Constructing Christian Sacred Spaces with Theater Ruins in Late Antique Macedonia (20 min)

Presenters

Matthew Schueller, College of William & Mary

Abstract

As across the Mediterranean in the late fourth–sixth centuries C.E., Christian churches proliferated in Macedonia as foci for urban life. Churches were often built near or on disused public spaces and using their material, and episcopal basilicas especially encroached on theaters and recycled their architectural membra. This development was partly practical since theaters’ monumentality made their high-quality materials and large footprints desirable for new public buildings. Referencing Christian authors like Tertullian, past scholars have also cast theaters’ reuse in church construction as repudiation of Roman public entertainment’s ties to “pagan” religions and Christian martyrdom. I contend, however, that practicality and censure do not adequately explain why Christian communities in late antique Macedonia built churches using theater ruins.

Based on the cases of Heraclea Lyncestis and Stobi in upper Macedonia, I argue that this reuse was equally motivated by a desire to appropriate positive communal memory of the connections that theaters had regularly promoted in urban populations. This motivation more fully explains the bold displacement of theater blocks for building in and around Heraclea and Stobi’s episcopal basilicas (e.g., in the nave’s apse, interior colonnades, and surrounding streets). Meanwhile, the cities’ ruined theaters remained visible nearby for contemplation, especially by the lower-class people allowed to live in them. Imperial edicts protecting old monuments, Christian authors’ reflections on games’ popularity, and wider Christian appropriation of the pagan past further attest that such high–profile reuse was meant to elicit positive elite and nonelite recollections of interactions in Heraclea and Stobi’s theaters into the later sixth century. Overall, then, reusing theaters for church construction in late antique Macedonia should be explained by a balance of practicality, censure, and emulation in Christian efforts to present their sacred spaces as improved successors to once prominent crucibles for urban life.