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Byzantine Church Arch
Byzantine Church Arch
Byzantine period
WAU /Ar.Thushara.G.Nair /B-Arch 2021-26 /PSGIAP House church floor plan, Dura Europos, c. 230
• At Jerusalem, Constantine’s church of the
Holy Sepulchre (dedicated 336) marked
the sites of Christ’s Crucifixion,
Entombment, and Resurrection
On 23 February 532, only a few weeks after the destruction of the second basilica,
Emperor Justinian I inaugurated the construction of a third and entirely different basilica,
larger and more majestic than its predecessors
Theodosian capital
WAU /Ar.Thushara.G.Nair /B-Arch 2021-26 /PSGIAP
Originally a church, later a mosque, the 6th-century Hagia Sophia (532–537) by Byzantine emperor Justinian
the Great was the largest cathedral in the world for nearly a thousand years, until the completion of the Seville
Cathedral
WAU(1507) in Spain.
/Ar.Thushara.G.Nair /B-Arch 2021-26 /PSGIAP
The Church of Justinian I today.
WAU /Ar.Thushara.G.Nair /B-Arch 2021-26 /PSGIAP
The mihrab located in the apse where the altar used to stand, pointing
towards Mecca. The two giant candlesticks flanking the mihrab were
brought in from Ottoman Hungary by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent.
WAU /Ar.Thushara.G.Nair /B-Arch 2021-26 /PSGIAP
Windows at the Base of the Dome, Hagia Sophia
WAU /Ar.Thushara.G.Nair /B-Arch 2021-26 /PSGIAP Ceiling decoration showing original Christian cross
still visible through the later aniconic decoration
BYZANTINE ARCHITECTURE DURING ICONOCLASM*
The "Transitional Period“
Corresponds to the Iconoclast controversy (a dispute over the use of religious images, or
“icons”), incursions by the Arabs
, and an economic downturn, was not conducive to architectural production and, it seems, less
conducive to the documentation of building activity.
The period nevertheless accounts for dramatic and permanent changes in Byzantine religious
architecture in both form and scale.
2.The Minarets