Byzantine Culture

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Byzantine Houses

From courtyard mansions in Constantinople to two-room village houses, what Byzantine domestic architecture looked like, what was in it, and what archaeology has recovered.

Byzantine domestic architecture is the least studied part of Byzantine material culture, for an obvious reason: churches were built to last and were maintained, while houses were built cheaply, rebuilt constantly, and demolished when they fell down. Almost no Byzantine house survives above foundation level outside a handful of abandoned sites.

What exists has been recovered by excavation over the last century, and the picture is now reasonably clear at both ends of the social scale.

The Late Antique House

Down to the sixth or seventh century, the wealthy of the eastern empire lived in recognisably Roman houses: a courtyard or peristyle with a colonnade, rooms opening off it, mosaic floors, painted plaster walls, a large reception room (triklinos) for dining and receiving clients, private baths, and latrines connected to a drain.

Excavated examples at Ephesus, Aphrodisias, Antioch, Sardis and Apamea show these in quantity and in good condition. The “Terrace Houses” at Ephesus are the best preserved: several storeys, marble revetment, glass mosaic, frescoes, heated rooms, and interior plumbing.

These houses are indistinguishable in kind from those of the second century. The domestic architecture of the Roman Mediterranean elite survived the Christianisation of the empire essentially unchanged.

The Break

Then it stops. Across the eastern Mediterranean, in the seventh century, the peristyle house disappears. Excavations at almost every urban site show the same sequence: large houses subdivided into smaller units, courtyards built over, mosaic floors covered with earth and beaten surfaces, colonnades walled in, and industrial or agricultural activity — presses, ovens, animal pens — appearing inside what had been reception rooms.

The causes are the general crisis of the seventh century: the Persian and Arab invasions, the plague, the collapse of the curial class that had paid for urban amenity, and the contraction of cities to fortified cores. The process is visible in the same layers that show the end of civic bathing, the end of monumental building and the end of the coin sequence in many towns.

The Middle Byzantine House

What replaces it is smaller, simpler and more defensive.

The characteristic middle Byzantine urban house is a two-storey structure with a ground floor of rubble masonry used for storage, workshop space or animals, and a living floor above reached by an external staircase, often with a wooden balcony. Rooms are few. Windows are small and high. The roof is tiled or, in poorer buildings, of thatch and clay over timber.

Houses are packed tightly along narrow streets, frequently sharing walls, with irregular plots — Byzantine cities have none of the rectilinear planning of their Roman predecessors, because the grid was built over.

Byzantine building law, in the collection attributed to Julian of Ascalon and reproduced in later legal handbooks, deals with precisely the problems this produces: rights to light and air, the blocking of a neighbour’s view of the sea, the placing of windows overlooking another’s courtyard, the distance required between a bakery oven or a workshop and an adjoining wall, and drainage. It is a body of urban planning law arising from dense, unregulated construction.

The Village House

In the countryside, the excavated and ethnographically continuous type is a one- or two-room rectangular building of rubble stone with mud mortar, a beaten earth floor, a hearth, a flat or low-pitched roof of timber, brush and clay, and often a lower level for animals whose body heat warmed the room above.

Additions — a storeroom, an oven, a pen, a courtyard wall — accumulated as the household grew. Villages were nucleated, tightly built and often on a slope above the fields, as described in the Byzantine village.

This house type survived in Greece, Anatolia and the Balkans into the twentieth century, which means that ethnographic evidence can reasonably be used to interpret the archaeology.

Inside

Furniture was sparse. Chests served for storage and seating; low tables were brought out for meals and removed; beds might be a raised masonry platform with a mattress, or bedding laid on the floor; niches in the wall held lamps and small objects.

The kitchen equipment recovered archaeologically is consistent across sites: coarse cooking pots (chytrai), a tagenon or frying pan, storage amphorae and pithoi, glazed tableware from the ninth century onward, glass lamps and drinking vessels, and hand mills. The food this produced is described in Byzantine cuisine.

Every house had an icon corner — a shelf or niche, usually on the east wall, with an icon and a hanging lamp — and this is one of the few features attested continuously from the middle Byzantine period to the present in Orthodox households.

Heating was a brazier. Chimneys were rare before the late period; smoke left through a hole in the roof or a window, which is why Byzantine interiors were sooty and why the kapnikon, the “hearth tax,” was assessed on smoke.

Aristocratic Houses of the Later Period

The wealthy of the middle and late Byzantine city lived in fortified urban mansions — masonry blocks of two or three storeys around a courtyard, with a tower, few external openings at ground level, and a large hall on the upper floor.

The best surviving examples are at Mystras, where the Palace of the Despots and several private mansions stand to roof height. The Palace’s great hall, some thirty-six metres long with a throne niche and a row of arched windows, is the only Byzantine secular reception room that can still be walked into.

The Tekfur Sarayı in Istanbul — the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus, part of the Blachernae complex — is the other significant survival: a late Byzantine palace block with three storeys of arcaded windows and decorative brick and stone patterning on the façade.

Water and Waste

Late antique houses had piped water and drains connected to street sewers. Middle Byzantine houses generally did not: water came from a well, a cistern or a public fountain, and waste went into a cesspit or the street.

Constantinople retained a functioning water supply throughout its history, described in the Basilica Cistern, and public fountains were maintained. Private cisterns, collecting rainwater from the roof, are among the most common features found in excavated Byzantine houses.

Why It Matters

The trajectory of the Byzantine house — from the mosaic-floored peristyle villa to the two-room stone box and back, partially, to the fortified mansion — is the clearest physical evidence for what happened to Byzantine urban society.

It also corrects an impression that the churches give. A visitor who judges Byzantium from Hagia Sophia and the Chora is looking at where the money went, not at how people lived. The same city that built those buildings housed most of its population in small, dark, smoky, crowded rooms with a lamp burning in front of an icon.

The Building Regulations

Byzantine urban law dealt with the practical consequences of dense, unplanned building, and the provisions are among the most vivid evidence for what the cities were like.

The core text is the treatise of Julian of Ascalon, a sixth-century compilation from Palestine, incorporated into later Byzantine legal handbooks and into the Hexabiblos. It covers:

Light and air. A new building may not block a neighbour’s existing windows; minimum distances are specified.

The sea view. A building may not obstruct a neighbour’s view of the sea — a right explicitly protected, and one of the more appealing provisions in medieval law.

Balconies. Regulated for projection over the street and for the distance they must keep from an opposite building’s windows.

Noxious trades. Bakeries, glassworks, forges, tanneries, fullers and lime kilns are regulated for their distance from party walls and dwellings, on account of smoke, smell, fire risk and damp.

Drainage and sewage. Where waste may be discharged and who maintains a shared drain.

Party walls. Rights and obligations where two houses share a wall, including the right to insert beams.

Trees. Distances from a neighbour’s wall, and liability for roots and overhanging branches.

A body of law this specific implies the conditions that produced it: houses built against each other with no setback, workshops in residential streets, shared drains, and neighbours in permanent low-level dispute.

Furnishing a Room

The contents of a Byzantine house can be reconstructed from wills, inventories, dowry lists and excavation, and the picture is consistent.

Storage dominated. Chests (kibotia) held clothing, textiles and valuables, and doubled as seating and sometimes as beds. Large ceramic pithoi sunk into the floor held grain, oil and wine.

Textiles were the main form of household wealth and the main item in dowry lists: mattresses, cushions, coverlets, curtains, hangings. A dowry inventory typically lists textiles by type, colour and value before anything else.

Furniture was minimal — low tables brought out for meals, stools, occasionally a chair for the head of the household, a loom.

Lighting was oil lamps in ceramic or glass, hung in metal frames or set in wall niches.

Cooking used a hearth or a portable brazier, with glazed and unglazed ceramics, a metal cauldron if the household could afford one, and a hand mill.

The icon corner, a niche or shelf on the east wall with an icon and a hanging lamp, is attested from the middle period and is the one feature that survives unchanged into modern Orthodox households.

Metal objects were valuable and appear individually in wills. A bronze cauldron was worth recording by name.

Reading an Excavated House

For anyone looking at an excavated Byzantine house plan, a few markers do most of the interpretive work.

A staircase base against an outside wall indicates an upper living floor over a ground-floor store or stable — the standard two-storey arrangement.

A hearth or ash layer locates the living room; its absence on the ground floor supports the upper-floor reading.

Storage vessels sunk into the floor mark the storeroom, and their capacity indicates the household’s scale.

A cistern mouth in a courtyard is almost universal in Byzantine urban houses and is often the best-preserved feature.

Reused masonry — column drums, inscribed blocks, cut marble — in rubble walls is normal and dates the house after the building it was robbed from.

Subdivision walls cutting across earlier rooms, especially across a mosaic floor or a colonnade, mark the seventh-century transition from the late antique house to the medieval one, and are the single most diagnostic feature in the archaeology of Byzantine urbanism.

That last point is worth emphasising. A visitor at Ephesus, Sardis or Aphrodisias who sees a crude wall built across a mosaic floor is looking at the moment the classical city ended, and it is legible on the ground.

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