A Byzantine-era floor mosaic has been discovered at the St Constantine and Helena Monastery Church in Ordu on the Black Sea coast of Turkey. The style and motifs dates it to the 5th or 6th century A.D. It is the first in-situ ancient floor mosaic found in the Ordu area. The surviving mosaic consists of geometric and botanical designs created with white, black and red tesserae. The main image features two chevrons (probably a rhombus before their meeting points were damaged by later construction) flanked by pairs of labryses, the double-headed axe that was an important symbol of deities and religious rituals in the ancient Near East. The botanical elements include leafy plants, the spikey acanthus that was the Byzantine version of the more familiar rounded Greco-Roman leaf and pears. The labrys, which has been a religion symbol going back as far as the Neolithic proto-city of Çatalhöyük (7500 B.C. – 6400 B.C.), strikes me as an unexpected decorative element for the floor of a Christian monastery church. I can’t think of another instance of it in my admittedly limited knowledge of the topic. Byzantine mosaicists borrowed heavily from classical Greek and Rome, however, and the labrys made frequent appearances in representations of storm gods Zeus and Teshub. There are Biblical references to the axe as an instrument of God’s power and judgment, and while it’s not double-headed, it wouldn’t be the only ancient symbol to have been ported into the new religion. It could also have been a recycled element. The mosaic in the overhead view of the whole floor looks a little variegated — the chevrons are intersected by a diagonal border, the center right has a leafy plant that cuts in and to the right of that what looks like opus sectile (marble inlay) rather than the tesselated style of the rest of the floor. Then again, there may be different levels of flooring that you can’t see in the flat overhead shot, and that at least part of it pre-dates the church. I dunno. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The Byzantine abbey was discovered in 2023 during an excavation of a site where eight tombs dating to the Roman Empire were found in 2021. The 2023 excavation uncovered the remains of a later structure in the tombs and identified it as a monastery church dedicated to the Roman Emperor Constantine and his mother Helena, both venerated as saints in Eastern Christianity. Helena (who famously went on a pilgrimage to Palestine and Syria and left with armfuls of ostensible relics of Christ, including his cross, his tunic, the crucifixion nails and the rope that bound him to the cross) is considered a saint in Roman Catholicism, Orthodox, Anglican and Lutheran denominations too.