On Tuesday, December 12, 2023, at 17:30, in the building of the National Archaeological Institute with Museum in Sofia, 1 Atanas Burov Sq. (opposite the Presidency Building), Dr. Pantelis Charalampakis is going to give a lecture, as part of the “Academic seminar of NAIM” lecture series, on а group of textual graffiti from the medieval site at Murfatlar.

The medieval rock-cut site at Murfatlar became known to archaeologists already in the late 1950s. And yet, almost seven decades later, it still remains a mystery to science, due to both natural and human factors. The presentation is focused on neglected and to a large extent unpublished types of textual graffiti on the walls of the site of Murfatlar (Greek inscriptions; nomina sacra; monograms; ligatures; Christograms; Staurograms), as well as on revisited evidence pertaining to such previously known graffiti that have been overlooked, published with mistakes or misinterpreted. This study is based on the author’s participation in two NAIM-BAS scientific expeditions of 2022-2023, the personal systematic documentation of the evidence, and the modern technology for photographing and drawing carried out by the expedition’s experts.

Pantelis Charalampakis (PhD, 2008) has been working at the National Archaeological Institute with Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, since 2020. His main research interests are Byzantine sigillography and prosopography, with numerous publications. Since 2022 he is supervising the research project on the digitization of the Byzantine and medieval Bulgarian seals from Bulgaria – National Scientific Program “Development and promotion of Bulgarian studies abroad” of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Bulgaria / NAIM-BAS. He is the author, together with M. Campagnolo-Pothitou, of “The Radenos family: a prosopographic study through literary and sigillographic evidence”, Revue des Etudes Byzantines 77 (2019), and co-editor, with O. Karagiorgou and C. Malatras, of TAKTIKON. Studies on the Prosopography and Administration of the Byzantine themata (Athens, 2021), which received the “Vasso Penna” Award 2023, by the Christian Archaeological Society, nominated the best work on numismatics and sigillography for the years 2018-2022.