The Holy Apostles, Byzantine Studies Symposium, Dumbarton Oaks, April 24–26, 2015

Margaret Mullett and Robert Ousterhout, Symposiarchs

In the early years of Dumbarton Oaks, one of the research projects initiated by A.M. Friend was devoted to the lost church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople. It was an early humanities collaboration of a literary scholar (Glanville Downey), an architectural historian (Paul Underwood) and an art historian (A.M. Friend), and it represented an attempt to reconstruct a lost building. A three-volume publication was envisaged, but a symposium was also held on the subject in which major scholars were involved. It took place in 1948 with Sirarpie der Nersessian as symposiarch, and Friend gave two lectures on the reconstruction of the lost mosaic cycle; Paul A. Underwood spoke about the architecture; Der Nersessian herself gave two lectures on mosaics, while Glanville Downey spoke about the literary texts, Milton Anastos about imperial theology, and Francis Dvornik on the Patriarch Photios. As Kurt Weitzmann summarized, “It was a very unified program, demonstrating how Friend had been able to get every scholar at Dumbarton Oaks involved in his project.”

Unlike the projects on Norman Sicily or on Venice, the results of the Holy Apostles initiative were never published, nor was the 1948 symposium. Some materials survive in ICFA from that project, also unpublished. Nevertheless, the church of the Holy Apostles continues to attract scholarly attention from philologists, historians and art historians. In the seventy-fifth year of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, a symposium devoted to the church of the Holy Apostles will complete the task of those early years by assessing the significance of the church, its milieu and its legacy.