The Basilica of Hagios Demetrios

The great five-aisled basilica of Hagios Demetrios in Thessaloniki is the monument of the saint’s cult standing on the ground: a church raised in the fifth century over the Roman baths where tradition placed the martyr’s imprisonment and death, rebuilt after the fire of the 620s–630s, and adorned with the votive mosaics and the silver ciborium that the Miracula make the focal point of the cult. This file describes the site, the architecture, the mosaics and their evidence for the saint’s earliest iconographic type, the kiborion of the shrine, and the church’s near-destruction in the fire of 1917 and its modern restoration. The miraculous claims attached to the building are reported here as the testimony of the sources, above all the Miracula Sancti Demetrii (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; the Myrrh-Streamer)

The Site

The church stands on the eastern side of the upper city of Thessaloniki, on the line of an ancient street, and it stands deliberately: it was built over a complex of Roman baths that local tradition identified as the place of the saint’s imprisonment and martyrdom. Excavation beneath and around the present basilica has uncovered the remains of a Roman bath-house and, below the eastern end, a sunken structure that became the crypt — the space the cult would later treat as the very site of the saint’s death and as the source of the myrrh (Bakirtzis 2002, on the crypt and the baths; Skedros 1999, ch. 1, on the topography of the cult). The siting is itself a historical argument: the church was not placed where it was for convenience but to enclose the locus of the passion, and the whole building is in this sense a reliquary in masonry around a remembered place rather than around a body — for the Miracula and the early tradition are emphatic that no relics of the saint were ever found, and the cult centred instead on the site, the ciborium, and the myrrh (Skedros 1999, pp. 1–11; Miracula I.5, on the search for the body, ed. Lemerle 1979, vol. 1).

The earliest cult-building on the spot appears to have been a small oratory; the great basilica that replaced it is the church whose ruins and restorations the visitor sees today. The relation of oratory to basilica is not fully recoverable from the archaeology, but the literary tradition and the building history converge on the fifth century as the moment a monumental church was raised here (Bakirtzis 2002; Cormack 1985, ch. 2).

The Founder and the Fifth-Century Basilica

The tradition of the church’s foundation is preserved in the Miracula themselves and in the dedicatory inscriptions and mosaics of the building. According to it, the great basilica was built by Leontios, an eparch (the prefect of Illyricum), in gratitude for healing he had received at the saint’s shrine: stricken with a paralysing illness and cured through the saint’s intercession, Leontios is said to have raised the church in thanksgiving (Skedros 1999, pp. 12–17, gathering the foundation tradition; Miracula I.1, ed. Lemerle 1979, vol. 1, which presents the ciborium and the eparch’s relation to the shrine). The traditional dating places this foundation in the early fifth century, around 412–413.

This dating, and the figure of Leontios himself, are not secured by independent documentary evidence and must be reported as the tradition gives them. [Disputed: the date of the great basilica's first construction and the historicity of the eparch Leontios as founder rest on the church's own dedicatory tradition and the *Miracula* rather than on external documentation; the traditional date of c. 412–413 is widely repeated (Skedros 1999, pp. 12–17), but archaeologists and art historians treat the foundation more cautiously as "fifth-century," and the relation of the foundation legend to the surviving fabric (much of it post-fire) is debated (Cormack 1985, ch. 2; Bakirtzis 2002).] What is not in serious doubt is that a large basilica stood on the site in the fifth century, and that it was this church — its plan and parts of its decoration — that was rebuilt after the fire of the following centuries.

The first great basilica was destroyed, or gravely damaged, by fire in the early seventh century, in the period of the great Avar-Slav sieges and the floruit of the Miracula. The conventional dating of this fire falls in the 620s–630s, often given as c. 620 or c. 634 (Cormack 1985, ch. 2; Bakirtzis 2002). The church was rebuilt soon after, and the rebuilding is the decisive event in the history of the surviving fabric: a number of the famous mosaics belong to this post-fire reconstruction, and the seam between fifth-century and seventh-century work runs through the very panels that are the church’s chief glory. [Disputed: individual mosaic panels are dated by different scholars to the fifth-century basilica or to the seventh-century reconstruction after the fire; some of the votive panels are placed before the fire and some after, and several are not firmly fixed on either side of it (Cormack 1985, ch. 2, reviewing the controversy; Grabar and the general early-Byzantine scholarship on the Demetrios mosaics).]

The Architecture

Hagios Demetrios is one of the largest of the early Byzantine basilicas and the grandest surviving expression of the cult of a single martyr-saint. It is a five-aisled, wood-roofed basilica with a transept — a broad central nave flanked on each side by two aisles, separated by colonnades, and crossed near the eastern end by a transept that gives the building something of the form of the great pilgrimage basilicas. Above the side aisles run galleries (a tribune storey), and the eastern end terminates in the sanctuary and apse. The roof was of timber, not vaulted — a feature that made the church vulnerable to fire and helps account for the catastrophes of the seventh and twentieth centuries alike (Cormack 1985, ch. 2; Bakirtzis 2002, on the plan and the galleries).

Beneath the eastern end and the transept lies the crypt, reached by stairs, occupying the level of the Roman baths. This sunken space is the supposed martyrium — the site tradition assigned to the saint’s imprisonment and death — and it became, in the later medieval and post-Byzantine period, the centre of the myrrh-cult: the place where the myron was understood to issue and where pilgrims gathered it. The fittings of the crypt, including basins and channels associated with the collection and distribution of the holy oil, belong to this dimension of the cult and have been studied in detail by Charalambos Bakirtzis, who connected them with the lead and clay ampullae (pilgrim flasks) by which the myrrh was carried away from Thessaloniki (Bakirtzis 2002, on the crypt and the ampullae; on the myrrh itself see The Myrrh-Streamer).

The scale and plan of the church declare its function. This is not a parish church but a pilgrimage basilica, designed to gather and move large numbers of the faithful around a shrine; the galleries, the broad aisles, and the relation of nave to transept to crypt all serve the circulation of pilgrims toward the saint’s ciborium and down to the site of the passion (Cormack 1985, ch. 2; Skedros 1999, ch. 1).

The Votive Mosaics

The mosaics of Hagios Demetrios are among the major monuments of early Byzantine art and the single richest visual witness to the saint’s cult. They are not a unified programme but a series of votive panels — individual ex-voto images set up by donors on the piers and walls around the sanctuary, each commemorating a vow, a thanksgiving, or a petition. Their character is therefore documentary as well as artistic: they show us how the cult was practised, by whom, and in what visual language the saint was imagined (Cormack 1985, ch. 2, the fundamental treatment; Grabar on the early-Byzantine mosaic tradition).

Several panels survive and are repeatedly cited. One shows St Demetrios with the founders — the saint standing between, and laying his hands upon the shoulders of, two figures conventionally identified as the bishop and the eparch responsible for the church (the ecclesiastical and the civil authority of the city), a composition that visually states the partnership of saint, church, and city in the building (Cormack 1985, ch. 2). Another shows Demetrios with two small children, the saint protectively flanking the little donors who had been commended to him. A third type shows Demetrios protecting suppliants, his arm about the shoulders of those who have taken refuge with him — the visual form of the role the Miracula assign him as the defender and protector of his city. Together these panels present the saint not as a remote intercessor but as a present patron who places his hands and his protection on the bodies of his clients (Cormack 1985, ch. 2, on the votive logic of the panels; on the protecting role see The Defender Against the Sieges).

For the iconography of the saint these mosaics are primary evidence, and they say something often surprising to those who know the later Demetrios. In the earliest panels Demetrios is shown as a young, beardless aristocrat — a richly dressed nobleman in the costume of the late-antique elite, the chlamys and patterned tunic, not the cuirass and weapons of a soldier. He is the courtier-saint, the well-born young man of the city, and only later does the tradition reshape him primarily as a warrior-saint in armour, the military companion of St George (Cormack 1985, ch. 2, stressing this aristocratic, non-military early type; Skedros 1999, ch. 1, on the development of the soldier-iconography). The mosaics thus preserve a stage of the saint’s image earlier than, and different from, the militarised type that would dominate the middle and late Byzantine icon. [Disputed: the dating of the individual votive panels between the fifth-century basilica and the seventh-century post-fire reconstruction is contested, and the "founders" panel in particular has been assigned by different scholars to either phase (Cormack 1985, ch. 2; Grabar and subsequent art-historical scholarship).] (On the later militarised image, see the iconography of the warrior-saint discussed in the cult of the military saints, and compare the treatment of the icon in Icons and Iconoclasm.)

The Silver Ciborium

At the heart of the church, and at the heart of the cult as the Miracula describe it, stood the silver ciborium (Greek kiborion) — a free-standing hexagonal canopy of precious metal, raised over the saint’s shrine within the nave. The Miracula repeatedly make this kiborion the focal point of the cult: it was the place to which suppliants came, beside which the saint was seen by visionaries, and which was itself the object of marvels in the narratives — including the great fire that, in one of the most famous episodes, damaged the silver canopy and occasioned its remaking (Miracula I.6, on the ciborium and its fire, ed. Lemerle 1979, vol. 1; with Lemerle’s commentary in vol. 2). Because the cult possessed no body, the ciborium did the work a tomb-reliquary did elsewhere: it was the architectural focus of the saint’s presence, the structure that localised him within his church (Skedros 1999, pp. 1–17, on the cult without relics and the role of the ciborium; Cormack 1985, ch. 2).

The Miracula describe the kiborion as hexagonal, of worked silver, with doors, and large enough for a man to be within it, and they treat it as the very place of encounter with the saint — the spot where Demetrios is seen seated, where he appears to those who sleep beside it, and which the saint himself, in the narratives, refuses to abandon when the city is threatened (Miracula I.1, I.6, ed. Lemerle 1979, vol. 1). The original silver canopy does not survive; what stands in the church today is a modern reconstruction evoking the lost structure. But the literary description is detailed enough that the ciborium of the Miracula is one of the best-documented liturgical furnishings of the early Byzantine world, and it anchors the whole devotional geography of the building (Lemerle 1979–1981, vols. 1–2; on the texts themselves see The Miracula).

The Fire of 1917 and the Modern Restoration

The basilica that had survived, in its post-seventh-century form and through its long centuries as a mosque under Ottoman rule, was devastated in the great fire of Thessaloniki in August 1917, which swept through the city and gutted Hagios Demetrios. The timber roof and much of the interior were destroyed; several of the mosaics were lost or damaged in the conflagration, so that part of what is known of certain panels survives only through earlier drawings and photographs (Cormack 1985, ch. 2, on the 1917 fire and the loss and recording of mosaics; Bakirtzis 2002). The fire of 1917 is thus, with the seventh-century fire, one of the two great caesurae in the building’s history, and it is one reason the surviving fabric is a palimpsest of fifth-century, seventh-century, and twentieth-century work.

The restoration of the church was a long undertaking of the inter-war and post-war decades; the basilica was reconstructed on its old plan and reconsecrated in 1949. The work sought to recover the early Byzantine form of the five-aisled basilica while conserving the surviving mosaics and exposing the crypt and the substructures beneath (Bakirtzis 2002; Cormack 1985, ch. 2). Today the church of Hagios Demetrios is inscribed, with the other Palaeochristian and Byzantine monuments of the city, on the UNESCO World Heritage List (as one of the Palaeochristian and Byzantine Monuments of Thessaloniki), recognised both as a monument of early Byzantine architecture and mosaic and as the standing centre of one of the great urban saint-cults of the Christian East (Bakirtzis 2002, on the monument’s modern status; on the wider world it belongs to, see The Byzantine Church).

The Building and the Cult

The basilica is the cult made visible. Its siting over the baths fixes the cult to the place of the passion; its crypt becomes the source of the myrrh; its mosaics preserve the saint’s earliest face and record the vows of his clients; its ciborium, described so fully in the Miracula, gives the bodiless cult a material centre. To read the Miracula beside the building is to see how completely the texts and the monument interpret one another: the church is the setting of the miracles, and the miracles are the church’s account of why it stands where it stands (Skedros 1999; Cormack 1985, ch. 2; Lemerle 1979–1981). The protecting saint of the mosaics, with his arm about his suppliants, is the figure the Miracula set upon the walls in the years of the sieges (see The Defender Against the Sieges).

References

Lemerle, Paul, ed. Les plus anciens recueils des miracles de saint Démétrius et la pénétration des Slaves dans les Balkans. 2 vols. Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1979–1981. (The critical edition of the Miracula Sancti Demetrii; vol. 1, the Greek text by book and chapter — the ciborium and the eparch at I.1, the search for the body at I.5, the fire of the ciborium at I.6; vol. 2, the commentary and historical analysis.)
Skedros, James C. Saint Demetrios of Thessaloniki: Civic Patron and Divine Protector, 4th–7th Centuries CE. Harvard Theological Studies 47. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999. (The cult without relics, the foundation tradition of the eparch Leontios and the date c. 412–413, the topography of the site, and the development of the saint’s iconography from aristocrat to soldier: esp. ch. 1 and pp. 1–17.)
Cormack, Robin. Writing in Gold: Byzantine Society and Its Icons. London: George Philip; New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. (Ch. 2 on Hagios Demetrios: the votive mosaics and their donors, the “founders” panel, the early aristocratic and non-military type of the saint, the dating controversy between the fifth-century basilica and the seventh-century reconstruction, the seventh-century and 1917 fires, and the modern restoration.)
Bakirtzis, Charalambos. “Pilgrimage to Thessalonike: The Tomb of St. Demetrios.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 56 (2002): 175–192. (The crypt and the Roman baths, the myrrh and the lead and clay ampullae, the architecture and galleries of the basilica, the 1917 fire and the modern restoration, and the church’s status as a UNESCO monument.)
Grabar, André. Byzantium: Byzantine Art in the Middle Ages, and the general early-Byzantine art-historical scholarship on the Demetrios mosaics. (The mosaics of Hagios Demetrios within the development of early Byzantine monumental art; the dating of the votive panels.)