Syriac Christianity and the Holy City of Jerusalem: Entangled Histories in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages

The lecture introduces the audience to the process of interaction of one of the most important Middle Eastern Church traditions, Syriac Christianity, with the Holy City and the Holy Land. Even if scholars have often argued that the late antique pilgrimage to the holy places was not of interest in Syriac Christianity, the sources have demonstrated the opposite. At the end of Late Antiquity and beginning of the Middle Ages, the Holy City acted in Syriac Christian canon as a matrix for encountering holiness, and a standardized process of pilgrimage became part of a recurrent devotional custom of monks and lay people.