The Orthodox Church

The first Christian churches of the Roman Empire were mostly basilicas: long halls with aisles and an apse at one end, adapted from Roman public buildings. In the eastern half of the empire, builders increasingly crowned churches with domes. The most ambitious was Hagia Sophia, the church of Holy Wisdom in Constantinople, built in just five years, 532–537 CE, for the emperor Justinian. Its vast dome, which seemed to float on a ring of windows, impressed contemporaries as an image of the heavens and became the defining symbol of Byzantine church architecture. After the Ottoman conquest of 1453 it became a mosque, then a museum in 1934, and a mosque again in 2020.

Few later churches attempted Hagia Sophia’s scale. From the ninth and tenth centuries, after the end of the controversy over icons, Byzantine builders settled on a smaller and more compact plan, the cross-in-square. Four arms of equal length meet under a central dome raised on a drum, with lower corner bays filling out a square. To the west lies the narthex, to the east the sanctuary with its three apses. The plan suited monasteries and parish churches alike and spread with Orthodox Christianity to the Balkans, Russia, Georgia and beyond.

Inside, the space was organised around a symbolic programme of images. The Pantocrator looked down from the dome, the Mother of God appeared in the apse above the altar, and feasts and saints filled the walls in a fixed order. Between nave and sanctuary stood the templon, a low barrier of columns and a beam. Over the centuries icons were placed on it, and in late medieval Russia it grew into the tall iconostasis, a wall of icons arranged in tiers, which later spread across much of the Orthodox world.

The Byzantine model travelled north with the conversion of the Rus’, traditionally dated to 988, when Prince Vladimir of Kyiv was baptised. Byzantine masters and their local pupils built the Cathedral of St Sophia in Kyiv in the eleventh century, a cluster of domes over a cross-in-square core, with mosaics and frescoes inside. From Kyiv and later from Novgorod, Vladimir and Moscow, the type was adapted to new materials and a colder climate: steeper roofs shed snow, drums grew taller and narrower, and domes took on the swelling onion shape. In the Balkans, Bulgarian, Serbian and Romanian builders likewise blended Byzantine plans with local stonework and decoration. Even where the outward forms changed, the inner order of narthex, nave and sanctuary, and the fixed places of the great icons, stayed remarkably constant across the Orthodox world.

The church exists above all for the Divine Liturgy, the Orthodox celebration of the Eucharist, most often in the form attributed to St John Chrysostom. The building is designed for its movements. The priest prepares the bread and wine at a side table in the sanctuary. In the Little Entrance he and the deacon carry the Gospel book out through a side door and back through the royal doors; in the Great Entrance they bring the gifts in procession to the altar. At communion, the priest comes out onto the solea to give the sacrament to the faithful.

Orthodox teaching sees the church building as heaven on earth. The nave, where the people stand, represents the world being transformed; the sanctuary represents the heavenly realm; the iconostasis stands between them as a meeting point. Icons are not decoration but, in Orthodox belief, windows onto the holy, and worshippers greet them with the sign of the cross, a bow and often a kiss. Candles and incense fill the church, and much of the service is sung, traditionally without instruments.

The church year gives the building its rhythm. The most important night is Easter, called Pascha, when the church is darkened before midnight and then filled with candlelight as the priest proclaims the resurrection and leads a procession around the outside of the building. Great Lent, Christmas and the twelve great feasts each have their own services. Churches also host baptisms, weddings with crowns held over the couple, and funerals, and in many villages the church remains the centre of community life.

The basic layout of narthex, nave and sanctuary is shared across the Orthodox world, but each region gave it its own look. In Greece and the Balkans, small brick and stone churches with tiled domes are typical, many decorated inside with frescoes. Medieval Serbia produced a distinctive style in the monasteries of the Morava valley, with richly carved stone around windows and doors. In Georgia, churches built of dressed stone carry tall, conical roofs over their domes, as at Jvari and Svetitskhoveli near Mtskheta.

Russian builders developed the onion dome, often gilded or brightly painted, and multiplied domes over a single church. St Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square in Moscow, built in 1555–1561, gathers a ring of chapels around a central tower into one colourful cluster. In the forests of northern Russia, carpenters built whole churches of logs, culminating in the twenty-two-domed Church of the Transfiguration at Kizhi.

In Romania, the monasteries of Bucovina, such as Voroneț, Sucevița and Moldovița, are famous for frescoes on their outer walls, painted in the sixteenth century and showing scenes such as the Last Judgement in deep blues and greens. Wooden churches with steep roofs and very tall, slender spires are characteristic of Maramureș. Wherever they stand, from Alaska to Lebanon and from Finland to Cyprus, Orthodox churches keep the same heart: a congregation facing east towards a screen of icons and the altar beyond it.