The Stoudios Monastery as a Lieu de Mémoire: Preserving History and Making It

Human existence could not be so glorious without sentiment. Intellectual fascination coupled with emotional attachment provides material structures with new dimensions of reality, escalating their presence beyond physical occupation. This is a habit humans tend to all the time; simple connotations are evidence of higher associative ability, and such is the tendency that French academic Pierre Nora strives to encapsulate by his creation of the term lieu de mémoire – a place of memory. Lieux de mémoires are simply physical entities that provide context or definition for a culture, very much like artifacts or relics, but more significant. The emotional weight of such entities are exceptionally heavy, as if the weight of an entire society is carried on their shoulders, and this is a quality that is entirely organic in nature; symbols and monuments are not crafted artificially, but through natural processes of interaction and association with some people, a statement that echoes some passage of time. Through the lens of history, the lieu de mémoire can be analyzed and characterized, so writes Nora[1]:

 

"The study of lieux de mémoires, then, lies at the intersection of two developments…: one a purely historiographical movement, the reflexive turning of history upon itself, the other a movement that is, properly speaking, historical: the end of a tradition of memory. The moment of lieux de mémoire occurs at the same time that an immense and intimate fund of memory disappears, surviving only as a reconstituted object beneath the gaze of critical history."[1]

 

With an extensive and multifaceted past, Istanbul – once known as Constantinople – is a city steeped in historical and cultural value, and thus provides the perfect catalytic potential for the formation of lieux de mémoires. The Stoudios Monastery is one such locale whose enduring presence and legacy has granted it a unique position in the memory of its host city; as a sanctuary for history as well as an element of it, the Stoudios Monastery perfectly emphasizes Nora’s concept of the lieu de mémoire.

 

[1] Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations. No. 26. N.p.: University of California Press, 1989. 11-12. Print.