Development of Centric Plans in Early Byzantine Church Architecture

Abstract

The results of the project “Language, literature and culture in historical and social perspective”, carried out within the framework of the Basic Research Program at HSE University in 2025, are presented in this work.

The author reconstructs the chronology of the development of centric plans in Early Byzantine church architecture. The following main stages have been identified: the appearance of rotundas and octagons in all types of ecclesiastical buildings prior to 350 AD (except mausolea — since the 380s); the appearance of a cruciform plan, tetraconch, and octagon with corner niches/apses in all types of buildings (except for the martyria) between 350 and 400, as well as square baptisteries; the appearance of an apse in the eastern part of centric buildings in the early 5^th century; a combination of different figures in double-shell centric buildings in the mid-5^th century; the emergence of an eight-arm octagon and new types of polygonal buildings with arms of the cross from 450 to 500; the appearance of hexagons and hexaconches in the early 6^th century; double-shell octaconches and ‘irregular’ plans, rotundas with attached arms of the cross and squares with four apses from 527 to 565; an octaconch with reduced angular apses in the late 6^th century. It is evident that Roman architecture served as  the source of the most of the simple plans and some of the complex ones, but some of them (the octagon and the cross) received in Christian architecture a new sense, thanks to the new functions (martyrium and baptistery). In the late 4^th century, new complex plans emerged from  experiments in attaching different variants of the arms of the cross to various centric figures; from the 5^th century onwards, the combination of different centric figures in one building, usually a double-shell martyrium; and from the 6^th century onwards,  partial violation of the centric plan symmetry.