The Pierre Belon Association, hosted at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme (FMSH), was founded in 1993 by Hélène Antoniadis-Bibicou, Maurice Aymard, and André Guillou to promote and support research on the Balkan, Hellenic, and South-East European worlds. Since its creation, it has provided a space for scholarly dialogue and international cooperation, bringing together researchers from a range of disciplinary and geographical backgrounds around the study of South-East European societies and their many historical legacies.
The association takes its name from Pierre Belon du Mans (1517–1564), a Renaissance naturalist, physician, and traveller from France, whose travel accounts remain an essential source on the eastern Mediterranean and the Balkan region. Through his attentiveness to the landscapes, practices, languages, forms of knowledge, populations, and ways of life he encountered on his journeys, Pierre Belon embodies an open, comparative, and interdisciplinary approach that the association seeks to carry forward in its work and scientific orientations today.
The Pierre Belon Association pursues its activities around the study of the cultural, religious, social, legal, and political dynamics specific to South-East Europe, understood broadly to include the Balkans, the Hellenic world, Southern Italy, and the Romanian lands, as well as their zones of contact and interaction with the Mediterranean, Anatolian, and European worlds. It favours a long-term, diachronic approach attentive to the phenomena of continuity, transformation, transmission, and reappropriation that have characterised these spaces from the Byzantine period through to the modern and contemporary eras.
The association brings together researchers from a wide range of fields in the humanities and social sciences: history, anthropology, philology, sociology, religious studies, art history, archaeology, linguistics, law, literature, and political science. This disciplinary diversity makes it possible to cross-reference methods, fieldwork, historiographical traditions, and documentary corpora, encouraging comparative and cross-cutting approaches to South-East European societies.
The activities of the Pierre Belon Association are organised around several complementary strands: scientific publishing, building networks of researchers, developing international collaborations, and promoting research on the Balkans and the Hellenic world. It also helps foster scientific exchange by organising, hosting, or supporting academic gatherings, study days, conferences, and collective projects that bring together specialists from different countries and research traditions. The association publishes the annual journal Études Balkaniques – Cahiers Pierre Belon, a multidisciplinary journal devoted to South-East European societies and their historical, cultural, and social dynamics. Founded by André Guillou, the journal welcomes original work from across the humanities and social sciences and favours comparative approaches, contextualised analysis, and long-term studies.
Alongside the journal, the Pierre Belon Association also carries out editorial work devoted to publishing monographs, edited volumes, critical editions of sources, and scholarly translations. These publications cover Byzantine, post-Byzantine, and Ottoman history as well as contemporary Balkan and Hellenic societies, religious traditions, cultural phenomena, intellectual circulations, social practices, memorial constructions, and identity recompositions.
The association pays particular attention to phenomena of circulation — of texts, knowledge, norms, practices, and cultural models — as well as to interactions between neighbouring societies (whether geographically close or sharing cultural similarities) or, at times, antagonistic ones. It is equally interested in the imperial, confessional, and linguistic legacies that have shaped South-East European societies, without reducing them to single or fixed explanatory frameworks. In this perspective, Byzantine, Ottoman, Mediterranean, and European legacies are understood as historical and cultural elements that are constantly reinterpreted according to political, social, and intellectual contexts.
Through its scientific and editorial activities, the Pierre Belon Association aims to contribute to the renewal of studies on the Balkans and South-East Europe by fostering interdisciplinary exchange, international collaboration, and the dissemination of innovative research to a broad academic audience.
French remains the main language of the association's publications, but it is also open to contributions in English in order to strengthen the international circulation of research and dialogue between different scientific traditions.