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Typika of Constantinople Monasteries

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Rule of the Monastery of St. John Stoudios

Typikon of Emperor John II Komnenos for the Monastery of Christ Pantokrator 

Typikon of Empress Irene Doukaina Komnene for the Convent of the Mother of God Kecharitomene

Rule of Michael Attaleiates for his Almshouse in Rhaidestos and for the Monastery of Christ Panoiktirmon

Typikon of Athanasios Philanthropenos for the Monastery of St. Mamas 

Testament of Constantine Akropolites for the Monastery of the Resurrection (Anastasis)

Typikon of Theodora Synodene for the Convent of the Mother of God Bebaia Elpis

Typikon of Michael VIII Palaiologos for the Monastery of St. Demetrios of the Palaiologoi-Kellibara

Constantinople Home Page

  For eleven hundred years there had stood on the Bosporous a city where the intellect was admired and the learning and letters of the classical past were studied and preserved. Without the help of Byzantine commentators and scribes there is little that we would know today about the literature of ancient Greece.

  It was too, a city whose rulers down the centuries had inspired and encouraged a school of art unparalleled in human history, an art that arose from an ever varying blend of the cool cerebral Greek sense of the fitness of things and a deep religious sense that saw in works of art the incarnation of the Divine and the sanctification of matter.

  It was too, a great cosmopolitan city where along with merchandise ideas were freely exchanged and whose citizens saw themselves not as a racial unit but as the heirs of Greece and Rome, hallowed by the Christian faith.

From: Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople, 1453.