The tzykanisterion () was a stadium for playing the tzykanion (, the Greek name for Chovgan, from Middle Persian čaukān, čōkān), a kind of polo adopted by the Byzantines from Sassanid Persia.
The tzykanisterion () was a stadium for playing the tzykanion (, the Greek name for Chovgan, from Middle Persian čaukān, čōkān), a kind of polo adopted by the Byzantines from Sassanid Persia.
==History== According to John Kinnamos (263.17–264.11), the tzykanion was played by two teams on horseback, equipped with long sticks topped by nets, with which they tried to push an apple-sized leather ball into the opposite team's goal. The sport was very popular among the Byzantine nobility: Emperor Basil I (r. 867–886) excelled at it; his son, Emperor Alexander (r. 912–913), died from exhaustion while playing, Emperor Alexios I Komnenos (r. 1081–1118) was injured while playing with Tatikios, and John I of Trebizond (r. 1235–1238) died from an injury during a game.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).