The mission of this site is to store and disseminate publications on hierotopy, a field of science about the creation of sacred spaces. The papers can be found in a section Library.

The summary paper by Alexei Lidov “Creating the Sacred Space. Hierotopy as a new field of cultural history” In: Spazi i percoprsi sacri, p. 61-90, 2012

September 11-13, 2019, Moscow, the symposium “Air and Heavens in the Hierotopy and Iconography of the Christian World ” was organized the Russian Academy of Arts.
( The program of the symposium , Proceedings (compendium of abstracts) )
After the meeting on September 12 a new hierotopic book «The Hierotopy of Holy Mountains in Christian Culture» was officially released.

July 27, 2021 The feestschrift to Lidov’s 60th anniversary is published by Routledge. It is a collection of papers on hierotopic subjects edited by Jelena Bogdanovic Icons of space. Advances in hierotopy. (The introduction and first 2 papers are readable via Preview)

Kieran Dodds wrote to A. Lidov:

We recently opened a photographic exhibition about church forests in Ethiopia. When I was speaking to a Wheaton professor Matt Milliner earlier in the year and he described the inter-disciplinary study of Hierotopy which you have pioneered and how it could apply to Ethiopia. Roberta was very enthusiastic to see this connection.

In Ethiopia the forest functions as part of the church where the congregation stand and acts as the clothes of the church,as one priest described it. In 100 years, 95% of Ethiopia’s native forest has disappeared and in the north the last remnant surround the buildings protected by faith. I titled the exhibit Hierotopia to connect the study of sacred space in its original Byzantine context to the physical land of Ethiopia where the forest is part of sacred space that points to a deeper country (as CS Lewis would say).
impressive video of Ethiopean church forests