ABSTRACT
The town of Silivri or Selymbria in Turkish Thrace has seen better days. When John Covel visited in 1675, he wrote “The Greekes had formerly 22 churches within ye walls, but now … there are but 14, and those most pittifull little sad holes.”1 He admired the city’s fortification system, of which he left a detailed description and some sketches of the walls. The fortifications had all but vanished before Ferudun Dirimtekin reported on them at the 1955 Byzantine Congress.2 Of the churches seen by Covel, remains of only two had survived into the early twentieth century, when both were destroyed. Because of the Thracian coastal city’s proximity to and political connections with Constantinople, its monuments are of particular importance. Silivri also sits at the southern end of the Long Wall, the outermost element in the defensive system of the capital.3 Although there is almost nothing Byzantine left at Silivri today, surviving visual documentation of its monuments, including some unpublished views, allows the possibility of a reassessment of its Byzantine architecture. In this chapter I shall examine the evidence for two of its Byzantine churches.
