BYZANTINE CHURCHES

We just had a fantastic trip to Turkey.  So expect continual postings from this trip.

A huge revelation revelation was how the Byzantines used domes.  They employed a cascading assembly of full domes, half domes and quarter domes for the structure of their churches.  I’ve been looking at iconic images of Hagia Sophia for decades, but I did not really understand how they used the arch to create their magnificent spaces.  A you probably know, the dome is nothing more than a radiating arch.  The basic Byzantine church was nothing more than a nesting of domes.  As the building progresses from the center to the exterior, the domes become smaller and more divided, each one supporting and resonating off of the others.

It is an unwritten rule of design that when you have limited means of expression, the best work results.  This is certainly true of the Byzantines.  All they had was the dome for their significant structural element.  Of course they had the lintel, but a stone lintel does not span very far.  Yet they were able to use these arches and domes in the simplest and most elegant way imaginable.  And I think that because of their simple and harmonic use of this one simple element, we all respond emotionally to the wonderful and uplifting interior space.  Yet we really don’t know why we have such an emotional response.

I could not have explained to you to save my life how the Byzantines structured their churches.  The drawing above is a synthesis of the many, many Byzantine churches (which of course now are Mosques) which we visited.  I chose Choissey’s projection for this drawing.  Although this is not as transparent as most other drawings, there is a natural transparency to Choissey’s projection system;  much more on that later.

Nevertheless, after I did this drawing from the photos that I took of the interior spaces, I had a much better understanding of the wonderfully simple architectural methodology of the Byzantines.