Plans & Prospects 2023

Alumni profile
Above: Kateryna working as an interpreter
with the OSCE at the war area in Donbas,
Eastern Ukraine
Right: Taken in May 2012 at Dumbarton
Oaks, Harvard Research Centre
Left: During a first trip to Oxford as a visiting
doctoral student at Keble College, Oxford
in real life, but the rest is not what we
call the empirical. Historians would
discard these legends on the basis that
they don’t contain facts and details
that are reliable in the conventional
sense.” Yet Kateryna’s work demands
she suspend her empiricism, even if
briefly. She wrote her dissertation about
the legendary origins of Hagia Sofia, a
narrative popularly attested to in more
than eighty manuscripts in Byzantine
Greek, and countless others in Latin,
Persian, Turkish, Old Slavonic and
Georgian. “The legend is what people
actually wanted to hear. This what they
loved, and this is what was welcomed.
And that, in a way, realistically reflects
their mentality, how they saw the
world, how they perceived their past,
how they perceived the past of this
church. Now we differentiate between
historical memory and imaginative
origins; but for them, they didn’t have
this distinction. They couldn’t image
their past without the intrusion of
God, without the appearance of angels
and miraculous events. It was a part of
them.” What sparks Kateryna’s curiosity
is the peculiar accuracy of documents
that relate not to events, but to how
contemporary individuals thought, felt
and operated in Byzantine society.
“I did have to make choices,
and they were hard choices”
Legends, Kateryna says, are just as
important today as they were in the
Byzantine Empire. “I’m confronted with
the same thing in Ukraine, because
people go through the experience of
war, and it traumatises them.” The
same kind of stories – which nowadays
we think of as “urban legends” – are a
means for cultures and communities
to process and retain traumatic
experiences. She describes parallels
between contemporary and medieval
memory (and for interested readers she
recommends Mary Carruthers’ 2008
work The Book of Memory: A Study of
Memory in Medieval Culture). Speaking
to Kateryna, one gets the sense that,
as risky an enterprise as following one’s
curiosity can be, remaining curious
allows one to face those risks. “It’s like
a kind of natural ignition”, she tells me.
“Not everybody has it, but we can
discover something like it. It’s a little bit
of work.” Curiosity encourages us to
seek out new ways of thinking and living;
perhaps it equips us to survive things we
could never have anticipated.
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