The historian of Eastern Christianity encounters several challenges when exploring the world of religious materiality, some of which are rather different from those facing scholars of Latin Christendom. This is because the study of religious materiality relies in fundamental ways on the existence of what might be called an infrastructure of preservation, that is, a constellation of social practices, mechanisms and institutions that favour, or at least facilitate, the survival of the material record of religious experience into the modern day. Museums are a case in point. Whereas the development of a market for objects of curiosity in early modern Europe culminated in the establishment of institutions whose sole purpose was to house, study and, above all, protect a wide array of material culture, such repositories only emerged in the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century. And when they finally appeared, their collections tended to showcase ancient artefacts that spoke to the tastes of Europeans or, conversely, focused mainly on the Islamic heritage of the Middle East.

To be sure, the study of archaeology and visual culture has gone some way towards addressing this problem: gravestones, icons and even ecclesiastical vestments have been the subject of fruitful studies. In 2011, the annual Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Symposium – which plays a key role in defining the agenda of the field of Byzantine studies – focused its entire programme on one aspect of religious materiality, namely the cult of saints.