HIEROTOPOI
Historizing Interrituality with the Environment and Religious Orography in Topographic Interactions
An interdisciplinary project on ancient religious landscapes
Exploring how Greek and Roman communities shaped and experienced sacred landscapes, combining approaches from classical studies, archaeology, and the study of religion.
Sacralizing Space
The project investigates how space was sacralized in antiquity: which strategies, actors and practices inscribed religion into landscapes and turned parts of the world into sacred topoi.
Relational Religious Landscapes
We explore how sacred landscapes shaped ways of understanding, experiencing and relating to the environment, mediating relationships between human communities, divine agents and “organic nature”.
Topographic Writing & Memory
Our aim is to analyze the “topographic writing”, tracing how myths, rituals and monuments turned the landscapes into living archives of religious history, identity and collective memory.
Specialness & Relational Normativity
We study how certain places and things were marked as “special”, and how rituals, norms and civic structures regulated proper ways of relating to them, creating relational normativities in sacred space.
Protecting Sacred Environments
An important issue is to understand legal, ritual and social frameworks that protected rivers, groves, rocks and other religious topoi, showing how sacrality underpinned obligations of care with clear ecological relevance.
Comparative Chronotopes
The project compares Greek and Roman religious chronotopes across centuries to ask how past forms of life and religiosity might help us rethink contemporary ecological relations and imagine more sustainable ways of being in the world.
A combination of ancient sources and expertise
HIEROTOPOI brings together a wide range of ancient evidence and an international team of scholars to understand how religious landscapes were created, experienced and regulated in the Graeco-Roman world.
Research network
- Collaboration with international scholars from Austria, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, and Spain.
- Hosted at the Austrian Archaeological Institute (ÖAI-ÖAW).
- Funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).
Project Updates
- Read short research insights and case-study snapshots.
- Follow our workshops, lectures, conferences and publications.
- Stay connected to debates on religion, landscape and ecology.
“If ever you have come upon a grove that is full of ancient trees which have grown to an unusual height, shutting out a view of the sky by a veil of pleached and intertwining branches, then the loftiness of the forest, the seclusion of the spot, and your marvel at the thick unbroken shade in the midst of the open spaces, will prove to you the presence of deity.”
Seneca, the Younger
Moral Epistles, 41.3
