Archaeology Magazine - June 1949 - 45

Summeriq¿q
churches. The mass began to be celebrated reguwere added as
larly in them, and baptisteries
Liturannexes in the outer parts of the buildings.
blended
with
thus
these
were
martyria
gically,
their
further
increase
still
To
churches.
ordinary
points of similarity with such churches, the mausoleums which were shrines of saints were placed in
the interior of cities, not merely without the walls,
It is certain that this process
as in the beginning.
fifth
in
the
century, that is to sayf before
began
the same thing was done in western Europe.
Finally, it is probable that the custom of dividing
up the bodies of saints and of dispersing fragments
of relics, in the Asiatic provinces, also helped in
the moving of the martyria of the saints into the
interior of cities. All churches possessing these
relics were and at the same time were not sepulchral shrines; and the sanctuary, in a real cemetery at the gates of a city, which originally contained the real and unique tomb of the saint, was
no longer distinguished from other churches dedicated to the same saint which possessed a tiny
fragment of his relics.
This leveling has undeniable importance, architecturally, because the numerous churches named
for saints which were built in the interior of cities
in Syria, Asia Minor, and Constantinople,
beginning with the opening of the sixth century, were
already churches and not simply commemorative
But they reproduced
faithfully the
martyria.
different types of plans established for mausoleumand adopted their vaults and their
martyria,
domes.
In other words, the history of the memoriae of
the Holy Land, and that of the martyria of holy
bodies in the East in general, jointly promoted,
though in different ways, the preservation and the
of the cult building of domed cenpopularization
tral plan, and the spread of these architectural
in conforms to ordinary churches.
Moreover,
trast to what happened to the comparable architecture of the ancient Christian baptisteries, which
disappeared with the last monumental baptisteries,
in the Christian East the architectural types of the
memoriae and 'the martyria survived these buildings themselves, once they had been transferred to
churches designed for ordinary worship.
Thus, from the architectural
point of view,
the
sixth century,
with
these churches, beginning
well-estabthe
of
various
are simply reproductions
Created
.
memoriae
lished types of martyria or
with a view to a specific religious function, these

101
types were handed over to sanctuaries which had
a different function - that of the ordinary church
- while at the same time the latter progressively
abandoned the basilican forms which thus far had
been peculiar to them. It is well known that the
abanmediaeval
Byzantine Empire practically
doned the use of the basilica with a wooden roof,
and that in consequence it also gave up the simultaneous use of the two parallel traditions, that of
the basilica and that of the domed central plan.
It was the latter tradition alone which was maintained iti the Byzantine Empire and became the
predominant one down to modern times (Figure
9) . The influence of Neoplatonic ideas (through
the writings of Pseudo-Dionysios
Areopagitica
to the
and his school) had surely contributed
success of the type in its use as an ordinary church
by considering it as an imitation of the Universe.
been
as has just
architecture,
that
as
Latin said, did not develop in the same way
the
of
It did not adopt the forms
of the East.
reand
martyria for ordinary liturgical churches,
mained faithful to the traditional basilica throughout the Middle Ages.
Naturally we would like to know the reason
for this divergent attitude, which was destined to
cause a progressive increase in the differences be-

Fig. 9. Sketch of the elevation of the Church
of "Hosios David" at Thessalonica, probably
actually a martyrium of the prophet Zacharias,
dating from the fifth century.

Archaeology Magazine - June 1949

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - June 1949