Epigraphies of Pious Travel

Beginning from as early as the 4th century AD, first as a result of the emperor Constantine Is welcoming policy towards Christianity, and through its subsequent rise to the status of the state religion of the Roman Empire, streams of pilgrims to the holy sites and other places of worship are increasingly on record. Pilgrims journeys find expression in written sources, most centrally in hagiography. They would also manifest themselves through material culture, in buildings and portable objects that pilgrims took with them on their journeys or brought home from the holy sites as tokens of memory and piety. Little attention, however, has been so far paid to inscriptions left by pilgrims either on their journey to and from the pilgrimage sites, or within the holy spaces themselves. While medieval Latin (Western European) areas and their epigraphy has attracted academic attention, there has hardly been any research on the Greek-speaking, i.e. Byzantine, East. This is also true for inscriptional evidence of pilgrims from Rus` the medieval Russian realm. In the holy places of the East, we find both Greek and Old Russian inscriptions left by pilgrims. These inscriptions are of "informal" character, and typically described as graffiti and dipinti. They range from mere mentions of names and brief invocations to God, the Virgin Mary, or saints, to more extended texts placed in building structures. As today, the wish to immortalize oneself epigraphically came alongside with the desire to demonstrate visitation of a sacred place or to document one`s pilgrimage. The documentation of Greek and Old Russian inscriptions collected in the course of the project Epigraphies of Pious Travel will serve not only to create a profile of a typically medieval pilgrim of the Christian east, but also to reconstruct and visualize pilgrimage routes. The pilgrimage routes led primarily to and through Asia Minor (for example, Ephesus, Aphrodisias, and Myra) and the Levant, but beyond that also to the north. We find Greek pilgrimage inscriptions in churches of Rus`, such as the church of St Sophia in Kiev, just as we find ancient Russian pilgrimage inscriptions at Byzantine sites such as Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Within the framework of the project, the pilgrim inscriptions will be made available in an open access online database. In addition, the pilgrimage routes will be made visible on the basis of the inscribed testimonies in an interactive map that will also be openly accessible. Alongside creating the scholarly tools, the project will encompass significant research agenda, with numerous publications and a major conference to be held in Vienna.

The rapid rise of Christianity in the fourth century CE was reflected in an equally speedy growth in religious travel. Literary sources increasingly recorded streams of Christian pilgrims to saint's tombs, biblical sites and other places of worship. Hagiographies provide detailed accounts of the miracles pious travellers might expect to receive, whilst material finds (such as ampullae and other tokens) attest to the pilgrim's desire to keep mementos of their journey. One major source for these travels are the inscriptions carved by pilgrims both along their routes and at their final destinations. These "graffiti" have received significant attention by scholars of medieval Western Europe, where the primary language is Latin, but little attention has been paid to their Greek counterparts in the east. Nonetheless, the Byzantine Empire was flush with the scratched testaments of pilgrims. From major city cathedrals to local sacred caves, all manner of pious travellers left graffiti behind. These texts and images ranged from elaborate liturgical quotes and detailed representations of saints to simple signatures and hurriedly scratched crosses. Each graffito is an attestation of the author's desire to immortalise themselves epigraphically, creating a long-lasting reminder of their visit to the sacred place at the site itself. The Epigraphies of Pious Travel project is centred on collecting, editing and republishing the Greek-language graffiti of pilgrims in the Eastern Mediterranean. During the course of the project, members have collated a corpus of c. 1,000 pilgrimage graffiti, which is in the process of being published on our digital database, hosted with OpenAtlas. Each entry features the data necessary to understand and contextualise the graffito - the text of the inscription (with linguistic analysis), a detailed description of its placement, and an accompanying description of the dating criteria. Interactive maps allow users to visualise the distribution of graffiti found across the territories of the former Byzantine Empire. The database will not only create interest of byzantinists, but also of other scholar doing research on antiquity, late antiquity and the medieval period as well of a broader public (e.g., graffiti from the project will be used in a concert at Nidaros Cathedral at Olavsfest in Trondheim (July/August 2026)). Accompanying the website are numerous publications on Greek Graffiti, including both close analysis of graffiti on site and an examination of broader trends of personal expression in travel.