The founders of Ceraneum were the employees of two academic units of the University of Łódź: the Department of Byzantine History and the Unit of Paleo-Slavic Studies and Folk Culture. The cooperation started in 2008 and was originally connected with organizing a series of open lectures on Byzantine and Paleo-Slavic studies and similar disciplines. So far, several of such lectures have been arranged. The noticeable interest they aroused (not only among the teaching staff, but also the students and doctoral students), as well as the integra-tion of the Łódź communities of specialists in history and Paleo-Slavic studies that they brought about finally led to the decision to form an extradepartmental research unit.
The research at Ceraneum focuses on the broadly defined history, religion and culture of the Mediterranean Basin, especially the area of the Byzantine Empire and Slavia Orthodoxa. The scope of the unit’s research interests was extended so as to include other disciplines from among the humanities and the social sciences. Accordingly, the application to found the extradepartmental Centre was filed to the Senate of the University of Łódź by the deans of as many as four faculties: the Faculty of Philosophy and History, the Faculty of Philology, the Faculty of International and Political Studies and the Faculty of Law and Administration.
The basic tenet of the founders of Ceraneum is the multidisciplinary character of scientific inquiries, linking diverse fields of research and encompassing miscellaneous methodological principles. Thanks to this, we hope to arrive at a higher perspective of the history of the aforementioned geographic/cultural region, as well as to provide scholars working on different aspects of history and culture with an opportunity of a direct exchange of ideas.

Publications on the activities of the Ceraneum Centre: