Conversing Hellenism: The Multiple Voices of a Byzantine Monument in Greece

The church of the Virgin of Skripou, in Boeotia, offers a remarkable instance of the potential layering of history as realized in a Byzantine monument. This is initially discernible in the hybrid character of the building, composed as it is of remnants from an earlier time, re-ordered and invested with new meaning at the time of its construction. The subsequent reception of the church in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries likewise serves to highlight the variety and complexity of attitudes projected by contemporary beholders over time. Finally, the church's role within the popular imagination, first as the inheritor of famous antiquities and later as the site of miraculous intervention, has been crucial to its survival and preservation at the hands of a community that has actively cultivated notions of local identity and collective memory.