Download PDF | Veronica della Dora, Charalambos Dendrinos, Marc Guscin, and David John Williams - Sacred Mobilities in Byzantium and Beyond_ People, Objects and Relics-Brill (2024).
376 Pages
Preface
This interdisciplinary collection of essays explores the nexus between mobility and the sacred in Byzantium and in the centuries after its fall. Over the past two decades, the construction, experience and use of sacred space have generated growing interest in the humanities, including Byzantine studies. Recent scholarship on the subject has intersected with issues of sound, embodiment and performance, with environmental perceptions, and with power, identity and territorial imaginations, among other things. At the same time, the Mobility Turn has increasingly extended from the domain of the social sciences to the humanities, prompting new questions, approaches and understandings of issues related to transport, movement, and circulation of people, objects and ideas.
Bringing together experts from different disciplines including history, art history, literature, geography, architecture and theology, this volume aims to set these two streams in dialogue to further our understanding of Byzantine and post-Byzantine spiritual culture and society. Most of the chapters in the volume are based on presentations at the International Virtual Colloquium ‘Sacred Mobilities in Byzantium and Beyond: People, Objects and Relics,’ organized by the co-editors under the aegis of the Institute of Classical Studies (ICS) of the University of London’s School of Advanced Studies on 1–2 June 2021.
The event was co-sponsored by the Hellenic Institute and Centre for the GeoHumanities of Royal Holloway, University of London. We would like to express our warm thanks to Greg Woolf, then director of ICS, for his support, to Valerie James, Manager of ICS, for her administrative and technical assistance, and to all participants in the event, both younger and seasoned scholars, for their excellent input and the stimulating discussions that prompted the birth of this volume.
Our grateful thanks to Jack Dooley for compiling the index. Our deepest thanks also to Marcella Mulder and to the Brill Medieval Mediterranean Series Editorial Board for their support and excellent editorial guidance, and to two anonymous readers for their valuable feedback and suggestions. The present volume is dedicated to the loving memory of Julian Chrysostomides (1928–2008) and Denis E. Cosgrove (1948–2008), pioneers, teachers, and sources of endless inspiration.
Notes on Contributors Veronica della Dora is Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research spans cultural geography, the history of cartography and Byzantine studies. Her books include The Mantle of the Earth: Genealogies of a Geographical Metaphor (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Landscape, Nature and the Sacred in Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Imagining Mount Athos: Visions of a Holy Place from Homer to World War II (University of Virginia Press, 2011).
Charalambos Dendrinos is Senior Lecturer in Byzantine Literature and Greek Palaeography. His research interests cover holiness and the sacred in different religions and traditions, and editions of unpublished texts by Byzantine authors. He has recently coedited with Ilias Giarenis the volume Bibliophilos. Books and Learning in the Byzantine World: Festschrift in Honour of Costas N. Constantinides (Byzantinisches Archiv 39) (de Gruyter, 2021) and edited the volume Imperatoris Manuelis Palaeologi Opera theologica (Corpus Christianorum, Series Graeca 71) (Brepols, 2022).
Ekaterine Gedevanishvili is a Senior Researcher at the Giorgi Chubinashvili National Research Centre for Georgian Art History and Heritage Preservation. Her research interests and publications cover the medieval art of the Christian East, and specifically the cult and image of holy warriors, and the correlation between text and image. At present, she runs a multidisciplinary project that will result in a monograph on the cult of the Holy Warriors in Georgia.
Molly Greene is Professor of History and Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. Her books include The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, 1453 to 1768: The Ottoman Empire (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Early Modern Mediterranean (Princeton University Press, 2010) and A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Princeton University Press, 2000).
Mark Guscin is a Research Associate of the Hellenic Institute of Royal Holloway, University of London and a freelance writer. His research interests focus on the Face in Christian art and hagiography, Byzantine history and iconography. He is the author of The Tradition of the Image of Edessa (Cambridge Scholars, 2016), The Image of Edessa (Brill, 2009) and The History of the Sudarium of Oviedo (Edwin Mellen Academic Press, 2004).
Revd Antonios (Christos) Kakalis is Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Newcastle. His recent books include Place Experience of the Sacred: Silence and Pilgrimage Topography of Mount Athos (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024) and Architecture and Silence (Routledge, 2020), and as a co-editor, Mountains and Megastructures: Neo-Geologic Landscapes of Human Endeavour (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), The Place of Silence: Architecture / Media / Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Mountains, Movements, Mobilities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
Chrysovalantis Kyriacou is Lecturer in Ecclesiastical History at the Theological School of the Church of Cyprus and a Research Associate of the Hellenic Institute of Royal Holloway, University of London. His research interests and publications span Byzantine and post-Byzantine history and culture in the Eastern Mediterranean, and particularly Cyprus under Latin rule. He is the author of Orthodox Cyprus under the Latins, 1191–1571: Society, Spirituality, and Identities (Lexington Books, 2018).
Maria Litina is a Researcher of the National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation and the Centre for History and Paleography, Athens. Her research interests and publications focus on Balkan history and historiography (19th–20th centuries), Greek-Bulgarian relations, and the presence of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem in the Balkans.
Revd Andrew Louth is Professor Emeritus of Patristic and Byzantine Studies, University of Durham, Honorary Fellow of the St Irenaeus Orthodox Theological Institute, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Fellow of the British Academy, and Archpriest of the Diocese of Sourozh. His publications include Denys the Areopagite (1989), Maximus the Confessor (1996), and St John Damascene (2002), and, more recently: Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology (2013) and Modern Orthodox Thinkers (2015).
Mihail Mitrea is a Researcher in Byzantine philology at the Institute for South-East European Studies of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest, and a Lecturer in Byzantine studies at the Faculty of Orthodox Theology of the Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca. His research interests and publications span late Byzantine literature, hagiography, epistolography, theology, Greek palaeography, manuscript studies and textual criticism. He has recently edited the volume Holiness on the Move: Mobility and Space in Byzantine Hagiography (Routledge, 2023).
Bissera Pentcheva is Professor of Medieval Art at Stanford University. Her work is informed by anthropology, music, and phenomenology focusing on the changing appearance of objects and architectural spaces. She is the author of Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium (2010), The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium (2010), and Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space, and Spirit in Byzantium (2017) (all published by Penn State University Press)
Rehav Rubin is Professor of Geography at Hebrew University, Jerusalem. His research interests and publications lie in historical geography and the history of cartography and mapping, mainly the Holy Land. His books include Stories Told by the Mountains: Cultural Landscape through Time (Resling, 2018), Portraying the Land: Hebrew Maps of the Land of Israel from Rashi to the Early 20th Century (de Gruyter, 2018) and Image and Reality: Jerusalem in Maps and Views(Magnes Press, 1999).
Revd David John Williams is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research interests focus on Byzantine spirituality, sacred materialities, cross religious dialogue, shared sacred spaces and syncretism.
Introducing
Sacred Mobilities Veronica della Dora According to a local Athonite tradition, under the rule of the last iconoclast emperor Theophilos (829–842), after a night of intense prayer and with the help of her son, a pious widow from Nicaea cast her much-treasured icon of the Mother of God into the sea to save it from destruction. Rather than sinking into the abyss or floating on the surface, the icon stood upright on the water and started to travel. Many years later, it reached the bay of St Clement’s Monastery (the future Ivēron) on Mount Athos in a pillar of fire rising all the way up to heaven. Stunned by the wondrous sight, the monks tried to approach it, but in vain. No matter how close they got, the icon kept retreating out to sea. After the Mother of God gave a sign to the abbot of the Monastery, a humble hermit called Gabriel managed to draw near to the icon and take it ashore.
Full of joy, the monks carried the miraculous image to the main church of the Monastery in a procession. When they entered the church the following day, however, the icon had disappeared. After searching, they discovered it hanging on the gate of the Monastery. This occurrence was repeated three times, until Gabriel reported that in a vision the Mother of God revealed to him that she did not want her icon to be guarded by the monks, but to be their Protectress. The icon was thus permanently installed at the gate of the Monastery and became its palladium. For this reason, it was called Portaitissa, or Gatekeeper.
The story is visually summarized in a rare ‘cartographic icon’ dated to the mid-eighteenth century and treasured in the Monastery of Ivēron (Fig. 1.1).2 As explained in the inscription, the icon represents the miracle of the Portaitissa and the broader geographical settings in which it took place.3 More intriguingly, it presents us with a little window onto a world in motion. The choppy waters of the Aegean are traversed by currents and criss-crossed by a multitude of vessels.
On the mainland, imperial soldiers ride their horses out of Constantinople (in the lower part of the icon) accompanied by a little dog. Further up in the composition, they march into the coastal town of Nicomedia, while the pious widow and her son rush to cast the icon into the sea.4 Opposite, across the Aegean, Gabriel receives the miraculous image on the Holy Mountain, where its long journey ends. The cartographic icon is a good place to introduce sacred mobilities, the subject of this volume. A post-Byzantine representation of a Byzantine miracle story, the icon presents us with the worldview of its maker (presumably an Athonite monk), as well as with a specific experience of travel.
The ‘map’ is unusually oriented with south at the top, in such a way as to reproduce the author’s view from Mount Athos. Constantinople, Nicomedia and Athos are portrayed on a larger scale, due to their prominence in the story and in the geographical imagination of the author. Other locations are arranged and named around the coast, so as to replicate the experience of cabotage, the customary mode of sea travel in the Mediterranean until the invention of steam.5 We are thus compelled to follow the miraculous voyage of the Portaitissa, as our eye is taken on a circular anti-clockwise periplus from Constantinople to Athos by way of Nicomedia and the southern Aegean (occupied by a large ‘icon within the icon’).6 The movement of our gaze is stimulated by the combination of different scales and different perspectives: the cartographic view of the region and its myriad of islands, the bird’s-eye view of the main cities, and the view from sea level conveyed by the curved marine horizon serving as the boundary for the upper part of the composition – and for our visual journey. Perhaps even more striking is the variety of human and non-human mobilities enshrouded in the icon itself: the macro-mobilities of trade and imperial military networks conjured up by the vessels and soldiers; the pious micro-mobilities of the widow, her son, and monk Gabriel; and, above all, the miraculous mobilities of the icon itself.
To these mobilities we can add others that are not captured in the space of the icon: for example, the symbolic mobility of the pillar of fire migrating from the Old Testament (Exodus 13:17) to an Athonite story; the ritual mobility of the monks’ procession welcoming the icon; the transmission of a pious oral tradition and its translation into a written account and eventually into a visual representation; the diffusion of the cult of the Portaitissa resulting in the transformation of the icon into a focus of pilgrimage and in the multiplication of its replicas across the Balkans and beyond.7 Miraculous travel, pilgrimage, procession, transmission, translation, diffusion, as well as the visual journey of the beholder to and through the microspace of the icon, are only some of the many kinds of Orthodox Christian sacred mobilities that we encounter in Byzantium and in the centuries after its Fall. Commonly taken as the ‘ability to move freely or be easily moved,’ mobility is no monolithic concept.8 It can apply to space as well as time, or even social status. Most importantly, it comes in different shapes. The English words ‘journey’ and ‘voyage,’ for example, imply a linear movement across space and time, the former word coming from the Latin diurnus (the distance walked in a day), and the latter from via, or ‘way’ (like its Greek homologue hodoiporia).
Both words usually apply to people. ‘Circulation’ (from the Latin verb circulare, ‘to form a circle,’ or ‘small ring’) and kyklophoria, by contrast, indicate a circular movement and are generally used for objects, texts and ideas. ‘Diffusion’ (< Lat. diffundere, ‘to scatter,’ or ‘pour out’), ‘propagation’ (< Lat. propagare, ‘to extend,’ ‘spread,’ or ‘increase’), and their Greek correspondents diachysē and diadosē, on the other hand, express the action of spreading in different directions and apply to ideas and texts as much as to diseases. Other kinds of mobility terms apply specifically to religious contexts and bear particular inflections in different languages and traditions. For example, the Greek word proskynēma translates as pilgrimage, but it literally indicates the act of bowing down, prostrating in veneration before an icon or a relic, rather than the journey to the shrine. Anakomidē, the translation of relics, implies a vertical movement of return from earth to heaven, as well as the horizontal movement between two different locations. Litaneia, the word for procession, is rooted in the verb lissomai (to supplicate) and thus enshrouds the meaning of a petition, rather than physical movement like its Latin counterpart (which derives from the verb procedere, to move forward).
All these words place emphasis on the sacra and on ritual performance, rather than on sheer movement across space.10 How are the mobilities of sacra, or linked to sacra, different from other types of mobilities? And how are Byzantine and post-Byzantine sacred mobilities distinctive? Can they be disentangled from other mobilities and secular infrastructures? How do they contribute to the making of sacred places? More generally, what does a mobilities-focused approach bring to our understanding of Byzantine and post-Byzantine spiritual culture and society? Sacred Mobilities in Byzantium and Beyond attempts to address these questions. This introductory chapter frames the volume within contemporary debates on mobility humanities and on Byzantine spatialities. More specifically, it frames the volume’s essays in terms of different kinds of ‘sacred mobilities.’ The following three sections consider how the emerging field of mobilities studies and renewed interest in sacred space have informed recent debates and scholarship in Byzantine and post-Byzantine studies, and how these two streams can converge in productive ways. The last part of the introduction outlines the structure of the volume and provides an overview of subsequent chapters in which different types of sacred mobilities are explored in further depth by way of individual case studies.
Mobilities in Byzantium
The last two decades have seen a growing appreciation of Byzantium as mobile, dynamic and globalized, as opposed to traditional stereotypes portraying it as a static, fossilized culture encumbered by its own tradition.11 Issues of mobility in Byzantium, especially commercial systems, have captured scholarly interest for nearly a century, and unsurprisingly so.12 Among Europe’s medieval civilizations, Byzantium is probably the one that poses the question of travel and communications most pressingly, as for over a thousand years it succeeded at integrating lands and peoples that today encompass around a dozen independent states.13 Two decades ago, Michael McCormick thus noted the potential of a (then emerging) alliance between historians, literary scholars and archaeologists to reconstruct Byzantine exchange networks and mobility patterns by combining textual sources (including hagiographic accounts) with material findings (for example, coins, pottery and wood). He also noted a growing interest in other aspects of Byzantine mobility, such as the psychology of travel of the Byzantine elite and the use of travel metaphors in literature, for example.14 Many other studies have followed since, especially in the last few years.
This renewed interest in Byzantine mobilities parallels the emergence and establishment of mobilities studies as a burgeoning cross-disciplinary field – and in many ways, it bears its distinctive imprint. A mobility ‘turn’ started to take place in the social sciences in the 1990s in response to pressing contemporary issues such as migration, intensified global travel and digital communications, together with a growing appreciation of the significance of movement for individuals and societies, especially at times of increased levels of mobility.
The turn triggered new ways of theorizing global and transnational mobilities, with a specific focus on how these intersect with issues of power, identity-making and the micro-geographies of everyday life.15 In the humanities, the ‘mobility turn’ has generated new questions and approaches that place special emphasis on cultural, symbolic and experiential aspects of mobility, as opposed to the sheer movement (or patterns of movement) of people and goods. More generally, there has been an increased acknowledgement that movement and mobilities, like space and time, are ‘embodied, sensed and apprehended qualities.’16 As such, special attention has been redirected to their affective and performative dimensions, as well as to the connection between mobility and the human imagination.17
There has been, in other words, a growing recognition that mobility is much more than physical motion: it is enmeshed in power, norms, meanings and pre-existing imaginaries. It implies ‘social, material, temporal and symbolic components that make movement possible.’18 The ‘mobility turn’ in the humanities has also led scholars to pay attention to different typologies of mobilities and the diverse materialities and immaterialities these entail. Examples include the transmission, circulation and reception of ideas, images, texts and knowledge; the ways in which human and non-human actors become parts of translocal networks and linkages; how individuals, households, and other categories of people move across social layers and communities, and how this movement impacts, or even shapes, personal and group identities. Special attention has been paid to the tension between the ‘microhistories’ of individuals moving away from their place of origin and the ‘global histories,’ or long-distance mobilities and networks in which their lives were entangled and to which they contributed. Most recent studies following this line of enquiry have focussed on travelling state officials and clerics. The latter range from late antique bishops and Byzantine monks to early modern pilgrims and clergymen moving between East and West, and across different faith denominations.19 What all these studies demonstrate is the transformative action of space and mobility. In John-Paul Ghobrial’s words, rather than a mere obstacle to be overcome through mobility, ‘space transformed people while they moved.’20
Complex, fluid and multi-layered identities were thus shaped and continually negotiated, as Chrysovalantis Kyriacou’s chapter in our volume compellingly illustrates. Transmission and circulation seem to have been prevalent frameworks for considering movement of objects and ideas in the Eastern Roman Empire and beyond. A recent body of work guided by these frameworks has produced increasingly sophisticated understandings of global connectivity at different levels. For example, Fabio Guidetti and Katharina Meinecke’s recent edited volume on the circulation of visual culture between 300 and 800 CE explains the existence of a visual koinē appealing to geographically and culturally distant patrons by way of a polycentric network approach. The spread of certain artistic patterns across the Roman Empire and beyond it, as the essays in the volume show, was made possible thanks to the frequent travels of artists and their ‘mobile’ workshops and to the circulation of portable artworks. Objects and images were used as ‘a common language by an extended international family of rulers who sustained itself through charged symbolic bonds.’21 In tracing patterns of diffusion, circulation and exchange, altogether, these and similar studies have widened the scale of the (Eastern) Roman Empire to a truly global scale encompassing entire continents and distant cultures, as much as local and regional networks.22
In this sense, ‘glocalization,’ a concept borrowed from the social sciences, has proved useful in enabling movement across different scales and emphasising the diversity, rather than homogeneity, generated by mobility and exchange.23 Following the movements and trajectories of objects and ideas through transnational networks has indeed produced an increasing appreciation of their ‘geographies of reception.’24 As they move from one place and cultural milieu to another, texts and images are received, interpreted and appropriated in different ways (see, for example, Ekaterine Gedevanishvili’s chapter in the present volume). Likewise, objects and even relics can take on different meanings or significance as they travel and can in turn differently impact the places they move through, as Andrew Jotischky showed in his work on the cult of St Catherine in medieval Byzantium and the Latin West,25 and Mark Guscin in his chapter on the Image of Edessa in the present volume.
Renewed attention has likewise been paid to travel infrastructures and their complex workings and experiential dimensions. One compelling example is the ‘braided network’ model that Marlena Whiting recently devised in order to capture the plurality of people moving through the Roman road system in Late Antiquity for different motivations and to show how their networks intersected and diverged.26 In his masterful study on perceptions of space in Late Antiquity, Scott Fitzgerald Johnson showed how pilgrims travelling along this same network shaped an entire way of constructing knowledge.27
Turned into literary model, their ensuing accounts and itineraria forged a distinctively hodological and archival mode of imagining and describing the world at a time in which the Mediterranean oikoumenē was being incorporated into a universal Christian vision of the cosmos. Many centuries later, this mode continued to characterize post-Byzantine proskynētaria (pilgrims’ booklets) of the Holy Land, the subject of Rehav Rubin’s chapter in our volume. Whereas large-scale state infrastructure such as the Roman road network and the idea of a Christian oikoumenē conjure up a globalized world, there has nonetheless been an increased acknowledgement that globalization in pre-modern times was a very different phenomenon from how we understand it and experience it today.
Long-distance exchange in Late Antiquity and in the Middle Ages was based on a chain of what Johannes Preiser-Kapeller called ‘small world networks,’ that is, networks ‘created and used by merchants and other travellers, e.g. clergy, through a multitude of mostly small-scale and everyday actions and interactions, even in the absence of large-scale state initiatives’ and thus able to be sustained also in times of political fragmentation.28 Under the Ottoman rule, as Molly Greene and Maria Litina’s chapters in this volume show, the Orthodox Church played a key role in developing and sustaining its own travel infrastructures, which, in turn, created their own ‘little worlds.’ Maritime mobilities have undergone similar rethinking. Rather than as a macro-region characterized by common rhythms and climatic conditions, over the past two decades, the ancient and medieval Mediterranean has been increasingly re-imagined and narrated in terms of ‘local irregularity,’ as a series of fragmented yet interlocked micro-regions connected through coastwise navigation, or, more recently, as a ‘sea of converging differences’ and a heterogeneous ‘contact zone.’29
More specifically, the perceived ‘terra-centrism’ of spatial history has been increasingly challenged thanks to a renewed attention to Mediterranean mobilities as experienced ‘from sea level’ through the study of microstructures and individual spatial perceptions (as opposed to traditional ‘great migration’ or ‘crusader’ narratives).30 Within this framework, the concept of insularity (the condition of being an island) has received special attention. While over the last two decades island studies have established themselves as a proper field of enquiry, insularity has been elevated to an analytical tool intrinsically connected to (and defined by) mobility.31
The imagined isolation of islands has been challenged by their archipelagic interconnectedness, as best exemplified by the history of the Aegean region.32 This renewed attention to the sea and insularity is especially significant in the context of Byzantium.33 At the zenith of its territorial expansion, the Byzantine Empire was nearly encircled by water, and navigation was the main mode of transportation for both people and goods. The boundless marine expanse nonetheless usually evoked images of terror – from Gregory of Nazianzus’ famous life-changing averted shipwreck to the tenth-century Patriarch Nicholas’ reproach to greedy merchants for exposing themselves to the ‘perils of the deep’ for the sake of gain, and not least, the omnipresent metaphor of the stormy sea of life pervading Byzantine hymnography, autobiographical accounts and philosophical meditations alike.34 As with their ancient predecessors, Byzantine sailors and their successors preferred to keep close visual contact with the coast and rely on its familiar landmarks.35 Broken up by peninsulas and its myriad of islands, the Aegean was particularly suitable to this mode of navigation. Its fragmented archipelagic space was sustained and defined by commercial, administrative and military networks, as much as by the ‘invisible routes’ of spiritual movements – as evocatively illustrated by the cartographic icon of the Portaitissa which opened this introductory chapter.
Sacred Space, Iconicity and Performance Whereas all these studies and the resulting models usually dwell on the macro-scale of empire and its regions, the past two decades have also seen the emergence of another research stream engaged with micro-mobilities, and more specifically with the kinaesthetic dimension of Christian worship in Byzantium. Key to these studies is sacred space, whether in physical sites of worship (such as churches and monasteries), or open-air processions and pilgrimage practices, for example.
The study of sacred space in cultural geography, anthropology and archaeology, among other disciplines, has long been dominated by the comparative work of the Romanian philosopher and historian of religions Mircea Eliade. Sacred space, according to Eliade, is manifested through theophanic events, or divine revelations, which cause an interruption in an otherwise amorphous ‘profane space.’ Eliade conceptualized these two kinds of space in opposition to, and as qualitatively different from, each other.37 In contrast to profane space, sacred space, he believed, is ordered around an ‘axis mundi’ and articulated through a trans-cultural geometry of boundaries, pathways and thresholds. This approach was challenged in the 1990s by a group of anthropologists influenced by poststructuralism and by the work of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim. Focusing mainly on contemporary pilgrimage, these scholars reconceptualized sacred space from a territorial container for the ‘extra-ordinary’ to a zone of friction between competing narratives and social practices enacted by different groups of people.38 In envisaging sacred space relationally, as a social construction, this work disrupted the rigid dichotomy between sacred and profane.
It also brought a dynamic and situational element to an otherwise static and universalistic understanding of the concept. At the same time, however, this approach also dismissed the insider’s perspective and the symbolic and experiential dimensions of sacred space. Over the past two decades, these aspects have captured growing interest. Broadening the attention from the contested politics of religion to the intimate poetics of spirituality, recent work in cultural geography, for example, has increasingly turned to issues of embodiment, materiality and numinosity.39 In this sense, sacred space has come to be conceptualized not so much as an empty vessel filled with conflicting narratives and contested meanings, but as a complex, and often carefully crafted, texture of material objects, bodies, and affects holding a transformative potential on the believer. Intriguingly, analogous interest in the phenomenology of sacred space has emerged in parallel in Byzantine studies and has introduced a new dynamic and multisensorial dimension to the field, as well as prompting renewed interest in liturgical performance and its micro-mobilities. In the early 2000s, the Russian art historian Alexei Lidov coined the term ‘hierotopy’ to capture the powerful dialectic between sacred images or objects and the faithful, as well as the complex symbolic dimension of the space resulting from these interactions. Unlike the abstract, geometrical word ‘space,’ hierotopy combines the material texture, meaningfulness and topographic specificity of place (topos) with sacred (hieros) ritual performance (or simply with the act of gazing).
As an interdisciplinary field of enquiry, hierotopy is concerned with the study of the creative processes and dynamics involved in the articulation of the sacred in architectural and urban settings, as much as with human interaction with the transcendental world. It explores, in Lidov’s words, the ‘human, material creation of the sacred, and its causes within realms which are understood to be divine, immaterial, or symbolic.’40 As such, hierotopy entails both visible and invisible movements. In Byzantium, Lidov observed, the most significant aspect of relics and miraculous icons was their role in creating particular hierotopies around them: In many cases relics and venerated icons were established as a core, a kind of pivot in the forming of a concrete spatial environment. This milieu included permanently visible architectural forms and various pictures as well as changing liturgical clothes and vessels, lighting effects and fragrance, ritual gestures and prayers, which every time created a unique spatial complex.41
Movement was key to the making of these three-dimensional ‘spatial icons.’ Even in front of an ordinary icon, the believer was never a static, passive viewer, but an active participant engaged in a dynamic two-way visual exchange. Byzantine visuality was defined by the ancient extramission theory, whereby the eye emitted optical rays which extended to the gazed object, touched it and bounced back to the eye, conveying ‘the essence of the thing seen.’42 Gazing was therefore a dynamic and tactile act. Rather than guiding the gaze toward a vanishing point within or beyond the image (as in Renaissance western painting, for example), icons invaded the space in front of them. Instead of imitation, they implied participation and intimately shaped the experience of the faithful.43 While applicable to other religious traditions, it is significant that hierotopy was originally conceived in the context of Byzantine art history. Introducing her influential book The Sensual Icon (2013), Bissera Pentcheva, one of the main proponents and pioneers of the phenomenological approach in the field, lamented the strident contrast between medievalists’ traditional tendency to characterize Byzantium in terms of strict spirituality and dematerialization on the one hand and the insistent sensuality of its ceremonies on the other.44
Newly recast focus on multi-sensoriality has since led to the subversion of this stereotype. In the built spaces studied by Pentcheva, Lidov and other scholars following their lead, everything is animated by motion: the flickering candlelight reflected on the glittering surfaces of metal icons and golden mosaics; the reverberation of chants and prayers spiralling up to the church’s dome; the shafts of light quietly filtering through the windows and their changing patterns; the delicate fragrance of the incense filling the nave and slowly dissipating; and not least, the whirling motions of liturgical performance. It is through these micro-movements that invisibilities become palpable, absences are made present, and hierotopies come into being. Amidst these micro-movements, certain patterns have captured special attention. According to Nicoletta Isar, Byzantine sacred space was liturgically enacted through the circular, revolving movement of choros, which literally means choral dance but is also phonetically associated to chōra, a space in flux and in becoming. In Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, the choros structured the space of the church and enabled the enactment of the mystery of divine Eucharist.45
As Antonios Kakalis shows in his chapter in our volume, this circular movement continues to define Orthodox liturgical ritual. Evoking the spiralling movement of the Cherubs and the Seraphs, for the Byzantines, the choros inscribed a celestial image (or spatial icon) on a terrestrial space. In this way, it enabled a second, vertical movement: the temporary convergence of heaven and earth. It opened up, in other words, ‘a space of interaction between human and divine, a circle where charis was born’46 – in the same way as the circular periplus of the Portaitissa on the Ivēron cartographic icon sanctifies the island-scattered surface of the Aegean. The invisible movement of sound and its interaction with church buildings and believers have likewise gained special prominence within recent phenomenological studies of Byzantine sacred space. Sound is itself movement, in the same way that silence is stillness.47 Sound is produced by a vibrating object that radiates its energy through the air, or through another medium, in the form of compression waves, which propagate with varying speeds. Sound, therefore, requires matter to gain presence, but it also needs space to propagate. As it invisibly diffuses, it structures space and defines place. Yet, as with incense, it emerges in the ritual and quickly dissolves in silence and stillness, ‘evaporating the fleeting impression of divine tangibility.
For the Greek Fathers, the ephemeral movement of sacred music bridged the worlds of matter and the spirit, in such a way as to prove that ‘the Creator of these worlds is one.’49 Liturgical music opened up an actual space in which humans could praise God together with the angels in a strong, ontological sense.50 Amplified and transfigured through chanting, words penetrated the flesh and touched the human heart, inviting, in turn, an inner movement into its deepest reaches.51 That of soundwaves, however, was also a physical and carefully crafted movement through the space of the church. The structure of the building moulded the naked pressure waves by clothing them with a distinctive pitch, tone and reverberation, a theme that Pentcheva explored in her compelling studies on the soundscape of Hagia Sophia and further engages in the liturgical context of Hosios Loukas in her chapter in the present volume.
Mobile Sacra and Sacred Mobilities Byzantine sacra elicited movement and, in turn, offered themselves as mediators enabling movement across terrestrial and celestial realms. As material objects, nonetheless, sacra themselves moved around – and as they moved, they configured their own hierotopies. Sometimes these could encompass entire cities, as in the case of relics and icons taken on procession around the walls of Constantinople to protect the capital from sieges and natural disasters.53 Transported to often geographically distant locations, Byzantine sacra had the power to generate temporary ‘hierotopies on the move,’ like in processions carrying relics from Mount Athos and other sacred centres of Orthodoxy in the Ottoman Empire during alms begging missions (see Litina’s chapter in our volume). But sacra could also generate new permanent sacred places. Examples vary from the use of relics of saints to consecrate altars (a practice introduced at the end of the fourth century) to ‘fragments’ of the Holy Land (such as soil and stones) embedded in replicas of the Holy Sepulchre in medieval Europe.
The employment of spolia and imitation of architectural spaces that marked the loca santa ‘made it possible to transfer sanctity and evoke their memory elsewhere.’54 After all, since its foundation in the fourth century, Constantinople was itself shaped as a Christian capital through the movement of the relics of the Apostles, a pattern continued in various post-Roman communities.55 Anchored to a place, sacra could extend their influence to entire geographical regions and become magnets for pilgrims asking for a miracle, or simply seeking grace and protection (as Mihail Mitrea shows in his chapter in this volume). The ‘making’ of a new sacred place, however, was hardly the result of a single well-structured, systematic plan by specific individuals, but rather of slow, and often spontaneous, processes of stratification and assemblage usually happening over extended periods of time and entailing movements of objects, texts and people on different scales.56 In very different contexts (a famous medieval Byzantine shrine in Greece, a former church turned into mosque in Umayyad Syria, and a small parish in contemporary Scotland), the chapters by Pentcheva, Williams and Kakalis in this volume all speak to the complexity and multidimensionality of such processes, spaces and movements. Whereas in all these cases sacra necessitated human agency to move around, hagiographic literature and miracle accounts often emphasise icons and relics’ ability to move by themselves, or rather, by divine agency. The journeys of the Portaitissa, Athos’ earliest recorded wonder-working icon, are but one example.
Through her uncanny movements across the Aegean and from the main church to the gate of the Monastery, the Portaitissa revealed her miraculous nature as much as non-human will. In this, she joined a host of other miraculous icons which mysteriously disappeared and reappeared in different places around the Byzantine (and later Ottoman) Empire.57 Unlike the predictable travel routes of humans, these icons do not follow linear trajectories; they defy both space and human understanding. Whether on large or small scales, their movements are ultimately dictated not by human wish and agency, but by the Mother of God herself. In other miracle stories, usually related to saints and relics, holiness is also revealed through the opposite action, that is, their ability to stop natural movement and subvert the laws of physics. For example, the ship carrying the body of St Peter of Athos is said to have refused to sail round the cape. ‘Despite full sails and vigorous rowing, it did not budge from its position in the open sea for several hours until the helmsman set his course to the Monastery of Klementos, where the saint wished to be buried.’58 More frequently, holy relics (and living saints) had the power to quench the motion of the raging elements, just as Christ had done in the Sea of Galilee (Mark 4:35–41).59 Another characteristically Byzantine type of sacred mobility was indeed that of Scriptural archetypes and symbols.
The Greek Fathers and their Byzantine successors interpreted human salvation history as a series of prefigurations and revelations starting from the Old Testament and culminating with the Second Coming of Christ. The earth was itself deemed a vast reservoir of familiar symbols through which God at once concealed and revealed himself – to the extent He wished. In the Lives of Byzantine saints, archetypal topographies from the Bible were superimposed, for example, on geographically and temporally distant landscapes inhabited by early Christian hermits. In turn, as the boundaries of the empire expanded and contracted, the image of the ascetic wilderness travelled from Palestine and Egypt to Asia Minor, the Balkans, and even to the Italian peninsula.60 In a similar way, Gedevanishvili’s chapter in this volume shows how, juxtaposed to warrior saints, Old Testament scenes such as the hospitality of Abraham could be interpreted as foreshadowings of illuminated rulers in distant Georgia.
While studies on Byzantine mobilities have usually focused on travel and pilgrimage, commercial networks, migration, artistic exchange, or liturgical performance, this volume specifically interrogates the role of different types of mobilities in articulating religious narratives and shaping sacred spatialities. Examples range from movements of saints and translations of relics resulting in new foci of devotion (Pentcheva, Williams and Mitrea), to the circulation of texts and of sacred images used to promote patronage or legitimize political ambitions (Pentcheva, Guscin and Gedevanishvili); from saints’ visitations to actual and virtual pilgrimages (Mitrea and Rubin); from the role of post-Byzantine metochia and monasteries as travel infrastructures in an increasingly mobile transnational world (Greene and Litina) to the making of new complex territorial and religious identities (Kyriacou), as well as pan-Orthodox worldviews (Rubin); and finally, contemporary reconfigurations of the sacred by way of ‘assemblages’ such as contemporary Orthodox icon screens and liturgical objects (Kakalis). Collectively, the essays interrogate the varied and multifaceted geographies of these mobilities – from the microscale of the church building to the macroscale of entire regions – and explore how their poetics and politics intersected. The structure of the volume is roughly chronological. The first part features Byzantine case studies, especially from the medieval period.
Pentcheva’s opening chapter focuses on the eleventh-century katholikon of Hosios Loukas Monastery in southern Greece. Despite its location in an apparently rugged and isolated setting, as the chapter shows, the cult of the saint and the presence of his relics turned the Monastery into an important shrine at the intersection between extensive pilgrimage and trade networks. Setting its lavish mosaic programme in conversation with hymnography and histories of patronage, Pentcheva conceptualizes the katholikon as a Bilderfahrzeug (an ‘image-vehicle’) that received and transmitted the liturgy and sacred topography of Constantinople, as well as a shell, in her words, ‘irradiated by a desire for the divine and for the promise for a fusion with it.’ Linked to the capital and to powerful military patrons from the Byzantine province of Italy, the shrine at the same time fostered a forceful message of imperial victory, as well as bearing witness to the cosmopolitan character of the Byzantine Empire at its height.
The link between the mobility of sacra, patronage and the promotion of imperial politics is a theme that, in different ways, underpins the following two chapters. Gedevanishvili takes us to a remote mountainous province of Georgia and, through her detailed iconographic reading of the decoration of the Svip‘i church façade, she shows how an extensive invisible network linked this distant country to the centre of the Byzantine Empire. Like Hosios Loukas, the Svip‘i programme was both the meeting point and result of multiple mobilities operating on different spatial and temporal scales: the mobility of a text (Emperor Leo the Wise’s homilies on St Dēmētrios) composed in Constantinople; of an Old Testament scene (the hospitality of Abraham); and of a regional cult of warrior saints. Located in a region of strategic defensive significance, the church, Gedevanishvili suggests, was part of a broader sacred network, as well as of a political strategy aimed at promoting the dynastic ambitions of the country’s ruling house.
Whereas both Bissera’s and Gedevanishvili’s chapters focus on specific shrines and their artistic programmes, Guscin, by contrast, follows the movements of a sacred object, the Image of Edessa, and their complex intertwining with Byzantine imperial politics. Originally transported to the Mesopotamian city at the time of Christ’s terrestrial ministry, in the tenth century the miraculous Image was translated to Constantinople by the Byzantine-Armenian naval admiral and then Emperor Romanos I Lekapenos in an attempt to propagate divine approval for his own rule and dynasty.
The attempt was a failure, as in the same year, Lekapenos’ own sons removed him from power, and almost immediately the rightful heir, Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, removed them all and became emperor, appropriating the translation of the Image as divine consent for his own rule. Guscin’s chapter shows how the mobility of the sacred object was used (successfully by Constantine and unsuccessfully by Lekapenos) to justify imperial authority, from both a political and religious stance. Holy relics, as Mitrea’s chapter shows, could in turn generate mobilities over more or less extended areas of spiritual influence and create what he calls their own ‘saintly geographies.’ Focusing on two late-Byzantine saints, the Archbishop of Thessaloniki Gregory Palamas and the Patriarch of Constantinople Athanasios I, Mitrea considers the geographical distribution of their miracles and the mobility of the beneficiaries to their shrines.
These range in scale, from local and long-distance travel to the microscale of devotional body movements or gestures (kinesics) involved in the stories of healing, as reported by their contemporaneous hagiographers, Philotheos Kokkinos and Theoktistos the Stoudite respectively. In these miracle collections, as Mitrea demonstrates, the physical mobilities of the faithful visiting the shrines are complemented by instances of imagined mobility, including dream (or imagined) visions of visits to the shrines and even visitations by the saints themselves. This category of mobilities is usually triggered by the supplicant’s condition of immobility (due to infirmity). If mobility entails freedom (to move), the saints’ relics had the power to restore this freedom, as Christ himself had repeatedly done during his earthly ministry.61 Williams shows the continued influence of mobile relics in shaping (and reconfiguring) holy sites beyond Christianity.
His chapter explores the use of memory as a hierotopic device in the conversion of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and the church of St John the Forerunner in Damascus into mosques. The crafting of Islamic foundation narratives served to move Muslim sacred objects, hagiography and geography into the history of the pre-existing Christian holy sites. In the case of Hagia Sophia, the sacred land of Mecca was made present in the mortar of the dome through the incorporation of Meccan earth, water of Zamzam and the saliva of the Prophet. In the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, a repetition of the Byzantine narrative of the finding of the head of St John the Baptist featuring Caliph Al-Walid I placed the relics firmly within an Islamic context and therefore justified the appropriation and conversion of that sacred place.
The four chapters following move us to the Ottoman centuries and to an Orthodox network outweighing the locale thanks to increased mobility and connectivity. In this period, we witness the emergence of new territorial identities and complex mosaics of ethnic and religious coexistence and diversity. In his chapter, Kyriacou follows the movements of two late sixteenth-century Cypriot ecclesiastics: Giulio Stavriano, the Armenian bishop in Cyprus and then Catholic bishop of Bova in Calabria, and Antonios Darkes, an Orthodox priest of Latin descent who visited the Holy Land as a pilgrim in ca. 1589 and later wrote a poetic narrative of his pilgrimage, published in Venice in 1645. By focusing on these two stories of clergy’s mobility as cases of ‘exceptional normality’ and multiple identities, Kyriacou enables us to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanics of identity preservation, negotiation, and conflict, especially with relation to the religious and cultural heritage of Byzantium in Cyprus, Italy and the Holy Land.
The two chapters following shift the focus from the mobilities of clergy to the complex infrastructure enabling these (and other) mobilities. Greene takes us back to Greece, this time to the Pindos mountains. Charting a monastic landscape largely obliterated by the Bavarian reforms in the early nineteenth century, she considers the role of monasteries in facilitating mobility across a mountain world that is unfailingly described as remote and isolated. Surviving documentation demonstrates that in the Ottoman period the monasteries in the region extended hospitality, willingly or unwillingly, to a wide array of visitors. Furthermore, some of the brotherhoods were sometimes also responsible for the construction and maintenance of road infrastructure, which was deemed a pious act of Christian charity. Altogether, the chapter conveys the picture of a highly mobile mountain society, which challenges common stereotypes.
The Pindos monasteries, Greene shows, provide a valuable window on the historical experience of mountain mobilities during the Ottoman centuries. Litina’s chapter expands the focus from a province of Greece to the entire Balkan region by way of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem’s extensive network of metochia (dependencies). Her meticulous historical reconstruction shows how the establishment of such network between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries played a crucial role in consolidating the presence of the Patriarchate in regions of the Ottoman Empire outside its jurisdiction.
Operating as embassies or consulates, the principal aim of the metochia was to secure financial support for the Patriarchate’s enormous financial debts in order to continue preserving and maintaining the Holy Shrines in Palestine and defending the Patriarchate’s privileges against territorial claims by other Christian denominations. Metochia thus served as staging posts for monks travelling from the Holy Land through the Balkans and carrying sacred objects for veneration, together with collection boxes. At the same time, these networked structures also provided pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land with essential travel infrastructure. In the chapter following, we move to the heart of this network, Jerusalem and the Holy Land – and to the end of our journey through Orthodox networks in the Ottoman Empire. In this chapter, Rubin explores the mobilities of souvenirs that Orthodox pilgrims brought back home from the Holy Land, and more specifically of proskynētaria, special booklets and topographic views on canvas featuring the holy sites visited by the pilgrims. Mobile tokens of place and treasured blessings, proskynētaria, Rubin’s detailed iconographic analysis shows, presented the Holy Land as an exclusively Orthodox sacred territory. In displaying and promoting the vision of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, these representations fostered a distinctively Greek Orthodox geographical imagination. Brought back to the pilgrims’ home communities, proskynētaria spread this vision, while enabling virtual pilgrimages and triggering the desire for actual pilgrimages to the holiest places of Christianity. The last thematic chapter in the volume brings us to the present through Orthodox ritual and liturgical objects. Kakalis’ contribution focuses on the biography of the twentieth-century iconostasis of the Orthodox Church of St Andrew in Edinburgh, Scotland. Iconostases, as Kakalis demonstrates, are much more than mere screens.
They are structures that transform a boundary into a phenomenon of liturgical inhabitation and shape ritual movements. The St Andrew iconostasis, however, is also a complex material assemblage made of parts and objects which travelled from different places and were added at different times. In this sense, this iconostasis can be viewed as a material expression of the parish’s transnational character. Liturgical movement is combined with an ethos of inclusivity that has been practiced by the community since its establishment in 1948. Enshrouding stories of transborder movement, the iconostasis is penetrated through ritual choreographies, sounds and scents. In this way, it becomes a ‘spatial icon’ of the interconnection between the members of the Church, and between them and God.
In the afterword to the book, Andrew Louth draws our attention to the two key components of mobility – space and time – and cautions us about the disjunction between their modern and premodern perceptions. Whereas we tend to conceive them as primarily quantitative, in antiquity space and time were qualitative and continued to be perceived and experienced as such in Byzantium. Taking the Platonic notions of chōra and diastēma as starting points, Louth thus invites us to move away from the relativism underpinning modern conceptualizations of sacred space and time and rethink these two dimensions through a cosmic perspective. Cosmic movement, he reminds us, is more than physical movement, for it has meaning bound up with the quality of time characteristic of the seasons, different parts of day, and ‘ages’ of creation.
To be in space and in time is thus not to be located in an abstract system of mathematical coordinates, but ‘to belong to the realm of changing and becoming.’ From this perspective, sacrality is not something conferred to space, but a quality of space and time, hard to grasp perhaps for a modern mind but fundamental to Byzantine ways of seeing and experiencing creation. The secular, Louth ultimately reminds us, is simply the product of an impoverished sense of space and time deprived of such quality. … Ultimately, the rationale for the wide temporal and geographical coverage of the present volume is to show continuities and discontinuities in patterns and typologies of mobilities and the reception of Byzantine spiritual culture at different times and in different places.
Altogether, the authors explore how sacred places and objects lie at the intersection of different routes and trajectories and, as such, they are not fixed and given, but always in the making, at once transforming and transformative. Regardless of their historical or geographical setting, the chapters also show that while Byzantine and later Orthodox sacred mobilities were ultimately heaven-bound, they nonetheless remained deeply entangled in earthly topographies, networks and infrastructures.
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