Medieval Smyrna/Izmir: Transformation of a City

Smyrna/Izmir, nowadays the third most populated city and a bustling economic center in modern Turkey, is situated in one of the Mediterraneans most exciting crossroads of cultures littered with remains of ancient sites and monuments of different periods. There is a long tradition of archaeological research on classical, Hellenistic, and early Christian sites of the region, and Smyrnas significance as an international hub of trade in the late Ottoman Empire have attracted the interest of numerous scholars. Since 2008, the Tabula Imperii Byzantini (TIB) project at the Austrian Academy of Sciences has been focusing on the historical geography of Western Asia Minor in Late Antiquity and Byzantine times and has been gathering the surviving written and material evidence. The project Medieval Smyrna/Izmir probes the question as to how the city of Smyrna and its hinterland developed from its last heydays under Byzantine rule in the 13th century to the Ottoman conquest in the 15th century. During this period, the western coastland of Asia Minor underwent not only substantial environmental change but also profound political, cultural, and religious transformations, in the course of which Byzantine-Christian institutions, structures, and elites were gradually superseded by Muslim-Turkish entities and eventually absorbed into the nascent Ottoman Empire. The project examines this multilayered process through an interdisciplinary approach combining historical geography with methods of social and economic history and archaeology. It combines key components of Byzantine-Turkish transformation with broader archaeological questions concerning long-term patterns of settlement and human agency shaping the regions entire medieval period. These axes of investigation will revolve around five thematic subunits, namely (a) environment, land use, economic practices, (b) political ideology, government, institutions, (c) urban life, (d) suburban and rural life; (e) religious spaces and practices. In this way, the project aspires to achieve a comprehensive reconstruction of transformative processes, which includes both material aspects of living conditions and the symbolic universe of different population groups. The archaeological research will document currently existing material evidence of historical habitation, thus promoting future collaborations in the field of Byzantinearchaeology in Anatolia. The historical research aims to produce a transposable case study of socio-cultural transformation, which will help elucidate similar processes in other parts and periods of the Mediterranean up to modern times. The projects institutional framework is provided by an international collaboration between the TIB project (Andreas Külzer; Despoina Ariantzi), the Medieval Institute of the University of Notre Dame, USA (Alexander Beihammer), the Greek and Byzantine Studies Unit and the Department of Archaeology at Uppsala University (Myrto Veikou, Daniel Löwenberg), and colleagues in Turkey.

The present project addresses how Smyrna and its surrounding region evolved from its final flourishing under Byzantine rule in the 13th century to its incorporation into the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century. The project employed an interdisciplinary methodology that integrated historical geography, social and economic history, and archaeology. Specifically, the research objectives sought to: (1) trace long-term patterns of settlement and land use by analyzing the interplay between environmental change and human activity; (2) examine political and institutional shifts; (3) investigate changes in urban, suburban, and rural life; (4) explore the evolution of religious spaces, practices, and institutions. A core component of the research involved the Cartulary of the Lembos Monastery near Smyrna, preserved in the manuscript Vindobonensis historicus gr. 125 (Austrian National Library). It constitutes one of the richest collections of legal documents surviving from the Byzantine world. The cartulary contains 207 documents, issued primarily between 1224 and 1294 by a wide range of authorities. The corpus thus provides detailed evidence concerning landholding, administration, and social relations in the region. The archaeological component of the project originally envisaged an extensive and intensive systematic survey of the hinterland of Izmir, but the permit applications were denied. As a result, the archaeological strategy had to be adapted and the team carried out a non-systematic, extensive survey during two field campaigns in 2021 and 2022 in the region of Izmir and the Hermos/Gediz Valley. Across the two campaigns, the team conducted 71 site investigations, focusing on locations with known or suspected archaeological potential. Archaeological remains were identified at 55 of the 71 investigated sites. The material spans a broad chronological range from antiquity through the Byzantine, medieval, and early modern periods. Overall, the project has significantly advanced our knowledge of the transformation of Smyrna/Izmir and its hinterland during the pivotal centuries of Byzantine decline and Ottoman rise. Key achievements include: (1) The production of the first complete critical edition of the Lembos monastery cartulary, with extensive commentary and English summaries. (2) The documentation and preliminary analysis of 55 archaeological sites with material spanning from antiquity to the early modern period. (3) The creation of a robust MESMY Archaeological Database and GIS-based visualization platform integrating new and existing archaeological and historical data. (4) The development of methodological approaches suited to complex, modernized landscapes and to research contexts with restricted formal access. These results offer a more comprehensive and nuanced reconstruction of the region's medieval transformation, both in its material conditions of life and in the symbolic and institutional worlds of its inhabitants, and provide a solid foundation for ongoing and future research.