The construction of sanctity through architecture within the early historical cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean forms the main theme of the essays in this volume. We take construction of sanctity in its dual sense to mean the way in which ancient and medieval patrons, architects, and masons physically shaped the environment in sacred cause, as well as in a metaphorical sense as the way in which ideas and situations generated by the built environment contributed to the cultural formulation of the sacred. Both meanings presuppose intimate human participation, and each informs the other. For the latter sense, human engagement in a sacred context finds its most recognizable expression through cult practice, which consists principally of structurally organized, repeated, privileged, performed actions or rites that signal to all involved that engagement with the divinity has been properly transacted; in a word, rituals.1
Ritual actions stand in service of belief; they are a constitutive part of religion. As Smith succinctly explains, “Ritual is, first and foremost, a mode of paying attention.”2 Throughout the Orthodox Christian liturgy, for example, the officiant reminds the congregation of this fact: “Let us be attentive,” he instructs. In the cases discussed in this volume, architecture serves as a “focusing lens” - to use Smith’s terminology, although in many instances the relationship of action to setting is far from clear. Sometimes we have precise accounts of ritual movements that can be tied to specific places and buildings, such as that provided by the typikon of a Byzantine monastery or by the text of a pilgrims’ guide.
In other instances actions may be inferred from physical evidence that appears - at least to our eyes and minds - heightened or to stand out of the ordinary, as at the Theatral Circle at Samothrace or the monumental stairs of so many ancient Greek sanctuaries. Without doubt, in the cultures under consideration here, events that may be defined as rituals occurred in contexts other than the sacred, and no doubt many actions in addition to those that can be called rituals occurred within sanctified spaces. Indeed, private rituals of worship occurred within domestic settings during all periods under consideration. Markets and fairs overlapped temporally and spatially with religious festivals; sacred settings could also be employed for not-so-sacred activities. One need think, admittedly anachronistically, of St. Paul’s in London, which outside of service became a thoroughfare and a market. Moreover, as Rose makes clear in his essay, sacred rituals conducted within sacred space may be inextricably intertwined with political, social, and cultural aims.3 While all of the authors of this volume would agree that neither ritual nor sacred space is a neatly bounded concept, our focus has been the sacred aspects of sacred spaces that can be recognized and understood as such.
The architectural investigations offered here are micro-histories. As the authors point out in a range of ways, architecture is site-specific and ritual is situational. They attempt to explain the sacred parameters of particular spatial or architectural phenomena found in the archaeological and architectural record of particular places. Taken together, these studies may begin to shape a dialogue that returns place to the center of studies regarding sacred experience, regardless of whether that experience was pagan, Christian, or Jewish. Although the case studies span multiple religious traditions over two millennia, certain themes recur with such frequency that they take on a defining function in our understanding of the construction of sanctity. They are worthy of review.
Shaped Actions: The Passage of the Body and Eye. In the first chapter to this volume, Jas Elsner warns of the dangers of inferring actions from architectural forms: “the material cultural frame of a ritual center - architectural, topographic, decorative - may offer no clues at all as to what people choose to do liturgically with it.” To be sure, the configuration of solids and voids will not ever allow us to recover all the actions that ever took place within sacred spaces, especially in places of great accumulation. But “no clues at all” stands counter to the very nature of architecture, which, although itself chiefly static, exists and serves to shape human actions. Ritual actions, while hardly exclusive to sacred contexts, lie at their core. It is thus no surprise that almost every paper presented here concentrates on movement and encounter within the architectural environment. Although not articulated as such, most of the essays have the phenomenological basis that architecture is understood through experience and that the two are not only inseparable but also mutually transformative.'* The authors explore their interconnectedness through a full range of sensory apprehensions.
Thus Hollinshead begins her discussion of monumental stairs with the weight of the body and the tread of a foot; the difference of feeling and of seeing in the acts of going up or going down. In her overview of monumental stairs and ramps in Greek sanctuaries, she demonstrates just how tactile the management of the celebratory crowd would have been. Miles tracks Pausanias along the monument-littered 22-kilometer road between Eleusis and the City Eleusinion, the termini of which are framed by twin propyla. The physical and visual experience engendered by gathering in an architecturally constructed circle within the entrance of the Sanctuary of the Great Gods interests Wescoat. Rose recreates the route of the ancient tour guide around the highly charged memory monuments of Troy reinvented at Ilion. Perry notes the formidable role of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus as the ending point of triumphal procession and the starting point of the religious procession inaugurating the Ludi Romani. Yasin asserts that we may understand the configuration of the Late Antique martyria that explicitly separate altar and relic only by connecting the pilgrims’ twin experiences of physical passage and lines of sight. The portable Tabernacle, with its capacity to reformulate place, provides for Branham a model for mapping new territory, juxtaposing representational space with performance. And as Marinis makes clear, Byzantine church design provides unobstructed space to accommodate the processional entrances of the liturgy while allowing clear observation by the congregation.
Reciprocity of Architecture and Ritual, or Space, Building and Place. By framing topography and shaping space, sacred architecture can establish the conditions for religious ritual; the two are, as Rose says, mutually reinforcing. But each site examined here differs in significant ways; this point come through forcefully in Gusterhout’ s comparison of the Holy Sepulchre and the Hagia Sophia, and in turn the places of Jerusalem and Constantinople. In the cultures under consideration, there is a clear language of sacred architecture. While the component forms do not differ so markedly from those used in secular architecture, in one or more categories of placement, composition, scale, material, elaboration, or decoration, they communicate a sacred or ritual setting. We have come to have such clear assumptions and can so readily recognize a sacred “constellation” of features that sometimes that which is right before our eyes, so to speak, goes unrecognized. Curcic’s paper, for example, asks us to look again at some standard features of Byzantine architecture and architectural decoration as signifiers of divine light. While not every dogtooth brick band or every zigzag pattern would fit the bill, he argues convincingly that in select instances these decorative details should be read symbolically. Similarly, Wescoat argues for special meanings of interiority and regeneration associated with the use of the Corinthian order at Samothrace. Again, not every application of the Corinthian order should be interpreted in this way, but its unique usage and special position in the Sanctuary of the Great Gods call out for special consideration.
Social and Spatial Boundaries. Just as there were zones of increasingly sacred character and increasingly limited access at the Temple of Jerusalem, similar zones appear in many of the sites discussed here. In the church of the Monastery tou Libos discussed by Marinis, these zones may be understood in relationship to both the liturgy and to the privileged burials within the complex. In other examples, the distinction is between space within and space without, and efforts to find meaning in architecture often center on the negotiation of boundaries. Gne way to construct sanctity is to set it apart. The root of the word temenos (sacred precinct) is in temenein.5 As with the Holy of Holies in the Temple, the bema of a Byzantine church or the naos of a pagan temple were areas of limited, privileged access. The threshold marks a zone of liminality. To be able to enter that space was a mark of status. In a like manner, cutting oneself off from the larger world and forging an alternate sacred community involves the establishment of boundaries. This is certainly what happens in the Theatral Circle on Samothrace. In contrast, the Sacred Way between Athens and Eleusis and its framing propyla, are overtly part of the urban fabric. While the propyla mark the transitions into temenoi, the road itself is a public thoroughfare; it becomes sacred space through its active engagement in processions. Processions similarly connected the churches of Byzantine Constantinople. While monasteries or churches marked sacred space, set off and treated differently from the world outside, they could be linked by means of ritual procession into a web of sanctity. The Great Palace formed a separate, isolated zone of sanctity within the city, highlighted by its chapels, its relics, and the ceremonies that bound them together; clearly part of its sacred aura came from its isolation from the rest of the city.
Construction of a Sacred Topography. In the cultures under discussion, sacred experience can be linked directly to the extraordinary nature of a place. In the late nineteenth century, the Anatolian archaeologist and religious historian Sir William M. Ramsay had associated the concept of religious awe with special localities marked by distinctive natural features. As places that communicated with the divine, oracles were often associated with topographical phenomena. Similar themes emerge in the writings of Rudolph Otto, Emile Durkheim, and Mircea Eliade. There are places on earth where natural forces interact to exude a numi-nosity, and we might argue that Samothrace is one such place - or at least this is how it was perceived in Antiquity. In opposition to this view - and in specific reference to Eliade, Smith argues that sanctity is a political construct. Following his argument, we might post the question, is place inherently sacred, or is it made sacred by human response? Some places came to be regarded as sacred by the occurrence of an event regarded as holy, such as the sites of Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection, or the place where the ascetic St. Symeon the Stylite lived atop his column. In these and other examples, architecture plays a significant role. Both received distinctive architectural frameworks to heighten the experience of the place, such that architecture becomes place. Elsewhere, in many religious contexts, a sacred presence might have been introduced into an architectural setting by the mortal remains of a holy figure, as at the tomb of Felix at Nola addressed by Yasin, or in a unique Jewish example discussed by Magness, the enigmatic bone deposit at the synagogue of Dura Europos.
Architecture may be used to both frame the experience of place and to establish between reciprocity between places that frame ritual experience.
In offering a new reconstruction for the Propylon to the Eleusinion in Athens, Miles shows just how closely connected the two entrances termini graphically demonstrates the way in which architecture and its decoration mirrored. Rose, too, notes the “related design strategies” tapping into the ancestral past at work on the Athenian Acropolis and the Ilion’s Athenaion and ties them to the shared Panathenaic festival and the structurally related traditions of the arrhephoroi in Athens and the Lokrian Maidens at Ilion.
History and Memory. History and memory are powerful and essential instruments in the architect’s toolbox. For architecture to signify, it must appeal to shared instincts and experiences, even when exploring new territory. For ritual to mean anything, there has to be a collective memory of the action and its significance, even as it is reconstituted with each enactment. Both are simultaneously fixed and protean. Visual associations, historical appeal, and cues to memory form central themes in several of the papers presented here. Memory and historicism play a critical role in the crafting of sacred spaces investigated by all of the authors working in the Roman period. Miles points to the intense historicism of the Second Sophistic as a guiding idea in forging ritual experience between the gates of the Eleusinian sanctuaries, with the Athenian kary-atids mirroring their sacred sisters in Eleusis. Twenty-two kilometers and six centuries separate the Propylaia on the Athenian Acropolis and the Greater Propylaia at Eleusis, but shared architectural forms collapses the distance conceptually and binds the two places; the iconography of the Lesser Propylaia and the new gate to the City Eleusinion erected in the second half of the second century C. E. employ the same iconography (here separated by only two centuries) to remind the participants of where they are and what the cult offers.
Rose traverses an even greater panorama, exploring the weave of the ritual-historical ties between Ilion, Athens, and Rome through the invention, replication, and manipulation of architecture, landscape, and cult. For Perry, the sanctity of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus resides in the premise that the building, in each of its incarnations, recaptures enough of the original form to physically tie the building to the sacred foundations of the city. That it actually looked “the same” was, as Perry demonstrates, far less important than the idea that it could be relied upon to encapsulate the historical memory and tradition of
Rome. The portable Jewish Tabernacle holds the collective memory of the house of Israel, transforming each place it rests into the sacred center of the tribe. Allusions to Tabernacle sacrifice and sacrificial imagery (either in metaphor or paint), become, for Branham, a way for Jewish religious communities to map their post-Temple identity in meaningful historical terms.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, the fixed and immutable loci of the events of the Christian passion form the historical armature for the sanctity of place in Jerusalem, as Ousterhout demonstrates. Of course, not all appeals to memory need be historically based; architects in the premodern Mediterranean rely on the powerful adhesive of familiarity to fix recognizable actions, utterances, and forms into powerful new configurations in sacred landscapes. The monumental staircases of Hellenistic Greek sanctuaries both generate and facilitate procession; and when they are empty, the bear the memory of the processions past and those to come. In sum, by framing actions and creating social environments, architecture shapes and maintains memory.
Iconography and Signifiers. If spaces were crafted with the express and nonneutral aim of shaping sacred experience in sacred settings of the eastern Mediterranean, the manner in which the framing walls, colonnades, windows and doors were adorned was equally, and to modern eyes, more obviously charged. Studies of pagan, Jewish, and Christian sacred iconography are legion, but the authors in this volume bring new vigor to the enterprise by concentrating more specifically on the interaction of iconography, space, and movement. Perhaps the most overt declaration of iconography interacting both with place and participants can be found in the karyatids representing Eleusinian priestesses that mirror the procession of worshippers entering the sacred precincts of the City Eleusinion and the Sanctuary of Demeter at Eleusis, which Miles discusses. Equally declarative are the symbols of the cult - myrtle, wheat, boukrania, kistai, plemochoai, phialai - displaying in stone above the entrances the same objects that were plied back and forth by the cult personnel and participants. For Wescoat, it is the act of departing through the remarkable Corinthian fagade of the Propylon of Ptolemy II in the Sanctuary of the Great Gods that gives the order meaning. Similarly, Magness and Branham focus on the direct interaction of iconic imagery with the liturgical space of the early synagogue. In so doing Magness stands in sharp opposition to Elsner’ s pessimism that the focus on priestly rituals in the Dura paintings may have no connection with the activities within the building.
Other instances of iconographic signifiers may be more abstract (to our eyes) but no less powerful, especially when surrounding windows and doors, the most volatile parts of a sacred structure. Curcic, in an extraordinary bold stroke, locates powerful theological meaning in one of the most ubiquitous decorative forms of Byzantine architecture, which he has now named “radiant light.” Magness combines the painted imagery surrounding the Torah Shrine at Dura with the inscriptions on ceiling tiles to demonstrate priestly influence and connecting that, in turn, with the potential for apocalyptic expectations. Ousterhout reveals the way the Hagia Sophia itself becomes the sacred object, even an iconic image. While containing no significant relic and commemorating no important event, by dint of its audacious architectural expression, it came to be venerated by pilgrims. Implicit in all essays stands the notion that iconography facilitates the formation of cultural and religious identity; Branham draws these ideas out by exploring the way in which the strategy of mapping sacrifice from one object, person, or place to another transforms, reorients, and recreates early Christian and Jewish “theological cartography.”
Architecture and Ritual Accoutrement. Architecture does not operate independently of the humans who animate it and the accoutrement they use to communicate and accomplish sacred acts. The papers presented here do not focus on the archaeological accoutrement of cult, but in certain instances, the intersection of cult objects in archaeological contexts provides essential evidence for interpreting sacred space. In establishing the evidentiary base for hero-worship at Ilion from the inception of the Iron Age city, Rose points to the geometric pottery assemblages that signal feasting on circular platforms hard up against the Bronze Age wall of Troy. Miles combines the archaeological evidence for the ritual vessels known as plemochoai discovered in the City Eleusinion with the iconography of the Ninnion plaque and the representation of plemochoai on propylaia at both ends of the Sacred Way to establish a greater claim for the vessel in the rituals of the cult. Wescoat seeks to make sense of the extraordinary quantity of curiously shaped conical bowls found in the region of the Theatral Complex as evidence for cult activity in the entrance complex in the Sanctuary of the Great Gods. In a quite different trajectory, the lost accoutrement of ancient Jewish sacrifice - altar, thymiaterion, and incense - resurfaces metaphorically in the virtuous bodies of Christian widows and virgins.
Buildings, Actions, and Texts. The authors refrain from engaging the once popular and largely rhetorical strategy of ‘reading’ the building. As architectural historians, they appreciate that the act of reading a text is fundamentally different from the experience of architecture, which requires a radically different engagement with time, motion, and sensory perception.6 Curcic’s contribution most closely approaches Elsner’s urging to look again to the ancient texts “as a series of theological proposals instantiated through liturgical performance and ritual artifacts.” The nature of biblical theophany in both Old and New Testaments forms the theological proposal that Curcic finds instantiated in the three-dimensional “radiant frieze” framing first painted programs and ultimately windows, doors, and the upper zone of Byzantine churches. Rabbinical texts provide the theological framework within which Magness debunks notions that human bones in all contexts were impure. Yasin charts the transformations in the early Medieval sacred landscape at Cimitile/Nola’ with its dual sacred focal points through the synchronized evidences of architectural forms, Paulinus’s writings, and the inscriptions embedded in the fabric of the complex, which give directions to the pilgrims as to how to move, and where to look. The repeated textual invocation of sameness presented by ancient authors, set against literary description and archaeological evidence, leads Perry to question what is meant by sameness in a sacred context of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, and why being the same matters to the construction of sanctity in Rome’s oldest and most defining temple. Mining the typikon for religious establishments allows Marinis to identify the primary function of certain establishments, such as the church of St. John at the monastery tou LiboS’ and from there to conclusions regarding the divergent architectural designs within the monastery.
Architectural Process and the Cumulative Aspect of Sanctity. By and large, our way of understanding architecture centers on its culminating moment; we often cannot resist finding the accomplished program within the germinating idea. The classical Athenian Acropolis stands as a case in point, for the monuments are so artfully related that scholars find it hard to resist the idea that they must all have been part of a fully articulated ingenious master plan conceived c. 449 b. c.e., which was then faithfully executed over the second half of the fifth century, despite war, plague, and changing financial circumstances. However, the authors of this volume repeatedly point out the cumulative nature of architectural thinking and practice. As one architectural idea builds upon another, ritual experience is shaped and recrafted. The several monumental stairs and stoas at Lindos and Kos developed over two centuries; similarly, the full potential of a seamless grandstand and closed orchestra in the Theatral circle at Samothrace was not realized until after the open plan had been built and experienced. The monuments and memorials that form the “fingerposts” for Eleusis accumulate over centuries to shape the path of the second century c. e. initiate; those that define “Holy Troy” reach back to the Bronze Age.
With the striking exception of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (an outrageously bold and theoretically engendered project), Early Christian and Byzantine sacred places are in a constant state of architectural accumulation. With each addition or revision we witness a combination of practical response to circumstance (the pilgrims need to venerate the dead or witness the eucharist), a striving to define an idea (how to create the right spiritual conditions for witness; how to combine the polar experiences of eucharist and saint veneration), and the intense desire to lay claim to sacred experience. Paulinus, in fact, celebrates the virtue of accumulation by adding halls, joining buildings, and giving directions to the pilgrims that emphasize the rich experience of passing through and visually enjoying the several conjoined sacred spaces. The architecture of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre hardly survives the trauma of its accumulated sacredness. The point is that very few constructions of sanctity are found to be sufficiently perfect in the experiences and minds of their users to remain untouched. They do not hold satisfaction for very long; not because they are incomplete ideas or inferior executions but because the construction of sanctity cannot remain static. It exists in a constant state of revalorization, accomplished by the reenactment of rituals as part of religious expression and by the need to take ownership of sacred place and experience as a socially (Burkert would argue biologically) defining aspect of being human.7 Our interpretations, of course, contribute to that revalorization.
Notes
1. Much of Kyriakidis 2007 is devoted to the question of defining ritual, with very different views proposed. Elsner, here, addresses the fundamental concerns, and while he comes down on the somewhat more pessimistic side, we favor the more optimistic, e. g, Renfrew (2007). While fully recognizing that ritual plays a significant cultural role in nonsacred settings (we have all just finished witnessing the inauguration of the forty-fourth president of the United States), it is possible to distinguish between daily habits and customs, on the one hand, and ritual actions, on the other.
2. Smith 1987, pp. 103-4.
3. In his essay, Elsner notes the ritualization of things other than the sacred, e. g., power.
4. The concept has a rich philosophical tradition explored by M. Heidigger and H.-G. Gadamer, but as Lindsay Jones (2000 p. 45) writes, “Whether deriving this insight from [R.] Ingarden, [H.-G.] Gadamer, reader-response criticism, or elsewhere, we need to accept the profound ramifications of conceiving of peoples’ interactions with architectural works as dynamic, open-ended, interactive processes (or events) in which both buildings and beholders make substantial contributions and both are significantly transformed.”
5. Note the important study by Branham 1992.
6. See Lefebvre 1991, pp. 7, 143-4; Sullivan 1990. Reviewed by Jones 2000, pp. 121-33.
7. Burkert 1996.
Works Cited
Branham, J. R. 1992. “Sacred Space Under Erasure in Ancient Synagogues and Early Churches,” The Art Bulletin 74, pp. 375-94.
Burkert, W. 1996. Creation of the Sacred. Tracks of Biology in Early Religions, Cambridge, MA.
Jones, L. 2000. The Hermeneutics ofSacred Architecture. Experience, Interpretation, Comparison, Vols. 1-2, Cambridge, MA.
Kyriakidis E., ed. 2007a. TheArchaeology ofRitual, Los Angeles.
Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production ofSpace, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith, Oxford and Cambridge, MA.
Renfrew, C. 2007. “Archaeology of Ritual, of Cult and of Religion,” in Kyriakidis 2007, pp. 109-122.
Smith, J. Z. 1987. To Take Place; Toward a Theory ofRitual. Chicago.
Sullivan, L. E. 1990. “‘Seeking an End to the Primary Text’ or ‘Putting an End to the Text as Primary,’” in Beyond the Classics? Essays in Religious Studies and Liberal Education, ed. F. E. Reynolds and S. L. Burkhalter, Atlanta, pp. 41-59.
World History
