In this paper I address the phenomenon of the Holy Fire and the hierotopical and art historical aspects of this great miracle of the Christian world. According to the belief of the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Fire descends every Great Saturday of Easter upon the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. It seems very significant that the Holy Fire was perceived as a kind of the most important relic, which could be preserved and transferred from Jerusalem to any other place. I will argue that there is a possibility to reconstruct the ritual, spatial and artistic environment, which came to being in conjunction with the Paschal miracle of the Holy Fire. Some particular rites are discussed: "Lo Scoppio del Carro" in Medieval Florence, ''les lanternes des morts" in France, Italy, Spain. As I have argued elsewhere, it was the cupola of the kouvouklion over the Holy Sepulchre that pre-destined the appearance of the onion-shaped domes A number of other sources, testifying to the influence of the Holy Fire are also discussed in the paper. All of them make it clear that the Miracle of the Holy Fire was a powerful, though nowadays underestimated, paradigm of the Christian visual culture, which exercised its influence on both iconographic devices and concepts of particular sacred spaces that played a crucial role in translations of New Jerusalems.

This paper examines the rhetorical capacity of architecture, and in particular, “the rhetoric of architecture” rather than the usually examined “rhetoric about architecture.” In this work, the rhetoric of architecture is understood as codified visual and architectural conventions as a series of transpositions that frame specific meanings other than and beyond visible and spatial. Here the proposed “rhetoric of architecture” is also more about its capacity as a “mnemonic tool” and about the “craft of composition” rather than about persuading others or about representation based on exact likeness. This concept is particularly significant in the creation of the sacred. By focusing on the architecture of the critical building of the Holy Sepulchre that enclosed the Tomb Shrine in Jerusalem as described by Patriarch Photios in the ninth and Abbot Daniel in the early twelfth centuries, this paper argues for the recognition of the mnemonic links that the Byzantines may have used not only for remembering the Tomb of Christ, but also for their several reconstructions of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem as well as for embedding the meaning of Jerusalem and New Jerusalem in their churches built elsewhere.

The complex of monastic buildings of Horomos is one of the largest in medieval Armenia and the whole Christian East. In the course of the study of Horomos, I paid particular attention to a number of buildings which marked the shaping of new architectural types: the fore-church hall called zhamatun; the entry arch with two chapels above the pylons; the two-story mausoleum with tree chapels above the liturgical hall; and hall-reliquaries. Such creativity was extremely rare for the medieval architectural tradition in Armenia, with its well-established typology and a limited number of architectural plans. In Horomos, however, there were not less than four new building plans, each of which initiated a new architectural type. The largest church of the monastery and the zhamatun are both dated to 1038 by an inscription that mentions the patron, Hovhannes Smbat Shahinshah Bagratouni. Like other twelfth- and thirteenth-century ‘copies’ of the Horomos zhamatun, most of which looked like covered cemeteries, that building may have had a funerary function, and was, probably, built as a royal mausoleum. The article analyzes the architecture of this 16-column hall. I will focus on the origin of this composition and to the carved decoration. Unlike traditional concepts of this architectural type’s development from local domestic architecture, I offer some architectural models that were based on new concepts: among these were the late antique churches of Armenia, such as Ejmiatsin cathedral and Zvartnots, and the Anastasis Rotunda. This research brings us closer to an understanding of the conceptual architectural idea that was shaped in the last years of the so-called “Armenian renaissance” of the end of the tenth and the first half of the eleventh century.

In this article, I discuss a proskynetarion icon of the Holy Land and Jerusalem, called the Kharetat al mousafer, located in Saydnaia Monastery in Syria. The relationship between pilgrimages and proskynetaria, which served as a tool of Christian propaganda, will be discussed with a focus on the Saydnaia proskynetarion as a case study, showing the way of the Melkite painter, Issa al-Qudsi depicted the Holy Land topography. In this icon, the Holy Sepulchre (Church of Resurrection) was also represented, opening a discussion around proskynetaria in Syria during the eighteenth century.

This essay explores the architectural history of Jerusalem in the Abbasid (751– 970) and Fatimid (970– 1036) periods. Compared to the time of the Umayyads (661– 750), Abbasid-era Jerusalem was characterized by a caliphal disinterest in the monuments of the holy city. However, it also saw growth in the identification between local populations and their respective religious monuments. This contest over sacred space culminated under the Fatimid dynasty, in the cataclysmic reign of al- Hakim bi- Amr Allah (r. 985– 1021), who is infamous today because he called for the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre. Indeed, al- Hakim’s incursion into the city was predominantly destructive. Nevertheless, his attention to the city would have productive results for eleventh- century Jerusalem. His successor, al- Zahir, was deeply invested in renovating the structures of the Haram al- Sharif, ushering in a chapter of architectural patronage and a resurgence of imperial interest in the structure. This essay argues that this patronage was carried out with the goal of undoing the excesses of al- Hakim’s reign. In al-Zahir’s reimagining of the sacred space, the platform’s architecture emphasized the orthodox Islamic tales of the Prophet’s night journey and ascension to heaven, in direct contrast to the perceived heresies of the later years of al- Hakim’s reign.

The rebuilding in 1040-48 of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,the holiest site in Jerusalem, is one of the most important events in medieval religious and political history. Its recognition in the Theodore Psalter, as marked in the illuminations on folios 128r and 36r, is therefore of considerable importance. The themes of Sion, Constantinople and Heavenly Jerusalem have been well established in the interpretation of the marginal psalters. This new evidence, suggesting that the rebuilding of the church was both acknowledged and celebrated in one of the most prestigious Byzantine manuscripts of the time, makes an important addition to prior analysis and to the understanding of Byzantine thinking in the mid-eleventh century.