Byzantine Culture

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Nea Moni of Chios

Nea Moni on Chios was founded by Constantine IX Monomachos around 1042 and decorated by Constantinopolitan mosaicists. Its unusual architecture, dramatic style, earthquakes and massacre.

High in the hills of central Chios, reached by a winding road through mastic scrub, stands a monastery founded by an emperor to keep a promise. Nea Moni — “the new monastery” — was built by Constantine IX Monomachos in the 1040s, decorated by mosaicists sent from Constantinople, and is the only one of the three great eleventh-century Greek ensembles whose patron, date and circumstances are known with confidence.

It is also the one that has suffered most. An earthquake in 1881 brought down the dome and with it the mosaic of the Pantokrator; a massacre in 1822 killed most of the monks; and the community today numbers a handful of nuns in a complex built for hundreds.

The Foundation Story

The story is recorded in a monastic chronicle and is consistent with the documented facts. Three hermits living on the mountain — Niketas, John and Joseph — found an icon of the Virgin hanging in a myrtle bush. They also, according to the account, foresaw that Constantine Monomachos, then in exile on Lesbos, would become emperor, and told him so.

When he did become emperor in 1042, the hermits went to Constantinople to remind him of the prophecy and to ask for a monastery. He gave them one, on a scale that suggests he took the debt seriously: imperial funds, tax exemptions, estates on Chios, and craftsmen from the capital.

The chrysobull granting the monastery’s privileges survives in later copies, and Byzantine documents from the imperial chancery confirm the endowment. Whatever one makes of the prophecy, the imperial patronage is solidly attested — which is precisely what makes Nea Moni so valuable as a dated point in the history of Byzantine art.

The Architecture

The church is an “island octagon,” a variant of the domed octagon found at Hosios Loukas but simplified: the dome rests on eight squinches springing directly from the walls of a single square naos, with no columns or piers at all in the interior.

The result is a completely unobstructed space, and it is startling to walk into — a small church with the openness of a much larger one. The dome originally rose about fifteen metres over a floor roughly eight metres square.

Two narthexes to the west and a later exonarthex with flanking chapels complete the plan. The masonry is rough by comparison with the refined cloisonné of the Greek mainland, which is a reminder that the money went into the interior.

The Mosaics

The decoration was carried out by mosaicists trained in Constantinople — the style has no local precedent on Chios — probably in the 1050s.

What survives is the narthex programme and the sanctuary and squinch mosaics of the naos. The dome Pantokrator was destroyed in 1881; a photograph taken before the earthquake does not exist, and the loss is total.

The style is the most dramatic of the three eleventh-century ensembles. Figures are tall and thin, with small heads and large hands; drapery breaks into sharp, nervous folds; the faces are intense and often anguished; and the compositions are asymmetrical and crowded in a way that generates real tension. The Crucifixion, the Descent from the Cross and the Anastasis in the narthex are the outstanding scenes.

Where Daphni is classical and Hosios Loukas is ascetic, Nea Moni is visionary. The comparison between them is the standard case study for the proposition that eleventh-century Byzantine art had several registers available at once rather than a single evolving style.

A technical detail worth noting: the Nea Moni mosaicists set their tesserae at markedly varied angles, so that the gold ground glitters unevenly as the viewer moves. The technique is discussed in Byzantine mosaics, and Nea Moni is where it is most aggressively exploited.

The Later History

Chios was Genoese from 1346 to 1566, and the monastery continued under both Genoese and then Ottoman rule with its privileges largely intact. It was wealthy, owning a substantial share of the island’s mastic-producing villages.

The catastrophe came in 1822. During the Greek war of independence, an insurrection on Chios prompted an Ottoman reprisal in which tens of thousands of islanders were killed or enslaved — the event that produced Delacroix’s Scenes from the Massacres of Chios and a European outcry. The monastery was burned and its monks killed; the bones of the victims are kept in an ossuary chapel by the gate, which is the first thing a visitor now sees.

The earthquake of 1881 brought down the dome and the bell tower. The dome was rebuilt without its mosaic.

What Remains

Despite everything, the surviving mosaics are extensive and of the first quality, and the building’s spatial effect is undamaged. The complex also retains its enclosure wall, a cistern, the refectory, monastic cells, and a defensive tower.

It has been a UNESCO world heritage site since 1990, together with Hosios Loukas and Daphni. Conservation has been continuous since the 1960s, and the mosaics have been cleaned and consolidated in several campaigns.

Constantine IX and Monastic Patronage

The foundation says something useful about eleventh-century imperial behaviour. Constantine IX Monomachos is not among the more admired emperors — he presided over the debasement of the coinage, the dismantling of frontier defences in Armenia, and the breach with Rome in 1054 described in the Great Schism. He also founded Nea Moni, rebuilt the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, endowed the monastery of St George of Mangana in Constantinople on a lavish scale, and refounded the law school of the capital.

The pattern — heavy investment in monastic and ecclesiastical foundations by emperors whose military and fiscal records were poor — is a recurring feature of the period and one of the standing criticisms made by Byzantine writers themselves. Michael Psellos, who knew Constantine IX personally, is sharp about the Mangana expenditure while remaining fond of the man.

For the history of art, the effect was fortunate. The monastery on a mountain in Chios received capital-quality mosaic work because an emperor felt he owed three hermits a favour, and the accident preserved a style that would otherwise be known only from Constantinople, where almost nothing of the period survives.

The Chrysobull and the Endowment

Nea Moni is unusually well documented for a provincial Byzantine monastery, because its imperial privileges generated paperwork that later copyists preserved.

Constantine IX’s grants included the island’s tax revenues from a substantial group of estates, exemption from imperial taxation, and independence from the local bishop — the monastery answered directly to the emperor and, in ecclesiastical terms, was self-governing.

Later emperors confirmed the privileges, and the accumulated documents record landholdings across Chios and beyond. By the late Byzantine period the monastery was one of the largest landowners on the island, with mills, orchards, olive groves and a share in the mastic villages whose resin was Chios’s principal export.

The economic pattern — imperial foundation, tax exemption, accumulated estates, a community supported by rents from dependent peasants — is the standard one described in Byzantine monasticism and the Byzantine village. Nea Moni is a well-documented specimen of it.

The Mosaics’ Technique

The Nea Moni mosaicists did something specific with their materials that is worth looking for.

Byzantine gold tesserae are made by sandwiching gold leaf between a glass backing and a thin protective film of clear glass, then cutting the sheet into cubes. Setting them flat produces an even sheen; setting them at varied angles produces a broken, shifting reflection.

At Nea Moni the gold-ground tesserae are set at markedly irregular angles, more so than at Daphni or Hosios Loukas, with the result that the background glitters unevenly and appears to move as the viewer walks. In a small, dark church lit by oil lamps and a few windows, the effect would have been considerably stronger than it is under modern lighting.

The figures, by contrast, are set flat and regularly, so they stay stable while the ground shifts behind them. This is a deliberate exploitation of the medium, and it is the strongest argument that the workmen were first-rate specialists rather than provincial imitators. The technique is discussed further in Byzantine mosaics.

The Massacre and the Ossuary

The 1822 events deserve more than a sentence, because they determine what a visitor now encounters.

Chios had been a prosperous, largely autonomous Ottoman island with a Greek Christian majority. A small insurgent force landed from Samos in March 1822 and besieged the citadel. The Ottoman response was a punitive expedition of considerable scale: contemporary estimates, which vary widely, put the dead in the tens of thousands and those enslaved higher still, out of a population of perhaps 100,000.

The monastery was attacked, its buildings burned and the monks and refugees sheltering there killed. The church survived; the monastic quarters largely did not.

The bones of the victims are kept in a small ossuary chapel by the gate, visible behind glass, with a cannonball lodged in the wall above. It is the first thing on the site, before the church, and the juxtaposition — an eleventh-century imperial foundation approached past a rack of nineteenth-century skulls — is the site’s defining experience.

Delacroix’s Scenes from the Massacres of Chios, exhibited in Paris in 1824, made the event a cause across Europe and contributed materially to the philhellenic movement that brought foreign support to the Greek revolution.

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