Death in Smyrna: The Martyrdom of Polycarp as an Urban Event

The essay concentrates on the Martyrdom of Polycarp, a script largely believed to contain the earliest extant occurrences of a Christian technical martyrdom vocabulary. On the one hand, we will lay bare the distinctively urban character of this death performance by showing how and to what extent all the components of the martyrdom apparatus relate to the city as socio-spatial condition of production and consumption, textualisation and memorialisation of an ‘urban religious event’. On the other, we will look at how the text manages to turn a Roman death spectacle into a Christian propaganda event by hijacking practices and rerouting sequences of a public urban show. For both purposes, the critical conceptual toolkit will be provided by the most quintessentially urban among the 20th-century artistic-cum-political avantgardes: the Situationists