Cochran, Daniel C

A Sacred Contest in a Contested Space: A Case Study of the Appropriation and Reuse of the Temple of Apollo at Didyma Daniel C. Cochran University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Art History The Life of St. Porphyry paints a vivid picture of the bishop of Gaza leading his band of Christians in the destruction of the Great Temple of Zeus Marnas. After they tore the temple to its foundations, Porphyry ordered the marble slabs from the temple’s sacred cella be used to pave the forecourt in front of the church “so that the stones would be permanently desecrated by men, women, dogs, and pigs.” Although scholars have long recognized the polemical nature of such hagiographic texts, the ubiquitous descriptions of aggression and hostility towards pagan structures continue to engender a simplistic and inaccurate picture of appropriation, as if a church served as a lifeless marker of Christian territory. Individual case studies of temple appropriation that take seriously how churches functioned as sites of liturgical worship reveal that this was instead an incredibly complex phenomenon that was conducted and understood by its perpetrators and victims in a wide variety of ways depending on local and regional contexts. This scholarship has emphasized the complex and often ambiguous relationship between Christianity and paganism, revealing that pagan practices and beliefs survived alongside Christianity far into the late antique world, heavily influencing Christian ritual, art, and theology. These new insights have radical implications for the study of temple appropriation. Rather than focusing on the appropriated building as a product of Cochran 1 Christian triumphalism, it is now possible to examine how the placement and design of a temple-church, along with the performance and interpretation of its liturgy, shaped what Alexei Lidov calls “a vivid, spiritually intensive, and concretely influential environment.”1 As part of a larger project, this paper attempts to contribute to this exciting area of research by presenting a case study of the appropriation of the Didymaion—the great oracular sanctuary of Apollo at Didyma in southwest Turkey (Figure 1). My objective today is twofold: first, I argue that the church constructed on the site of the Didymaion was designed to accommodate the processional liturgy that originated in Constantinople and eventually spread south to the Aegean coast of Asia Minor during the mid-sixth century. Second, I suggest that the performance and interpretation of this liturgy provides a convincing explanation for why the church was constructed in this particular location. While traditional academic studies tend to view examples of temple appropriation as simply displays of Christian power, my conclusion suggests that the Christians at Didyma appreciated the temple in which they built their church as a powerful, living monument that was incorporated into their liturgical worship and sense of communal identity. The historian Procopius writes that during the reign of Justinian it was impossible either to build or restore a church except with imperial support, not only in Constantinople but elsewhere in the empire. While surely exaggerated, this claim reflects 1 Alexei Lidov, “Hierotopy: The Creation of Sacred Spaces as a Form of Creativity and Subject of Cultural History,” in Hierotopy: The Creation of Sacred Spaces in Byzantium and Medieval Russia, (Moscow: Indrik, 2006): p. 39. Cochran 2 Justinian’s aspirations for unity in church design, liturgical practice, and theological belief. Justinian’s efforts are particularly apparent along the Aegean coast in the southwest of Turkey. Prior to the sixth century, the majority of Christian churches in this region were built in either Western, Syrian or Greek architectural styles. In addition to a sense of political and economic stability, Justinian introduced into this region the unique ecclesiastical architecture that had developed in Constantinople. Richard Krautheimer was the first to provide a survey of the numerous churches sponsored or commissioned by Justinian, but his work focused almost exclusively on the provincial capitals of Ephesus, Sardis and Aphrodisias. I suggest that the church built within the Didymaion, while certainly lesser known than Justinian’s church of St. John outside Ephesus, is yet another product of the emperor’s massive building campaign. While a small Christian presence at Didyma is reported as early as the second century, it was not the reign of Justinian that this community emerged as a powerful religious, political and artistic center. It was Justinian who promoted Didyma to civic status, bestowed upon them the new name of Justinianopolis, and, most importantly, awarded them the status of bishopric.2 Shortly thereafter, Didyma successfully petitioned the emperor to permanently relieve them of an expensive land tax, and an inscription honoring Justinian excavated near the apse of the church suggests that this monetary stimulus allowed for the construction of the church itself (Figure 2). 2 Stephen Mitchell, A History of the Later Roman Empire AD 284-641: The Transformation of the Ancient World, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007): p. 177. Cochran 3 Clear similarities in architectural design further connect the church at Didyma with the basilicas of Constantinople (Figures 3-5). The two most significant similarities are the axial alignment of the main entrances into the church and the absence of barriers separating the aisles and the nave. Both of these features originated in Constantinople alongside the city’s unique processional liturgy.3 Christian communities throughout the Mediterranean incorporated processions into their liturgical worship, but most excluded the laity and the catechumens from participation. These individuals were often relegated to the aisles of the church by means of a raised stylobate or a screen, behind which they awaited the procession of the clergy into the nave. In contrast, the early-Byzantine liturgy that developed in Constantinople encouraged the laity to process into the church alongside the clergy. The nature of this procession, aptly known as the First Entrance, required the portal leading from the atrium into the narthex of the church be aligned with the entrance into the nave so that the procession could proceed into the church uninhibited. Furthermore, this unique liturgy required a relatively open floor plan, allowing the laity to disperse from the nave into the aisles as they followed the clergy into the church. From Hagia Sophia and Eirene in Constantinople to San Vitale in Ravenna and the church of St. John in Ephesus, the transplantation of these architectural features was accompanied by the implementation of this processional liturgy, allowing of course for slight local and regional variations. Thus, the political and religious resurgence of Didyma as a direct consequence of Justinian’s patronage and the structural similarities between the churches of these two 3 Thomas Mathews, The Early Churches of Constantinople: Architecture and Liturgy, (London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971): p. 133. Cochran 4 cities, suggests that the Christians at Didyma adopted the capital’s processional liturgy in which the clergy, the laity and even the catechumens processed together into the church. I argue that it is precisely this processional liturgy and its immense theological significance that allows us to reconsider how the church at Didyma functioned as a Christian place of worship. This question of functionality is particularly perplexing in this case because the church was built not high on the temple’s platform but rather deep within its inner sanctuary. While the ancient Didymaion was constructed to resemble the external appearance of its greatest rival—the nearby Temple of Artemis at Ephesus—the façade obscured from view a massive open-aired inner courtyard, or adyton, measuring 45 meters long and 21 meters wide (Figure 1 and 6). This peculiar design is the result of an ingenious effort to preserve the ground level at which the oracle’s sacred spring bubbled forth. To this day, anyone wishing to access this recessed area must traverse one of two narrow tunnels 21 meters long and just over 1 meter wide that descend from the outer pronaos to the floor of the adyton. It was within this highly inaccessible space, sunk an incredible 4 meters below the level of the platform and more than 28 meters below the temple walls, that the Christians constructed their cathedral complex, complete with a baptistery. Surprisingly, the Christian community preserved the full height of these walls, even though they completely obscured the church from being seen by anyone standing outside the temple. The choice to appropriate this site stands in stark contrast to most examples of this phenomenon, such as the temple-church at Aphrodisias or the much later appropriation of Cochran 5 the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina on the Roman Forum (Figure 7).4 In these two examples, the resulting temple-church achieved maximum visibility, effectively advertising to the local community the power of the church. Moreover, such a platform allowed the laity to flood into the church from all directions in anticipation of the clergy’s processional entrance. It was, therefore, far more usual to build a church (or rather, just a martyr’s shrine) within the temenos or perhaps at the edge of the temple platform, like at Sardis, than it was to make use of the main central rooms of the former temple (Figure 8). Constructing a church within the adyton of the Didymaion was particularly problematic, since every stone and piece of equipment needed to build the church had to be hauled up the steps of the temple and down through the narrow tunnels leading to the adyton floor (Figure 9). This must have been an incredible challenge for what was a relatively small Christian community. A host of other religious, civic, and domestic structures outside the temple would have served as far more practical solutions if the primary desire of the Christian community were for visibility, notoriety and accessibility.

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