Read Byzantine Architecture: A Complete History

Byzantium built for a thousand years with one material vocabulary — brick, mortar, marble revetment and gold mosaic — and one structural idea pursued with unmatched persistence: the dome raised over a square, heaven's canopy held above the gathered church. This book follows that pursuit from the basilicas the early Christians inherited from Rome, through the staggering gamble of Hagia Sophia in 537, the small perfect cross-in-square churches of the middle centuries, the rock-cut chapels of Cappadocia and the mountain monasteries of Greece, to the empire's brilliant old age at the Chora — and then beyond its borders and its death: to Venice and Norman Sicily, to Kiev and Novgorod, to the Ottoman mosques that are Hagia Sophia's legitimate heirs, and to the Byzantine Revival skylines of London and Paris. It treats the neighbouring traditions of Armenia and Georgia as what they were — distinct national architectures in constant, fruitful dialogue with Constantinople, borrowing and lending in both directions. And it is honest about evidence: the origins of the pendentive, the structural history of Hagia Sophia's first dome, and the birthplace of the cross-in-square are all debated, and the debates are flagged where they arise, because Byzantine buildings reward the reader who separates what the fabric proves from what the chronicles prefer.