Byzantine Housing and Living Conditions: How Households Used Domestic Space

Early Byzantine elite residences used Roman courtyard plans, with reception rooms and sometimes private baths or heated floors. Later urban houses often combined smaller rooms with an enclosed court. Rural dwellings could place cooking and sleeping beside storage for grain and wine. Households adapted rooms and buildings as work, property and family needs changed.

Domestic archaeology preserves walls, hearths, storage vessels and water installations. Inventories and wills record selected possessions, particularly in wealthy or institutional households. Some surviving buildings also contain later alterations.

On this page7 sections

From Roman villas to more compact Byzantine houses

In the early Byzantine period, especially before the end of the sixth century, wealthy housing still drew on Roman houses, or domus, and villas. The characteristic arrangement was a peristyle, an internal courtyard surrounded by columns and connected to rooms around its edges. Such houses could serve both domestic and social purposes. A reception room or dining room stood near the principal entrance, and the triclinium, traditionally a dining space, could also host guests or formal audiences when there was no separate reception hall.

Large early Byzantine residences at Ephesus could include columned courtyards and reception rooms with apses. Some covered about 1,000 square metres. Mosaics, marble facing and heated floors furnished these wealthy houses, while kitchens and latrines served their occupants.

From the fourth to the sixth centuries, older urban spaces were increasingly occupied or divided into smaller domestic units in several cities. Former public areas, including parts of agoras (public squares), colonnades, and palaestras (exercise grounds), could be adapted for housing after their original functions declined. Some large houses were also divided into apartments that could be sold or rented.

Courtyards, rooms, and movement through the house

In the middle Byzantine period, houses were commonly organized either around a courtyard or along a more linear plan. A courtyard house placed rooms around an open central area, while a linear house used a direct passage rather than an enclosed central court. The courtyard could reduce direct contact between the household and the street, with the entrance opening into a more controlled internal space.

Rooms around courtyards were commonly small, with documented areas ranging from four to twenty square metres. Separate rooms could accommodate storage, household work and living space, and occupants could change their use.

Medieval Pergamon houses commonly had packed-earth courts enclosed from the street by a wall. Rubble masonry bonded with mud supported tiled roofs, while wooden lintels and doors closed entrances. Courts connected rooms with water facilities and areas for work or animals.

Cooking, storage, and household work

Household compounds could accommodate workshops and stables beside living space. Excavated houses at Corinth contain wells and ovens used for bread. An attached workshop could be called an ergasterion.

Storage was especially important in rural households. Large fired-clay vessels known as pithoi held cereals and wine, and some were buried in the ground. In houses with two levels, the living area could be upstairs while the lower floor contained storage jars, tools, and even animal-powered mills. The arrangement separated people from some of the dust, equipment, and bulk storage associated with agricultural work.

Rural houses were usually smaller and less elaborate than urban residences. A typical documented arrangement consisted of two or three rooms: one room with a hearth served as both kitchen and sleeping space, while another stored grain and wine. Houses could be rectangular or irregular, especially where additions had accumulated. Materials depended on local practice and availability, including stone, brick, wood, or woven material coated with clay. Dirt floors and thatched roofs were common in the evidence summarized for peasant housing, while ceramic roof tiles were less frequent.

Domestic space also supported work and everyday production: preparing meals, keeping supplies and making or repairing household goods.

Heating, water, and domestic comfort

Domestic amenities varied sharply with wealth and period. In the large early Byzantine houses of Anatolia, wealthy owners could install hypocausts, systems that heated floors, as well as private baths, latrines, kitchens, and fountains.

Water management appears in more modest forms in the houses of medieval Pergamon and other settlements. Many houses had cisterns or large ceramic vessels set into the ground. Courtyard wells are also recorded at Corinth. These installations helped households secure and store water within the domestic compound.

Heating in simpler dwellings centered on the hearth, which could combine cooking and warmth in the same room. The contrast with the hypocaust-heated rooms of wealthy residences illustrates how domestic comfort depended on status and resources. A house’s location, building materials, and access to fuel and water also affected how its occupants used each room.

Furniture, sleeping, and the interior of poorer homes

Inventories and wills from the eleventh to fifteenth centuries name icons, books and vessels. They commonly record valuable possessions more fully than ordinary wooden furniture.

Beds used wooden frames on trestles, with cords or chains carrying mattresses of reeds, straw or wool. They could also serve as seats. From around the tenth century, dining seated at a table became more common than reclining.

Urban, rural, elite, and monastic differences

Urban housing changed as cities contracted, populations moved, and older buildings acquired new uses. In Athens, excavated middle-class houses formed roughly square blocks around central courtyards. In Anatolia, early Byzantine houses commonly used the peristyle, while the evidence for the seventh to ninth centuries is sparse. From the tenth to the fourteenth centuries, surviving houses show new arrangements, often with more compact plans and fewer traces of the classical courtyard form.

Some rural aristocratic estates were equipped to receive emperors. Monastic compounds supplied another form of accommodation: Saint Meletios in Greece arranged residences, workshops, stores and stables within a closed group of one-storey buildings. Other monasteries used residential buildings of several floors.

Regional conditions shaped domestic construction. In Cappadocia, some households occupied complexes cut into rock, with rooms arranged around courtyards that lay substantially below the exterior facade. In rural Anatolia, the combination of a low courtyard and a high outer wall also appears in houses from the early Byzantine period.

Late Byzantine houses at Mystras

Settlement at Mystras grew below its thirteenth-century castle, and the town later became the centre of the Despotate of the Morea. Houses commonly had a ground floor and one upper level; some had two upper storeys. Lower rooms could store goods, while an upper reception room or triclinium accommodated the household and guests. Reed partitions could divide the upper space.

Mystras’s steep terrain produced elongated houses along the hillside and other buildings oriented down the slope. Some had curved façades. Later occupation altered parts of these buildings into the early twentieth century.

The domestic remains at Mystras include houses fitted to a steep hillside within the medieval town. Their relationship with streets, churches and the palace helps place the dwelling within an urban neighbourhood.