Publisher's Synopsis
Fifteen centuries of architectural activity have left within the area of contemporary Greece a great number of ecclesiastical monuments that are worthy of attention and academic study. Some of them are amongst the masterpieces of Byzantine church architecture. In this book an attempt is made to systematically collect, for the first time, information on the medieval churches in Greece that is either scattered in various publications or comes from the direct study of so far unknown or almost unknown monuments. An attempt is also made to specify their particular features that make them remarkable within Byzantine and post-Byzantine church architecture. The book is divided in eight chapters that correspond to eight distinct historical periods, from the 3rd century to 1830. In each of these the political, social, economic and technological conditions are presented, under which the churches were built. The detailed analysis of their architecture that follows -typological, stylistic and constructional-, allows us to study the development of church-building in Greece from the time of Constantine the Great to that of the establishment of the Modern Greek State, a development which was slow and hard to decipher, but exceptionally interesting. The photographic material complementing this new composition of architectural history is rich and original.
