Early Christian Architecture

Preface; I. Introduction: I.1 Prelude "To Imitate the Bees"; I.2 Towards an Interpretation of Spolia: Delimitations and Methods; I.3 Reuse The Development of a New Architectural Practice; II. Translatio of Materials: II.1 Fragments and Fragmentation. The Disposition of Spolia in Church Buildings; II.2 Translations and Transferences: Christian Versions of Roman Architecture; II.3 The Aesthetics of Appropriation Eclecticism, Variety, and Antithetical Harmonies; III. Translatio of Meanings: III.1 Breaking Down the Past Rejections of Rationality; III.2 "Seeing the invisible" Towards a New Metaphorical Architecture; III.3 To "Strip Error Bare" The Rhetoric of Transformation; IV. Translatio of Time: IV.1 "Novelty in the Old and Age in the New". The Rhetoric of Renovation; IV.2 Recollecting the Past Spolia and Historical Consciousness; IV.3 Inventing the Past: Spolia and the Ideology of Classicism; Bibliography; List of Illustrations; Photo Credits; Index.

This papers examines three early Christian memorial sites in Jerusalem and Bethlehem (church of the Nativity, Eleona church on the Mount of Olives, and Church of the Resurrection) erected in the 330s in the time of Constantine the Great and his mother Helena. All three churches included rock caves as memorial sites. The paper shows that the three differing variants of architectural staging of these caves within the memorial buildings weren‘t merely architectural attempts found within the framework of a process of architectural innovation, when it was a matter of finding adequate settings for a successful and rapidly expanding religious community and its places of remembrance.
The architectural analyses of the three building concepts provide specific insights into the ideas of the appropriate spatial and medial staging of a 'sacred place'. I suggest that the architectural presentation of the cave spaces within the new buildings was linked to the semantics of pre-Christian places of worship, in order to create an associative  context to the commemorated events easily recognizable by a contemporary visitor.

The following newly discovered epigraphic monuments from Doliskana Church in historical Klarjeti are presented in the paper: inscription on the west tympanum (revealed due to chipping of plaster), fragments of inscriptions on arches of the dome’s drum, and an explanatory inscription on a wall painting (on the south façade, at the right side of the entrance). According to the author, the first two inscriptions should have been patronage inscriptions linked with the first stage of construction work in the first half of the 10th century. Inscription on the tympanum was purposely plastered over and covered with painting. The stones bearing the inscriptions, traced on the dome, are the reused stones. The above-mentioned facts generate suspicion that at the final stage of construction work a special attempt was made to wipe out the existing initial patronage documentation with the purpose of presenting king Sumbat as the sole building patron. Could this have resulted from political and intradynastic rivalry with the first stage patron of Doliskana? (The latter could have been Sumbat’s elder brother Bagrat (937-945) or a predecessor ruler).

Bronze finds from the apse of the early Christian basilica, atop of which was built Saint Sophia’s church in Thessaloniki, are presented and discussed. Namely, a hammered cross-shaped, bronze polycandelon with three of its original glass lamps, and a monumental cast bronze
arch decorated with a wine scroll stemming from a kantharos vessel, and the last part of the dedicatory inscription, “ἀνέθετο”. The arch was probably decorating a ciborium over the Holy Table or a reliquary, or the entrance of the chancel screen, over which was probably set the polycandelon. The church was destroyed by an earthquake and the precious bronze finds were not recovered, as were not recovered the massive bronze polycandelon chains which had been found at the middle of the church’s central nave in older excavations. The finds present the most important surviving works of the local metalworking trade of the late 5th or 6th c.

A scripture guide with links, to bring an individual to the point of deciding to be baptized in order to become a Christian. All photos were personally taken by the author. Permission is granted to freely print and distribute this publication.

In the areas of Northern Illyricum more than 100 Early Christian churches were registered, but only a small number of them has been archeologically explored. The largest amount of data was obtained in the last decades, most prominently from the areas of Naissus, Remesiana, Turres, at the sites of fortified hillforts of the Western or Southern Serbia, as well as the areas along the Danubian limes. 
The discovered glass lamps belong to the most frequent types of cylindrical, conical of hemispherical vessels, with a hollow foot or a button-shaped bottom. The glass window panels suggest a wide-spread tendency of recycling raw materials – mostly of a relatively poor quality. The archaeological and archaeometric researches have provided certain indications on the existence of local glass workshops, which were able to meet the needs of the local population for objects made of glass, possibly used in the sacral context as well.

The largest city necropolis of Naissus in the period of Late Antiquity was formed east of the fortress, along the road to Ratiaria. Since it is located in today’s city quarter of Jagodin Mala, it became known by that name in the literature. In Late Antiquity, this area had been used intensively for burials, from the end of the 4th century to the 6th or beginning of the 7th century.

During the systematic exploration of this area, five church edifices, a crypt (martyrium?), over 65 brick lined tombs, a large number of brick lined graves and around 300 graves of the deceased, interred in the ground, have been identified. Between the tombs and in the free spaces, the deceased were buried in simple grave holes or in wooden coffins. The area has revealed different types of sepulchral structures, building methods, and materials that were used, as well as the funeral practices of the inhabitants of Naissus in Late Antiquity, during Early Christianity. The wealth of grave goods and inventory suggests that the population lived in a time of social and economic prosperity.

أحمد أمين، العمارة المسيحية المبكرة، سلسلة كراسات قبطية، العدد الخامس، برنامج الدراسات القبطية، مكتبة الإسكندرية (الترقيم الدولي: 978-977-452-314-3)
ملخص
يلقى هذا الكتيب الضوء على العمارة المسيحية المبكرة كمدخل لدراسة العمارة القبطية؛ حيث يمكن فهم خصوصية العمارة القبطية بعد استيعاب القواسم المشتركة وأوجه التمايز بين العمارة المسيحية المبكرة فى كافة أرجاء البلاد التى انتشرت بها المسيحية، والتى كانت خاضعة فى هذه الفترة للإمبراطورية الرومانية.
وتناول الكتيب السياق التاريخى للمسيحية المبكرة، ومفهوم مكان العبادة فى هذه الفترة منذ نشأتها. وتطور مكان العبادة بداية من العلية مرورا بالكنيسة المنزلية و حتى الكنائس العامة. وناقش الكتيب كذلك عمارة الكنائس عصر الإمبراطور قسطنطين والذى شكلت فترة حكمه نقطة تحول محورية فى تاريخ المسيحية بصفة عامة، والعمارة المسيحية المبكرة موضوع الكتيب بصفة خاصة.
وتطرق الكتيب لطرز وأنماط تخطيط الكنائس فى العمارة المسيحية المبكرة، مع إلقاء نظرة سريعة على أصول وتطور هذه التخطيطات، وأشهر النماذج لها.
وعرض الكتيب لموضوع البازيليكا المزدوجة كشكل معمارى ميز الفترة المبكرة،مسترشدا بالدراسات الأكاديمية وأعمال الحفائر الحديثة، لاستكمال الفجوة فى مكتبتنا العربية بصفة عامة، ومناهج دراسة العمارة المسيحية فى تخصصات الآثار وتاريخ الفن على وجه الخصوص.
وأشار الكتيب فى نهايته باختصار إلى العلاقة بين تخطيط الكنائس والوظيفة، وإلى آلية بناء الكنائس وتمويلها.

Three independent converging lines of physical evidence support a preliminary interpretation of Irish Early Christian occupation at the Gungywamp site, Groton, Connecticut:

-Calibrated Carbon-14 date to mid 6th century AD.
-Hiberno-Latin "nomina sacra" petroglyphs.
-Calendrically oriented drywall oratory architecture.

The Lives of Holy Bishops of Cherson are the most famous hagiographic works in the “Crimean mediaeval cycle.” This volume analyses their versions in Greek (nine texts),
Church Slavonic (nine texts), Armenian (two texts) and Georgian (two texts).
      The complex of main points of the source: 1) indication of a “burial outside the city”;2) “topic with resurrection of a child through the sacrament of baptism”; 3) Jerusalem origin of Christianity in Cherson; 4) absence of miracles post-mortem; 5) parallels with the Life of John of Gothia; 6) the source keeps silence about the tradition of veneration of the holy bishops in Cherson (but only contemporarily with the author of the Life);
7) obvious controversy between the account of the Life and Chapter 53 of Constantine Porphyrogenetos’ De Administrando Imperio; 8) irregular information of the bishops – all
these allow us to suggest that the Lives of Bishops of Cherson, or at least their variant that became a source for all known versions, originated in the Iconoclastic period.
Possibly, the origin of the Lives is connected to the formation of new bishopric system in the Crimea in the Iconoclastic period. This was the impact for the appearance of local
hagiography.
The so-called “four-apsidal church” is the only object, which relation to the hagiographic story is almost generally accepted, in contrast to acute discussion on the
connection between other sites and place-names of the Lives.      The chronology of building of the four-apsidal church is reliably determined according to the chronology of levelling
layers within the limits of the late second and third quarter of the sixth century. The church existed for a relatively short period, to 880s, that makes its attribution as the martyrium of
St. Capiton doubtful. The kiln for baking lime (no. 1) below the church fl oor has nothing to do with it: it coincidence to “Capiton’s church” is accidental. Architecture of the church does not give reason to interpret this tetraconch of Cherson as a martyrium.  The idea that there was relation between the shape of tetraconch and martyrium is a mistake.
Archaeological context does not have evidences of pilgrimage to this church. However,the size of the Cherson church makes it unique among simple tetraconchs. Its buildingcertainly was an important event in the church history of Cherson. The silence of sources and lack of epigraphic monuments do not allow us to build hypotheses concerning thesaint to whom this church was dedicated. Hypothetically, we can interpret this church as
the fi rst stage of rapid development of architecture that started in Cherson and its environs 10 or 20 years after its construction. texts), Armenian (two texts), and Georgian (two texts).

"Remains of an Early Christian basilica, in today’s church of San Lorenzo
in Lucina in Rome, were identified in the 1930s by Richard Krautheimer
during his work on the second volume of Corpus basilicarum Christianarum
Romae.1 In the Corpus, Krautheimer made a detailed survey of
all the elements belonging to the Early Christian basilica which were
known in those days. More recent excavations and research since the
early 1980s have uncovered previously unknown elements of the Early
Christian basilica, which make it possible to make a more detailed reconstruction of its original shape. While it is possible to trace the church
of San Lorenzo in Lucina back to circa AD 600 in various sources, it is
not possible to identify it with certainty in sources earlier than this date,
but the basilica, often attributed to Pope Sixtus III (432–440), could
instead be identified with the basilica Lucinae where Pope Damasus was
elected in 366."

Acheiropoietos basilica comprises a phenomenally preserved, typical example of the threeaisled timber-roofed Hellenistic-type basilica with narthex and galleries, thus fitting more than any of the Thessalonican monuments to the standardized Early Byzantine ecclesiastical architecture.
Due to the overall symmetry of its architectural form and the presumable homogeneity of its original sculptural decoration, Acheiropoietos is usually considered as the last maintained architectural composition of the city that still echoes the aesthetics of the Late Antiquity.
However, based on a recent architectural and sculptural analysis of the monument, it occurs that Acheiropoietos was originally erected as a m Roman-type basilica without galleries during the last decade of the fifth  or the first decade of the sixth century (ca. 500). Even though the ground-plan of the church remained unaltered through the ages, its upper-structure was later remodeled. The galleries, a not surviving clerestory and extended annexes were added during the first —among many— structural restoration of the building that took place during the seventh century, as a result of the 620-630 series of earthquakes that devastated large part of the city along with its main urban infrastructure and ecclesiastical monuments.
Based on this new evidence, the present paper presents the various architectural sculptures of the basilica as: (a) a variety of bases of both the classical and the simplified variations of the attic-ionic type, (b) various column shafts, (c) the largest maintained group of twenty nine composite capitals with double fined-toothed acanthus leaves at the tribelon, the nave and the outer-narthex colonnade that beyond their superficial uniformity are divided in four subgroups, (d) various subtypes of the Impost-ionic capitals at the south gallery colonnade, (e) the twenty nine decorated impost-blocks that crown the composite capitals of the nave colonnades, (f) the consoles that support the traverse arches of the narthex, as well as (g) a variety of different type cornices adorning the masonry of the segmental apse and the nave arcades.
At the same time the several types of Constantinopolitan mason marks that connect the primary architectural sculptures of the main nave with specific imperial sculptural workshops of the sixth century are discussed.
Based on this recent study, the architectural sculptures of the gallery level, that until recently were encountered as parts of the original building, have been re-dated and attributed to its second phase. At the same time, several, unobserved until now, characteristics of those at the ground level—apparently belonging to the first phase sculptural decoration of the basilica— showcase that they were not tailor-made for the late fifth-early sixth century basilica; on the contrary they consist of (a) ready-made architectural sculptures, made with proconesian marble in Constantinopolitan workshops, (b) lower-quality sculptures of local workshops made with white coarse-grained marble form the Thassian quarries at Alyki, and (c) secondary, mostly undecorated, architectural members as imposts and thresholds that were cut on the building site from marble sarcophagi, looted from the abandoned Late Roman cemeteries of the city.

Bishop Fructuous and his deacons
Augurius and Eulogius were executed
in the year 259 in the Tarraco
amphitheatre. Two superimposed
churches are located in this area. The
upper church dates to the 12th century
and the lower was built in late 6th
century or early 7th century. The latter
features three naves, a sanctuary,
ambon choir and an adjacent room
which served as preparatorium,
mausoleum and baptistery. A great
construction effort was made to place
the temple in the exact space of the
martyrdom as it was necessary to lay
the foundations for its structures at the
bottom of the fossae. The basilica
exploited most building elements from
the Late Imperial period of the
amphitheatre and other buildings in the
city. The metrological study of the
temple shows that it was designed
based on meditated technical and
theological criteria applying a holy
mathematics in keeping with the
thought of Augustine of Hippo and
Isidore of Seville.

Belief in the presence of malevolent spirits residing in the
ruins of abandoned cult buildings is an enduring theme in religious history. This short magazine article provides an introduction to the architectural, structural and sociological aspects of temple destruction and conversion in the late antique period.

"Entendiendo el arte como una manifestación de la actividad del ser humano, enmarcada en el tiempo y lugar en que se lleva a cabo y con una finalidad comunicativa con diversos propósitos, el Arte Paleocristiano engloba todas aquellas expresiones artísticas que se dieron allá donde el Cristianismo Primitivo, el cristianismo de los primeros siglos de nuestra era, tuvo presencia."

*****

"Understanding art as a manifestation of the activity of the human being, framed in the time and place in which it is carried out and with a communicative purpose for various purposes, the Paleochristian Art encompasses all those artistic expressions that occurred there where Early Christianity, Christianity of the first centuries of our era, had a presence. "

Master's thesis with a focus on the developments that have led to the acceptance of the use of spolia in early Christian Church buildings in Rome (300-600 A.D.), as well as whether the practice of reuse matched the ideologies as they are presented in the written sources.

The largest necropolis of Naissus (modern Niš, Serbia) in the late antiquity period was formed on the right bank of the river Nišava, east of the fortification, along the road that led to Ratiaria. It is located on the site of today's city district of Jagodin Mala, after which it became known in literature. This area had been intensively used for burials from IV to the end of VI or beginning of VII century.
The necropolis of Naissus in Jagodin Mala represents a well organized cemetery, with regular rows of graves and tombs, whose number is the largest in the vicinity of grave basilicas, which were erected at a small distance one from another. Five such buildings were registered so far by the archaeological research and the most important one is the basilica with a crypt (V-VI c.).
The most  luxury grave constructions belong to barrel vaulted tombs and tombs with arcosolia and calotte, sometimes decorated with wall painting (representations of St Paul and St Peter, IV-V c.; Christ monogram in the laurel wreath, cca 382 AD; etc). Richness of the grave goods and inventory indicates that city population lived in socially and economically prosperous times.