The translatio of holy relics and icons from Constantinople to monasteries and shrines in the East is a recurrent literary motif in several Eastern Christian traditions, namely Armenian, Syriac, and Georgian. Narratives about the displacement and re-placement of saintly remains are attested in a vast array of Eastern Christian texts, including hagiographies, historiographies, geographies, travelogues, and even historiolae. The placement of Byzantine relics and icons in specific spaces fostered the inception of local hagio-geographies through the establishment or development of shrines and pilgrimage sites ‒ generally within the perimeters of rural monasteries ‒ that became cross-cultural, transregional, and cross-generational places of encounter and memory building. This endeavour was also designed to create an ideal tie with the Byzantine past and present through different models of reinterpretation and re-adaptation of sainthood (and also martyrdom). Yet, scholarship has only recently and sporadically begun to examine how narratives about Byzantine saints and the use of Byzantine relics and icons contributed to the prestige of specific places and fostered the process of community-building amongst Armenian, Georgian, and Syriac communities of the middle, late, and post-Byzantine spaces. This Thematic Session explores the interaction of saintly relics and icons with their “new” space through the analysis of varied textual sources and material evidence produced within the Armenian, Georgian, and Syriac landscape.
The Syriac-speaking communities of the Fertile Crescent gradually distanced themselves from the Byzantine world between the 5th and 6th centuries. The East Syrian Church (the Church of the East), in particular, had already marked its separation in 410 (with the Synod of Mar Isḥaq), well before the divisions provoked by the Christological controversies. Nevertheless, this…
This paper explores how the cult of the Virgin Mary, and particularly the iconography of the Virgin of Mercy (Madonna della Misericordia), was received, adapted, and transformed in the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia during the 13th century. Focusing on two exceptional miniatures from the Gospels of Prince Vasak and Marshal Ōshin (Morgan Library, MS M.740)—both…
The Martyrdom of Saints Eudoxios, Romylos, Zenon, and Makarios is a composite late antique martyrology, originally composed in Greek, that unites two distinct narratives: the martyrdom of the Praepositus Romylos under Emperor Trajan and the martyrdom of the Komēs Eudoxios together with Zenon, Makarios, and 1104 fellow soldiers under the Emperor Diocletian. Their shared site…
The Armenian tradition bears striking testimony to a unique reverence for manuscripts, particularly for so-called “magic gospels” (e.g., the Shurishkan Gospel, the ‘Anania’ Gospel, the “Red” Gospel, the ‘Tsughrut’ Gospel) and for healing books known as ‘Nareks’. These codices were not merely treasured texts but were often venerated as sacred objects imbued with divine presence,…