The Church of Saint Demetrius, Thessaloniki - Greece 2013
I visited the Church of Saint Demetrius in Thessaloniki in December 2013. At first sight, its broad nave, rows of columns and richly decorated sanctuary belong to the familiar world of Byzantine Christianity. Yet this church has a second history beneath its floor. Descending into the crypt reveals an older Thessaloniki, where Roman public life and the beginnings of Christian worship meet within the same archaeological space.
The earliest structures below the basilica belonged to a Roman public bath complex near the city's ancient forum. Its surviving masonry, arches and water-related installations are not the remains of an earlier pagan temple. According to Christian tradition, Demetrius was imprisoned and killed here during the persecutions of the early fourth century, traditionally dated to AD 303. The archaeological remains establish the presence of the baths; the association with his imprisonment and martyrdom belongs to the religious memory of the city. It was precisely this association that gave the location its later sacred meaning.
After Christianity gained legal recognition in the Roman Empire in 313, a small place of prayer was established over the ruins. In the fifth century, a larger basilica was built, traditionally associated with the prefect Leontios. Following a destructive fire in the seventh century, the church was reconstructed as a five-aisled basilica. In this way, the bath complex was not simply demolished and forgotten: parts of its former space became the crypt, incorporated into a Christian sanctuary that grew around the memory of the saint.
The underground chambers also tell the story of changing forms of devotion. A fountain and basins became associated with holy water and, later, with the fragrant myrrh that believers connected to Saint Demetrius, known as the Myrrh-Streamer. Today the crypt preserves fragments from several centuries of the church's history, including carved capitals, architectural sculptures, inscriptions and pottery. Not every object displayed below was originally part of the Roman bath: many belong to later phases of the basilica and were recovered during excavations and restoration.
The building itself experienced further transformations. After the Ottoman conquest of Thessaloniki in 1430, it was converted into a mosque in 1493 and was known as Kasımiye Camii. It returned to Christian worship in 1912, but the devastating city fire of 1917 severely damaged it. Restoration and archaeological work in the decades that followed brought the buried structures back to light, and the church reopened in 1949. The crypt was eventually arranged as an exhibition space, allowing visitors to see evidence of the city's different historical layers.
For me, the most compelling aspect of Saint Demetrius was this passage between two worlds. Above ground stands a monumental place of Christian worship; below it are the remains of an ordinary Roman public building that became inseparable from the city's religious identity. The photographs bring these layers together—not as proof that one religion replaced another on the site of a temple, but as a record of how a city can preserve, reinterpret and build upon its own past.