The concerns of this interdisciplinary volume emerge from the intersection of the mobility “turn” originating in the social sciences and the study of sacred space that has been productive in Byzantine studies for several decades. Mobility, the ability to move or be moved, is an expansive theme that can be applied to far more than movement between geographic locations, but to every change and action, every thought or motion in the mind or imagination. Consequently, the essays in this book each analyze various types and multiple levels of mobility—from macro- to micromobilities and from physical to figurative mobilities—in relation to their chosen objects of study. The papers explore the mobilities of sacred spaces, objects, and people, and of cultural patterns and religious institutions.
A chronological order to the chapters provides structure, with the first four dealing with the Byzantine Empire or its medieval neighbors (Georgia and Edessa). David Williams’s essay on the conversion of churches into mosques provides a bridge into the post-Byzantine material that occupies the next five chapters and spans up to the present day. Byzantine culture and its legacy provide a throughline across all entries and connect the diverse locations and significant span of time covered in the volume.
The introduction by Veronica della Dora is wide-ranging and well-sourced. It gives a valuable historiographical overview both of the development of mobility studies and of scholarly interest in sacred space. The first section of the introduction considers major threads in Byzantine mobility studies, addressing relevant patterns of travel, navigation, and commerce and current concepts such as “glocalization” (9), “small world networks” (10), and more. The second section focuses on sacred space, treating the influence of Mircea Eliade and Emile Durkheim’s theories of religion, and the work by Alexei Lidov on hierotropy begun in the early 2000s. The third section centers on issues related to the mobility of sacra, typically relics or icons that were transported or that were moved by divine agency. Della Dora poses questions here that, even if not addressed directly by the essays that follow, are excellent calls to action for future scholarship, for example: “How are the mobilities of sacra, or linked to sacra, different from other types of mobilities? And how are Byzantine and post-Byzantine sacred mobilities distinctive? Can they be disentangled from other mobilities and secular infrastructures?” (5).
Bissera Pentcheva’s opening chapter contributes a sophisticated analysis of the katholikon of Hosios Loukas and its mosaics. This monastery is often illustrated but remains under-theorized, as the author notes, and this essay initiates welcome avenues for future investigation. The program emphasizes the Virgin and prophet Symeon as receptacles for the Logos, and in turn as models for Loukas’s holiness. This operation of “vesseling” informs many of the conceptual moves of the essay: reading the nesting architectural spaces of the church and concavities of squinches as containers for the divine, seeing the Hodegetria icon as a “channel” for Constantinopolitan tropes of imperial victory, and others. The essay invokes the concept of Bilderfahrzeug (image-vehicle), developed by Aby Warburg to designate recurrent visual forms that can contain new or changing content. This framing resonates with theological themes at the monastery, but risks portraying visual form as a passive shell for ideas and eliding the relationship between material form and meaning.
Ekaterine Gedevanishvili’s chapter turns to the mobility of texts and royal ideologies as they traveled from Byzantium to Georgia to explain the unique imagery of the church of St. George at Svip‘i. The painted façade shows Abraham above three military saints: George, Demetrios, and Theodore. Gedevanishvili presents a strong argument for imperial patronage at Svip‘i, as the centrality of Demetrios fits with his adoption as a dynastic symbol by David IV (1089-1125) of the Bagrationi dynasty, who named his son Demetre. Gedevanishvili lays out how the Bagrationis imitated imperial symbols and models used by the Byzantine emperors of the Macedonian dynasty: their association, first, with Demetrios, begun by Leo VI the Wise, and, second, with Old Testament leaders. The Bagrationi family went one step further and promoted itself as directly descended from King David. Gedevanishvili argues that the façade painting is a “visual summary” (92) of one of Leo the Wise’s homilies that compares Demetrios to Abraham, and that this text had become popular in Georgia by the time of the painting’s commission. In my view, it is not necessary to treat the façade’s image as an illustration of any specific text, of which, moreover, only one medieval Georgian translation is mentioned—rather, the façade’s combination of two symbols of divine dynastic protection and legitimacy fits within the larger symbolic appropriations outlined above.
The next essay, by Mark Guscin, also treats material whose imaginary and documented physical movements “were used to promote and justify religious, political and dynastic claims and policies” (106): in this case the Image of Edessa (Mandylion). First, the origins of the famed image are assessed, and Guscin stresses that its direct connection to Christ was used by the kingdom of Edessa to establish its special place in Christian history. As part of this discussion, Guscin argues for the presence of Christianity in Edessa during the second century, which may well be the case in some form. However, the author’s use of visual evidence to support this fact bears comment. Guscin asserts that coinage of Abgar the Great shows this king “clearly wearing” a cross on his crown (111). This fact is not clear at all: other coins of Abgar show starbursts or crosshatch designs in place of the simpler sign that could be mistaken for a cross on some examples. Even if Abgar was ever personally a Christian, the use of the plain cross as a royal emblem would be unlikely given what we know about the development of Christian visual culture around the Mediterranean. [1] A fountain in the Historical Museum in Şanlıurfa should also not be used as evidence for the presence of Christianity in Edessa “by the beginning of the second century” (67), as it certainly dates later based on both style and iconography. The implications of theacheiropoieton for controversies over the nature of Christ are interesting to raise, but no instances where the image actually plays a role in the debates is provided. The Mandylion also seems to have played a far less important role in iconoclastic debates about images than one would expect or than the author suggests, [2] and only one textual source is given in the section on this topic. The fact that the stories describe Christ as impossible for Abgar’s envoy to represent and the image as only visible to those with proper spiritual understanding (as in the Symeon Magister story) complicates the author’s reading of the Mandylion as a straightforward representation of Christ’s human form. The portions that deal with the political uses of the image’s movements are the stronger parts of this essay, though Guscin’s interpretations of this enigmatic object fit well with the volume’s themes.
Mihail Mitrea’s chapter tracks “spiritual geographies” (130) in the hagiographic literature of two contested Byzantine saints, Patriarch Athanasios I and Gregory Palamas. These literary geographies include the spatial distribution of miracles, believers’ travels to shrines, imagined pilgrimages, and dream apparitions. A second theme of the chapter is kinesics, or gestures and postural movements, and the author provides pages of tables comparing the miracles by beneficiary, ailment, and movements and gestures performed. The hagiographic texts in turn work to expand relevant spiritual geographies through promotion of the saints, with Mitrea concluding that Kokkinos’s miracle collection for Palamas weaves a more compelling spatial pattern and richer description of bodily movement and expression than does Theoktistos’s Oration on the translation of Athanasios’s relics. More explanation of how effective these texts were, respectively, in spreading these cults would be welcome, as of how their spatial patterns may differ due to genre (Theoktistos’s focus is on the relics; Kokkinos’s text is a Life).
David Williams next examines the role of evolving narratives in the conversion of two churches (Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and the Church of St. John in Damascus) into mosques when those monuments passed from Byzantine into Ottoman and Umayyad control. Williams uses Lidov’s influential concept of hierotropy, which understands the construction of sacred space as an ongoing creative process, and effectively emphasizes the role of narrative in creating and converting pre-Islamic sacred spaces. Foundation narratives inserted Muslim figures into the mythical histories of pre-Islamic buildings, tombs of holy Muslims were “discovered” in Christian locations, and real and imagined relics of importance to Islam were incorporated into buildings. Such narratives legitimized Muslim ownership and re-created these spaces as sacred for Islamic believers. The theme of mobility appears in the transfer of relics and the movement of narratives.
Chrysovalantis Kyriacou’s entry begins a series of chapters on post-Byzantine Orthodox material. After introducing mobility’s impact on the social landscape of multifaith Cyprus under the Franks, Venetians, and then Ottomans, this chapter looks at the individual life histories of two Cypriot ecclesiastics for how they expressed multilayered identities when moving across different contexts. Kyriacou treats the two clerics as cases of “exceptional normality,” (203) a term used by microhistorians to describe edge cases that nonetheless reveal general truths about an area or group. The main sources mobilized are the “egodocuments” (204), i.e., autobiographical or self-referential texts, composed by the two men. An additional theme drawn out of the two lives is the persistent legacy of Byzantium, especially in the form of Orthodox Christianity, as a cultural and religious unifier around the Mediterranean.
Molly Greene uses the written sources preserved in the monasteries of the modern prefectures of Evrytania and Trikala in the southern Pindos mountains to open “a valuable window into the historical experience of mobilities in upland areas during the Ottoman centuries” (240). These monasteries were largely founded between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and, as Greene demonstrates, in proximity to preexisting villages and routes of travel. Monastic institutions facilitated mobility in the mountains, building infrastructure, attracting pilgrims, and providing hospitality (sometimes begrudgingly, as a poem by an aggrieved abbot attests). With this data, Greene argues convincingly against prevailing assumptions that mountains were regions of limited mobility and that monastic foundations were remote and isolated.
Maria Litina next studies the relationships between metochia (dependencies) of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher between 1845 and 1900. This network, which developed to compensate for the loss of patronage by the Byzantine emperors, extended the power and fundraising ability of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem into Constantinople and across the Balkans. Litina draws on sources in the Patriarchal Archive to understand how “the metochia network enabled the mobility of people, sacred objects and money over an extended geographical area that transcended ethno-linguistic boundaries” (262-63). Although the author notes that involvement with the metochia could be “an important investment not only for this life but also after-life” (263), the chapter continues the previous chapter’s focus on physical movement and the economic and social functions, i.e., profane activities, of religious foundations.
Jerusalem also appears as a central node in the chapter by Rehav (Buni) Rubin, which covers two genres of Orthodox pilgrimage art (proskynētaria) made in Jerusalem during the centuries of Ottoman control. Proskynētaria booklets, some illustrated, described sacred sites of the Holy Land in a geographical order that mirrored pilgrimage routes. A subtype of proskynētaria icons presents the sacred topography of the Holy Land from an Orthodox point of view. These icons were produced on canvas and could be rolled for transport—the ultimate portable memorabilia. Rubin considers both artistic genres as “map-icons” (306) for the concept of sacred space they present: this is “a conceptual image of a strictly Orthodox devotional cityscape” (309), with Muslim control erased and elements of daily and residential life invisible. The essay thus treats the cartographical presentation of space in pilgrimage art and the mobilities of pilgrims and their souvenirs in spatial as well as virtual pilgrimages.
The final essay, by Christos Antonios Kakalis, investigates the mobilities embodied by the contemporary iconostasis built for the Orthodox Community of St. Andrew in Edinburgh. Following a history of icon screens and their liturgical function, the first section of the chapter draws on anthropological theories of ritual to understand the icon screen as a threshold or limen, a liminal zone separating the sanctuary and the nave and sacred space from profane space. This line of demarcation, though, is necessarily permeable, and its ritual crossings during the liturgy serve to integrate the church and connect the congregation with the divine. Dynamic connections also flow through the second portion of the chapter, in which Kakalis presents a biography of the iconostasis as an evolving object that combines the artistic efforts and personal stories of the multinational congregation who hail from the United Kingdom and across Europe. The two parts of the chapter are successfully linked through use of assemblage theory, in which an assemblage is conceptualized as a dynamic network always in the process of transformation based on the relations of its components. Mobility is the force that activates these complex connections.
Andrew Louth’s afterword asks the reader to reflect on how ancient concepts of space and time—the component elements of mobility—may differ from modern notions that reduce space and time to “measurable parameters: the three dimensions of space and the single direction of time” (340). Louth describes late antique and medieval experience of space and time as encapsulated by Plato’s discussion in the Timaeus, where space is not an arena for geometrical movement but a receptacle in which all change and becoming occurs. Space and time gain spiritual importance in the Platonic view of the cosmos, in which the universe is composed interconnected parts whose relationships contain meaning and reflect divine order.
The question of how culture shapes experiences of mobility is of great importance, and the paradigms put forward by Louth illuminate new aspects of the premodern material covered in the volume—they work particularly well alongside portions of Pentcheva’s argument. Later chapters, though, treat objects and events from after the early modern scientific revolution, the turning point Louth names for the beginning of the modern view. How do these ancient concepts inform modern ideas about mobility, and are modern ideas about space and time indeed so limited? Louth closes out the volume with the provocative implication that something of premodern experiences of space and time persist in the modern world in religious settings. This is a very brief point that I wish was argued further, as it comes closest to answering some of the thoughtful questions raised by Della Dora in the introduction about the shared distinctiveness of the sacred mobilities explored in the wide-ranging chapters, good as these chapters are in their own right.
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Notes:
1. See Robin M. Jensen’s important study on the sign of the cross: The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), esp. 66: “Thus, despite the importance of making the sign of the cross in everyday religious practice or in tracing it on the foreheads of the newly baptized, early Christians did not--to any significant degree--incorporate plain crosses in their homes, tomb epitaphs, or even on small personal objects (rings, dishware, clothing). It would be the middle of the fourth century before crosses began to show up to any extent on such objects. Rather, these early believers favored devices like doves, anchors, or fish, which presumably alluded to the cross without actually depicting it.”
2. Argument made by Karin Krause in Divine Inspiration in Byzantium Notions of Authenticity in Art and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), at 278.