The paper discusses an exhibition currently hosted by the Royal Academy of Arts and devoted to over one thousand years of Byzantine art, featuring the most important and wide-reaching collection of artifacts from the Byzantine period displayed in Britain over the last fifty years. The exhibition is revealing not merely because of the objects on display but also because of what it says in connection to our contemporary understanding of Europe itself. The study suggests that the exhibition is indicative of a shift in the images of East and West. This is not to say that we are witnessing an end to the intra-European divide between East and West, but rather that the current geopolitical context has accentuated the notion of a division between Europe and Islam. Thus, the public are inadvertently presented with the false yet dominant idea that Islam represented and still represents the end or at the very least a caesura of European culture. A deeper insight into history, however, reveals a very different picture, as the persistence and legacy of Byzantine art and religious life were more or less guaranteed under Ottoman rule. great britain [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]