Fleshing Out the Byzantine House

Delivered at 36

Annual Byzantine Studies ConferenceSunday, October 10, 2010, 9amUniversity of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

Kostis KourelisLooking through any survey of Byzantine architecture, theabsence of houses is quite noticeable. With its routes in 19th-c“Christian Archaeology,” our discipline has laid emphasis on churches,considered to contain the highest artistic expression of a presumablydevout civilization. As early as the 1960s, however, a growing numberof scholarly camps began to critique the monopoly of churches andreligious art in monopolizing Byzantium’s story. One such camp, theMaterial Feminists, argued that the exclusion of houses was far fromcoincidental, but a deliberate suppression of female agency by modernpatriarchic society. For the medieval world, there is no denying thatmen built churches, men administered churches, and hence it makessense that men have written the history of churches. Historians of religion have gone as far as to argue that Constantine robbed womenof their prominence in architectural matters when the

ecclesia

waskicked out of the home and moved into state-sponsored spaces.Leaving houses out of the architectural canon in 21st-centuryByzantine Studies is enormously problematic for obvious politicalreasons. Such omissions are especially puzzling given the scholarlydirections that broader architectural history has taken in fullyembracing the home and resolving the unique challenges that itsarchaeology presents. Pioneers like Amos Rapoport, Delores Hayden,Dell Upton, John Vlach and Alice Friedman have shown that theinclusion of houses in the architectural canon is a political litmus testfor all disciplines. To say it a different way, revisionist history muststart at the home, but such a project requires a fundamental re-definition of architectural history’s margins and methodologies. Thematizing female production and reproduction instead of malecreativity is central to this re-definition, and archaeology offersappropriate methodologies. Its microcosmic and contextualperspective into walls, floors, roofs, pigments, mortars, trash, furniture,fittings, food, tombs, teeth and even nitrogen isotopes allows us to seenot only masculine wall building, but the physical conservation andtransformation of these walls by female home-makers and home-keepers. For feminist philosophers like Luce Irigaray, the home is bydefinition the female womb to which the male nostalgically returnsafter a hard day’s of work. Unfortunately for women, Irigaray adds,there is no home for them to return to. Even if erecting houses is amasculine profession (not entirely in houses), the process of house1

conservation is a feminine endeavor and it represents a broaderarchitectural lifecycle. In a most influential essay, Martin Heideggerposited that building a house and dwelling in a house are fundamentalprocesses of being in this world. We dwell by making the places thatstructure and house our activities. But the metaphysical premiseinvolves a double process of construction and preservation.Heidegger’s critics have pointed out that male dominated discoursehas valorized construction to the expense of preservation. For Irigrary,Hannah Arendt, Simon de Beauvoir, and most recently Iris Young,conservation is where female agency takes over the house, and it iswhere the architectural historian must turn his attention, specifically inthe domestic chores of cleaning, cooking and child-rearing. [

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] If Le Corbusier was correct to state that “the house is a machine forliving,” the feminist historian must investigate the house as a machinefor birthing.Birthing was risky business in Byzantium, concluding frequentlywith either the death of the child, the death of the mother, or the deathof both. Following Aristotelian traditions, the womb was a dynamicspatial enclosure. [

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] A prayer to the Virgin inscribed herematerializes the notion of the womb on a womb-like domestic vessel,an amphora of daily use. What is particularly interesting about thisostrakon, excavated by the Metropolitan Museum in 1912, is itsarchaeological context. It was found in a monk’s cell sealed in hisroom’s destruction layers. In the words of the excavator, “it was foundupon the sleeping-mat.” This physical manifestation of the Virgin’swomb was held closely to the body of the monk’s as he lay to sleepevery night.[

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] The Byzantine womb, the “Hystera,” was spatial. Itfloated unpredictably inside the woman’s body. Amulets worn to avertthe womb’s hysterical movements, depict the organ as an octopus likecreature with many legs and a human face. This amulet at the SacklerMuseum pleads, “[O] womb, dark and black, like a serpent you coil;like a dragon you hiss.” [

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] Like many others, this amulets alsoincludes a hatched bar that marks a downward spatial barrier, aboundary, a gate marking closure and concealment. I will interpret thisfigure as an architectural signifier, denoting a threshold or a door thatthe amulet hopes to keep shut for the duration of the pregnancy.As a domestic activity, pregnancy was architectural in more thana bodily or metaphorical sense. Our literary sources tell us of thedemon that terrified expected mother and inflicted miscarriages. Shewas thought to physically enter the walls of a household and steal thechild from the mother’s womb. [

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] Although not sanctioned byChristianity in any official fashion, our texts narrate battles betweenthe demon Gylou and Saint Sissinios (in 32 manuscripts) or SaintMichael (in another 25 manuscripts). In the earliest surviving Sissiniosstory (the15th-century manuscript at the Bodleian Library), we read2

about an expecting mother Metilene who had lost two of her previouschildren. In order to keep Gylou from interfering with her most recentconception Metilene builds a new house in the form of a tower andseals the walls, both inside and outside, with lead at great expense.Metilene here is the agent of architectural construction investingheavily on demarcating a safe interior space. Unfortunately forMeteline, her brother Saint Sissinios comes to visit and by opening thedoor, inadvertently lets Gylou invade the home. Manipulating houseelevations during pregnancy and childbirth is indicated in other literarytexts, such as in the mid-9th-century Lexikon of Photius, where weread about the re-plastering of walls when a child is born. Sucharchitectural expressions of feminine concealment are also testified bythe ethnographic record. [

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]ARCHAEOLOGYIf the house becomes the sealed architectural expression of childbirth and the conservation of the household, we must turn tosome real Byzantine houses from the archaeological record. [

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]One of the best excavated Byzantine sites (although poorly published)is the city of Athens. Looking at a plan published by T. Leslie Shear Jr.in 1984, we cannot fail to notice that the physical Byzantine house ismore than masonry walls. Ovens, hearths, jars, pits, grinding floors,wells and troughs dominate the architectural space. [

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] A sectiontaken through rooms 1, 2, and 3 (marked in red here) [

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]presents a domestic interior perforated by subterranean spaces thatare just as architectural as the walls, but evoke domestic conservationin the Heideggerian dichotomy of being. Note the pythos is largeenough for inhabitation, just like the jar that the Cynic philosopherDiogenes used as a residence only a few feet away from here.Diogenes provided the mould for many Christian saints, although theydidn’t’ share his propensity for public masturbate in front of his jar. In a1916 play, “The Jar,” Luigi Pirandello dramatized the scenario of pythosenclosure at a rural village near Agrigento, Sicily, which the Tavianibrothers dramatized in their 1984 film

Kaos

. The relevance of subterranean jars gains particular importancewhen we consider recent finds at the Athenian Agora. [

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]Between 2004 and 2007, Anne McCabe excavated a series of houses insector BH and unearthed a fetus buried under the floors. The fetus was30 weeks old (born 1 ½ months prematurely) and was buried in acooking vessel. [

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] A similar burial was discovered in aneighboring house, and after going through some old excavationrecords, Anne has surmised that as many as five such house burialshave been documented in the Agora. The feminine space of childbirth,here, literally finds architectural expression in the manipulation of space. The skin of the floor becomes an extension of the womb3