Abstract
AbstractThe Mani Peninsula is home to hundreds of Orthodox Christian churches that were built within the last millennium. As in other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean countryside, the topological relationship between churches and settlements is a critical factor in understanding the significance of the sacred landscape. Many churches are situated in the central part of a village or on its very edge, but others – what are referred to as “outlying churches” orexokklisia– are built at great distances away. In this paper, we make the first attempt to assess the spatial relationship between the spaces where people worshipped (the churches) and the spaces where they lived (the settlements) at a regional scale, focused specifically on the Middle Byzantine period and later (mid-9th century CE to the present day). Comparing these patterns across the Byzantine, Ottoman, and Modern periods allows us to frame Mani’s sacred infrastructure within a changing, diachronic perspective. The results point to a change in the topological relationship between church and settlement that is best described as the “nucleation of the sacred landscape.”
Highlights
Churches and other forms of sacred infrastructure are the physical manifestation of a broader and, at times, less tangible sacred landscape
The mean distance between newly founded churches and their nearest settlements decreased over time, from 345 m in the Byzantine period to 301 m in the Ottoman period, and 209 m in the Modern period
The exploratory spatial analysis presented here suggests that the sacred landscape of the southern Mani peninsula was transformed over the course of the past millennium
Summary
Churches and other forms of sacred infrastructure are the physical manifestation of a broader and, at times, less tangible sacred landscape. We investigate the spatiality of sacred infrastructure as a means of understanding the transformation of a sacred landscape over the long term. While location can mean many things, in this paper we use the term to refer to the topological relationship between churches and permanent settlements. In rural areas of the Eastern Mediterranean where Byzantine Orthodox Christianity once prevailed, churches can be located within the heart of a settlement, on the settlement’s outskirts, or in remote places kilometers away from the nearest living person. These latter types of churches are commonly referred to in Greece as exokklisia (outlying churches). In the words of Yaeger and Canuto, a community is “an ever-emergent social institution that
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