Sacred spaces and new cities in the Byzantine East

Abstract

: Some of the main trajectories of urban development in Roman Syria and Asia Minor have been studied in detail. Not much attention, however, has been paid to the fact that in some places the urban can be seen as the product of sacred. There are various examples of large rural sanctuaries that over time gained urban characteristics and eventually developed into cities. During the second wave of urbanisation in Syria in the 2 nd / 3 rd centuries CE, some of those “ urbanised sanctuaries ” were formally recognised as cities. This close entanglement between sanctuaries and the emergence of urbanity was not con-fined to the pagan period. Christian places of worship could trigger the urbanisation of rural places, too. Resafa, for example, developed from a small border post into a flourishing city of Sergiopolis due to the popularity of the martyrium of S. Sergios. It is remarkable that in most cases the cities that developed around sanctuaries very quickly emancipated themselves from those sanctuaries. The growing complexity of the cities ‘ metabolism turned them into regional hubs in their own right. They proved to be very resilient and maintained their urban role even after the sanctuaries that initiated the process of urbanisation were fi-nally abandoned.