Eternal Victory: Byzantine Territorial Expansion and Constantinopolitan Liturgical Splendour at Hosios Loukas (Steiris, Greece)

Authors

• Bissera Pentcheva Stanford University, USA

DOI: https://doi.org/10.57050/jisocm.113301

Keywords:

Hosios Loukas, Imperial Ceremonies, Music, Chant, Liturgy, Hagia Sophia

Abstract

Starting in the ninth century but gaining momentum the late tenth century Byzantium reclaimed its territories in the East: capturing Crete, Antioch, and northern Palestine. These victories were celebrated with triumphal processions in Constantinople. New chants were written specifically to be performed in the Great Church and the palatine chapels. Some of the poetry and music was composed by the emperor himself. Analyzing the melodic contour of some of these songs shows how they strategically used the acoustics of the dome to offer a glittering vision of power. And the same time, the figural mosaics in Hagia Sophia and in the palatine chapels gave an anthropomorphic concreteness to the experience of the divine in the reverberant sound. None of these figural programs survives. Yet, a monastery near Thebes (Greece), Hosios Loukas, preserves one of the most extensive Byzantine mosaic cycles. As this analysis will reveal, it channels the Constantinopolitan liturgy and enables us to explore how chant and figural images operated together to shape a vision of the resurgent empire.