Introduction

Summary

Between the fifth and the ninth century ad, the church in Constantinople commemorated nine earthquakes that struck the city, prescribing an elaborate liturgical rite annually for each occasion.¹ Worshippers sang specially composed hymns, heard carefully chosen passages from Scripture, and engaged in mass processions that retraced the steps of the city’s earthquake evacuation route. The rite, in its original fifth-century form, communicated a theology of earthquakes as divine and terrestrial judgment for collective sin but showed confidence in the power of collective repentance to turn aside natural disaster and divine wrath. These and other rituals and prayers related to earthquakes in Byzantine Constantinople were means by which city-dwellers could make meaning from disaster and renegotiate their relationships to God and the land around them in the face of its most destabilizing ecological characteristic: its seismicity.

Located on the North Anatolian Fault, Constantinople (today Istanbul) has experienced countless earthquakes over the course of its history.²