“BYZART – Byzantine Art and Archaeology on Europeana” is a cooperation project funded by the Connecting Europe Facility program in the frame of Europeana Generic Services. The project, successfully completed in 2020, brought together an international and interdisciplinary team (University of Bologna, coordinator; Ionian University; Open University of Cyprus; Aristotle University of Thessaloniki; Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Art Studies; National Hellenic Research Foundation, Institute of Historical Research; Museum of Ravenna) to achieve the ambitious goal of digitizing and making available through the Europeana platform more than 75,000 audio-visual sources related to the Byzantine and post-Byzantine cultural heritage. The contents linked to the BYZART project belong to 29 unpublished collections and include glass plates, cardboards, slides, and analogic photographic material, as well as a musical archive of traditional Orthodox church music records and an audio-visual archive, comprising material that was previously kept – sometimes in a fragmentary form – in different storage areas. The project team has developed a digitization strategy aimed at maintaining, cataloging and making available the large amount of items contained in each collection, also by including Linked Open Data resources in the metadata set in order to empower content searchability and accessibility. In such a way, it has reached the goal of guaranteeing the preservation and enhancement of a great number of remarkable cultural heritage objects from all over the Mediterranean and of making them accessible to both scholars and the general. The project’s results can indeed be used and manipulated by a wide range of actors and stakeholders, such academics, schools, museums, and cultural organizations, as well as private individuals interested in Byzantine culture. BYZART’s sustainability is ensured by the Alma Digital Library, whose section “AMS Historica (Alma Mater Studiorum Digital Treasures)” permanently hosts the BYZART collection.
By digitizing and showcasing materials from archives originally belonging to former eminent archaeologists and art historians, the BYZART project has played a major role in opening up and improving our knowledge of Byzantine culture through the eyes of its main characters.
Among the major outputs of the project, the virtual exhibition “The Silk and the Blood. Images of Authority in Byzantine Art and Archaeology” has been set up in order to enable users to get an immersive journey through BYZART digital collection. It includes introductory sections and topic-oriented sessions which offer in-depth insights into contents, geographic distribution and time-span of digitized cultural heritage objects. Main sessions regard indeed BYZART archives, an interactive map of cultural heritage elements and a graphic timeline which offers a summary view of the main protagonists and historical stages of the Byzantine empire. In addition to general panels, users can also enjoy ten thematic sessions dedicated to archaeological contexts, findings and works of art focusing on the topic of authority and its manifold expressions in Byzantine Art and Archaeology.