Approximately 29 kilometers north of the ancient city of Laranda (now Karaman), the ruins of Binbirkilise — “Thousand and One Churches” — are scattered across the hills and plains of the extinct Karadağ volcano in central Anatolia. Beyond the numerous structures clustered within the ancient settlements of Madenşehir and Değle, Karadağ hosts additional Byzantine-era remains…
Around the year 600 C.E., a woman named Eulogia, daughter of Potamon, donated a silver object into the care of a priest Praepositus for use in a church located within the former Pharaonic Temple of Rameses II at Luxor. Alongside a prominent Christogram is emblazoned the name “Father Abraham, Bishop” in Greek; archaeological and epigraphic…
This paper traces the foundations of cenobitic life through the Studite cenobitic reform of the 9th century AD. By analyzing the Catechisms, a work of St. Theodore the Studite, the backbone of the monastic regulation of the life of his community is presented. It is an attempt to analyze some of the most basic topics…
While light has received substantial attention in Byzantine studies, shadow – its inseparable counterpart – remains largely unexplored. This paper proposes a preliminary study of the role of shadow in monastic churches, considered not as a mere absence of light, but as a sensory condition constitutive of spatial experience. Challenging conceptions of ecclesiastical space based…
The letter corpus transmitted under the name of Isidore of Pelusium is the largest surviving Byzantine collection (ca. 2,000 letters), yet its past and future exploitation is greatly hampered by the uncertainty about its historicity and date. Some viewed it as a later literary fiction, many as a genuine correspondence from the early fifth century…
Scholarship on the Sinai Peninsula is abundant. However, a mythology has been built up that reduces the history and landscape of Sinai into a sweeping narrative that fits a particular regime of asceticism (cenobitic). If we look at the primary sources, we can see other kinds of asceticism and descriptions of the desert, yet this…