In 2018, Koç University – Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for Late Antique and Byzantine Studies (GABAM) and The Friends of Music Society in Athens departed on a journey deciding to create a research framework of cooperation on Byzantine secular music tradition. They launched the Byzantine Musical Instruments (BMI) research project under the scientific supervision of Prof. Nikos Maliaras, and Mr. Antonios Botonakis’s appointment as the Post-Doctorate researcher, who conducted the study. This project involved different stages of realization, including research on primary resources in Turkey and Greece, curating the material, designing the schema that was adopted and inputting the data.

 

The extensive investigation on primary and secondary resources revealed figures of musicians and musical instruments, featured on artefacts such as caskets, wall paintings, mosaics, wooden icons etc. but also on illuminations preserved inside Greek manuscripts, dated between the 2nd and the 16th century. All these depictions amounted to more than 400 visual representations, which were fully integrated at a functional and fully operational database open for researchers, hosted at the Suna Kıraç Library digital space, at Koç University in Istanbul. The results of this project were also presented at a digital exhibition titled Echoes of an Empire, which is hosted at the Europeana portal.