The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and the Return of the Near East

On 4 June 2026, the European Studies Centre hosted a book seminar with journalist and Middle East Eye correspondent Sean Matthews on his new book, The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and the Return of the Near East. Chaired by Othon Anastasakis, Director of South East European Studies at Oxford, the event explored Matthews's central argument that Greece is being reabsorbed into the Near East after a century of westward orientation.

Matthews opened with a reading from the book's epilogue, reflecting on his family's roots on the island of Oinousses. Through his great-grandfather's changing nationality on ship manifests—from Ottoman subject to Greek citizen—he illustrated how the collapse of empires reshaped identities. Greece, he argued, has long occupied a frontier between East and West, and that dividing line is becoming increasingly blurred. He noted that older travel writers readily situated Greece within the wider Near East and recalled that the United States treated Greece as part of its Near East portfolio until 1974.

He outlined three reasons why Greece matters beyond its borders: it was the first nation-state to emerge from the Ottoman Empire, the first site of sustained Western intervention in the region, and a key marker of the decline of the cosmopolitan order inherited from the Byzantine and Ottoman empires. The book's title, he explained, reflects the continuity between those empires and the hybrid cultural space they created.