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Episode 317 - The Byzantine Legacy with David Hendrix

January 30, 2025·42 min·4 clips

While exploring Rome, David Hendrix realized he had overlooked the hidden Byzantine treasures in his own backyard of Istanbul.

The opening stays practical. The host explains how his own 2018 trip to Istanbul led him to David Hendricks and the Byzantine Legacy website. David comes into view through the city itself. His work is a guide to surviving Byzantine sites in Istanbul, made for people who are trying to find and visit them. The project also reaches into Byzantine sites elsewhere in Turkey, Greece, Italy, and beyond. David does not talk about it like a finished institution. It sounds more like a public resource that keeps changing, with limited funding and ambitions that keep getting wider. Money is a real constraint. More support would let him travel, bring in other people, and maybe translate the material into Greek and Turkish. That part is still open. He also says the edges of the project are not always obvious, because every expansion brings new decisions about what counts. The purpose stays clear: Byzantine Legacy gives people accessible, reliable information about places. Scholars matter here too. David wants the site to share academic work and projects so that research does not stay trapped in narrow circles. The reach is real. A map of Byzantine churches on the site has been viewed more than 300,000 times, partly because there is not much else like it. Locals planning visits and scholars chasing obscure church ruins can end up using the same tool. The host points listeners to David's Instagram, X/Twitter, YouTube, and Patreon, framing the site as the kind of careful project that lasts only if interested people keep it going. Even the Telepaideia sponsorship fits: small courses in ancient languages and classical texts sit beside the same concern with making old worlds readable.

As heard by us

A practical look at the Byzantine Legacy project and the sites it maps.

The episode follows the Byzantine Legacy project with David Hendricks, framing it as a guide to what survives of Byzantium in Istanbul and beyond.

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Need a practical map to Byzantine sites in Istanbul and the person behind it?

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