The Unheimlichkeit of the Patria of Constantinople

This paper takes as its subject the icons and especially statues of Constantinople: the thousands of beings of bronze, stone, and paint that inhabited the city alongside humans. It examines the impact of these ostensibly inanimate objects upon a living population that, from 326 to 1204, not only encountered them on a daily basis but also attributed an uncanny agency to them. Largely consisting of examples of figural art accompanied by explanatory inscriptions, these works may be identified with what the French intellectual Pierre Nora has termed “lieux de mémoire”. Central to the imperial capital’s monumental landscape, they constituted public sites around which collective memory thickened and swirled in such a way as to encourage individuals and groups to commemorate the past, as well as to articulate rival claims over the present and future. The performances at these sites of both displays of authority and acts of subversion underpinned the transformation of civil society into the “Empire of the Romans”. We can observe the process in the successive recensions of the heritage guidebook to Constantinople that were produced from the eighth to the twelfth centuries. The development of the Patria culminated with the creation under the patronage of the Komnenoi of a text that reorganised a mythical topography into a physical itinerary prescribed for emperors who were expected to lead processions in the capital’s streets. In the early thirteenth century, however, the cultural assumptions upon which such imperial projects rested collapsed when, to adopt Nora’s turn of phrase, “memory passed through history”. The fundamental nature of the break is apparent from the expression in the historiographical writings of both conquered and conquerors of nostalgia for a lost world in which humanity had been in habitual communication with the supernatural.