Other Churches at Butrint

Church building flourished in Butrint, not just with the 6th-century constructions of the Great Basilica and the Baptistery, but also in the 13th century as the city’s fortunes were renewed. Other than the Great Basilica and the Acropolis Basilica, seven small churches have so far been identified within Butrint, and more exist in the landscape beyond – along the Vivari Channel, on the Vrina Plain, at Shën Dëlli and at Çiflik. Common to all is the importance of their location: situated at visually striking points or at major gateways of the city. The latter indicates that the walls and gates were still functioning, and suggests a thriving and sizeable population, though it is dangerous to equate the number of churches with the number of inhabitants to use them.

Next to the theatre, suspended high against the hillside, are the remains of a small, decorated church (the Stoa church). This was probably demolished during the excavations of the theatre by the Italian Archaeological Mission. The decoration, dated to the 14th century, is a vibrantly painted row of over life-size figures, three of which remain. The first is a bearded male figure with yellow halo; his right hand is raised in speech, in the left he holds a white scroll or tablet. His fur-lined cloak suggests that he is an eremitic prophet like Elijah. The central figure is the Archangel Michael. He has great blue/red feathered wings reaching to the ground, and in his right hand he holds up a sword. The third, female, figure holds a slender double cross against her breast; unlike the men, she is surrounded by a red-brown halo. Her identity is uncertain, but she could be Saint Paraskeve, the personification of Good Friday.

The best preserved of the small churches is the Northeast church. It is a single-celled structure (6.95x4.6 m) with a central apse pierced by a narrow window. Its west wall was formed of the city wall, and hence the church was entered through doorways in the lateral walls. Its presence might have signalled a path at this location leading from the lower city to the acropolis.

A church was inserted into the Roman nymphaeum (the ‘Gymnasium’) close to the Forum. In late antiquity the fountain niches were decorated with mosaics of a kantheros and birds, and in the later Middle Ages a bell tower was added. Similarly, the church next to the Baptistery is a late medieval rebuilding of an earlier church with the addition of a bell tower. Associated cemeteries were found at both sites. A cluster of 13th- to 14th-century burials in the Triconch Palace – including a solitary skull set in a packing of stone – would suggest that another chapel was located here.

By the West Gate to the Acropolis, a chapel or church was in the 15th-century adorned with figurative paintings including the Virgin of the Annunciation. Though little survives today, it is a testament to how this dense landscape of ecclesiastical buildings continued to be a feature of Butrint through the Early Modern period.

 

• The Churches of Butrint
• The Great Basilica
• QTVR of the great Basilica
• Other Churches at Butrint
• The monastery at Diaporit
• QTVR of the monastery at Diaporit
• Reconstruction of the monastery at Diaporit
• The basilica on the Vrina Plain
• Excavating the Vrina Plain basilica (QTVR)
• The mosaic pavement of the Vrina Basilica
• The mosaic pavement in detail

The martyrdom of Saint Terinus
In the Middle Ages the Butrint theatre was associated with the martyrdom of Saint Terinus. The saint was said to have been thrown to the beasts there in AD 251, as told in a 10th-century text of Bishop Arsenios of Corfu. According to Arsenios, “no-one, man or woman, missed the spectacle, not the slaves, the craftsmen, the men small and great, boys who had left their teachers/masters and girls who escaped every restraint”. The 3rd-century theatre at Butrint had no facilities for animal spectacles. Hence the event is unlikely to have taken place here. Instead, could the location and the paintings of the Stoa church be related to this story? Certainly, by the 10th century little remained of the theatre but its memory and the link to the saint.