Build the house of assembly long, with its head toward the east and rooms for the clergy on either side of the east end; seat the bishop in the middle of the head with his presbyters about him, and the people in order down its length.
Smoke, smell and fire kept from houses
Set ovens, baths, kilns, dyers, fullers, tanners and threshing floors at a fixed distance from their neighbours’ houses, and where the wind will not carry their smoke, smell or chaff into them.
Julian’s treatise records the building customs of the cities of Palestine in the sixth century. Many of its rules concern the rights of neighbours (light, views, water running off roofs), and a group of them deals with nuisances: trades that bring fire, smoke, stench or noise are to be kept a set distance away from houses, the distance depending on the trade, and the prevailing wind is to be taken into account.
The rules were preserved because Harmenopoulos copied them into his law book in 1345, and they continued to be applied in Greek and Balkan towns for centuries. Similar principles appear in the Islamic law of the neighbourhood, which grew up in the same cities.
Related rules
Repair the public buildings of the city before beginning new ones; and pull down the booths, sheds and houses that private people build into the public porticoes or against the walls of public buildings.
Leave at least twelve feet between a new house and its neighbour; build no balcony lower than fifteen feet from the ground or nearer than ten feet to the house opposite; do not block a neighbour’s view of the sea within a hundred feet; and keep the shops between the columns of the great porticoes small and faced with marble.
gap ≥ 12 ft (≈ 3.7 m) · balcony ≥ 15 ft up, ≥ 10 ft apart · sea view protected within 100 ft
Assign each guild its quarter: the silversmiths to work in their shops on the Mese in full view; the perfumers to keep their stalls between the Milion and the Chalke gate, so that their fragrance rises to the holy image over the gate and fills the palace porches; the livestock trades to the outer fora.
Raise the principal church of the capital on its highest ground at the head of the city, so that it rises above the houses like a ship riding the waves and is seen from the sea on every side.
Before the palace gate make a square ringed by public buildings (the Great Church, the senate house, the palace vestibule), and set in it a column carrying the emperor, facing east toward the empire’s enemies.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Smoke, smell and fire kept from houses”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/julian-nuisance-trades. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.