Content and Structure of Post-Byzantine Greek Descriptions of the Holy Land

Abstract

The task of this article is to review post-Byzantine descriptions of Palestine, Syria, Egypt and other Holy Places of the Christian East in order to generalize the identified materials in the texts under study. The methods of work were comparative historical, textual when comparing various editions and translations of monuments, as well as a linguistic-comparative method when collating Greek, Latin, Old Slavic and Eastern descriptions of the Holy Land. The transition from the Byzantine proper to the post-Byzantine tradition of describing the Holy Land is organic and thematically almost imperceptible: in the new conditions of the Turkocracy, pilgrimage literature consistently continues to develop on the same historical and theological foundations. Pilgrimage literature is becoming widespread in a variety of genres: lives of local saints, proskinitarian guidebooks, poetic poems, theological tales of miracles. There is a gradual increase in the authors’ interest in the diversity of places of heterodox service in the Christian East. In general, the palette of descriptions becomes completer and more detailed, and the repertoire of the monuments under consideration is enriched.