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Celebrating the Encaenia van St. Sophia in Constantinople: Liturgical Context, Literary Associations, and Ideological Significance of the Byzantine Diegesis.
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The central source of my doctoral thesis is a Byzantine narrative of the building of the Church of St. Sophia in Constantinople. Apart form this legendary text that is the focus of my research there are several textual sources from the literatures closely related to Byzantine that I shall utilise in my research: various Slavonic and Oriental (Armenian, Ethiopic, Arab-Jacobite etc.) texts, mostly hagiographic in nature. In addition, a number of art-historical data will be incorporated into the research as indispensable and, at times, extremely revealing evidence. In my dissertation I will approach the core narrative of the building of St. Sophia from the literary perspective analysing its content, vocabulary and structure in order to answer the questions of the purpose of its initial composition and the subsequent function of the story. I will undertake to interpret the meaning of the story by placing it in the context of relevant literary production and show that it manifests features common to a number of Byzantine and later Slavonic texts. Therefore, I will argue that the text in focus is a valuble speciment of a whole body of texts that were designed to serve as hagiographic narratives for feasts of church dedication. I will advance and elaborate a hypothesis that it is the feast of the inauguration of a newly built church-Christian roots of which originated in Jerusalem with the institution of the famous encaenia of the Martyrion and Anastasis complex by Constantine the Great-that should be connected with the production of a series of hagiographic texts appropriate for its commemoration. The account of building of St. Sophia, viewed in this context, sheds light into an aspect of the Byzantine ceremonial life that has not been well studied-the celebration of the church dedication was a significant feast in the life of the capital of the Byzantine empire that absorbed the elements of Jewish, Early Christian (Jerusalemite) and imperial rituals. Besides the introduction and conclusion, my dissertation will contain three main chapters. The first chapter will discuss the image of Justinian as represented in the narrative. I intend to show that the depiction of Justinian in the narthex of St. Sophia of Constantinople is closely connected with his image in the narrative of the building of this church; indeed, I believe that the famous mosaic must be preceded and, to a large degree, influenced by the legend. The second and the third chapters will focus on different aspects of the feast of the church dedication (history and ritual side of its celebration) as well as draw together liturgical and hagiographic texts related to the celebration of the feast. An adequate analysis and interpretation of the material should allow me to reconstruct the original purpose and function of the narrative of building of St. Sophia, to suggest a narrower dating of the text and to show that its content demonstrates more affinities with the contemporary ceremonial life (ninth century Constantinopolitan milieu) rather than with the real events of building and dedication of the Great Church by Justinian the Great in the sixth century.
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KOVALCHUK KATERYNA
Faculty of Arts
Doctoral Program in Language and Literature: Latin and Greek
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Project number:
3H060170
Duration of the project:
01.06.2006 - 24.11.2008
Funded research
Nederlands
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