Hagiotopography and the Synaxary of Constantinople

The Synaxary of Constantinople, written in the tenth century, is with its translations and revisions, one of the best-received liturgical texts of Orthodoxy, which is not only to be grasped in immediate liturgical contexts but even found its way into private libraries. It was the declared intention of the Synaxarists to create a comprehensive collection of notes, in which they were essentially concerned with listing the place of birth, life, suffering, death and burial site of each saint alongside a brief biography. From the beginning, then, the Synaxary was important as a gazetteer of all the sites related to the saints of the ecumene, and reading or listening to its texts on the relevant anniversaries contributed to constructing a common space.

This project takes a new approach to the Synaxary by treating it as a coherent text that provides information about the social space and the vertical – and above all the horizontal – spatial hierarchies of the Byzantine Empire.

For this purpose, the text will be transformed into a hagiographic GIS and supplemented with material sources. On the one hand, this will make recognisable ritually based spatial relationships, while on the other hand also allowing other questions of historical and archaeological hagiographic research to be answered.

The basis of the project is Hippolyte Delehaye’s edition, which is based on the so-called Synaxary of Sirmond. This edition allows the names of about 2,000 persons mentioned in the Synaxary to be linked to more than 600 identifiable places for the first time. To this end, relevant data of objects associated with these saints are entered into the database.