Desecration and Reassignment of Anatolian Religious Sites During the Last Great War of Late Antiquity (Byzantine-Sasanian War 603-628): Material and Ideological Legacies

Dr. Yuri STOYANOV, SOAS University of London

Allegations of Persian destruction and desecration of Christian sacral architecture represented an important part of Byzantine wartime propaganda and ideology, particularly in the last stages of the epic Byzantine-Sasanian collision in the Anatolian, Caucasian and Near Eastern war-theater in the 620s. While much of this wartime propaganda focused on the alleged massive destruction of paradigmatic Christian sites in Jerusalem, similar claims were advanced in relation to important Byzantine urban centers in Anatolia such as (among others) Edessa (modern-day Urfa) and Antioch (modern-day Antakya), to an extent in anticipation of the onslaught on imperial capital during the Persian-Avar siege of Constantinople in 626. Recent and ongoing archaeological exploration of Byzantine to early Islamic Jerusalem has led to a major reassessment of the Persian conquest of the Holy City and its religious policies during its Sasanian occupation, which has important implications for the evolving exploration of the Anatolian war-theater, the alleged Persian desecration and reassignment of Christian religious sites in Anatolia and Byzantine retaliatory destruction of premier Zoroastrian religious sites in the Sasanian heartlands. The paper intends to summarize the material evidence of such alleged wartime desecration and reassignment of Anatolian Christian religious sites and the lasting legacy of the notion of violated sacred space in Byzantine ideologies of warfare and Reconquista in Asia Minor during the Byzantine and post-Byzantine periods.