Sevastopol to Establish Institute of Byzantium and Crimea

The Institute of Black Sea and Byzantine Studies will be created on the basis of the Sevastopol State University (SevSU) and the museum and temple complex «New Chersonesos». It is expected that scientists from Sevastopol, Moscow, and also from abroad will work there.

For several years now, SevSU has been working within the framework of a mega-grant aimed at studying Crimea and the Black Sea region in the Middle Ages. Both Moscow State University and SevSU staff are participating in this work — under my leadership, a historical and archaeological laboratory for the comprehensive study of the Byzantine Black Sea region was created. And now we understand that in the future this work will result in the creation of an international institute— reported TASS President of the Faculty of History of Moscow State University (MSU), Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Sergei Karpov.

The academician explained that there is currently a large reserve for the work of the future institute. The history of the Crimean peninsula, including the Byzantine and later medieval periods, is of great interest to Russian and foreign scientists; work has been conducted since the 18th century, but the accumulated material is fragmented and requires compilation and comprehensive analysis. For example, Karpov and his colleagues have copies of unique materials obtained over many years of cooperation with Italian archives, where documents from the heyday of the Genoese and Venetian republics are stored, whose trading posts flourished in Crimea. They are already doing a lot of work, analyzing and introducing these documents into scientific circulation, but in the future, the information obtained must be entered into an archaeological context and correlated with other sources.

He specified that the Institute of Black Sea and Byzantine Studies is planned to be created on the basis of SevSU, but physically it will be located in the premises of the museum and temple complex «New Chersonesos», where the State Historical and Archaeological Museum-Reserve «Tauric Chersonesos» is also preparing to move.

In his opinion, the proximity and cooperation with «Chersonesos Taurica» ​​will be a big plus for such an institute: after all, it is this museum that stores a huge array of data obtained during the research and excavations that have been conducted since the 19th century on the site of the ancient city and in other places in the southwestern Crimea. In addition, the new complex has access to high-tech equipment that allows for the most modern analyses at the request of scientists. At the same time, the format of the new division of SevSU will make it possible not only to attract leading scientists from Moscow, regions of the Russian Federation and even from abroad, but also to create a local scientific school.

The backbone of this institute will be made up of the employees of our laboratory, but there is also the task of training more specialists who will ensure systematic and mass work in each of the areas: be it archeology, osteology, or even such special disciplines as numismatics. It will be possible to invite specialists and send our employees to improve their qualifications, for example, to Moscow. We are planning joint archaeological expeditions with Chersonesos and other leading scientific institutions, holding scientific conferences to discuss the most pressing and controversial issues in the history of Crimea and the Black Sea region as a whole, because it is very difficult to separate the history of Crimea from the history of the greater Mediterranean — it was a crossroads of civilizations— added S. Karpov.