Byzantium
In this project, Byzantium is not the name of a period or a state, but a way of thinking about the world. It is a cultural order that brought theology, image, and liturgy together into a single, coherent language of meaning. Without it, the icons, frescoes, and churches of Crete remain unintelligible, even if we know their dates and authors.
Today, Byzantium is often reduced to a stereotype: rigid, ceremonial, and remote from modernity. In reality, it was one of the most durable and internally consistent cultural systems in European history. For more than a thousand years, it developed a language in which theology, art, and religious practice mutually conditioned one another, forming a coherent vision of the world.
At the center of this order stood not the individual, but the community. The image was not an expression of individual creativity, but a carrier of meaning recognizable to all participants in the culture. The icon was not meant to surprise or impress with novelty; it was meant to be legible, faithful, and rooted in tradition. It was precisely this consistency that made the Byzantine visual language remarkably resilient to political and geographical change.
Byzantium shaped a way of representing the world in which the history of salvation served as the organizing axis of reality. Liturgical time, the space of the church, and visual narrative formed a single structure. Images did not exist in isolation—they were part of a larger arrangement, ordered by the rhythm of feasts, biblical readings, and communal prayer.
For Crete, Byzantium remained a point of reference even when the island lay outside the borders of the empire. The Byzantine period was followed by Venetian rule and later by the Ottoman Empire, yet the language of images remained strikingly stable. This is not a matter of chance or aesthetic resistance, but evidence that the Byzantine cultural order functioned independently of the prevailing political authority.
For this reason, Cretan iconography is not a “mixture of influences,” but a conscious continuation. Even when Western elements appear—perspective, modeling, new themes—they are absorbed into an existing system of meanings. Byzantium does not disappear; its external form changes, but its core remains intact.
Byzantium also entails a specific understanding of the image as a bearer of truth—not empirical truth, but truth interpreted within tradition. This explains why disputes over images in this world were fundamental in nature, and why the question of their legitimacy was treated with such gravity. The icon was part of an epistemological order, not merely a religious one.
In this project, Byzantium is neither background nor “epoch,” but an interpretative key. It makes it possible to understand why images appear as they do, why their language remained stable for centuries, and why Crete became one of the most important places for its continuation. Without Byzantium there is no iconography; without iconography there are no frescoes; and without frescoes, it is difficult to speak of the meaning of these churches at all.