Church of St. Polyeuctus
Intended as an assertion of Juliana's own imperial lineage, it was a lavishly decorated building, and the largest church of the city before the construction of the Hagia Sophia.
It introduced the large-scale use of Sassanid Persian decorative elements, and may have inaugurated the new architectural type of domed basilica, perfected in the later Hagia Sophia.
It was meant to replace an earlier church, built by Eudocia, wife of Theodosius II and Juliana's great-grandmother, to enshrine the relic skull of Saint Polyeuctus.
The building constituted thereby a direct challenge to the prestige and authority of the low-born reigning dynasty, and it may have been one of the reasons for the massive scale of Justinian's reconstruction of the Hagia Sophia a few years later.
"[6] The importance of the Solomonic allusions is however questioned by some scholars, who see the church more as a statement of the imperial prestige of the Old Roman aristocracy, from which Juliana descended, and of Chalcedonian orthodoxy, which she had championed during the reign of the Monophysite emperor Anastasius I (r.
After stalling for time, she had her gold melted down and fashioned into plates, with which she adorned the interior of the roof of the newly built church of St. Polyeuctus, thus preserving it from the emperor's avarice.
These fragments, in conjunction with references to the approximate location of church in Byzantine texts concerning the imperial processions on the Mese avenue, allowed a secure identification.
[2][8] The site was extensively excavated between 1964 and 1969 by archaeologists under the direction of Dr. Nezih Firatli from the Istanbul Archaeological Museum and Richard Martin Harrison of the Dumbarton Oaks Institute.
Based on the epigram and the substructures, Harrison also posited the existence of a pair of two-storey exedrae, composed of three niches with a pier in between, on the northern and southern sides of the ambo.
[14] A notable characteristic, which has not been attested before in Constantinopolitan art and architecture, is the extensive use of Sassanid Persian decorative motifs such as friezes of running palmette and pomegranate leaves or symmetric geometric and vegetal patterns.
These massive pieces of marble consist of a concave segment with a large frontal peacock carved in the center, tail fanned out proud.
[22] Martin Harrison notes that this workmanship is all done by the artist’s eye, and with no use of a constant measure, as indicated by the marks made by the chisel, minute irregularities, and slight bends in the lattice work.
The peacocks—associated with the goddess Hera and royalty in Antiquity and symbolizing renewal and rebirth for Christians[23] —adorned with carved necklaces, were painted in blues, greens and gold.
