Sharing Monasteries: Mapping Late Antique Religious Competition at Alexandria.

A predominantly Christian urban public space, built through the dynamics of destruction, occupation, and replacement, Alexandria was an area of competition and sharing between the various Christian denominations, primarily the two patriarchates, Chalcedonian, and non- Chalcedonian. In the urban/peri-urban spaces of Alexandria, there has been a continuous interweaving of histories of coexistence and different forms of resilience, captured in the present study through the three dynamics (i. e., top-down, bottom-up, and middle-up). These dynamics reveal the mixture of forces and the function of places as fragmentary remnants, which have survived the changes in religions over time. By analyzing the monastic sites, this study would like to demonstrate how the institutional strategy of making Alexandria a Christian city by destroying, converting, substituting, and reusing materials from pagan temples worked materially and symbolically, with an aesthetic and architectural transformation of the city. Often religious sites in and around Alexandria were spaces not only of a lived religion but also spaces of the resilience of religious communities or denominations that formed the minorities, whether pagan or Christian, of various factions.