As open spaces offering welcome respite in densely built-up areas, modern cities squares are places for residents to meet, communicate and have fun. Squares in that sense do not seem to have existed in Byzantium. Terraces with arcades affording a view out to sea or over the surrounding area above the walls were designed as recreation areas. Following earlier Roman tradition, the cities of Late Antiquity had a forum in the centre: this was a complex of public buildings, with halls for the city archives, the parliament, the courts, the library, the mint and more, usually at a lower level than the Capitol, where the temples of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva were founded. In the forum there were arcades one or two storeys high, sometimes with a basement, housing shops that surrounded the main square. In the middle there was usually a column supporting a statue of the emperor. Fairs and even executions took place in some of them, such as the Forum Bovis (“of the Ox”) in Constantinople.

After the 7^th century the forums in the capital were converted into market places. Indeed, when a shortage of men and economic depression obstructed the maintenance and reconstruction of old buildings, the forums and public buildings either fell into ruins or were taken over by private individuals, makeshift workshops, warehouses and places of ill repute. In the new fortress cities founded on high ground, away from plains and the sea, squares were created at wide points in the streets or in the free spaces around churches. In fact, the law required that open space be left around religious institutions. The fresco in the narthex of the catholicon at Vlacherna Monastery near Arta accurately reflects how religious and commercial life were linked in a capital city square.  It shows the procession held every Tuesday in Constantinople for the icon of the Virgin Mary Hodegetria (“Our Lady of the Way”). A religious procession is taking place, with a man in the centre holding the miraculous icon on his shoulders. A deaconess is giving out glasses of holy water; a man from Khazaria is weighing out caviar; a trader is offering bottles of wine or beer; a greengrocer is selling garlic behind her counter and a fruit seller is sitting in front of baskets of merchandise. Though not designed in advance to cater for processions or other religious ceremonies and festivals, it appears that open spaces such as these were thronged with street vendors selling all manner of wares.

Public spaces and squares in cities are rarely testified in mid and late Byzantium. In Mystras there was an open space suitable for gatherings of all kinds in front of the Palace of the Despots.  According to later sources, this was where the famous city was held during the summer months, possibly on August 15^th.

The scarcity of squares and deliberately planned open spaces could be interpreted as resulting from urban sprawl and the cramped nature of Byzantine cities, especially in the provinces. Typical examples are the medieval villages of Chios, where dense house construction left almost no open spaces, except those next to churches. Indeed, the spaces around churches and monastery enclosures where fairs, commercial transactions and social interactions took place gradually became hubs of urban social life.