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The subtitle ("A Byzantine Mystery Novel")
describes the book fairly accurately, since it would be misleading to
call it simply a crime novel in historical dress. It is much more: a
fully developed historical novel that plays in an exactly drawn and
well researched setting, while, at the same time, breathing life into
this historical framework through a concrete literary form; it is the
story of how a series of murders was solved by someone who is anything
else but a detective; and, finally, it is also the story of this detective
despite himself, a complex personality that moves in the ambience of
Byzantine-Arab relations and between the worlds of politics, crime,
poetry and love.
The novel's plot develops over six days in May of 832, during the
third year of the reign of Emperor Theophilos. In the first half of
the ninth century the Iconoclasm controversy divided Byzantine society
for the second time. The State and its Church condemned the veneration
of icons as idolatrous, while monastic circles adhered to their veneration
as being orthodox. Meanwhile, the continuous raids of the Arabs in Anatolia
were causing great problems to the eastern provinces.
In these circumstances, Emperor Theophilos sends chief
secretary Leo, head of the imperial chancellery, as ambassador to Caliph
al-Mamun in Bagdad in order to negotiate peace in the East. The ambassador
and his retinue arrive in Cappadocian Caesarea (modern-day Kayseri in
Turkey), the last station before the border. Under a seemingly calm
surface, the town is in turmoil. Arab spies are preparing a revolt,
dissident monks are encouraging the idolotrous veneration of icons and
ruthless procurers are abducting young women for the slave-markets of
Syria. The military commander seems to have lost control of the town.
When the brutally murdered body of the town judge's thirteen-year-old
daughter is found outside the castle walls, the commander is forced
to ask for the ambassador's help.
Until this moment chief secretary Leo has lived the quiet life of a
civil servant. Unmarried, somewhat remote, he reads love romances and
plays music on an ebony lute of Arab craftsmanship. Now, amidst the
barracks, taverns and whorehouses of Caesarea, Leo must solve crimes
for the first time and is forced to confront himself and his past.
Panagiotis Agapitos has succeeded in reconstructing this
Byzantine world in a most dramatic manner. Together with the novel's
characters, the reader sees Caesarea, walks through the town, listens
to its sound, tastes the food and absorbs the smell of its neighbourhoods.
Substantial research into the Byzantine and Arab historical and archaeological
sources lies behind the novel. The invention of the protagonist Leo,
of the complicated criminal case and of the political-ecclesiastical
intrigue, combined with a narrative technique culled from medieval and
contemporary practice, invite the reader to plunge deep into this near-eastern
medieval society, without ever giving the impression that this is a
history lecture in book form. For the interested reader an epilogue
and a glossary of terms provide further information on the historical
and social ambience of the time.
The mixture of historical novel, crime novel and love romance is quite
innovative, much more so since there has been no such experiment in
the case of Byzantium. By means of an elegant but not affected style
and through various literary devices, the author conveys to the modern
reader a tangible feeling of Byzantine mentality. It should be underlined
that The Ebony Lute substantially revises the preconceived image
of Byzantium firmly rooted in the contemporary public's horizon of expectations,
a fact which (as has been the case in Greece over the past year) should
raise the interest in the book.
Translated into German from the Greek by Diether Reinsch
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