Ask the average person to choose between the glorious slanting light of a sunny autumnal Saturday and the distinctly unglamorous environs of a lecture theatre in the arts building at Belfield, and it would be no contest. But a respectable roomful of people chose the latter option recently - and were rewarded by a dizzying voyage into the depths of medieval Middle Eastern culture, as speaker after speaker opened tantalising windows into forgotten or neglected corners of European civilisation.
The occasion was the second in a series of annual symposia organised by the classics and art history departments at UCD, and the theme chosen for this year's conference, Cultural Exchanges between Byzantium and the Seljuk Turks of Anatolia, has major contemporary resonances, not just in an Ireland faced with a number of challenging cultural exchanges of its own, but in a wider world in which Christianity and Islam appear to be shaping up to each other with as much mutual hostility - if not as much large-scale violence - as at any time since the Crusades.
As a species, however, art historians and archaeologists do not appear to be unduly devoted to contemporary resonances. One of the most striking aspects of the day's discussions was the almost total lack of interest in drawing conclusions, stating facts or demanding that "something ought to be done"; a refreshing, if somewhat disorienting, atmosphere for a journalist accustomed to the considerably slicker questions-and-answers atmosphere of mass media. On Saturday, many questions were asked but few were answered. Nevertheless, people went home happy, heads full of ancient mysteries, eyes beguiled by superb slides depicting one stunningly beautiful building after another.
Whether, of course, a question can be answered depends to a great extent on the nature of the question. In her absorbing presentation, The Portal in Anatolian Seljuk Architecture, Prof Omur Bakirer of the Middle East Technical University in Ankara articulated the idea that the graceful, elegant entrances with which Seljuk architects adorned their most important buildings - many of them now, literally, doorways in the desert - were specifically designed to convey a message, whether political, aesthetic or religious, to those who approached them. The message is lost on 21st-century travellers: we look, and see only a doorway. It will doubtless take many more years of research to decode the symbolism which underlies their elaborate carved ornamentation and complex geometric patterns.
It seems, however, that the more we learn about the Seljuks, the more enigmatic they become. Having arrived in Anatolia, or present-day Turkey, as all-conquering nomads from the steppes of central Asia, they defeated the Byzantine army at Manzikert in 1071 and established their provincial capital at Nicaea, now known as Iznik. The greatest flowering of Seljuk culture took place in Persia, where, like many flowers, it withered fairly promptly, but a remnant of the Seljuk empire lingered in Anatolia, where it was dubbed the "Seljuk Sultanate of Rum", meaning Roman Asia. Throughout the succeeding centuries Seljuks and Byzantines squabbled, traded and inter-married, creating a series of cross-cultural undercurrents whose choppy, sometimes lethal waters were explored at breakneck speed by Dr Keith Hopwood from the University of Wales and Lampeter in his highly entertaining talk, Structures of Power in Anatolia 1071 1350.
Dr Hopwood, who recently published a paper on organised crime in the ancient world, proved to be as alert to the gorier aspects of his subject ("some say he was eaten by the Mongols, pour encourager les autres," he remarked of one hapless upstart) as to the subtle literary and architectural shifts by means of which the one culture left its imprint on the history of the other. In the intriguingly titled Brick Versus Stone: Seljuk Architecture in Iran and Anatolia, Prof Robert Hillenbrand from Edinburgh University declared that the greater flexibility and lighter texture of brick gave Persian architects a head start over their Turkish counterparts, who mostly used stone, and whose minarets, in particular, he described as "too stumpy" to qualify as architectural masterpieces. The Turks struck back, however, when he produced a slide of the superb 13th-century minaret built by the Seljuk Sultan Alaeddin Keykubat I, which still soars with inimitable grace over the skyline of the Mediterranean city of Antalya.
Nothing, it seems, is cut and dried in the area of art history - not even St George, whose career as a dragon exterminator was explored by Dr Oya Pancaroglu in her paper, Representations of the Dragon-Battling Figure in Anatolia and the Jazira. Good old St George and his dragon turn up, not just on the walls of Armenian and Georgian churches, but in a great deal of Islamic iconography as well, thanks to the saint's association, in popular culture, with the ideas of rescue, belief and triumph; a rare enough instance of good ideas being transferred from one culture to another.
Armenian and Georgian churches themselves turned up again, meanwhile, in the series of sumptuous slides with which Dr Antony Eastmond from the University of Warwick - introduced as "the only British specialist in Georgian art" - illustrated his fascinating investigations into the recurrence of Seljuk motifs on Christian buildings. For what purpose, we may never know: decoration? Imitation? Humiliation? The truth of cultural interaction is infinitely complex, he concluded, citing the case of the coins discovered at Trebizond, which, though they look Byzantine, with traditional Byzantine heads-and-tails imagery, had clearly been reweighted to fit in with Seljuk currency exchange rates.
Cultural interaction can be of a rather cruder kind, as Dr Mark Humphries from NUI Maynooth pointed out in East Meets West: From Anatolia to Southern Italy. Dr Humphries noted a number of unpalatable encounters, including the theft of the bones of the Greek bishop of the Turkish town of Myra, aka St Nicholas, by a group of unscrupulous Italian merchants in 1087, and the defacement of an Italian mosaic of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child in a southern Italian church following a brief but bloody Turkish invasion in 1480.
It was left to Dr Barry Flood from CASVA in Washington, to argue the case for mutual tolerance. On paper, The `Altar' As Mihrab: Byzantine Antiquities from a Seljuk Mosque in Damascus might appear to be an impossibly specialised topic for a lay audience, but Dr Flood's lucidity in tracing the history of a collection of magnificent Byzantine tables, used and re-used in Mameluk and Seljuk buildings, was both impressive and persuasive. We don't know for sure what these tables were originally used for in Christian churches, let alone why they were incorporated into Islamic structures, but it's tempting to believe that, rather than being paraded as "we are the champions" politico-religious propaganda, they were quite simply valued in themselves, as beautiful, rare, precious objects. Or is that the journalist in me, looking for an answer?
From Rum to Rumi: Cross-Cultural En- counters in the Art of Medieval Anatolia was held at University College, Dublin