Fountains and Water Culture in Byzantium

Brooke Shilling, Paul Stephenson

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781107105997
• eBook ISBN:
  9781316728635
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book restores the fountains of Roman Byzantium, Byzantine Constantinople and Ottoman Istanbul, reviving the sounds, shapes, smells and sights of past water cultures. Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, is surrounded on three sides by sea, and has no major river to deliver clean, potable water. However, the cultures that thrived in this remarkable waterscape through millennia have developed and sustained diverse water cultures and a water delivery system that has supported countless fountains, some of which survive today. Scholars address the delivery system that conveyed and stored water, and the fountains, large and small, from which it gushed. Papers consider spring water, rainwater and seawater; water suitable for drinking, bathing and baptism; and fountains real, imagined and symbolic. Experts in the history of art and culture, archaeology and theology, and poetry and prose, offer reflections on water and fountains across two millennia in one location.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Table of contents
• Illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Where do we go now? The archaeology of monumental fountains in the Roman and early Byzantine East
• 2 Monumental waterworks in late antique Constantinople
• 3 Fistulae and water fraud in late antique Constantinople
• 4 The Silahtaraga statues in context
• 5 The bronze goose from the Hippodrome
• 6 The Serpent Column fountain
• 7 The culture of water in the ‘Macedonian renaissance’
• 8 When bath became church: spatial fusion in late antique Constantinople and beyond
• 9 Zoomorphic rainwater spouts
• 10 Spouts and finials defining fountains by giving water shape and sound
• 11 Fountains of paradise in early Byzantine art, homilies and hymns
• 12 Where did the waters of Paradise go after iconoclasm?
• 13 ‘Rejoice, spring’: the Theotokos as fountain in the liturgical practice of Byzantine hymnography
• 14 Words, water and power
• 15 Ancient water in fictional fountains: waterworks in Byzantine novels and romances
• 16 The shrine of the Theotokos at the Pege
• 17 A dome for the water: canopied fountains and cypress trees in Byzantine and early Ottoman Constantinople
• 18 Sinan’s ablution fountains
• Bibliography
• Index