Ancient and modern by TheWanderingCamel
Totally dominated bythe towering peak of Syracuse's newest church (more of that in a minute) the ruin of the city's oldest church is both historically significant and very much more aesthetically pleasing.The new church is a huge, brutal edifice of concrete, the sort of building that gives modern architecture a bad name. It was constructed in the early 1990s to house an image of the Virgin that wept for a few days in 1953 and that has become a object of veneration and pilgrimage. Its vast interior was all but deserted when we visited and the little Madonna seemed rather lost in the emptiness under the soaring tear-drop-inspired roof.
Across the road, the Basilica di San Giovanni Evangelista (St John the Evangelist) stands roofless, its nave with the orginal Byzantine altar still in situ, open to the sky. There's no glass in the pretty rose window and trees are growing inside the walls. A newer church has been built next door but the old one is still consecrated and is used on special days. A crypt beneath the church was the burial place of Saint Marcian, Syracuse's first Christian bishop who was martyred here in 254 AD.
It was the custom to build a shrine over the burial place of a saint and the first church was undoubtedly built here soon after Christianity became the official religion of Rome in the 4th century. That church was destroyed by the Arab invaders but was rebuilt by the Normans who replaced them as the island's rulers. It then served as the city's cathedral until it was destroyed again by the earthquake of 1693. This time, it was not rebuilt.
You'll need to join a tour of the catacombs if you want to see inside but if time (or inclination) doesn't allow for this, do at least go and have a look at the outside. It is a lovely building, and very photogenic. It's a pity about the grafitti (something that, on the whole, we didn't see as much of as we'd expected in Sicily) but with its arches, carved capitals and 14th century portal, old stones and skeletal roofline, it is most appealing.
