Saturday 9 July 2011

Petr Balcarek - The Cult of the Holy Wisdom in Byzantine Palestine


The present article deals with the cult of the Holy Wisdom (Holy Sophia) on the territory of Palestine in the Byzantine period. The author raises the question of the origins of this cult: imperial Constantinopolitan or local Judaeo-Christian? After a close examination of several written and archaeological sources from Jerusalem and its environs (some examples from the fifth century, up to specific visual developments of the iconography of Sophia, the Holy Wisdom, in eleventh-century Jerusalem), the author is inclined to support the hypothesis of the local Judeo-Christian origins of this cult, among others due to Jerusalem´s creative and multi-cultural environment.

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