Squares
In Byzantium there were no
city squares in the sense we known them today, as open spaces for residents to
meet, communicate and have fun. In their place, recreation areas were terraces
built on high ground, with arcades offering a view out to sea or over the
surrounding space above the walls. 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. In the forum there were arcades housing shops
on one or two storeys, sometimes with a basement. They stood around the main
square, and there was usually a column supporting a statue of the emperor in
the middle. After the 7th century the forums in the capital were converted in
market places.
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 around churches. In fact, the law
stated that churches had to have open spaces around them. There is a typical
scene in a church fresco at Vlacherna Monastery near Arta, which shows us what life
was like in a square at that time. It shows the procession (litany ) 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 middle holding the miraculous icon on his shoulders. At either end
of the procession are various vendors who have come to sell their merchandise:
a deaconess (a woman who served the church) is giving out glasses of holy
water; a caviar seller from Khazaria is weighing out his ware on a pair of
scales; a trader is selling bottles of wine or beer, a woman is selling garlic
behind a counter and a fruit seller is sitting in front of baskets of her produce.
We
rarely come across public spaces and squares in mid and late Byzantium. Mystras was one example, as there
is a large open space in front of the Palace of the Despots. This is where the famous
fair on August 15th must have taken place.
The
lack of free spaces may be due to the fact that cities developed without an
organized plan, and space was limited inside the walls. Typical examples are
the medieval villages of Chios, where dense
house construction left almost no open spaces, except those next to churches
and monastery enclosures. These spaces played a vital role in the lives of
people there, hosting fairs, markets and other local society events.
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