which our Pan was recast. One of the eighteenth-century putti riding dolphins that are in the Fountain Terrace was stolen, also twice, once recovered, and once not. And fortunately they are an exact pair – they're not bilaterally symmetrical, as bookends are, they're literally the same object cast twice, so we made a cast of the existing one. There are two in the garden, and one of them is modern, cast from the other, which is the original. Smaller things have been stolen, but theft has been minimal.
EG: So, could you tell us a little bit about the interaction with the House Collections with the Fellows and the scholars and if that's changed over time?
JNC: I don't know if it's changed over time in the sense of predating my arrival here, because I don't really know what happened vis-à-vis the Fellows and the House Collection. When I first came, we used to do an orientation for the Fellows, which is still done, but that orientation also included a tour through the house and especially the areas where there was significant architecture and interiors or significant House Collection objects that might be of interest to the Fellows. They also had a tour with the Byzantine curators of the Byzantine Collection and they had a tour with the Pre-Columbian curators of the Pre-Columbian Collection. The House Collection tour got dropped after five years or so, I don't quite remember, because the schedule of what the Fellows did upon arrival just became somewhat onerous and the House Collection was expendable. So, we've never done that again except by request. And certainly when we reopened, there were a number of requests that I take people through the house and show them what happened during the renovation, and this involved taking both the docents and the Fellows. Also, occasionally, Fellows are interested in House Collection objects, especially the western medieval ones, and so of course they come to my office and, like any reader, they sit and read the dossier files and look at the historic photographs and so forth, but that's somewhat unusual. And every now and then someone is interested in the Blisses so they come and ask questions.
EG: Is that also true of the Archives? – interest in the Archives?
JNC: I have a lot of interest in the Archives from the studies programs, especially the directors. They change fairly frequently, as you know, sometimes every five years, sometimes every ten years, so they often, depending on their interests and the way they want to define their ongoing or upcoming projects – they want to see what's happened. Sometimes they have that material in their offices, but frankly a lot of the historical material is in the Archives, so they check out what they need. Also, by chance, I have a number of scholarly files that relate to research or projects that were given to Dumbarton Oaks by, especially, Byzantine scholars, although in one case by a Pre-Columbian scholar, and when Fellows are working on similar topics, they come and use these materials. However, I've had about ten Fellows in the twenty years that I've been here do that, so that's not a huge number.
EG: Is there much relationship between the House Collection and the Byzantine and Pre-Columbian Collections in terms of organization and exhibition?
JNC: Yes and no. The three Collections are all part of the same department, which is the Museum department. There's a little bit more of a sophisticated curatorial apparatus for the two primary collections, Byzantine and Pre-Columbian, less so for the House Collection, but we meet sort of on equal grounds otherwise. The exhibition space, so-called, for the House Collection is the Music Room, and it is by plan and tradition a different type of exhibition space than the gallery type of space that the Byzantine and Pre-Columbian Collections use. We have decided to retain a kind of residential, Edwardian, Kunstkammer look for the Music Room – no wall labels, no vitrines. Yes there are spot lights and there are a few museum fittings, but they are meant to be discrete. The only – I'm not quite sure how to answer your question, that's why I said yes and no. So, let me end by saying the new thing that we've done recently since the Collections were reinstalled is to bring collecting at Dumbarton Oaks and the Museum Collections at Dumbarton Oaks into something of a unified focus. And the Bliss Gallery – which was inaugurated with that reinstallation – has a vitrine which, as of tomorrow, will have an inaugural exhibit of animal bronzes, which come from at least two of the Collections. We had wanted them to come from all three of the Collections and they could have, but the Pre-Columbians needed their very few animal bronze sculptures for the permanent installation. We will probably do a hard stone exhibition there at some time, which will be House Collection Asian, House Collection European, Byzantine, and Pre-Columbian, in order to show that the Blisses were interested in artworks made of hard stone from many cultures, and that way refocus attention on their collecting and collecting interests rather than on the cultural nature of the collection. And that certainly was true, as I said a moment ago, with the inaugural special exhibition – hallway exhibition – titled "Collector's Microbe," which put objects from all three Collections into the same vitrines and onto the same walls in order to show that this was a Dumbarton Oaks collection in the singular, our literal and legal title – we are the Dumbarton Oaks Research Institute and Collection "singular," and I think that use of the singular was purposeful – I think that was by choice.
EG: Other than the creation of the Bliss Gallery, the House Collection has always been housed in the Music Room?
JNC: Housed, in a public sense, in the Music Room. Housed, in an institutional sense, throughout the building, so the paintings and furnishings that you see on the first floor – what we call the first floor gallery, the hallway between the museum wing and the Founders Room, for example – the paintings in the Founders Room and so forth, these are all House Collection items, including the Founders Room itself, the boiseries, the wall paneling of the Founders Room – these are all accessioned House Collection items. They are now actually on public display to a degree because we've just started running docent tours on Saturday by sign-up appointment, but that's a very new and historically unique moment in our public persona. But, we've always had House Collection objects used the way the Blisses wanted them to be seen and that is as beautiful things to delight, inspire perhaps, staff and Fellows and scholars. So, there's a public space and a private space, and there's a big storage space where a number of things don't see the light of day at the moment, because there's no room for them.
JNSL: Are you aware of any attempts either in the immediate past or the more distant past to take some of the stories associated with Dumbarton Oaks and its history and turn them into any kind of dramatic or sort of novelistic element? Has anyone ever shown an interest in doing that, because when I listen to these stories I think sometimes it sounds like it would make a great movie, or make a great play, or make a great story?
JNC: I've never heard of such a thing. I do think that a history of the institution needs to be written.
JNSL: That's something that several people whom I've interviewed have said.
JNC: And I think through the Oral History interview project and through the archival holdings, both the Bliss Papers at Harvard and the ones that we've now talked quite a bit about, it's all there. One might identify additional people to interview once one started writing a history, as always is the case with biographies or institutional histories. But easily eighty percent of it is already there, it just needs the time and the interest.
EG: So, have you noticed any significant changes over the time that you've been here since your undergraduate 'til the present, in terms of the academic or social or even physical setting here at Dumbarton Oaks?
JNC: Let me start with the physical setting. The physical setting was in need of renovation by the time that Giles Constable became director. He pointed that out in the interview that I did with him, and he wrote about it in his biannual report several times. He points out that well-made buildings are not like the buildings that he or I, as he put it in his interview, might buy because we can't afford to buy better-made buildings. We have to replace the roof every twenty years, whereas roofs on better-made buildings last for fifty years in all respects. But when he came to Dumbarton Oaks, the fifty year time bomb was about to explode. And it was absolutely true – the infrastructure of the physical real estate of Dumbarton Oaks was in dire need of renovation. And he was the one that reinforced the third floor – the attic floor, which is now used for the publications office space – in order to house shelving for the Byzantine library, and in Thomson's tenure, the courtyard gallery was built and all of that space underneath which had been just dirt was excavated to form a connection between the basement of the Garden Library and the Pre-Columbian Collection and underneath the Music Room, which allowed for offices and shelving and storage space and so forth. So, the physical plant improved fairly steadily. Air conditioning was added in the Constable era, and the physical plant continued to improve steadily in the years that I knew the institution. It improved dramatically in the '90s and at the turn of the century with the acquisition of new real estate: the director's house and the apartment building La Quercia, which took a certain amount of pressure off of the existing real estate, including some questionable legal pressures: the old director's house, now the Refectory, probably could not have housed a family of more than two people because using the upper floor as a bedroom space might have been considered illegal from a life-safety aspect. There were reasons to move on and certainly in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the decade we're in, the building of considerable new physical space – the library, the gardeners' court – and the renovation of the existing physical spaces was a remarkable change. That's the easy answer. Socially, I don't know. I was in my twenties when I was a Junior Fellow, and the parties and the swimming pools activities and going into Georgetown for impromptu, on-the-cheap dinners and beers was great fun. Do Fellows still do this today? Probably. I think when you interview some of the younger Fellows or staff, that's an interesting question to ask. I see Fellows being very serious here. They're very nice and when I interact with them on a social level I always enjoy that, but I see them being very serious, and I have a feeling that was always the case. That hasn't changed, but possibly the pressures of the world and the paucity of job openings in academic humanistic professions and just the need to spend your money wisely and move on and get your research and your dissertation done or your next book done and so forth leaves you little time to have a beer and a pizza. I don't know. You had a third prong on that question?
EG: Academically.
JNC: Academically. Oh, the standards here have always been very high, remarkably high I think, in everything – the choice of people that come. I know that sounds slightly self-serving, so forgive me. But the publications, the programs and projects that the institution has sponsored – I mean, Dumbarton Oaks has a stellar record, and I don't say that because I'm "in-house." I think I could write a critical review if I had to, but you know, you look at the history of what this institution has done in the world and here in its self-appointed research areas or interest areas, and it's just remarkable, it's remarkable.
AS: Has the evolution of the faculty to speak of here at Dumbarton Oaks changed the academics?
JNC: The Blisses and the early administrators wanted some kind of faculty presence, a kind of senior mentorship, I believe from what I've read. Let me back up to say that I think the Blisses initially just wanted senior research people here. When more junior people came and were given a kind of task working half day on their dissertations and half day on putting together a census of Byzantine objects in America or, if they were text people, looking at textual references for objects. (If you haven't read David Wright's paper on the early years of the institution, I highly recommend it to you.) I think the Blisses and the administration realized that there needed to be a kind of mentorship program for the more junior people who came – that this was something that would be very valuable. And because of the Harvard association, a kind of academic model was first chosen where there would be professors. But, it didn't make a great deal of sense because they didn't have students and they didn't give classes, per se. I mean, they might offer seminars maybe or give occasional lectures, but they didn't – it just wasn't a good model. And if they became tenured – initially a few of them did – what did they see their role to be? Did they see their role to be tenured faculty who fortunately didn't have to teach so they could spend one hundred percent of their time doing research, or just what? And so it was hard, it was a very hard model to keep going, and I think they were right in doing away with it, and in providing academic leadership and academic mentorship in other ways through having a coterie of like beings of all stages of life physically in one space. As is true now with the symposia and catalogue projects and the coin and seal seminars that are run in the summer, people with similar interests can come from different institutions and talk together, talk to senior members, talk to junior members. Dumbarton Oaks facilitates that, makes the bread and butter of that happen. It would only happen otherwise through email or through something much less interactive.
EG: So, sort of in closing, could you talk a little how you see the role of the Archives and the House Collection in the future?
JNC: The Archives should be exactly what it is today, only better. It should have every significant bit of Dumbarton Oaks institutional, intellectual history that's pertinent to the institution, housed there. It should be user-friendly, it should be – in a conservation sense – secure and well maintained. If we ever enter into an economic period and a digital period where things like that can be more easily accessible through digital technology, then that should happen. It happens obviously to a degree because everything you're doing will eventually become, if it hasn't already, part of the Archives and this comes in digital format, so the transition is underway. The House Collection should also carry on as it is, should maintain its course, ensuring that its role in both the Blisses' lives and in the institutional life of Dumbarton Oaks should not be forgotten. Its status should be maintained and honored because many of the art objects – by no means all, but a good many – are museum, world-class pieces that show a great level of connoisseurship and interest by the founders of this institution. Maintenance of this Collection should be insured, because it isn't inexpensive to maintain an art collection. But Dumbarton Oaks has and, I hope, will continue to do so. And I think that it should. In bad economic times, or when the world has moved on, one has to make choices, and it's possible that things will change, but for the moment I think we should stay the course for both the Archives and the House Collection.
JNSL: Thank you very much.
JNC: Thank you very much.
JNSL: It's been wonderful.]]>
Ioli, you have a long association with Dumbarton Oaks and an affection for the place. Can you talk perhaps about your first impression of Dumbarton Oaks? Is it a very different place now from when you arrived as a Junior Fellow in 1974–75?
I was a graduate student at Berkeley when I applied for a junior fellowship. I had no hopes of receiving one, since at that time D.O. was thought to be a place where Harvard students in the Byzantine field came to write their dissertations, and fellowships were very hard to get. I was clearly thrilled to receive a fellowship and even more surprised when I arrived to see where I had landed.
Looking back at those years I can say that being at D.O. gave me a whole new perception of educational institutions in the United States, but also the opportunity to do research at this extraordinary library. I came here at the beginning stages of my dissertation and I believe that having from the start of one's research such great resources gives one a better footing early on in academia. In addition the scholarly interchange that I encountered in my field --and it is true for all fellows-- opened up new horizons in rethinking my own research.
I always think that I owe D.O. the career I ended up having, when I look back at the first steps of a shy person, learning to discuss my work with others, and gaining a secure footing for what came afterwards. I was also lucky enough to have my fellowship renewed for an additional year, which secured the completion of the dissertation. While in residence this fall, I enjoy the broader intellectual community.
You are an art historian, a practitioner in a discipline which has changed a great deal over that time as well.
Yes, but I started as a classicist/archaeologist. Soon I realized that art history at that time offered a wider scope for interpretation. For example, renaissance art historians were working on topics like patronage (which didn't happen in Byzantine Studies until the 1980s). After my studies in Germany I went to Berkeley to work with David Wright. Byzantine art history then still focused on iconography and style and not many other tools. Reading what the Byzantines themselves wrote was not encouraged when I was a student. When I began teaching I realized that context was essential to an understanding of the art of a period. Of course we began increasingly to ask different questions, to look at types of objects that had not been given much attention before (steatites rather than ivories in my case). Things which had never been exhibited became part, for example, of the exhibition I organized at Harvard on Byzantine women. As soon as you begin to look outside that narrow visuality into contextual studies, interdisciplinarity makes a library like Dumbarton Oaks essential.
I think of you as someone for whom teaching is very important. Is this what you tell your students?
Undergraduates come with very little grasp of what Byzantium entails, either the period or the art, and my aim is to present fresh challenges, capturing their interest by discussing intriguing and impressive images almost like puzzles to be solved, and we do it together. Graduate students are another matter, and there I need to make sure that they have a broad education and that they have all the languages they need, especially Greek. I encourage them to read the texts (and there are great texts!) and learn from all the disciplines which can be brought to bear on Byzantium. I enjoy having graduate students around me, I like their enthusiasm, and I enjoy working with them as we did for example for the Women exhibition where we had a great collaboration.
But this is a semester without teaching. How are you spending this precious time?
I have returned to an old interest of mine. My master's thesis was on imperial art, and I published some of it in Dumbarton Oaks Papers. I have continued to work from time to time on the subject, on the imperial mosaics of Hagia Sophia, on relics at the court, and imperial psalters, and the role of personifications in suggesting imperial qualities. More recently I've been looking at assemblages of court art (the Khakouli triptych, the Pala Doro) and in them the figure of Alexander the Great. From another angle I've looked at pearls and the way they define empire.
You're going to be talking about heliocentrism in your public lecture on November 15. Is this a continuous feature of Byzantine thinking about the emperor? We tend to think of it as a Hellenistic trait above all.
Well, it is very strong in Constantinian art and then again in the sixth and seventh centuries, with Corippus in particular, and then it becomes prominent again with the Macedonians, I suspect with Basil I at the end of the ninth century. In fact I would suggest that it is after Iconoclasm in the mid-ninth century that the emperor was seen again as a new Constantine and parallel to the sun. I shall trace the story into the twelfth century when we have a range of writings, (acclamations and panegyrics), which touch on the theme—and are visualized in the roundel in the Dumbarton Oaks museum.]]>