mgr Anastasiia Liakhovich

Anastasiia Liakhovich is a PhD student researcher studying how Byzantine and Armenian hagiography from the 7th to 10th centuries depicts sacred space. Her work explores architecture, landscape, and pilgrimage as described through ekphrasis, rhetorical, and theological texts, linking the visible world to spiritual experience. Her broader academic interests include hagiography, spatial imagination, theology, and the cultural interactions between Byzantium and the Caucasus. Combining philological precision with theoretical perspectives from historical studies, anthropology, and literature, her project explores how medieval authors viewed geography as a place of revelation, sanctity, and identity.

Through a comparative analysis of Greek and Armenian sources, she examines how sacred architecture and natural landscapes were transformed into narrative spaces that articulate the relationship between orthodoxy, miaphysitism, and personal religious experience, empire and periphery, body and spirit. Her research ultimately aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the shared yet diverse spatial imagination of the medieval Christian world and to the broader study of space, text, and sacred experience in premodern cultures.

7th–8th February 2025 – Graduate and Early Career Workshop «Armenia & Byzantium V,» University of Oxford, title of the paper: «Adorned with the precious pearl and crowned with the gems of spiritual light…»: The Specificity of Greek and Armenian Sacral Architecture in St Gregory the Illuminator’s Vision.»

4th—6th April 2025 – Interdisciplinary Conference 2025, Doctoral School of Humanities, University of Warsaw, Chęciny, title of the paper: «Imaginary Geography in the Works of Greek and Armenian Hagiographies of the 5th—7th Centuries.»

24th October 2025 – The Workshop on Studying East of Byzantium XII: Spaces on 24th October 2025, 13th February 2026, 4th- 5th June 2026. Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art & Culture at Hellenic College Holy Cross. Title of the paper: «Constructing Sanctity: Landscape, Ekphrasis, and Identity in Byzantine and Armenian Hagiography From the 7th to 10th Centuries.»