Nea Ekklesia
— — five domes the lightning took in 1490.
Not only on a wall.
“Emperor Basil I dedicated the New Church in 880 inside the Great Palace of Constantinople, on the seaward terraces above the Sea of Marmara. Five domes, five sanctuaries, marble carried from the older empire. The building set the cross-in-square model that Byzantine architecture followed for the next six centuries. A lightning strike found the Ottoman powder magazine stored inside in 1490 and the church did not survive the explosion. Only the descriptions remain.
Nea Ekklesia, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Nea Ekklesia, the New Church, stood inside the Great Palace of Constantinople, on the terraces between the Hippodrome and the Sea of Marmara, in what is now the Sultanahmet district of Istanbul. Emperor Basil I founded the church and it was dedicated on 1 May 880. The site sat within the Palace's private quarter, near the Tzykanisterion polo grounds. No part of the structure survives above ground; the precise footprint is reconstructed from the 10th-century descriptions of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus and the Vita Basilii.
The church was the first major imperial foundation in Constantinople after Hagia Sophia and it set a pattern. Five domes rose above a cross-in-square plan, with the central dome over the naos and four smaller domes at the corners. The interior was lined with polychrome marble, mosaics on gold ground, and silver liturgical fittings noted by chroniclers as exceptional even by Byzantine standards. The cross-in-square model spread through the empire and beyond, shaping church architecture from Mount Athos to Kievan Rus' for nearly six centuries.
The Nea Ekklesia stood for 610 years and then it did not. In 1490 the Ottoman authorities were using the building as a powder magazine; a lightning strike ignited the store and the explosion took the church and the surrounding structures with it. Nothing was rebuilt on the footprint. The area is now part of the Cankurtaran quarter near the Topkapı walls, and the church survives only in the descriptions left by Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus and in the influence its plan carried across the Byzantine world.