OSROENE. - The Christian province of O. took shape within its definitive boundaries rather late, around the middle of the 5th century: its borders were, toward the east, the course of the Hâbûr from its confluence with the Euphrates to Circesium, and then the course of the latter from Circesium up to the latitude of Samosata. A region of Aramaic population with strong Arab infiltrations, it had entirely special characteristics from antiquity onward: its capital Ôrhâi (today Urfah), called Edessa by the Romans (v.), was an important center of culture and one — perhaps the most notable — of the places where Syriac rose to the status of a literary language.
Permeated by Christianity even before the peace of the Church, it elaborated a series of legends, culminating in the cult of St. Thomas, whose relics would have been brought there around 220, which gave it great fame in the East. At the same time the not distant Carrhae (Harrân) remained profoundly pagan, preserving its cult well into the late Middle Ages. On Edessa the documents of its religious history and therefore also of its Christian monuments are abundant, beginning with the Chronicon Edessenum compiled from the official documents of the Church. Unfortunately, the abundance of philological data is not matched by an equal — or even lesser — abundance of archaeological data, inasmuch as all the churches of the city have disappeared. An anonymous Venetian merchant, whose account was published by Ramusio, still saw many of them around 1507: « This city was royal, magnificent and miraculous, as can be seen from the ancient records, both of buildings and of palaces. There are ten to twelve very great churches, and built of marble of such a kind that I could not express it in words ». Even the Christian epigraphy both of the city and of the nearby monastery of St. James (largely in Syriac), though not poor, presents no salient archaeological data. One is therefore reduced to lists of church titles, important for the history of worship, but which say nothing about the structure and decoration of such monuments.
The most notable Christian monument of Edessa was the Great Church, which Muslim writers, beginning with al-Muqaddasi, count among the wonders of the world. Fortunately a Syriac poetic text, probably composed in the 7th century, gives a fairly ample and clear description of the form it came to assume following the reconstruction by Bishop Amidonius in the Justinianic era. The church was then a domed building of a Byzantine rather than Mesopotamian type, probably very similar to another building still preserved and well known, namely St. Clement's of Angora. The church was completely covered inside with decorative mosaics, probably aniconic.
Outside Edessa there are reports of churches and monuments that stood in various localities, and of the famous monastery of Qennesrè there even survives a veritable history, edited by Nau. Thus at Harrân the existence is known of a church of St. Elpidius and of a monastery of Aftonia in the vicinity of the city, and at Constantinè (today Virân Şahr) it is known that a xenodocheion there it was built in 456 by Bishop Abraham, and another in 513 under Bishop Samuel, as two inscriptions inform us. Virán Şahr has still preserved the ruins of the only early Christian monument in the region. This was a large round church having, inside the first outer circular enclosure and concentric with it, a second enclosure consisting of eight enormous pillars forming the corners of an octagon. Along two axes perpendicular to each other there were three square porticoes facing the three entrance doors to the church, and on the fourth side a long apsidal choir. It is not known whether the central octagon was covered by a pyramidal roof or by a dome.
At Edessa there was preserved a miraculous image of Christ, of which the copies, circulated also in the West, are very important for the iconographic history of the Messiah.
Bibliography10 works
Ugo Monneret de Villard