Butrint
Never a ‘non-place’
abstract
This short essay takes its direction from Marc Auge’s definitions of places and non-places. It reviews the settlement shifts at Butrint, ancient Buthrotum, between late antiquity and the 12th century. Butrint had been a place since the late Republic, if not earlier; a centre associated with mythic origins and healing. Located in at least three different places, Butrint after antiquity took three different physical forms, but appears to have sustained its association with a mythic past. Remaining not only a trading centre of varying importance, did the memory of its antiquity safeguard its continuity albeit in very different locations and settlement forms?
Keywords: Byzantine • Middle Ages • Adriatic
permalink: http://doi.org/10.14277/6969-115-7/SR-4-5