The collective volume Silk and Purple offers a journey into the world of Byzantine and post-Byzantine textiles, through the exploration of the different traditions that developed in the Eastern Mediterranean, from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period.

The team of editors and authors of the volume, composed of scholars with complementary interests and specializations, has created a diverse academic canvas. This spirit of interdisciplinarity permeates the present volume, which aims to fill a crucial gap in the existing Greek literature by providing an overview of both the most significant local producers and the fabrics that arrived from the West and the East in the bustling markets of Byzantium and Ottoman Greece.

The goal is to highlight this particular aspect of our material culture, which is so important yet still unknown to the wider public. Within this framework, the various chapters unfold facets of the economic, social, religious, and artistic phenomena that intertwine in the study of textiles just as the warp and weft of the loom weave complex patterns.