In Byzantium there were no city squares in the sense we known them today, as open spaces for residents to meet, communicate and have fun. In their place, recreation areas were terraces built on high ground, with arcades offering a view out to sea or over the surrounding space above the walls. Following earlier Roman tradition, the cities of Late Antiquity had a forum in the centre: this was a complex of public buildings, with halls for the city archives, the parliament, the courts, the library, the mint and more. In the forum there were arcades housing shops on one or two storeys, sometimes with a basement. They stood around the main square, and there was usually a column supporting a statue of the emperor in the middle. After the 7th century the forums in the capital were converted in market places.

In the new fortress cities founded on high ground, away from plains and the sea, squares were created at wide points in the streets or around churches. In fact, the law stated that churches had to have open spaces around them. There is a typical scene in a church fresco at Vlacherna Monastery near Arta, which shows us what life was like in a square at that time. It shows the procession (litany ) held every Tuesday in Constantinople for the icon of the Virgin Mary Hodegetria (Our Lady of the Way). A religious procession is taking place, with a man in the middle holding the miraculous icon on his shoulders. At either end of the procession are various vendors who have come to sell their merchandise: a deaconess (a woman who served the church) is giving out glasses of holy water; a caviar seller from Khazaria is weighing out his ware on a pair of scales; a trader is selling bottles of wine or beer, a woman is selling garlic behind a counter and a fruit seller is sitting in front of baskets of her produce.

We rarely come across public spaces and squares in mid and late Byzantium. Mystras was one example, as there is a large open space in front of the Palace of the Despots. This is where the famous fair on August 15^th must have taken place.

The lack of free spaces may be due to the fact that cities developed without an organized plan, and space was limited inside the walls. Typical examples are the medieval villages of Chios, where dense house construction left almost no open spaces, except those next to churches and monastery enclosures. These spaces played a vital role in the lives of people there, hosting fairs, markets and other local society events.