Novye Ierusalimy. Ierotopija i ikonografija sakral’nych prostranstv. [Die neuen Jerusaleme. Hierotopie und Ikonographie sakraler Räume]. Redaktor-sostovitel’ A. M. Lidov. Moskva: Indrik, 2009. 910 S., zahlr. Abb. ISBN: 978-5-91674-051-6

Novye Ierusalimy. Ierotopija i ikonografija sakral’nych prostranstv. [Die neuen Jerusaleme. Hierotopie und Ikonographie sakraler Räume]. Redaktor A. M. Lidov. Moskva: Indrik, 2009. 910 S., zahlr. Abb. ISBN: 978-5-91674-051-6.

New Jerusalems is the most recent volume in a series devoted to the conceptual foundations of Eastern Orthodox Christianity produced by the Research Center for Eastern Christian Culture in Moscow under the direction of Aleksei Lidov. The previous collections have concerned “Jerusalem in Russian Culture” (1994, eng. ed. 2005), “The Eastern Christian Church: Liturgy and Art” (1994), “The Miracle-Working Icon in Byzantium and Early Rus” (1994), “The Iconostasis: Origins – Development – Symbolism” (2000), “Eastern Christian Reliquaries” (2003), “Hierotopia: The Creation of Sacred Spaces in Byzantium and Early Rus” (2006), and “Hierotopia: Comparative Studies of Sacred Spaces” (2009). The current volume is based on papers given at a 2006 conference co-sponsored by the State Tret’iakov Gallery in Moscow, timed to coincide with the 350th anniversary of the founding of the Patriarch Nikon’s Resurrection-New Jerusalem Monastery.

The very term New Jerusalem is an ambiguous one, referring now to a political-religious instantiation of earthly Jerusalem in an urban locus (synonymous with second Jerusalem), now to the heavenly city that will descend to a transfigured earth following the Last Judgment to serve as the eternal abode for all those who have found God’s favor at the End Times (namely New Jerusalem). In the former case, a new or second Jerusalem is understood in the Davidian tradition, the site of the ruler’s domain, the capital of a chosen people, a city imbued with the sanctity and aura of the original ‘Old’ Jerusalem in the Holy Land. A new Jerusalem is primarily a result of inspiration from Old Jerusalem, but can itself elicit emulation. Ancient Kiev saw itself as a new Jerusalem, but also as a new Constantinople, the Byzantine capital itself deriving substance from the City of David.

The latter case, the New Jerusalem, looks not to the past but to the future. It is identified with salvation of the faithful, with paradise returned to those who will conquer death in the aftermath of Christ’s Second Coming. Additionally, one must consider the term (Old) Jerusalem itself, the original city of David, and its association with holy places and holy beings, a historical center of the world that earned God’s praise and God’s punishment. In a medieval setting, it is not always possible to keep these three distinct referents apart, one often shading into the other in the context of local predilection and value. The current volume preserves this ambiguity, presenting a wide range of themes that invoke all three notions. Foremost attention, however, is directed at the models provided by New Jerusalem and Old Jerusalem.

Old Jerusalem is reasonably well documented in Old and New Testaments as well as in pilgrims’ narratives, and thus provides a ready fund of specific holy places, persons and events to cite or emulate. The Book of Revelation, on the contrary, reveals the barest of details about the physical design of the heavenly New Jerusalem once descended. We know its gross dimensions, its cubical shape, and the material composition of its foundations, gates and walls. Made of pure gold, without edifices, it is bathed in the brightness of the Lord’s divine light and thus in need neither of sun nor moon. The representation and function of this supremely abstract city of contained space, in stark contrast to the vile and mundane Babylon, are thus left to the creative imaginations of the faithful as expressed in their own sacred spaces defined in verbal and nonverbal media. This volume shows, indeed, that there is a rich gamut of representational possibilities generated by this most desirable, yet least delineated, urban paradise.

In this collection of thirty-six articles by an international cohort of scholars, we come to understand the ubiquity of New Jerusalem / Old Jerusalem in a variety of forms and practices, most architectural, but some having to do with ritual, iconic representation and the disposition of relics. Locales considered range from the Holy Land to the Byzantine Empire, Rus’, Cyprus, Italy, Serbia, Germany, Georgia and Armenia.

Although specific, local characteristics are to be expected in the cultural expression of the various Jerusalems noted, one is struck by the recurrence of patterns of representation across such a large geographical spread. These patterns can be based primarily on an iconic association with Jerusalem, through formal or relational (diagrammatic) similarity; or an indexical (metonymic) association, through contiguity. Because the overarching subject matter of this collection is hierotopia – sacred space – Old and New Jerusalem provide very different models for emulation. Old Jerusalem, with its major buildings, elevations, walls, gates and streets, offers abundant sources for iconic representation.

The most consistent model for the visualization of New Jerusalem has long been the earth-bound Church of the Resurrection, the Holy Sepulcher, in Jerusalem itself, precisely because of its metonymic association with Christ’s victory over death and its corresponding symbolic link with the salvation of the faithful in the future. This complex of sacred spaces can, of course, be re-imagined in general terms as an enclosed baldachin (e.g. the Aachen reliquary, 969–979) or in much more precise terms as a reproduction of the physical site. Both can be understood as icons, but the latter is all the more striking with its emphasis on the duplication of exact dimensions and spatial configurations in order to recreate hierotopia in a new setting. A cardinal example of this is the Resurrection-New Jerusalem Monastery in Istra near Moscow, begun in 1656. Designed as an exact replica of the Holy Sepulcher, Patriarch Nikon had sent his assistant Arsenii Sukhanov to Jerusalem to obtain precise measurements, apparently firm in his belief that such an accurate replication of this holiest of spaces would generate a new Jerusalemic hierotopia in Russia. Also ensuring such accuracy was a wooden model brought back from Jerusalem, and architectural plans of the Holy Sepulcher, by the Franciscan monk Amico that found their way to Moscow before construction was completed. The perfect measurement of a gradient hierotopia, with sacrality amplified the closer one came to the Holy Sepulcher itself, guaranteed a similar result far from Jerusalem itself. The rotunda first recorded over the edicula surmounting the Sepulcher in the 13th century inspires the generation of rotunda-shaped bell towers in Armenia in the same time period. Similar attempts at reproduction are noted for Greece and Cyprus. In Russia, historical exactitude is favored by the increasing authority of the Antiochene understanding of the liturgy with its emphasis on the earthly life of Christ, a perspective played out in the reform of major royal rituals in the 17th century during Nikon’s tenure.

If the iconic imperative is inspired by New Jerusalem itself, its ambiguity leads to a variety of spaces meant to represent it, for example, holy caves in the wilderness of Georgia and Serbia juxtaposed to urban centers such as Mtskheta and Belgrade associated with Old Jerusalem. The eschatological New Jerusalem can also be imagined as a royal palace, a gate church over a major entrance into a walled city (e.g. Constantinople), an octagonal chandelier alluding to the cult of Jerusalemic light begun under Charlemagne, or as the special space created by a “Jerusalem wall” that separates nave from transept in 12th-century Sicily (e.g. Palermo, Monreale).

Hierotopia can also be created by contiguity with images of Jerusalem, icons, frescoes, and mosaics, encolpia in the shape of the Holy Sepulcher, together with manuscripts whose narratives invoke the spiritual setting of Jerusalem. Relics and Jerusalemic images brought back from the Holy Land provide tangible contiguity with the holy, presenting the spiritual power of Jerusalem Old and New to distant lands, the sole sources of such hierotopic proximity to the holy city. The True Cross and its reproductions provide the faithful with permanent attachment to this axis mundi, in life and in death through the markers on grave-sites.

This rich and original collection of contributions to the study of hierotopia offers important insights and tangible evidence of the variety and coherence of Orthodox Christian thought as it pertains to Old and New Jerusalem. It is a rewarding addition to the growing list of volumes documenting the intense activity and productive thought stimulated by Aleksei Lidov’s Research Center for Eastern Christian Culture.

Michael S. Flier, Cambridge, MA