Origins of Monastery of Stoudios

The Monastery of Stoudios was one of the most important monasteries of Constantinople, founded in the fifth century by a Roman official named Stoudios, and dedicated to John the Baptist. Under its abbot Theodore the Studite, around the turn of the ninth century, it became the center of a monastic reform that spread across the Byzantine world, with a rule that influenced later monasteries on Mount Athos and in Slavic lands. The monks were famous for copying manuscripts in a clear minuscule script, and for their defense of icons during the period of iconoclasm. The church of the monastery, the oldest surviving church in Istanbul, was later converted into a mosque, and is now a ruin.

Open on the timeline