Life in the rupestrian landscapes of Byzantine Thrace: Rock tales of the Strandzha Mountains

Rock-cut architecture was a primary way through which Byzantine society shaped its living environments according to specific needs and belief systems, almost wherever suitable rock formations were available. This dissertation examines the life of medieval inhabitants of the Strandzha region, Thrace, focusing on their interactions with and transformations of the bedrock. At the heart of this study is a group of previously overlooked and unpublished rock-cut sites, extensively surveyed and documented in a three-year-long fieldwork for the doctoral project. Moreover, the dissertation engages with new materialist approaches in archaeology and promotes a broader definition of rock-cut architecture not as an exclusively human-centric practice but as a manifestation of collaborations among humans and other beings. I argue that two nonhuman entities exercise their agency more manifestly than others: rock, which materializes the space carved within, and water, which acts both as a carver and a builder. The material qualities and landscape relations of the living rock set parameters for the spatial outcome, whereas flowing water is a major actor in the formation of karst topographies that can afford and often attract myriad forms of human engagement. Within this theoretical framework, the discussions of the large corpus of archaeological data produced during the fieldwork results in the reconstruction of multiple overlapping landscapes of Byzantine Thrace, a borderland close to the everchanging northwestern frontier of the Empire and part of the immediate hinterland of the Byzantine capital, Constantinople. In earlier scholarship, rock-cut spaces in Byzantium were usually portrayed as devoid of creativity and almost exclusively associated with monasticism. Instead, this study reveals complex living environments with different levels of investment into the rocky material and a diverse set of functions integral to the daily life of both monastic and lay communities. Whether in a religious or secular context, rock-cut sites are connected to main roads and wider settlement networks. More often than not, they overlook fertile lands and water sources and afford opportunities for rural communities to control and exploit this prosperous and well-connected region.