Recycling of Religious Space
Across Europe, even after the conversion of the continent, many pagan temples remained in use: not for the animal sacrifices of the past, or the worship of ancient polytheistic gods, but rather as places of worship for the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In Rome, the Pantheon became the Church of St. Mary and the Martyrs; in Athens, the Parthenon became the Church of Parthenos Maria; in Thessaloniki, the Rotunda of Galerius became the Church of St. George. While religious spaces are often indelibly linked in our minds to the faith practiced in them, the history of use, design, and situation of these spaces reminds us of the interplay between religions which has shaped their modern status.
As Christians, one of the first testimonies to the repurposing of religious spaces we find comes in the Book of Acts. As he travels the Mediterranean, St. Paul is shown making extensive use of existing places of worship in spreading his gospel message. In the cities he visits, he preaches to Jews and God-fearers in the Synagogues, and debates pagan philosophers at sites such as the Areopagus in Athens. In both cases, St. Paul seeks to demonstrate that his preaching is in continuity with that which was already practiced. Acts 17 depicts the Synagogues where he “entered into discussions with them from the scriptures, expounding and demonstrating that the Messiah had to suffer and rise from the dead,” but also explains that in his testimony at the Areopagus, Paul proclaims that the God he preaches is the unknown god whom the Greeks have already dedicated temples to.
In St. Paul's example, we see one of the first key ways that the adoption of religious sites has been justified: as a continuation of, and succession to, the historic beliefs. St. Paul sought to present Christianity as the subversive successor to both the scriptures of the Jews and the philosophy of the pagans, an idea which we see repeated in I Corinthians 1. We see similar testimonies in other parts of religious history: after Muslims took over Jerusalem in 637, they erected the Dome of the Rock over the Temple Mount, a testimony to Islam’s continuity with the previous revelations of Christianity and Judaism. Throughout the Protestant reformation and Enlightenment period, cathedrals – Canterbury in England, St. Giles in Scotland, Nidrados in Norway – became headquarters or important spaces for national churches, offering a continuity between historic and modern practices despite breaks with the papacy.
Religious sites have also often shared positioning as a claim of triumph and conquest over a previous religion. The Pantheon in Rome and Parthenon in Athens are famous examples, monumental temples that were both converted into churches, but a more poignant case is that of Saint Mary over Minerva, a church named for the temple it was built over. This practice was hardly unique; in Spain, the Great Mosque of Cordoba was built on the ruins of a Christian basilica, and after the reconquista, a large cathedral was built into the middle of the mosque. These transitions can allow religious structures to remain central cultural sites, even despite changes in religion. The Rotunda in Thessaloniki, Greece was originally a temple with a processional route to the city’s imperial palace, then was made a church after Rome’s Christianization in 381, a mosque in 1590 under the Ottomans, and a church again in 1912 after Greece took the city. But the complex also housed migrants during religiously-based forced migration between Greece and Turkey in 1923, regularly hosts museum displays, and serves as a major nucleus for modern protest movements, which has ingrained it into the Thessalonian and Macedonian identities. Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia serves a similar purpose, a testament to Ottoman claim of Roman legacy and the grandeur of the city’s imperial past. More symbolically, it represents Turkish attitudes towards religion: under Turkey’s historic secularism, it operated as a museum, but as secularism has declined, it was made an active mosque in 2020.
Despite theological conflicts between spaces, these transitions have been relatively easy to facilitate. As religions changed, previous structures provided space that was there and ready to be used, presenting the more affordable option of converting structures from one religion to another. Even when the historic structure wasn’t retained, materials like marbles, bricks, or stone from the previous site were regularly reused in successive constructions. Building new churches on old sites also capitalized on prime city-center real estate, as these newly-vacated lots provided access to worshipers and high visibility. In many European cases, retrofitting was not particularly hard: Thessaloniki’s circular Rotunda was built with the largest pagan shrine in the north, but was rotated to have its altar in the east when it became a church, and then turned slightly south-east towards Mecca when it was made a mosque. The eastern alignment of many churches proved quite suitable to use for mosques in much of Ottoman Europe, and so the transition between occupants was quite rapidly achievable.
There were also shared intentions underlying the religious architectural styles. The elements used for these sites, whether it be in pagan Rome or Christian Constantinople or Islamic Jerusalem, aimed to convey the grandeur of their gods or the God, reminding worshipers of the heavens above them and the omnipresence of the divine. The Parthenon was built atop the highest hill in the center of Athens, viewable from almost every part of the ancient city, a constant reminder that the gods were not escapable. In Christian design, soaring ceilings served as a way to point worshipers towards heaven and reinforce the liturgical celebration as heaven on Earth; in eastern Christianity, the church’s upward progression towards heaven was reinforced by progressions of icons on the walls: the lowest icons were post-biblical saints, with biblical stories were placed above them, and images from Christ’s life atop that. In the west, cathedral ceilings were painted dark blue and ornamented with golden stars to show the same connection, a practice still followed from Sainte Chapelle in France to the Cathedral of Charleston. Grand heights and upward motion were also adopted in Islamic mosque architecture, with gilded domes and ascendent minarets; elements like the vaulted iwans often pointed both directionally towards Mecca and upwards towards God. Large, towering structures – whether they be from Gothic belfries, towering iwans, modern steeples – invoke the power and majesty of God in the mind of the viewer.
This purpose is still retained by many religious sites these days, but they have also been adopted for another occupant: centers of government. Modern governmental buildings regularly take design elements directly from the religious structures that preceded them. In the U.S., neoclassical design, drawn from the temples of the Greeks and Romans, is ever-present in governmental structures: the towering columns and friezes of the Supreme Court Building seek to invoke ancient temples and divine justice, while the grand dome and rotunda of the Capitol take inspiration straight from the Roman Pantheon. And perhaps this transition makes sense: the lines between the two structures were quite blurred in ancient times. The Roman Senate would often convene in the city’s temples, at the feet of monuments to the gods, while governmental buildings like the Basilica of Maxentius in Constantinople were some of the first converted to Christian churches during the Christianization of Rome. The conflation of religious and governmental design serves as a testimony to the higher importance and duty which overshadows both the citizens outside and the politicians inside. They also follow religious structures in evoking power and majesty, not necessarily of God, but in this case of the state.
As Americans, this history of religious space is easy to forget: our churches are quite young, compared to the centuries of contestation in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and we have had a much more limited experience of religious change than that which the Old World experienced. But in viewing our places of worship, both now and in historic Christianity, we should not forget this interplay, and the way that our interactions with the religious that preceded, succeeded, and surrounded us play into our religious spaces. And the topic of what happens to churches no longer in use is rapidly becoming less foreign to us: with religious attendance on the decline in America, more and more churches shuttering their doors, and new congregations are not taking their place. After looking to the past in this piece, in my next, I hope to add to the discussion on what is happening and should happen to our religious spaces when they close for good.