Over the last twenty years, a concerted effort has been made to uncover the history of the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine. Now, with the archives opened and the essential story told, it becomes possible to explore in detail what happened after the Holodomor and to examine its impact on Ukraine and its people.

In 2008 the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University hosted an international conference entitled “The Great Famine in Ukraine: The Holodomor and Its Consequences, 1933 to the Present.” The papers, most of which are contained in this volume, concern a wide range of topics, such as the immediate aftermath of the Holodomor and its subsequent effect on Ukraine’s people and communities; World War II, with its wartime and postwar famines; and the impact of the Holodomor on subsequent generations of Ukrainians and present-day Ukrainian culture. Through the efforts of the historians, archivists, and demographers represented here, a fuller history of the Holodomor continues to emerge.

In this issue: Maya Maskarinec, “Saints for All Christendom: Naturalizing the Alexandrian Saints Cyrus and John in Seventh- to Thirteenth-Century Rome”; Joe Glynias, “Prayerful Iconoclasts: Psalm Seals and Elite Formation in the First Iconoclast Era (726–750)”; Jordan Pickett, “Water and Empire in the De Aedificiis of Procopius”; Florin Leonte, “Visions of Empire: Gaze, Space, and Territory in Isidore’s Encomium for John VIII Palaiologos”; Anastasia Drandaki, “Piety, Politics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Venetian Crete”; Julian Baker, Filippo Dompieri, and Turan Gökyildirim with Kelly Domoney, Tuğçe Pamuk, and Irmak Güneş Yüceil, “The Reformed Byzantine Silver-Based Currencies (ca. 1372–1379) in the Light of the Hoards from the Belgrade Gate”; Vasileios Marinis, “The Vision of Last Judgment in the Vita of Saint Niphon (BHG 1371z)”; Daniel Reynolds, “Rethinking Palestinian Iconoclasm”; Athanasios K. Vionis, “Understanding Settlements in Byzantine Greece: New Data and Approaches for Boeotia, Sixth to Thirteenth Century”; Nikos Zagklas, “Experimenting with Prose and Verse in Twelfth-Century Byzantium: A Preliminary Study”; and Christophe Erismann, “Theodore the Studite and Photius on the Humanity of Christ: A Neglected Byzantine Discussion on Universals in the Time of Iconoclasm.”

Published annually, the journal Dumbarton Oaks Papers was founded in 1941 for the publication of articles relating to Byzantine civilization.

In this issue: Audrey Becker, “Verbal and Nonverbal Diplomatic Communication at the Imperial Court of Constantinople (fifth–sixth Centuries)”; Alexandra Wassiliou-Seibt and Andreas Gkoutzioukostas, “The Origin and the Members of the Kamytzes Family: A Contribution to Byzantine Prosopography”; Michael Zellmann-Rohrer, “‘Psalms Useful for Everything’: Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Manuals for the Amuletic Use of the Psalter”; Raymond Van Dam, “Eastern Aristocracies and Imperial Courts: Constantine’s Half-Brother, Licinius’s Prefect, and Egyptian Grain”; Daniel Caner, “Not a Hospital but a Leprosarium: Basil’s Basilias and an Early Byzantine Concept of the Deserving Poor”; Paul Botley, “Greek Literature in Exile: The Books of Andronicus Callistus, 1475–1476”; Aude Busine, “The Dux and the Nun: Hagiography and the Cult of Artemios and Febronia in Constantinople”; Benjamin Garstad, “Dionysiac and Christian Elements in the Lysos Episode in the Greek Alexander Romance (β rec.).”

The Battle of Poltava has long been recognized as a crucial event in the geopolitical history of Europe and a decisive point in the Great Northern War between Sweden and the Russian Empire. The Russian victory at Poltava contributed to the decline of Sweden as a Great Power and was a major setback to Ukrainian independence. Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who joined forces with the Swedish king Charles XII against Tsar Peter I, remains a controversial figure even today.

In 2009, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute gathered scholars from around the globe and from many fields of study—history, military affairs, philology, linguistics, literature, art history, music—to mark the 300th anniversary of the battle. This book is a collection of their papers on such topics as the international, Russian, and Ukrainian contexts of the battle; Mazepa in European culture; the language and literature of the period; art and architecture; history and memory; and fact, fiction, and the literary imagination. Mazepa himself is the focus of many of the articles—a hero to Ukrainians but a treacherous figure to Russians. This book provides a fresh look at this watershed event and sheds new light on the legacies of the battle’s major players.