Caves, demons and holy men

In the late 1990s Michel Kaplan directed a memorable seminar in Paris devoted to the concept of sacred space in Byzantium and the West. The present contribution addresses a facet of this topic not included in the volume of published papers, that of the sanctified or sacred space of caves, and is a small token of appreciation for all I have learned about monasticism and hagiography from Michel’s important publications. From the limited evidence at our disposal we can deduce that Byzantines had..