The Emergence of Christian Commemorative Architecture in Palestine (Delivered at the "Transformations in Stone" Symposium at Lund University) (original) (raw)
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Jerusalem as Palimpsest. The Architectural Footprint of the Crusaders in the Contemporary City
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This thesis examines the relationship between Jews and Christians in the Holy Land from the age of Constantine the Great to the conquest of the eastern provinces by the Arabs from an archaeological viewpoint. At stake is a better understanding of how Jews adapted to changing times, particularly during the rise of Christianity in Palestine. Whereas earlier scholars have viewed the growth of the Byzantine empire as time of persecution toward the Jews, a re-evaluation of the archaeological evidence indicates that Jews prospered along with their Christian neighbors. In scope, this dissertation aims first to re-evaluate how many ancient building remains can be classified as synagogues, and how many of those can be accurately dated. For only after a solid body of archaeological research is firmly established can further progress be made toward our better understanding of the ancient world. Diversity in contemporaneous synagogue layouts, rather than a linear development throughout this p...
In a recent article Robert Markus queries -with reference to the fourth century C.E. emergence of a Christian network of holy sites -"why, how was it possible that any place should become holy?" 1 . He proceeds to analyse a sacralysing transformation of places in popular perceptions and practices as the reflection of a shift in Christian devotion "from the eschatological meaning of the historical narratives to their topographical associations" (Markus 267). This shift prepared the ground for the Constantinian church building programme effecting not only Palestine but as well the entirety of the Roman Empire. It came about, according to Markus, because early fourth century Christians felt it necessary to elaborate cult practices around tombs and relics of martyrs in order to assert continuity between their church -increasingly enjoying the support of the Roman state -and the church of early Christians, who discerned the signs of their divine election in the wounds of martyrdom that same state had inflicted on them. Markus writes that "the veneration of martyrs...served to assure the Christians of a local church of its continuity with its own heroic, persecuted, past, and the universal Church of its continuity with the age of the martyrs" (Markus 270). Martyrs and their relics came to be seen as resting 'in place', and the place of the cult became a site for encounter between the sanctifying individuals and events of an increasingly distant past and contemporary Christians who wished to participate in that sanctity.
A Byzantine Jerusalem. The Imperial Pharos Chapel as the Holy Sepulchre
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Constantinople was perceived as a Holy City, the Second Jerusalem, an expected place of the Second Coming. In this study we examine the sacred space of the greatest importance in Byzantium, the church of the Virgin of the Pharos, which served from 864 to 1204 as an imperial repository of the main relics of Christendom. This ‘Byzantine Holy Sepulchre’ enshrined the collection of 10 most important relics pertaining to the Passions and the Crucifixion and was termed by contemporaries as ‘the Decalogue’. The two miraculous images ‘not made with hands’ (Mandilion and Keramion) were also kept in this church as well as the head and hand of John the Baptist and a large piece of the Holy Cross. The space of the church, so richly saturated with the relics of the Holy Land, was seen as another Jerusalem, the symbolic image of the Holy Land. One of the special services held in this church was the service ‘of the Holy City’ which resembled the services at the Resurrection church in Jerusalem. The spatial arrangement of relics in the Pharos Church entered as image-paradigm into the sacred space of many churches all over the Christian world and was represented in iconography.