Byzantine gardens

The city of

Eastern Roman Empire and survived for a thousand years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The gardens of Byzantium were, however, mostly destroyed after the 15th-century Turkish conquest

of the city.

Design

Greek garden statue, the type of which survived well into Late antiquity

.

Byzantine gardens were based largely on Roman ideas emphasizing elaborate Hellenistic

Justinian the Great

, a Byzantine province as well).

Study

Little else is known about Eastern Roman gardens and very few references, let alone entire treatises, exist on the subject. The Eastern Romans, like their

Greek and Roman

gardens were more developed and better documented.

During the last 250 years of Greek rule ending in 1453, conditions drastically curtailed the tradition, which stretched back to Hellenistic times, of building luxurious villas, mostly outside the cities, with pleasing gardens, as appear in mosaics and frescoes or are recorded in texts. This period seems to have been less thoroughly investigated than have most earlier periods, and a concentration on it should produce a more coherent picture than another attempt to cover the whole span of Byzantine history.

References

Notes

Bibliography

Byzantine Garden Culture, edited by Antony Littlewood, Henry Maguire, and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (2002)
Byzantine Gardens and Beyond, edited by Helena Bodin and Ragnar Hedlund (2013)
Veronica della Dora, Landscape, Nature, and the Sacred in Byzantium (2016)

External links