L'épître 17/77 de Grigor Magistros: Une description de la cathédrale Sainte-Sophie de Constantinople? (Grigor Magistros's Letter 17/77: A Description of Hagia Sophia?)
Arevshatyan, Anna S. · 2025
In a letter written to his son-in-law for the feast of the Inauguration of the Church, Grigor Magistros recalls the Illuminator's vision of an angel commanding him to found a martyrium. That site, mentioned by Agathangelos, is not precisely known, and Magistros almost certainly never saw it. Arevshatyan therefore proposes that his description is modelled on a building he had seen: Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, then the principal church of the Christian world. She adds that a miniature in a Matenadaran manuscript containing Magistros's complete works shows him standing beside a magnificent church, possibly alluding to the poetic contest at Hagia Sophia in which the Armenian scholar bested an Arab poet by versifying the whole Bible.
Read the publication ↗Citation
Arevshatyan, Anna S. 2025. L'épître 17/77 de Grigor Magistros: Une description de la cathédrale Sainte-Sophie de Constantinople? (Grigor Magistros's Letter 17/77: A Description of Hagia Sophia?). Revue des Études Arméniennes, Vol. 43 (2025), pp. 247–256 (Peeters); DOI 10.2143/REA.43.0.3295025. https://doi.org/10.2143/REA.43.0.3295025
What this offers a reader
A detective piece: an Armenian writer describes a church he never saw, using one he did.
Armenian musicologist and philologist at the NAS RA; short and elegant.
Grigor Magistros stood in Hagia Sophia and beat an Arab poet at his own game. That story is in here.
Which church was an eleventh-century Armenian scholar really describing?
Topics
Related in the repository
Citation checked against the publisher's record on .