Basil the Great founds the Basileias

Basil, a native of Caesarea, was ordained presbyter in 364 or 365 and became bishop in 370. During a severe famine, probably between 368 and 370, he organized a soup kitchen and handed out food to the poor himself. Outside the city he built a complex that he called a poorhouse (ptochotropheion), a hostel (xenodocheion) and a rest house (katagogion). In a letter of 372 he defended the building work to Elias, governor of the province: around a church, with a house for the bishop and quarters for the clergy, rose lodgings for travellers and for those who needed treatment, with people to nurse and treat them, means of transport and escorts. There was also a special place for the care of lepers, and most of the staff came from the adjacent monastic community, aided by professional doctors.

The exact date is unknown. According to the NPNF editor, the Basileias was planned, if not begun, in Basil’s last years as a presbyter (before 370); modern accounts usually place it in the 370s, and in 372 the building work was under way. Theodoret relates that the emperor Valens, although he was at odds with Basil over the Arian creed, granted him land for the poor during his visit to Cappadocia in January 372, and the complex may have been built on it. In his funeral oration for Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus urged his listeners to “go forth a little way from the city, and behold the new city, the storehouse of piety”, and compared it to the wonders of the world. The Basileias is sometimes presented as a response to the famine or to an outbreak of leprosy, but ancient writers make no such connection.

Christian hostels and soup kitchens already existed; what was new at the Basileias was the treatment of the sick, lepers included, by physicians in one place and for the wider public, and it is often called the first hospital of this kind. It was still working in the middle of the 5th century, and hospitals on its model spread across the eastern empire.