Download PDF | Bouras, Charalambos - Byzantine Athens, 10th - 12th Centuries-Taylor & Francis Group (2018).
373 Pages
BYZANTINE ATHENS, 10TH—12TH CENTURIES
In this masterful synthesis, Charalambos Bouras draws together material and textual evidence for Athens in the Middle Byzantine period, from the mid-tenth century to 1204, when it was conquered by Crusaders. What emerges from his meticulous investigation is an urban fabric surprisingly makeshift in its domestic sector yet exuberantly creative in its ecclesiastical architecture. Rather than viewing the city as a mere shadow of its ancient past, Bouras demonstrates how Athens remained an important city of the Byzantine Empire as the seat of a metropolitan, home to local aristocracy, and pilgrimage destination for those who came to worship at the Christian Parthenon.
Byzantine Athens explores the relationship of the Byzantine infrastructure to earlier configurations, shedding light on the water supply, industrial facilities, streets and fortifications of medieval Athens, and exploring the evidence for the form and typology of Byzantine houses. Thanks to Bouras’s indefatigable study of all available archacological reports the first part of the book offers an overall picture of the Middle Byzantine city. The second part presents a fully documented and illustrated catalogue of nearly 40 churches, including synthetic treatments of their typology and morphology set in the wider Byzantine architectural context. Finally, Bouras joins his unrivalled knowledge of the surviving remains and exhaustive scrutiny of the relevant scholarship to offer a historical interpretation of the Athenian monuments. Byzantine Athens is a unique achievement that will remain an invaluable compendium of our knowledge of one of the most complex, yet relatively unknown, Byzan-tine cities.
Professor Charalambos Bouras (1933-2016) was a scholar of international recognition who taught History of Architecture in the Universities of Thessaloniki and Athens for 35 years. In addition to his ground breaking research as a specialist in Byzantine and PostByzantine architecture, he also made significant contributions to the understanding of ancient architecture. He was the President of the Committee for the Restoration of the Acropolis Monuments, and a member and vice-president of the Board of Trustees of the Benaki Museum, Athens. He passed away in July 2016 during the final preparation of this English edition of Byzantine Athens.
FOREWORD
Athens, one of the most celebrated cities of the ancient world, renowned for its unsurpassed cultural standards in art, architecture, writing, learning and philosophy, as well as for being the birthplace of democracy, retains its ancient reputation, despite periods of decline that have repeatedly threatened its survival, occasionally bringing it to the very brink. The history of Athens, through the two and a half millennia of its existence, oscillating from the peaks of glory to the depths of its declines, has left a checkered record of its past. Books on Athens are numerous, especially those dealing with antiquity, as well as those dealing with the modern era.
The history of the intervening centuries of Athens, especially between the eighth and the nineteenth centuries, is far more opaque. It has left fewer written records, while its shrunken urban fabric has preserved a far smaller number of buildings, physically miniscule compared to the grand monuments of antiquity and those of the modern era whose architecture was often inspired by the city’s glorified ancient heritage. Books on Athens associated with the Byzantine Empire, the Frankish rule, the occupation of the Catalans and under the Ottoman Empire, relatively speaking, are very few.
Outstanding among the books on Athens between pagan antiquity and the post-Byzantine era is the book by Charalambos Bouras, Byzantine Athens, 10th—1 2th Centuries, first published in Greek (Athens, 2010), whose updated English edition is presented here. Despite the paucity of historical accounts, with their frequently questionable assessments of the city they were describing, but making full use of the results of modern archaeology, Charalambos Bouras has reconstructed a remarkably vivid image of Athens, especially during the centuries of the Middle Byzantine Empire. Conceptually comparable to the book on Rome, the other great city of pagan antiquity, written by Richard Krautheimer, under the title Rome: Profile of a City, 312-1308 (Princeton, 1980), Athens emerges from its own ‘dark age’ era—as a shrunken and depressed medieval city is magisterially presented in a new light, which past critics had either failed to recognize, or intentionally denied that such bright moments in its history actually ever existed between the ‘peaks’ of its ‘ancient glory’ and its ‘pre-modern’ rebirth.
Bouras’s Athens, much like Krautheimer’s Rome, following a third-century crisis and Constantine the Great’s acceptance of Christianity as a new state religion in 313, was confronted with considerable pagan resistance in its midst. Additionally battered by ‘barbarian’ invasions from the third through the fourth century, Athens experienced gradual Christianization in the fifth and sixth centuries, but underwent its own ‘dark age’ decline during the eighth and ninth centuries. This was followed by three centuries of medieval recovery, from the mid-tenth century to the Frankish occupation in 1204, a period that effectively frames the essence of Bouras’s Byzantine Athens.
Confronted with a twentieth-century growth and explosion of archaeological excavations, albeit predominantly driven by desire to retrieve as much information as possible about the ancient city, their results increasingly in the course of time began to take notice of the intervening strata of the city during more than a millennium-long life as a peripheral town of the Byzantine Empire. Though numerous and carefully recorded, archaeological reports predominantly refrained from broader analyses and generally contributed very little to the comprehensive understanding of the Byzantine city. Pointing to the synthetic analysis of topography and architecture of medieval Athens by John Travlos in Chapter 8 of his book, Hodeodopixy ééhidig tév AOnvav (Athens 1960), Bouras singled out Travlos’s contribution as the first of its kind, outlining foundations for the understanding of previously unknown Middle Byzantine Athens.
Bouras’s book, published fifty years later, is a result of carefully gathered and researched material, primarily based on extensive archaeological excavations induced by a variety of factors affecting the growth of the modern city. Among these stand out excavations for the Metro construction, that yielded especially valuable insights into the history of the city from its origins to the present. Other invaluable archaeological information was produced by largescale excavations in areas, such as those within the ancient Agora, providing insights of special importance for the understanding of the city in antiquity, but also in areas where urban changes over time retained specific significant links to the main roads and streets over long periods of time. Important elements of continuity of urban fabric through centuries, in other respects, reveal discontinuities brought about by different patterns of urban life revealing the making of Middle Byzantine Athens.
In addition to the enduring matrix of the principal roads, features such as the city walls with strategically placed strong city gates defined aspects of the city in differing terms over time. Parts of the three lines of city walls have been partially preserved and recorded. The longest and the oldest of these — the so-called Themistoklean Wall — may have survived (in part at least) possibly until the Latin conquest of the city in 1204, but its practical use may have been minimal from it origins on account of its length that could not be effectively manned. Much shorter in length was the hastily constructed Late Roman, so-called ‘Post-Herulian wall’, built shortly after the devastating Herulian raid of A.D. 267, that fortified the area known as Plaka, on the north side below the Acropolis of Athens. Subsequently, it was extended by another stretch, along the southern flank below the Acropolis, known as Rizokastro.
The shortest, but by far the strongest, fortified section of the city walls enveloped the majestic Acropolis, rising atop a huge rocky formation that dominated the city in antiquity, as it still does today. The Acropolis is renowned predominantly on account of the Temple of Athena Parthenos, one of the most famous architectural monuments in the world, which was neither the sole reason for its origin, nor for its various other functions throughout its history. It goes without saying that the Parthenon shared the fate of the city of Athens throughout its history, as the eternal symbol of its glory and tragedy. From its origins tied to the city, the Acropolis, as was the case in many similar ancient cities, was intended to provide a secure shelter for the city inhabitants in times of crises. The Athenian Acropolis, on the other hand, being located in the very heart of the ancient settlement, was also the most important center of the city’s religious life, focused on the temple dedicated to its chief protectress — the goddess Athena Parthenos. Throughout its long history, the Acropolis witnessed scores of different responses in blending military, religious, and secular functions. Severely damaged at different moments of its history by fires, explosions, plundering and physical defacement, during the last century and a half the Acropolis has become a historical monument par excellence, undergoing a series of restoration undertakings whose conceptual aim has essentially been its return to its original state, substantially from the fifth century B.C.The very process of this general goal has yielded many mistakes in judgment, in technical matters and so forth, but, especially during the last decades of the twentieth century until the present, it has become one of the most impressive achievements in the history of architectural restoration that, in its own right, constitutes a major historical landmark.
At the helm of this project, from its beginning in 1975, stood the author of the present book, Charalambos Bouras, Professor Emeritus of the National Technical University of Athens, an architectural historian of major international distinction, whose knowledge and experience span fields from Ancient, Byzantine, Western Medieval, Renaissance, to the Modern. These are amply reflected in his teaching record at the university and in his published works that blend a profound understanding of disciplines, from history, archaeology, architecture, topography, urban planning and sculpture — above all through his books — Bolavtivé otavpod6/ia. pe vevpdoeic (Athens 1965), H dvaotijAwais tig otode tho Bpavpdvoc (Athens 1967), Néa Movij Xiov. Totopia kai opxitextovixy (Athens 1985), (with Laskarina Boura) Eddadixy vaodopia Kata tov 120 aidva (Athens 2002), and Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Architecture in Greece (Athens 2006). Undoubtedly, outstanding among his published books is Byzantine Athens, 10th—I 2th Centuries, his latest achievement, in which his knowledge of different fields of architectural history and his mastery of the related disciplines fully come to the fore in making medieval Athens accessible to its readers. Its superb English translation, by Elizabeth Key Fowden, brings the subject matter ever more closely to a broad audience deserving of this revelation of Athens’s hitherto unknown past. With it, a comprehensive general history of the great city of Athens, along with its ‘dark-age lacuna’, genuinely becomes a major new desideratum.
Slobodan Curéié
Princeton University, Professor Emeritus
INTRODUCTION
Previous research and scholarship
Very little remains of Middle Byzantine Athens compared to what has survived from the ancient city. We have, on the one hand, material remains amounting to a modest number of churches as well as the sad relics of buildings brought to light through excavation and, on the other hand, written sources which are unclear, few in number and have to be extracted from a variety of contemporary or later texts. Despite the fact that life continued in Athens over the course of millennia, we are not in a position to recapture an important period in the city’s history as a living organism!' on account of centuries of serious decline or radical changes, but also because we lack archival sources, the result of the political and administrative discontinuity the country has undergone since 1204.
Inevitably, comparison of medieval Athens with the glorious city of antiquity has always been, and continues to be, diminishing to the former. However, comparison with other provincial Middle Byzantine cities in the empire shows Athens to have been an important center with a literally impregnable fortress, relatively large population, metropolitan see, pan-Hellenic pilgrimage site and prestige that did not go unappreciated by educated people of that day. The state of our knowledge and understanding today make it possible for us to appreciate the existence over time of landscapes and ancient monuments, both around and inside the medieval city, that were preserved in a much better condition in the Middle Byzantine period than today. Furthermore, the great transformation and destruction of what Byzantine monuments had survived, as well as the natural environment, took place after the Greek War of Independence and the creation of the new Greek state — in other words, in a recent and quite well-known period.
Studies of Christian Athens, especially those focused on the urban plan and monuments of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries, are numerous. These studies have largely taken the form of articles; they are usually incomplete, some are not up to date, and quite commonly they fail to engage with other studies. Few are synthetic in nature, and those that are concern themselves more with the city’s history and less with its topography and architecture.
The information provided by the written sources is either limited or very well known, and has been used in previous studies. By contrast, the archaeological evidence, even though it is constantly growing, has not been adequately exploited by scholars. Moreover, studies using this evidence are primarily descriptive and do not address architectural issues.
The most important synthetic work on the topography and architecture of medieval Athens is still a chapter in a book published by John Travlos in 1960 about the development of the Athenian urban plan.* While more recent studies’ on the same subject may be well-informed, they tend to be overviews in article form that make minimal and only selective use of newer, more specialized publications. Only a very few Athenian churches have been satisfactorily published. The architecture of most of these has become known through the Index ofthe Medieval Monuments of Greece (Evpetipiov tov Meoarwvindév Mvyuetov th Eddddoc)* (1929, 1933). The significant progress represented by the publications of the American School is focused on Athenian monuments from antiquity and only a few from the medieval period. The same has been true of the hundreds of so-called ‘rescue’ excavations that have been carried out in the city from 1960 onwards and published in the Chronika of the Archaiologikon Deltion. Unfortunately, these publications typically present only general information and do not offer architectural interpretations of the finds.” Much new information has come to light thanks to the publication of catalogues of permanent museum collections and temporary exhibitions, or albums with photographs from archives found primarily outside Greece.
The state of research and publication led me to conclude that a new study of the medieval city of Athens would be an original and at the same time useful contribution. What is needed is a synthetic work that assembles not only the unexploited primary material, but also older evidence reconsidered and evaluated on the basis of more recent findings with an eye to Byzantine architecture and urban planning. Furthermore, this new study should draw the necessary correlations and attempt a historical interpretation of the monuments using both older and more recent historical studies.
The chronological boundaries of the present study embrace the three centuries of medieval Byzantine prosperity from approximately the mid-tenth century to the Frankish occupation in 1204. In the case of certain monuments, reference will be made to earlier building phases, primarily after iconoclasm. The outermost topographical boundaries have been extended somewhat in order to include comment on three important monasteries, of Kaisariani, Hagios Georgios known as the Omorfi Ekklesia at Galatsi, and the Monastery of Hagios Ioannes Kynegos of the Philosophers on Mt Hymettus.
The written sources
The written sources for medieval Athens, as for other contemporary cities in Greece, are very few. The information they contain regarding the city’s topography and architecture is even more exiguous and, in the main, indirect. Consequently, the written sources contribute more towards our understanding of the city’s ecclesiastical, economic and social history and only indirectly its built environment. Some sources dating from the Frankish period after 1204, and even some from the Ottoman period, are of interest when they refer to past affairs.
Inscriptions and graffiti that have survived to our day contain useful information, mainly about the dating of certain monuments and their founders. They also preserve information about the city’s history that may be of indirect use. Without exception they have all been transcribed and commented upon in earlier publications. Coins and associated portable finds are useful for the dating of buildings discovered through excavation, although investigation of these objects does not fall within the scope of the present study.
Discussion of the above evidence can be found at the relevant places in this study, both in the course of my investigation of particular monuments and in my historical commentary on and interpretation of the built environment of that time. Here, as a start, I present what can be understood as a synthetic catalogue of these monuments and their environs.
The richest source of information for medieval Athens is to be found in the writings of Metropolitan Michael Choniates® that include orations, letters, treatises, addresses and verse. These have been repeatedly published’ and commented upon and have provided the basic documentation for all modern studies* of the condition of Athens, as well as southern Greece, at the end of the twelfth century. Choniates’s generalizations, his negative view of provincial life and his endless complaints give a quite different impression from the picture of economic prosperity in Greece’ that can be derived from other sources in the period just before the arrival of the Franks. This situation raises doubts over Choniates’s credibility. The History written by his brother Niketas also provides some information about the city’s fate in the same period.
A fragment of a Praktikon'®
recording properties in the Athens area, and preserved by chance, contains very interesting data about the topography of Attica before 1204, including toponyms, physical boundaries, names of residents, economic data and other information indirectly related to the city. Several names of Athenians are attested in another similar document, the Ktematologion (land register) of Thebes.'' Information about monuments still preserved in the Middle Byzantine period can also be discovered in sources from the Late Antiquity.'* For example, a codex from the Monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai that was published by Papadopoulos-Kerameus'’ contains addresses and letters referring to the known hierarchs in Athens and, indirectly, to the Christian Parthenon. The Life of Hosios Loukas'* also contains indirect information about Athens and mainland Greece more generally in the tenth century. We find scattered information about Athens during the three subsequent centuries in Skylitzes’s Chronicle”” and in the letters of loannes Apokaukos.'® Venetian sources,'’ as well as an acta of Pope Innocent III,'* preserve occasional information about subjects relating to Athens immediately after 1204. Sources concerned with the metropolis of Athens, its metropolitans and other church officials in the Middle Byzantine period have also been published and commented upon.'’ These sources will be discussed below as part of the investigation of the condition of the Church in Athens.
The Middle Byzantine inscriptions preserved in Athens are either incorporated into particular architectural monuments (Hagioi Theodoroi, Hagios Nikolaos Rangavas, Hagia Aikaterine, Hagios Ioannes Mangoutes, the katholikon of the monastery of the Hagios Ioannes Kynegos of the Philosophers), or they are isolated inscriptions derived from monuments that were destroyed (the church of the Hagioi Anargyroi, Sts Kosmas and Damianos) in Halandri and tou Stavrou (of the Cross) at Aigaleo, the tower of Metropolitan Leo, an architrave from the Acropolis, or even funerary monuments that refer to a no longer extant monastery (of the Megale Panagia and the Hagia Triada). The graffiti come from buildings that are still standing and are often difficult to read and transcribe, but have proven to be of critical importance for the dating of certain buildings or historic events (the Parthenon, Propylaia, Hephaisteion, Soteira Lykodemou, Hagios Asomatos sta Skalia).
In later texts, especially the accounts of travelers starting with al-Idrisi” in the twelfth century, there is scattered information about the city of Athens and its monuments that later increases in volume as Europeans become interested in classical antiquity. References to Byzantine monuments are rare, but what interests us is information these sources provide about the state of preservation of ancient buildings that are lost today but were certainly still standing in the medieval period. In various Byzantine texts we find indirect reference to the cult of the Theotokos and pilgrimage to the Parthenon, transformed into a church dedicated to her and to which we have devoted a special section.
The physical environment of Athens
It is not necessary to describe the physical environment of medieval Athens, since very little had changed from ancient times until the 1840s when the inhabitants began to open new roads, erect large buildings in the city and scar the surrounding hillsides with quarries.
The Acropolis, the Areopagus, Mt Lykabettos, Mt Ardettos, the Agrai (the rising ground across the Ilissos River), and the hills of the Muses (Philopappos), the Nymphs (the Observatory) and the Kolonos Agoraios (the so-called Theseion) formed the city’s immediate natural surroundings. The eastern boundary was the small valley through which the Ilissos flowed until it met the Kifissos a considerable distance downstream and to the southwest. It is unknown whether these two rivers had water year round in the medieval period. A tributary to the Ilissos was the Kallirrhoe spring’! near the Temple of Olympian Zeus (the Olympiecion), while in the vicinity of the ancient Lyceum arose the Eridanos”’ or, rather, in it converged waters arising from the foothills of Mt Lykabettos.”* Already from antiquity, the section of the Eridanos located at the northern edge of the Athenian Agora was artificially covered and certainly continued to function” in the Middle Byzantine period. It passed through the small valley of the Kerameikos, along the ruins(?) of the Sacred Gate” and debouched into the Ilissos to the southwest of the city.
In the limestone rock of the western hills, the Areopagus and the Acropolis, there were caves. In some of these there were also springs (such as in the Klepsydra cave on the north slope, or the Asklepieion cave), while in others chapels had been built (such as that dedicated to Hagios Ioannes Chrysostomos in the cave of Pan and to Hagia Marina on the hill of the Nymphs). Although the Praktikon refers to many cultivated fields within the walls and even a ‘forest’ near the Kerameikos gate, we should probably envision the natural setting of the medieval city as quite bare, not unlike it was depicted by Stademann” after the Greek War of Independence.
Michael Choniates, who knew the ancient Greek sources, did not expect the uneducated Athenians of his day to preserve ancient names.” He himself, however, recognized besides the Acropolis, the names of Piraeus,” ‘honey-colored’ Hymettos,” Areios Pagos,” Kallirrhoe,*'
Lykeion” and other ‘immovable works of nature’ .*’
We possess no information about the routes of access into Middle Byzantine Athens. Clearly the roads from the Peloponnese and the area around Thebes ended up in the vicinity of Eleusis, whence travelers entered the Athens basin along the Sacred Way, which traversed the valley north of Mt Aigaleo where the Daphni monastery was located.** However, the main lines of communication were by sea, for the transport of both goods and people. The Praktikon mentions the ‘yopiov (village or site) Piraeus’, but nothing about the large natural harbor that was apparently not considered worthy of mention among the period’s centers of production.” Michael Choniates assures us that the wider region ‘. . . did not lack good bays, on both sides of the Peloponnesian Isthmus and of the Euripus. . ..*° Indeed, from the Life of Hosios Loukas we learn that journeys to and from Italy were made via the Gulf of Corinth and through the isthmus in the direction of the Aegean” and Piraeus, where an official called an ‘Athenarchos’ inspected those traveling to the capital.** It must be remembered that the small craft of those days did not venture far from the shore” so that those coming from Constantinople and Thessalonica would pass through the Euripos strait and coast along the eastern shores of Attica in order to reach Corinth or Monemvyasia.*” Choniates himself describes his travels by sea to Chalcis, Eretria, Aulis and Kea.”
General overview of the urban plan of medieval Athens
At the risk of seeming to get the cart before the horse, it is necessary to set out a general overview of the form and nature of the medieval city even before the primary evidence is considered. As we stated earlier in the introduction, a well-rounded understanding of our subject is hindered by the serious gaps in our knowledge with regard to the demographic conditions as well as the structure of provincial society and many of the important institutions in our period. Consequently, the role of the archaeological record is that much greater, despite the various reasons” for caution*’ that are valid for Athens as elsewhere.
In our overall picture of Athens in the Middle Byzantine period, as in the later years of foreign rule, the Acropolis fortress dominated the city. The part of the city that was fortified in Late Antiquity was extended slightly to the north and south, and in this new zone, across a relatively extensive area, the new Middle Byzantine residential neighborhoods spread out, but always within confines of the ancient city. Monasteries and isolated churches were built in this general area where the outer Roman fortification circuit seems to have served more as a boundary marker than a defensive wall.
The factors influencing urban development in medieval Athens, which will be examined indirectly“ in what follows, can be briefly described as:
The geomorphology, physical environment and natural resources.
The existing remains of the ancient and Late Antique city.
The economy, relation to the hinterland and secondary production and, finally, the urban plan.
On the basis of the archaeological finds, we can be certain that Athens underwent significant change during the period under investigation, with the spread of settlement into areas that had remained uninhabited from the seventh to approximately the second half of the tenth century. The city expanded beyond the Post-Herulian wall in all directions. There is no evidence that the expansion was based on a merging with a preexistent secondary residential core, or that there were certain limits inside the Valerianic wall. The density of the urban tissue in these new neighborhoods, especially in the Agora, is not what we would expect. It is clear not only that Athens lost its monumental character as a result of the Herulian invasion, but also that the urban landscape which developed in the course of the city’s last period of prosperity in the fifth and sixth centuries proved transitory.** The archaeological remains also bear witness to the fact that, in the period under review, the city came to resemble many densely built residential units interspersed with open spaces (such as the Tzykanisterion, or polo field) and cultivated tracts,** despite not having walls to limit them. The survival from antiquity of many roads created as the result of an earlier period of dynamic growth also lent the medieval urban fabric an irregular plan. Finally, the same archacological finds show that the houses were small in size and cheaply constructed (recycling building materials and putting to new use ancient walls, pavements, wells etc.). The constructions remind us of what Theodoros II Laskaris would say a little later about Pergamon, another ancient city that had seen better days.*”
Within the urban landscape of Athens during the period under discussion, the main point of reference was, of course, the looming presence of the Parthenon and its importance as a church. But we do not know the exact character of the citadel’s circuit wall, with its tower (or towers) and its supplementary fortifications, mainly at its western end. The churches, and especially their domes, were visible from afar on account of the small dimensions of the surrounding houses and the rise of the land. They did not occupy critical positions in the city such as hilltops or other natural elevations, but were woven into the urban fabric and, in the case of monasteries, surrounded by enclosure walls. It is not known how the Post-Herulian wall was incorporated into the urban fabric at this time or how much of its original height was preserved.
The difficulty of investigating the part of the city enclosed by the Post-Herulian wall and the fact that some areas were left undeveloped because of the sharp incline of the terrain,** combined with the scattered character of the built-up areas outside the walls, have all obstructed attempts to calculate the inhabited surface area. But even if we knew the total area, it would in no way enable us to calculate the number of inhabitants, as has often been noted.”
Our ignorance of the number of inhabitants in medieval Athens is indeed the great gap in our knowledge. It remains unknown why in the eleventh and twelfth centuries there was a great expansion of housing and, at the end of the same period, a gradual abandonment of the city, as witnessed by Michael Choniates.*” Neither do we know whether the few Athenian aristocratic families, and in general the ruling class, who here as elsewhere in Byzantium preferred city life, were confined to particular neighborhoods.”' It is nearly certain that there was no Jewish quarter, since there is no evidence for the existence of Jews in Athens,” which was not, in any case, among the places visited by Benjamin of Tudela.** Neither can the presence of foreign merchants be verified” despite the fact that Athens was among the cities where Venice enjoyed trading privileges.
It is unclear when Athens was capital of the theme and seat of the strategos of Hellas.” It certainly was not at the end of the twelfth century.” In any case, there is no evidence in Athens for buildings related to a strategos such as a praetorium, prison, customs office or other administrative buildings. It is very likely that transfer of the administrative center from the city to the Acropolis had already been made in the Dark Ages, while the buildings related to the self-government of city-states had long since ceased to exist. The establishment of officials on the Acropolis can be confirmed at the end of our period by the residence of the metropolitan in the Propylaia®’ once they had relegated to him many administrative responsibilities, as we shall see below.
From neither the written sources nor the archaeological remains does it emerge that Athens had a ‘Mesi’, in other words, a central street lined on both sides with venues for a range of commercial activities, and off which one gained access to some important place of worship, as in Thessalonica”* or Serres.”” Such a street might have been the one that crossed the Library of Hadrian from west to east, alongside the Megale Panagia, but this is simply conjecture. Moreover, we do not know whether a processional way (opsikion) had been established in connection with the pilgrimage to the Virgin in the Parthenon. It is possible that such a road coincided with the last section of the Panathenaic Way before it reached the Acropolis and that had remained in use from antiquity. Rows of shops or workshops have been found in other parts of the medieval city.
In any case, the absence of urban planning is confirmed not only by the cramped and disorderly state of construction, but also by the coexistence of residential buildings with polluting industrial establishments, as well as burials, despite the general ordinances that had long since been laid down. But, generally speaking, the absence of planning was widespread among provincial cities in the Middle and Late Byzantine periods.® In the older correct topographic drawing of the city by Fauvel,°' one cannot discern even the outline of the Post-Herulian wall in the fabric of the late eighteenth-century city. It is well known that Ottoman ideas about the economic activities of cities, as well as the important demographic upward turn experienced in Athens during the first centuries of Ottoman rule, triggered great changes in the general shape of the city.
The belief that parish churches were the nuclei of neighborhoods cannot be verified in the case of Athens, given that we do not know, on the one hand, which churches were katholika of monasteries®* and, on the other, what was the function of the small chapels woven into the dense residential tissue and of which paltry remains have been discovered through excavation. More shall be said about this topic below.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق