25 August 2004

Translating a Greek icon

Inspiration; Yannis Ritsos, left, with Amy Mims, who spent 12 years translating his last major work into English

Having brought Yannis Ritsos to English speakers, his translator is now taking Kavanagh to Greece, writes Patrick Comerford

Amy Mims, an award-winning poet and translator, is proud of her descent from the O’Sullivans of Castletown Bere, in Co Cork. Having lived in Greece for more than four decades, she now feels Greek. But having devoted much of her working life to introducing Yannis Ritsos, the great Greek poet of the left, to English-speaking readers, she is now introducing Patrick Kavanagh to her adopted home.

Mims met Kavanagh on her very first day in Ireland, in 1957. On later visits she went with Kavanagh and John Ryan, the friend and supporter of many literary figures, to Newgrange, where they made comparisons with Knossos and the Minoan civilisation of ancient Crete. Studies in classical Greek at Harvard, followed by Byzantine and modern Greek studies at Oxford, led to a Fulbright scholarship in 1958 to study medieval Greece. Having chosen to stay in Greece, she now describes herself as “Greek by identity”.

She has published four translations of Nikos Kazantzakis – author of Zorba The Greek and The Last Temptation Of Christ -- innumerable versions of contemporary Greek playwrights and poets, and her own poetry and essays. She has been good friends with Leonard Cohen since they first met on the island of Hydra, but her literary and artistic Greek friends have included the composer Mikis Theodorakis and, of course, Ritsos.

Like many creative Greeks, she was forced into exile under the colonels, first to Paris, where the Greek exiles included Vassilis Vassilikos, author of Z, followed by “18 ghastly months in London” and travels in Cyprus and Crete and among the Pontic Greeks of the Black Sea.

Ritsos (1909-1990) paid for his political commitment with long periods of internment and internal exile under the post-war right-wing regime and under the colonels. His epic poem Epitaphios became the anthem of resistance to the colonels, while Romiosini made the resistance movement the natural heir to the heroes of Greek mythology. Both were set to music and arranged by Theodorakis and Manos Hatzidakis.

Ritsos was hailed by Aragon as the greatest poet of his time; Pablo Neruda thought Ritsos better qualified for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Mims first met him in Cyprus in 1973, then spent the next 30 years making his works available to an English-reading audience.

Her translation of Ritsos’s nine-volume Iconostasis Of Anonymous Saints was a 12-year labour of love on his last major work, the one he considered his freest and finest ever; it led to her three-volume collection from the leading Greek publisher Kedros (1996-2001). Now a new complementary bilingual work, Ritsos Of The Iconostasis, offers readers in both languages a companion for the journey through the Joycean passageways of her translation of Ritsos’s swansong.

The iconostasis is the screen decorated with icons of saints that traditionally separates the altar from the main body of a Greek church. For Ritsos, the anonymous saints he needed to remember in his prayers and to keep the oil lamp of his heart burning before are not the traditional saints of Orthodoxy but the everyday “anonymous saints” from his neighbourhood in old Athens, members of his large family, the simple inhabitants of his home town of Monemvasia, his tragicomic aunts, unassuming political prisoners sharing internal exile on a lonely island and a close-knit band of friends.

All these “anonymous saints” are skilfully counterpointed with the hero, Ion, who is Ritsos, and his alter ego, Ariostos, and woven into a dreamlike tapestry of reminiscences, vivid memories from childhood, reflections on modern Greek history and politics, introspective confessions and surrealist dreams. Although a quarter of the size, it has been compared with Proust’Remembrance Of Things Past.

Although the Times Literary Supplement described Mims’s translation as a “wild and fascinating work”, the Iconostasis received little attention from the Greek literary world and has yet to attract a wider readership. Her translation has been praised by Louis de Bernières, author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, as “a marvellously diverse and rich work” of “sheer beauty, individuality and humour”, a “masterpiece that remains always inexhaustible” and a commonplace Odyssey of “the world’s little people”. Theodorakis believes Ritsos Of The Iconostasis “should be read by all who love the work of Ritsos”.

In Ritsos Of The Iconostasis, Mims finds similarities between Ritsos’s style and that of James Joyce in Ulysses. “Ritsos’s Iconostasis is embellished with an almost Joycean richness of words,” she says, “including outrageous puns, unprecedented though ineffably ‘poetic’ erotica and miraculous flights of language.” Although Joyce’s Ulysses is often compared to Kazantzakis’s sequel to Homer’s Odyssey, she prefers to compare Joyce and Ritsos.

She describes Ulysses as an expression of the “miraculous kinship” between Ireland and Greece, and believes Joyce and Ritsos would have enjoyed each other’s company. She speaks of Joyce “the Ulyssean” and Ritsos “the Odyssean” as “kindred spirits from two opposite poles of Europe”, yet “two writers with certain essential points in common”.

She sees parallels between Joyce and Ritsos in their tremendous variety of styles, the plethora of puns and use of invented words, games with names, superb passages where only the music of sound plays a role, the use of onomatopoetic words appearing as single sounds, the occasional obsession with bodily functions or misfunctions not usually discussed in polite company, and “the aura of ‘poetic obscenity’ … almost always transforming even the rawest sexual scenes into poetry.

“Molly Bloom’s monologue, with her allusions to her sexual life at the end of Ulysses, is transcended and transmuted into a marvellous paean to nature. Ritsos does the same thing. Wherever he has a particularly raw section, it is almost always followed by a lyrical outburst of unparalleled beauty. One of the main motives in my writing the companion was to help dissolve the prejudice against what many people have called the obscenity in the Iconostasis”.

Even Ritsos’s allusions to the Orthodox liturgy parallel Joyce’s outrageous quotations from the Latin Mass. Yet, unlike many critics, she praises Ritsos for “his deep religious themes”. “Many people think that for a Marxist this is impossible”" she admits. However, she insists “he did indeed believe in God and, above all, in the power of love”.

Ritsos’s epic Epitaphios, drawing on the imagery of the Good Friday rituals in the Greek Orthodox tradition, became the anthem of resistance to the colonels in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite its unique place in modern Greek literature, Epitaphios has never been fully translated into English. Mims translated eight of the 20 cantos for MBI’s recording, in 2000, of Epitaphios, but she admits the “translation of 15-syllable Greek verse can never really be at an end” and concedes she is still unhappy with the final work.

Now she is returning to her Irish roots, translating Yeats and Kavanagh into Greek. Having translated The Great Hunger and The Green Fool during two previous visits, she returned to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, the artists’ retreat in Annaghmakerrig, for a third visit earlier this year and continues to work on translating a selection of 28 of his shorter poems. She has persuaded Macdara Woods to write an introduction and hopes the Athens publisher Odos Panos will eventually publish her translations of Kavanagh.

This quarter-page feature was first published on the Arts pages of ‘The Irish Times’ on 25 August 2014

18 August 2004

The ancient
Greeks are
speaking to us
across the ages

Homer’s wooden horse in a scene from the film Troy. Some feel that the terrors of the modern era and the war in Iraq have set the stage for a return of Greek tragedy and its continuing lessons for us

The Olympic Games and the success of the movie Troy are inspiring fresh debates about the relevance and value of the classics, writes Patrick Comerford

Wolfgang Petersen’s epic treatment of the Trojan war in takes many liberties with Homer's story. However, after a family viewing, both the Iliad and the Odyssey were dusted down, and Homer became popular reading once more for my two teenage sons, testimony to the continuing power of the classics to stir the imagination.

The Olympic Games have returned home to Greece this month for the first time since 1896 and I am reminded that an important component of the original Olympic tradition was a ceasefire in all conflicts throughout the known world, a tradition now more honoured in the breach than in the observance.

Apart from the Olympic hype and the Greek success in Euro 2004, some Greeks were also captivated this summer by the success of The Trojan Women at the Epidaurus Festival, which was marking its 50th anniversary.

If Troy is based on the ultimate war story, then Euripides’s The Trojan Women is one of the greatest anti-war plays, and the critics hailed the Diadromi Theatre production as “majestic yet appropriate for a modern audience”.

The play deals with the imperious Greeks’ brutal treatment of the women of Troy following the Trojan War.

In this compelling tragedy, Euripides shows that in wars the victors often become dehumanised and that the winners in all eras are arrogant. After the Greeks have bullied their way to victory, a young girl is sacrificed to a ghost and an innocent infant is dashed to its death.

The Trojan Women, which finishes its summer tour in Athens next month, was also staged this summer, appropriately, in Troy. There were no fears that the message would be lost on a Turkish audience. “This is an honest play that praises the Trojans’ morals,” said the translator Costas Georgousopoulos, who pointed out that in this tragedy Euripides trivialises the Homeric heroes. To use a Greek play that criticises Homeric values, that points out the immoral politics in Greece during the Trojan wars, and that praises the Trojans is a positive gesture as the political authorities in both Greece and Turkey struggle to find new ways to be good neighbours after generations of mistrust and misunderstanding.

Euripides lived through Athens’ debilitating war against Sparta and eight of his 19 surviving plays deal with the disastrous political and social consequences of the conflict. In The Trojan Women, he presents the tragic fate of the women of Troy who are waiting to be handed over as slaves to their new Greek masters after the sacking of the city.

It challenges the false heroics that were perpetuated in the Homeric tradition – and that are uncritically represented in the film Troy. However, while The Trojan Women appears on the surface to be dealing with Homeric themes, the first audiences must have had a sense of déja vu as they realised that Euripides was demolishing mythology to criticise tragic deeds perpetrated a short while before on the island of Milos during the Peloponnesian War.

Georgousopoulos reminded his audience in Epidaurus that the play was first staged in Athens shortly after the Athenians destroyed Milos. The islanders, who had a tradition of friendship with Sparta, rejected Athens’ demand for a contribution of men or money for the war. But the Athenians were having none of this special pleading – the warning to small states that “you are either with me or against me” is a declaration that has been heard once again with tragic consequences recently.

The Athenians attacked Milos, put to death all male inhabitants, sold the women and children into slavery, and colonised the island, and Euripides’ criticism of a colonial military effort to expand power is clear in The Trojan Women. One of the timeless morals of the play is the corrupting effect that war has on its victors.

Another tragedy by Euripides, Hecuba, is being staged in London next month and in Stratford-on-Avon in January. At one level, Hecuba is a character study of Priam’s widowed queen, driven to murderous vengeance by her suffering. But according to director Jonathan Kent the play is also “one of the most savage indictments of war ever written”.

In Hecuba, both victors, Agamemnon and Odysseus, refuse to consider seriously the ex-queen’s human rights. But Euripides argues that if the justice owed to individuals is sacrificed to political expediency, society will soon disintegrate – a timely reminder to the world in the light of recent revelations about the treatment of captives in Iraqi prisons.

In Iphigenia at Aulis, written 16 years after Hecuba, Euripides took a cynical and satirical look at the actions of public figures.

It was written at a time when he was losing faith in political leaders and realised their inability to extricate themselves from an interminable war.

The Greek critic Spyros Payiatakis reviewed The Trojan Women for the Athens daily, Kathimerini. As he was leaving the theatre at Epidaurus, he overheard someone exclaim: “If Euripides was alive now, he would be suffering from déja vu” – the reference to Iraq was “more than obvious”. At the same time, the drama critic Michael Billington was writing in the Guardian of how the “terror of modern times” has set “the stage for Greek tragedy”.

Billington also saw the current series of revivals on the British stage as “a direct response to the Iraq war” and the tragedy in the Middle East. They include Martin Crimp’s Cruel and Tender, adapted from Trachiniae by Sophocles, and three plays by Euripides – Ion, Iphigenia at Aulis, and the two revivals of Hecuba.

Of course Greek tragedy is timeless, a permanent part of Western culture. As Crimp recently declared: “Every writer writes/rewrites the Greeks in his or her own image.” But directors have also discovered a metaphor for our own times in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Crimp’s own adaptation of Sophocles is set in a world where cities are pulverised, liberators become aggressors and violence is justified in terms of expedience. “If you want to root out terror there is only one rule: kill,” says a government minister.

“Coming at a time when even an independent US commission has denied the Bush regime’s linkage of Saddam Hussein’s regime to al-Qaeda, the words have an ominous ring,” Billington observes. But in the end, he says, “it is the Greek understanding of the human consequences of war and the gulf between public rhetoric and private feeling that makes these plays seem shockingly relevant to our own divided world”.

Rev Patrick Comerford is Regional Co-ordinator of the Church Mission Society Ireland (CMS Ireland).

This half-page feature was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on 18 August 2004.

17 August 2004

Keeping the past of a maritime republic alive

Letter from Venice
Patrick Comerford


The “Queen of the Adriatic” is a city of over 100 islands and 400 or more bridges. But few visitors give themselves a chance to get lost in its narrow alleyways or to discover the unique and colourful minorities that have been part of Venetian life for centuries.

Jews have lived and traded in Venice since 1381. In 1516 they were forced to live in the New Foundry or Ghetto Nuovo, a tiny island still linked by three small bridges to the rest of Venice. But by then their numbers were being swollen by new arrivals from Spain and Portugal, from central Europe, and from Greece and Turkey. Europe’s first Ghetto was soon too small for the Jewish community, which spilled out into the neighbouring Ghetto Vecchio and Ghetto Nuovissimo, and Napoleon tore down the walls and gates of the Ghetto in 1797.

About 200 Venetian Jews were deported to the death camps in 1943-1944, and only eight returned. But today there are about 400 Jews in Venice, including 80 or so in the Ghetto, their numbers boosted in recent years with the arrival from Rome and New York of enthusiastic, pious Hasidic Jews. Four synagogues remain open in the Ghetto area: the Scola Tedesca and the Scola al Canton, built by German and French Jews between 1528 and 1531, are virtual museums. But the Scola Spagnola, built by Spanish Jews at the same time, still alternates Saturday services with the Scola Levantina, built by Greek Jews in 1538, complete with a hip-level screen inspired by the iconostasis or icon-screen of Greek churches.

A significant Greek community has lived close to Ponte dei Greci (the Bridge of the Greeks) since the 11th century, when the first Greek artisans arrived to decorate Saint Mark's Basilica and many of the early churches of Venice. They expanded significantly with the influx of refugees following the Turkish capture of Constantinople in 1453. The church of San Giorgio dei Greci, with its leaning belltower, was built at a cost of 15,000 gold ducats between 1539 and 1573, and the vivid iconostasis or icon screen was painted by Michael Damaskinos, the greatest Cretan iconographer of the day and a contemporary of El Greco.

As the Serene Republic lost its Greek colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries, Greeks continued to flood into Venice, and their presence helped to spread classical culture throughout Europe. A whole Greek neighbourhood took shape around the church on the banks of the Rio dei Greci, and at its peak the Greek community numbered 15,000 people. But Napoleon's abolition of the Republic of Venice in 1797 marked the beginning of the decline of this prosperous community as their assets and church treasures were confiscated. However, a convent of Greek nuns and their girls' school survived until 1834, and until 1905 the Greek College provided Greek communities in the Ottoman territories with educated priests and teachers.

Despite their decline in recent generations, the small Greek community continues in Venice. The Collegio Flangini now houses the Hellenic Institute for Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies, a museum in the former Scuola di San Nicolo dei Greci displays a unique collection of icons, and San Giorgio dei Greci has become a cathedral, with an archbishop living in the old palace.

Close to Saint Mark's, the Calle degli Armeni is in the heart of the old Armenian quarter. By the end of the 13th century, the Armenian community had a secure presence in Venice, finding their niche as tradesmen and moneylenders. The church of Santa Croce degli Armeni was founded in 1496 and the procurators of Saint Mark paid annual visits in recognition of the "well-deserving and most-favoured Armenian nation." The city's best-hidden church is now locked except for Sunday services, and the most conspicuous Armenian presence is out on the lagoon on the island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, where a monastery was founded on the former leper colony in 1717 by a group of Armenian monks expelled from the Morea in Greece by the Ottoman Turks.

The monks of San Lazzaro survived Napoleon's confiscations because of an indispensable Armenian in the imperial secretariat. Byron spent six months here, learning classical Armenian and compiling a dictionary. But, despite the proximity of the Lido, the monks are virtually undisturbed by visitors. On the afternoon I arrived, only half a dozen others got off the vaporetto. As he took me around the library with its 200,000 precious manuscripts and books, the museum with its Egyptian sarcophagus and mummy, and the gallery of Armenian paintings, Father Vartanes explained that there are only eight Armenian monks left on San Lazzaro and no more than 10 Armenian families in Venice.

When evening falls and the tourists leave Venice, the dwindling numbers of Jews in the Ghetto, the Armenian monks on San Lazzaro and the remaining Greeks of San Giorgio are left alone once again.

The proportion of native Venetians who live here continues to decline rapidly as wealthy Italians from Milan and Turin snap up properties on the market. Even the Venetians are becoming a minority in their own city.

This feature was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on 17 August 2004 (p. 7)

19 June 2004

Cautious welcome
to Holy Mountain

About Us

Cautious welcome
to Holy Mountain

Scenes of Mount Athos: the wildlife and beaches remain unspoiled ...

... small hermitages and monasteries are almost hidden in the landscape (Photographs: Patrick Comerford, 2004)

The monks of the theocratic republic of Mount Athos resolutely defend their isolation – and the complete exclusion of women, writes Patrick Comerford

Mount Athos, in eastern Macedonia, is one of the most isolated parts of Greece, and reaching the peninsula is difficult, even for the most determined pilgrims. There is no direct road access from the Greek mainland and there are strict limitations on who can board the two ferries that ply daily from the small ports of Ouranóupoli and Ierissós to the coastline of this monastic mountain.

The monks of Mount Athos robustly defend their isolation and autonomy, and the number of arrivals is strictly limited each day. Most visitors may stay for only three or four days, and non-Orthodox visitors must demonstrate a genuine interest in Orthodoxy, theology or Byzantine studies before receiving a special permit. Known to Greeks as Ághion Óros, or the Holy Mountain, Mount Athos is a monks’ republic whose autonomy has been guaranteed for generations and is written into Greek constitutional law. Since 1926, Mount Athos has had the unique status of a theocratic republic, with its own government, elected by the 20 monasteries on the mountain.

There are no roads connecting the Holy Mountain with the rest of Greece, ensuring its continuing isolation. Sailing from Ouranóupoli or Ierissós, visitors have a feeling of leaving the world behind. Visas and passports are checked thoroughly before the two-hour journey, and large signs at both ports warn visitors to Mount Athos that the entrance of women and the approach of visitors and crafts without special permits are “entirely forbidden”, and that “any violation” of these prohibitions “involves serious penal sanctions”.

Since 1060, when the Byzantine emperor, Constantine IX, issued a decree banning women from living on or even visiting the peninsula, the population of Mount Athos has been exclusively male. The ban extends even to female animals – with the single exception of cats, which are needed to control rodents. Isolation has its benefits: because tourism and industry have made no inroads, the ecosystem and wildlife of Mount Athos are unspoiled. There are few paved roads, just a handful of trucks and buses, and no electricity pylons or telegraph poles. Beaches that any travel brochure would boast of have not been blighted by beach bars, banana boats or sunbathers.

At Vatopedi, the feeling is of a traditional Greek village ...

... (Photographs: Patrick Comerford, 2004)

Each of the 20 monasteries on Mount Athos has its own atmosphere and ethos, and the peninsula is speckled with smaller monastic dependencies, small houses and solitary hermitages. Although 20,000 monks were living on the Holy Mountain in its heyday, monastic life reached its lowest level in the 1960s, when numbers dropped to barely 1,000. In the past decade, however, there has been a dramatic revival, so that today there are more than 2,000 monks, with new young novices arriving in large numbers at monasteries such as Simonopetra, Philotheou and Vatopedi, along with a growing number of pilgrims.

This revival is hard to imagine at Esphigmenous, where even Orthodox visitors find anything but a warm welcome. At the strictest foundation on Athos, the monks have revolted against the authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople because of his ecumenical reputation, and daring monks have hung out a banner greeting visitors with the slogan “Orthodoxy or Death”.

By contrast, Vatopedi, a three-hour walk away, is Athos’s most welcoming monastery. Once described by Osbert Lancaster as “the Christ Church of Athos”, Vatopedi is like an intimate, hospitable Greek village with its cobbled courtyard, cascading buildings, hanging balconies and gently ageing belltowers and fountains. Vatopedi was facing serious decline a decade ago but has recently doubled its numbers to 90 monks, making it one of the fastest-growing monasteries on the peninsula – a revival which has confounded those who predicted that monastic life on the mountain was in terminal decline.

At Vatopedi, pilgrims are welcomed ...

... by Abbot Ephraim, one of the leading figures in the revival of the monastic tradition (Photographs: Patrick Comerford, 2004)

The welcome at Vatopedi is an exuberant expression of traditional Greek hospitality. Guests are warmly greeted by the guestmaster with a glass of raki and large dollops of loukoúmi – known to most Irish people, unfairly, as “Turkish delight” – and any efforts to pay for bed and board are politely spurned. At some monasteries, the monks are said to leave visitors standing in the rain outside the main church and the refectory and send them packing early in the morning. But at Vatopedi, pilgrims are welcome to take part in the liturgy with the monks and invited to dine with them in the refectory.

Staying at a monastery is no easy escape from the secular world. The monks follow the Julian calendar, which is a fortnight behind the rest of the world, and the clocks keep an eccentric Byzantine time - although the monks' wristwatches are more worldly. Each morning I was woken at 3 a.m. by the call that “Christ is Risen” to join the monks for Morning Prayer, followed by the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Only much later, at 7.30 a.m., is breakfast served: generous portions of cheese, bread, olives, beans, eggs, and even a glass of wine, as a monk reads from scripture and delivers a short homily.

As the monks pray and work during the day, pilgrims can easily find time to read, pray and be silent. The call to prayer comes again at 4 p.m. with Vespers, and later, after a simple dinner that bears a marked similarity to breakfast, the monastery’s relics and special icons are put on display. Without a hint of doubt, Father William, an American-born monk, points out portions of the True Cross, the girdle of the Virgin Mary entrusted to the apostle Thomas at her Dormition, the skull of St John Chrysostom, with a blackened ear still attached, and the skull of St Gregory Palamas, the 14th-century monk who became Archbishop of Thessaloniki.

During my stay, Greek businessmen taking their sons on their first pilgrimage questioned me about the ordination of women and the consecration of gay bishops. Villagers from Cyprus could not understand why a priest visiting the Holy Mountain was not wearing a cassock. A group of Romanian seminary students gently tried to convert me to Orthodoxy. There was a handful of Russians, Ukrainians and Bulgarians, and a small party of Greek-Americans. But everyone left me with time for prayer and solitude.

On the ferry back to Ouranóupoli, I gazed up at the onion domes and copper roofs of Panteleimon, the last Russian monastery on Mount Athos, but was starkly interrupted by a reminder of ugly reality from the outside world. A group of Serbs, who had visited Chilandar despite a devastating recent fire, wondered why the new Europe was forgetting their plight and failing to embrace Serbia. Mount Athos was no retreat from worldly politics.

A fountain inside a monastic courtyard in Thessaloniki (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2004)

Rev Patrick Comerford is southern regional co-ordinator of CMS Ireland, a Christian mission and development agency.

This feature was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on 19 June 2004.

04 May 2004

Web’s literary pilgrims find
oasis in iconic desert monastery

Letter from Sinai
Patrick Comerford


Despite the rapid growth of tourism in Egypt and the development of resorts such as Sharm el-Sheikh, the Sinai Peninsula has long been a remote region. It takes six or seven hours to travel from Cairo to Saint Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai, and for generations the Sinai Desert remained the wilderness it must have been when the Children of Israel trekked through here for 40 years after they fled across the Red Sea.

Today, the Sinai Peninsula continues to command the spiritual awe of followers of the three main monotheistic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. On Mount Sinai, God spoke to Moses through the Burning Bush and gave him the Ten Commandments, here Elijah hid in a crag in the rock, and here Muslims believe Muhammad was a visiting trader prior to the beginnings of Islam, perhaps even visiting Saint Catherine’s Monastery.

Saint Catherine’s Monastery, dating to the fourth century, is the principal tourist attraction in the desert.

“We have three types of tourists visiting us,” the monastery’s abbot, Archbishop Damianos, recently told the Greek journal Odyssey. “There are the devout, there are art lovers who came to see our treasures, and then there are the worst kind – those who come because they consider a daytrip to Saint Catherine’s to be the cultural part of their beach holiday.”

For many visitors, the monastery is the starting point for a daunting three-hour climb to the 600-metre summit of Mount Sinai. The daily trek, led by Bedouin camel drivers, sets off before 3 a.m. so climbers on the rough, steep path are saved from the burning sun. Later in the day, the monastery is open to tourists only for 2½ hours, from 9.30 a.m. to noon, and remains closed on Fridays, Sundays, and all Greek Orthodox holidays.

Egypt was once the intellectual and spiritual powerhouse of the early church, and the dogmatic debates in Alexandria helped produce the Creeds. But Egypt also gave Christianity the Desert Fathers and the monastic tradition.

In this remote corner of the Christendom, the monks of Saint Catherine’s continue to value the desert silence but are also acquiring some of the benefits of 21st-century technology.

The most visible legacy of the Desert Fathers at Saint Catherine’s is a unique library and collection of icons, textiles and religious artefacts. The Icon Gallery includes rare sixth-century icons that survived the ravages of the iconoclast controversy in the eighth and ninth centuries. The library includes 3,500 bound manuscripts, 2,000 scrolls and fragments, and more than 5,000 early printed books, of an age and linguistic diversity matched only by the Vatican Library.

In the monastery library, Father Justin explains that the most valued treasure was once the Codex Sinaiticus, dating from the fourth century. It was “borrowed” in 1865 by a visiting German scholar, Constantin Tischendorf, who promptly presented it to the Tsar; Stalin sold it for £100,00 to Britain in 1933, and the codex now rests in the British Museum. Fifteen missing folios were found in the monastery’s north wall in 1975, leaving the monks with part of the oldest existing copy of the New Testament.

The library also proudly retains a copy of the achitames – a document with the imprint of Muhammad’s hand, guaranteeing Saint Catherine’s protection under Islamic rule. In AD 635, the monks of Mount Sinai sent a delegation asking for Muhammad’s patronage and protection. The request was granted and was honoured when the Muslims conquered the Sinai in 641. Later, in 1009, the mad Caliph al-Hakim built a mosque within the monastery walls, with an unusual qibla pointing towards Jerusalem rather than Mecca as the direction for prayer. The monks continue to keep open the only mosque to survive within the walls of a monastery, and Father Justin describes it as one of the “many examples of tolerance, respect and affection” between Christians and Muslims in Egypt.

The monks admit they would find it difficult to survive without the support and kindness of their local Muslim neighbours. The local Bedouin, from the tiny Jabiliyya tribe, claim descent from 200 Greek soldiers brought by the Emperor Justinian from Alexandria and Thrace to fortify and guard the monastery in the sixth century.

Although they are Muslims, Father Justin says they join in many of the monastery festivals and look to the abbot, who is also Archbishop of Sinai, as their community leader, protector, judge, and even as their “grandfather”.

The Church of Sinai is the smallest self-governing Christian denomination in Egypt – its only members are Archbishop Damianos and his 25 monks, who have come mainly from Mount Athos and other parts of Greece.

But despite their long history and their tiny numbers, the monks are planning for the future of Saint Catherine’s. With the support of international donors, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Courtauld Institute in London, they are assessing the state of the library collection as part of a programme of refurbishment and conservation.

Father Justin points out that without this outside help, the resources of the monastery would have been overwhelmed by the task of safeguarding its treasures. The droves of tourists may disturb the morning peace of one of the most isolated monasteries in the world, but the west’s generosity has brought benefits too.

In the calm of the Sinai afternoon, Father Justin is busy digitising the ancient scrolls, manuscripts and books. “Our goal is to digitally reproduce the entire library,” he says without betraying any tiredness.

Once again, thousands of ancient manuscripts will be available to modern scholars, but this time without the threat of theft or misappropriation.

This feature was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on 4 May 2004

01 April 2004

Legacy of an
Irishwoman
who loved
a Greek writer

Letter from Crete
Patrick Comerford


Crete is the island of myth and literature. It is the island of the Minotaur, El Greco and Theodorakis. And it is the island of Nikos Kazantzakis, Greece’s most celebrated modern writer.

Kazantzakis was born in Iraklion in 1883. His works include translations of Homer, Aeschylus and Dante, the epic poem Odyssey, and the novels that earned him acclaim in the West, especially Zorba the Greek. By one vote, he lost the Nobel Prize for Literature to Albert Camus a few days before he died in 1957.

Manolis Chrysakis and his family are proud of their kinship with Kazantzakis. One balmy summer's evening with the Chrysakis family in Crete, Manolis’s uncle, the late Kostas Chrysakis, pored over old family photographs, postcards and letters, sharing childhood memories of his famous “Uncle Nikos”. Kostas treasured his photographs of his uncle's funeral, attended by older Cretans dressed in traditional island costumes, like Dirk Bogarde in Ill Met by Moonlight. The author’s grave is marked by a plain cross and the simple epitaph: “I hope for nothing, I fear nothing, I am free.”

In Report to Greco – an autobiographical novel edited by Eleni Kazantzakis and published four years after her husband’s death – Nikos Kazantzakis described falling in love with “an Irish girl” in the summer of 1902. She had arrived in Iraklion four years earlier as an English language teacher and they shared a love for music and poetry. “What joy when I began to saunter through English lyric poetry with this Irish girl! The language, its vowels and consonants, had become so many warbling birds,” he wrote.

Early one September morning, the couple climbed Mount Psilorítis, and he told a village priest they met that she was “the daughter of a pastor on a distant, verdant island”. As they talked, “the priest ... wagered that if the girl’s father had been with us, he would have converted him to Orthodoxy in one night.”

The pair separated the day before Kazantzakis left to study in Athens that autumn – he was 19 and she was 26. However, the Irish teacher’s identity remained a secret, even years later when he recounted the affair in Report to Greco. Kostas Chrysakis once told me his family knew about her but had no clues to her identity. The writer’s widow, Eleni, was aware of all her husband’s previous lovers and met many of them, but for most of her life she too never knew the identity of this Irish woman. Many researchers thought she was another Cretan myth, a romantic figure invented as a literary device by the writer himself.

Eleni’s goddaughter, Niki Stavrou of the Kazantzakis Foundation in Athens, also doubted whether she could ever establish her identify: “She seemed to me like a character drawn out of an Irish fairy tale, or at least an imagined dream-lover made up by the wishful imagination of a young author.” When Kazantzakis left Crete for Athens, his young Irish teacher “disappears a short while afterwards without leaving behind her the slightest trail. It sounded too magical to happen to anyone, even to a charmed spirit like Kazantzakis.” Now, however, new clues have identified this long-anonymous lover as Kathleen Forde, a rector’s daughter from Ireland. Niki’s father, Patroklos Stavrou, the adopted son of Eleni Kazantzakis, recently found notes this Irish woman sent to Kazantzakis and naming her as Kathleen Forde.

As he removed the notes tenderly from their protective wrapping, he said to his daughter: “If only we could find her!” At first, Niki’s search proved fruitless. “I am sure you can imagine how many Kathleen Fordes I found in Ireland.” Then an unexpected email arrived from Cathy Scaife in Western Canada, a descendant of Lewis Ogilby Forde, brother of a Kathleen Forde who was born in Ireland in 1876 and whose father was a Church of Ireland rector.

Kathleen left Crete soon after that tender summer, taking with her a secret she never revealed to her family. She followed her brothers to Canada before settling, around 1928 in California, where she may have found happiness in marriage to August Eberhardt. In an old family recipe box, Cathy Scaife found a recipe written by Kathleen and a little note with Christmas and New Year greetings to her brother Lewis and his wife Dorothy: “I find being married has done so much in settling me down and making me stick to things.” Comparing the handwriting with the notes found by Patroklos Stavrou, Greek police graphologists confirmed the handwriting was the same as that of Kazantzakis’s Kathleen.

Did Kathleen ever recover from her tempestuous affair with Nikos? “I can only imagine a young woman with a broken heart, having to hear people talk about him everywhere she went,” says Niki Stavrou. Kathleen died alone in a psychiatric hospital in Santa Cruz on October 8th, 1963. “Life can often outshine fiction in the most beautiful and tragic way,” says Niki.

For decades, Kathleen Forde’s identity had escaped me. Returning to the search, I found she was born on February 1st, 1876, in Kilcronaghan Rectory, Tobermore, Co Derry, the eldest daughter of Canon Hugh Forde (1847-1929). Unlike Kathleen’s Greek lover, Dr Forde never became a celebrated writer, but he wrote at least three books, travelled as far as Canada, Gibraltar and Morocco, was a senator of the University of Dublin, and had a doctorate in laws – the sort of priest who would have enjoyed theological debates with the village priest who was once host to Kathleen and Nikos.

When Eleni Kazantzakis died in Athens this February at the age of 102, she was brought to Crete to be buried beside her husband on the old Venetian walls of Iraklion, close to the spot where Kathleen Forde found love and romance on her Greek island generations before Shirley Valentine.

This feature was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on 1 April 2004

01 March 2004

Byzantine Studies, Kilkenny, 2004:
8: Icons and Byzantine spirituality

Andrei Rublev’s icon of the Visitation of Abraham, also known as the Old Testament Trinity

Patrick Comerford

Liberal Studies Group,

Maynooth University Campus

Saint Kieran’s College, Kilkenny,

Monday, 1 March 2004

8,
icons and Byzantine spirituality

This morning [1 March 2004] we are looking at Byzantine theology and schisms, icons and spirituality.

Earlier this morning, we discussed, we look at Byzantine theology and Church life; the Councils of the Church; schisms and heresies; iconoclasm; and the intrigues in the Patriarchates.

Now, we are looking at Icons and Byzantine spirituality.

Icons and Byzantine spirituality

Orthodox liturgical music:

In popular culture, movies such as Captain Corelli’s Mandolin or My Big Fat Greek Wedding have shown many people the difference in the Christian heritages of the west and those churches that have a Byzantine heritage. How did you react to the reliquary of Aghios Gerasimos being brought out to heal the demented in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin? Or to the actual wedding scene itself in My Big Fat Greek Wedding?

An understanding of the spiritual heritage of the Byzantine world is needed for some aspects of popular culture, and for understanding the religious mindset of many of our new immigrants in Ireland today, as well as helping you to understand what is happening to you when you visit churches during your holidays on a Greek island or in Cyprus.

It is often forgotten, that Orthodoxy is so much part of the current cultural, economic and political climate in Europe.

Orthodoxy today:

The Christianity of Byzantium today is organised in five main groupings, embracing perhaps 150 million or more people:

1, The Orthodox Churches of the four ancient Patriarchates, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. We traditionally call these churches Greek Orthodox.

2, The Greek Orthodox Churches of Greece and Cyprus.

3,The Orthodox Churches of Eastern Europe most notably, Romania, with the second largest, and Russia with the largest Orthodox Church in the world.

4,The rapidly growing Orthodox churches of East Africa, East Asia and other places, where Byzantine culture is inter-mingling with a variety of ethnic cultural identities.

5, The churches of the diaspora, including the Greek, Romanian and Russian churches in this island.

The gifts Orthodoxy has been offering us in recent decades:

In recent decades Orthodoxy has given the churches in the west a number of insights into worship, liturgy, spirituality, theology, ecclesiology (understanding the nature of the Church), and a sense of our church history: where we are coming from, what we are doing today, and where we are going to.

Worship and liturgy
The word Orthodoxy not only describes a large section of Christianity, it also means ‘right worship,’ or ‘right praise.’ The beauty of Orthodox liturgy is, to Orthodox, a sign that their theology is right, and that their faith is right. We have learned so much from eastern liturgy, and Orthodoxy has informed so much liturgical reform in the 20th century.

Their fasts longer and stricter, they celebrate name days and ignore birthdays, and, more importantly, Easter, not Christmas, is the pre-eminent Christian festival in every community.

Their priests may marry before ordination, but not after, and bishops are chosen from among the ranks of celibate monks, although they may be widowed men, who join a monastery.

Monasticism is a gift of the Byzantine Church to the western church. The first monks were in the Egyptian Desert, when Alexandria and Egypt were still part of the Byzantine world, and the monastic tradition has been handed down as an important part of Christian literature in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers.

Today, the Byzantine monastic tradition is most culturally energetic on Mount Athos, where there are over twenty monasteries and sketes on a peninsula in northern Greece that is autonomous and that may only be visited by men, and may only be visited by non-Orthodox men who have a particular interest in Orthodoxy and Byzantine culture. There, Byzantine culture and Orthodox spirituality are woven together in a seamless garment. But it is also possible to visit Orthodox monasteries throughout the Greek islands and in Cyprus to find women’s convents.

Monks and nuns in the Byzantine world, and in the Orthodox world to this day, belong to a monastery or convent, and not to a monastic order, such as the Benedictines. After joining, they remain members of their monastery for the rest of their lives, even if their work takes them somewhere else. [Metropolitan] Kallistos Ware lives in Oxford, and is a bishop in England, but remains a monk of Patmos. All monks on Mount Athos automatically become Greek citizens.

Spirituality

Particular examples are: the Jesus Prayer, Iconography, and writings such as the Philokalia.

The words of the Jesus Prayer are simple: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.’

The Philokalia is an anthology of ascetical and mystical texts, from the 4th to the 15th centuries. It was edited by two Greek monks, now regarded as saints, and was intended for both laity and clergy. It was eventually published in Venice in 1782, and it made the Jesus Prayer popular once again. It has since been translated and published in four volumes in English, reintroducing many aspects of Orthodox spirituality to the West.

In Orthodoxy, we also find a Patristic tradition of concern for the poor and the oppressed, expressed by Saint John Chrysostom. Saint John the Almsgiver, Patriarch of Alexandria (died 619) spoke of ‘my brothers and sisters, the poor.’ He used to say ‘that if, without ill-will, someone were to strip the rich right down to their shirts in order to give to the poor, he would do no wrong.’

‘Those whom you call poor and beggars, these I proclaim my masters and helpers. For they, and they alone, can really help us and bestow upon us the Kingdom of Heaven.’

Iconography:

Icons are familiar to the Irish experience. Some examples include:

The Redemptorists and the Icon of Our Mary Lady of Perpetual Succour, popular in many Irish kitchens and living rooms because of the nation-wide Redemptorist missions;

The Glenstal Book of Icons;

The icons at Bellinter (Sisters of Our Lady of Sion);

Irish icon writers including a nun in Tallow, Co Waterford, and a staff member of the Bon Secours Hospital in Glasnevin.

But from Orthodox experience, many may already be familiar with:

Rublev’s icon, the Visitation of Abraham;

the image of Christ the Pantocrator in the dome of Orthodox churches.
Rethym
How do the Orthodox use icons?

Pray through the icon rather than to an icon.

They are not painted; an icon is written; like a book, it is there to teach and to enlighten, entering into it is not worshipping it.

Icons and frescoes in church are not to distract but to tell the salvific story, with the climax in the Dome, Christ the Pantocrator, the one through whom all things are made.

[Tell the Story of Andreas Theodorakis of Rethymnon in Crete, an icon painter trained on Stavronikita, who was hurt when I wanted to buy one of his icons.]

The earliest icons were believed to have been written or painted at the time of Christ, the most famous examples being the many icons of the Virgin Mary said to have been painted by the Evangelist Luke.

However, scholars are still debating when Byzantine Christians began to use and venerate icons, which mostly took the form of holy figures painted on wooden panels.

Some argue that the practice began in the late sixth century, a time when the population as a whole began to sense the breakdown of the civilised Roman world and a need to turn to God. Others suggest that the veneration of icons began later and that holy relics were still viewed in the late sixth and early seventh centuries as the main channels of divine power.

In any case, the veneration of icons was developing in the seventh century, and at the time was drawing criticism from Byzantium’s non-Christian neighbours, especially Muslims and Jews.

The word icon (εἰκών, eikon in Greek) simply means ‘image.’ In other words, a representation in any medium of the artist’s vision of reality. In its restricted sense, the word came to be used for a religious image that plays a unique role in the Orthodox Church, in its worship, and in its doctrine.

In strict theological terms, these are not objects of devotion in themselves, but windows into the divine realm. They are kissed and venerated at the beginning and at various points during the liturgy and other services. But it is incorrect to venerate an icon when the holy elements are being carried in or consecrated, for example.

After the iconclast controversy was settled, icons played a more-and-more central role in the spiritual life of the church in the Byzantine world. Some churches and monasteries in Byzantium possessed special icons for special occasions, sometimes carrying them in public processions through the streets of Constantinople. And when the city was sacked in 1204 by the Fourth Crusade, many of these precious icons were looted and taken to the West, especially to Venice, but also to Rome, Genoa and other cities.

Today, icons are one of the most noticeable gifts in spirituality that all our churches have received as part of our heritage from Byzantium and from the Byzantine world. So, let us spend some time looking at some prints of icons.

Next week (8 March 2004): The other Byzantiums and the end of history:

9, The other Byzantiums: Alexandria, Jerusalem, Damascus: the world of Dalrymple in the past and today.

10, Wrapping up loose ends in Byzantine history.

Byzantine Studies, Kilkenny, 2004:
7: Byzantine theology and Church life

The Library of Celsus in Ephesus ... the Council of Ephesus met in 431 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Liberal Studies Group,

Maynooth University Campus

Saint Kieran’s College, Kilkenny,

Monday, 1 March 2004

7,
Byzantine theology and Church life

This morning [1 March 2004] we are looking at Byzantine theology and schisms, icons and spirituality.

First, we look at Byzantine theology and Church life; the Councils of the Church; schisms and heresies; iconoclasm; and the intrigues in the Patriarchates.

Then, later this morning, we look at Icons and Byzantine spirituality.

Introduction:

The creation of a schism:

Orthodoxy has never seen itself as being merely ‘Eastern Orthodox.’ Although present-day Orthodox churches trace their origins back to the four eastern partriarchates, Rome is still seen as the other fifth patriarchate, and the Pope as its patriarch, and still with the right of a primacy of honour, if Rome and the Orthodox world were to be reconciled.

The Orthodox will say that the faith of Orthodoxy is the faith of the church before division, with nothing added, and nothing taken away from their perspective. Dangers: no room for innovation, in terms of development of doctrine, or in the development of tradition (e.g. the ordination of women), and so tradition, which should be living to be tradition, rather than being a matter for antiquarian discourse, is frozen.

They will say that Orthodoxy is not an Eastern Mediterranean faith, no more than the Bible is holy scripture only for those in the Eastern Mediterranean, even though it is a product of that part of the world, and the Scriptures we have received are essentially Greek: the Septuagint Old Testament, and the Greek new Testament.

And yet we cannot understand Orthodoxy without understanding that the Orthodox Church is a Byzantine church. Nor can we understand Byzantium without understanding the place of the Church and Orthodoxy in its life.

The early church was successful in its early missionary work partly because it was working throughout a region that shared a common Graeco-Roman civilisation, in which Latin was the language of administration and Greek the language of the people, of everyday commerce. Our whole New Testament, including the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul and Peter, are written in Greek.

But over the centuries, the coherence of that civilisation began to crumble gradually. The empire, although theoretically one, was often divided into two parts. Constantine furthered the process by moving Rome to Constantinople.

The Barbarian invasions from the 5th century helped hasten the division of Greek East and Latin West. And the once-easy commerce between the two was further strained by both the invasion of the Balkans by the Avars and Slavs, and the conquest of the southern Mediterranean shores by the Arabs in the wake of the rise of Islam.

Old Rome became more distant from the New Rome, during the Iconoclast controversy, and the division of the old empire into two entities was sealed – sealed sacramentally – on Christmas Day 800 when Pope Leo III crowned Charles the Great, King of the Franks, as Holy Roman Emperor.

To divide the Empire was to divide the church, and the division deepened culturally in the years that followed: Photius, the greatest scholar in ninth century Constantinople, could not read Latin; in 864, the ‘Roman’ Emperor at Byzantium, Michael III, even called the language in which Virgil wrote ‘a barbarian and Scythian tongue.’ Charlemagne, who appears to have been semi-iconclast in his views, also condemned the Greeks for not using the filioque in the Creed.

In the East, all episcopal sees were seen as sharing in the heritage of the apostles (all the apostles, not just but including Peter), while in the West, Rome was seen as deriving its status from Peter, and it became not only the Petrine see but the Apostolic See, and the only Apostolic see.

While the doctrinal definitions of the seven councils were accepted, albeit reluctantly on occasions, the canonical rulings were often flouted, ignored, or countermanded, and the Bishop of Rome ruled like a monarch, or even like the emperor, rather than as one member of the college, council or synod of bishops.

The Councils of the Church:

[*** Handout on the councils of the Church ***]

Seven Ecumenical Councils:

The Church could be said to come of age with three events: the Edict of Milan, the foundation of the New Rome, and the Council of Nicaea. After the Apostolic Council in Jerusalem, there were seven further Councils of the Church regarded as doctrinally definitive by the Orthodox Church. They clarified the visible organisation of the Church, gave the five Patriarchates their authority, and defined once and for all the Church’s teachings on the fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith – the Trinity and the Incarnation.

Each Council was held in a Byzantine city that was part of the Ecumenical Patriarchate:

1, Nicaea I (325):

The Emperor Constantine presided at Nicaea I. This council condemned Arianism and elaborated the contents of faith, and it gave us the Nicene Creed. Nicaea I also dealt with the visible structures of the Church, recognising three great cities of the Empire – Rome, Alexandria and Antioch – as Patriarchates (Canon VI). A similar status was given out of honour to Jerusalem. However. Constantinople was not mentioned – the New Rome was not established as the new capital until five years later.

2, Constantinople I (381):

The second council met in the new capital in 381. This council expanded the Creed, especially the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, which it affirmed to be God even as the Father and the Son are God, and gave full meaning to the classical summary of the Trinitarian doctrine, ‘three persons in one essence.’
After 381, Arianism ceased to be a real force. The council also assigned Constantinople a place among the Patriarchates ‘because it is the New Rome.’ This position was not accepted or recognised by Rome until the Lateran Council (1215) – seven years after the Crusaders had razed Byzantium – and was resented by Alexandria, which had first place in the East and was founded by Saint Mark.

3, Ephesus (431):

The doctrinal problems at Ephesus were not about the Trinity but about the person of Christ. The principal controversialists were Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, and Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria. The council affirmed the title of Theotokos (God-bearer) for the Virgin Mary, but Nestorius refused to give her the title of ‘Mother of God,’ preferring ‘Mother of Christ.’ (Note, Ephesus is traditionally said to be the Virgin Mary’s home).

4, Chalcedon (451):

Chalcedon was summoned by Emperor Marcian. There the pendulum swung back towards the Antiochene school of theology, and the council rejected the extreme position of Alexandria as ‘Monophysite.’ The council was a defining moment in Orthodoxy: Canon XXVIII confirmed position of Patriarch of Constantinople, with five Patriarchates in the four principle cities of the empire and the city where Christ died. Pope Leo repudiated Canon XXVIII, but the Orthodox would argue you cannot have an a la carte approach to the councils.

5, Constantinople II (553):

This council was convened by the Emperor Justinian II to condemn the Nestorians and conciliate the Monophysites. Its decrees were rejected by the Pope Vigilius, who had refused to attend, until he was pressed into going by the Emperor.

6, Constantinople III (680-681):

Constantinople III in 680-681 condemned Pope Honorious I (d. 638) and anathematised him for holding the Monothelite heresy. At this time, a new threat to Orthodoxy came not from schism or heresy but from the rise of Islam. A key figure at this time was John of Damascus (d. 749), who was in the frontline for Orthodoxy with the rise of Islam and in the dispute over icons.

7, Nicaea II (787):

The last Ecumenical Council, Nicaea II, was marked by the ‘Victory of the Icons.’ A new attack on the use of icons and their veneration came in 815, and the final “victory of the holy images” in 843 is commemorated as ‘The Triumph of Orthodoxy’ on ‘Orthodox Sunday,’ the first Sunday in Lent.

The emperors and the patriarchs:

The role of the emperors in calling and presiding at the seven Great Councils of the Church underpins the reality that in the Byzantine world it would have been impossible to separate church and state: they were an organic whole. The emperor and his government could not operate without the sanction of the Church, nor could the bishops and the patriarchs serve the church without imperial support.

Eusebius spoke of the emperor as God’s representative on earth, or as a living icon of Christ. Byzantine emperors were allowed to enter the inner sanctuary of the Great Church and to receive the sacrament with the clergy. However, the emperor remained technically a layman, despite calling and presiding over church councils, implementing their decisions, playing a key role in resolving doctrinal disputes, and sanctioning the appointments of patriarchs and bishops.

After Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria fell to the Muslim Arabs, the Patriarch of Constantinople came increasingly to represent the whole church at the court of the Emperor. With Rome claiming an apostolic lineage back to Peter – which was claimed by Antioch too – Alexandria claiming a line that went back to the Evangelist Mark, and Jerusalem claiming an unmatchable source for its foundation, the Patriarchs of Constantinople soon started to claim that their see had been founded by Saint Peter’s brother, Saint Andrew, and began using the title Ecumenical Patriarch.

The title ecumenical is drawn from the Greek word oikumene, meaning the whole inhabited world. On a number of occasions, however, emperors came into conflict with bishops, and patriarchs with emperors.

When the Emperor Leo III introduced iconoclasm as an imperial policy, he was strongly opposed by the Patriarch Germanos I, who felt morally incapable of remaining in office and resigned as Ecumenical Patriarch in 730.

In 795, the Emperor Constantine VI divorced his wife and remarried. The Patriarch Tarasios was widely condemned by his fellow bishops for allowing the emperor to remarry, and there were calls for the excommunication of the priest Joseph who officiated at the wedding.

When iconoclasm was reintroduced by Leo V, the Patriarch Nicophoros was placed under house arrest after Christmas 815, resigned his office, and although an old man was exiled to the Asian side of the Bosphorus. Others too challenged the role of the Emperor in the Church. Saint John of Damascus asked: ‘What right have emperors to style themselves lawgivers in the Church?’

Remarriage (after widowhood, not without divorce) became a controversy again at the end of the 10th century when Leo VI (886-912) caused a major problem with his fourth marriage. His first three wives had died without children or in childbirth, and after he became was a widow for the third time, a mistress gave birth to a future heir, a child who would become Constantine VII.

Patriarch Nicholas I Mystikos, accepted the child as heir but refused to forgive the emperor for his behaviour, prohibited Leo VI from entering the Great Church and turned him back from its doors at Christmas and Epiphany 906-907. The emperor retorted by deposing the patriarch, seeking pardon from the Pope in Rome, and secretly marrying his consort. However, when he died in 912, Nicholas was reinstated as Patriarch, thus vindicating his firm stance against the Emperor.

Michael VIII (1259-1282) was excommunicated by the Patriarch Arsenios for usurping the throne, and so Michael deposed and exiled the patriarch. And so, we can say that church and state did not represent one entity in the Eastern Roman Empire – although they often aspired to this as an ideal. Michael VIII then conspired at reunion with Rome, although his efforts came to naught, and were seen not only as a way seeking vengeance on the Patriarch, but on threatening the survival of the culture of Byzantium.

If emperors could depose patriarchs, then patriarchs could also find them themselves being deposed due to conspiracies and intrigues in Byzantium, or because they were being accused of heresy.

John I Chrysostom was one of many saintly patriarchs to be sent into exile in 404; Nestorius was Patriarch of Constantinople when he was deposed in 431, accused of Nestorianism; others, such as Paul III or Tarasios, were installed as Patriarchs even though they were laymen, to satisfy an imperial whim or to settle an old score. Some were mere civic functionaries, others were corrupt, time servers, but there many great saints, some martyrs, and not a few great scholars.

The Great Schism:

The events surrounding the Papal excommunication of the Patriarch of Constantinople in 1054 are often presented in a dramatic form as if this were the moment of open breach between the church of the west and the churches of the east. But we should see the schism as a process rather than one event.

It was a schism marked at first less by theological division than by social, political, economic, linguistic division, and at first it might even have been a schism of temperaments, the divide between Byzantine East and Latin West. Although its fundamental cause, as the Orthodox writer (Metropolitan) Kallistos Ware, says, was not secular but theological, we have to consider the way Byzantine theology, the old theology of the New Rome, shaped the Church in different patterns than Latin theology, the new theology of the Old Rome.

Latin theology became more juridical and legalistic, while the Greeks continued to understand that theology was best expressed through worship and the Holy Liturgy. The two breaking points in the process that led to the Great schism were the Papal claims, and the use of the filioque in the Creed.

The filioque – the word that means ‘and from the Son’ describing the procession of the Holy Spirit – does not appear in the original text of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. This clause originated in Spain as a safeguard against Arianism. It received its sanction by the Spanish Church at the Third Council of Toledo, and spread from there to France and Germany, was welcomed by Charlemagne, and was adopted by the semi-iconoclast Council of Frankfort (794).

Charlemagne accused the Greeks of heresy for not using the filioque, yet in 808 Pope Leo III wrote to Charlemagne, saying while he believed the filioque to be doctrinally sound, he considered it a mistake to tamper with the words of the Creed, and had silver plaques inscribed with the Creed (without the filioque) and set up in Saint Peter’s in Rome.

Indeed, Rome continued to use the creed without the filioque until the start of the 11th century. For their part, the Orthodox point out that the Creed was the common possession of the whole church, and change could only be made by an ecumenical council. The west has altered the Creed without consulting the whole church in council, and so is accused of sin against the unity of the church.

Most Orthodox believe the filioque to be theologically and scripturally unsound; there are some who consider it admissible as theological opinion, though not as dogma, provided it is properly expressed, and still see it, nevertheless, as an unauthorised addition or insertion.

There were other points of irritation, even if not of doctrinal division. These included the marriage of clergy; the use leavened or unleavened bread in the Eucharist; the rules on fasting; divorce. The dispute over purgatory only emerged in the 13th century.

A schism unfolds

There were four principal, important events in the unfolding of the schism:

1, The ‘Photian schism’: A quarrel between Patriarch Photius and Pope Nicolas I (Photian schism in the west, the schism of Nicolas in the East). A row over the deposition of one Patriarch, the election of Photius, his subsequent deposition in 867 by the emperor and the restoration of his predecessor, and the eventual restoration of Photius in 877. The row was over the Pope’s claim to rule on who was the rightful patriarch. Although the schism was healed on the surface, the stirrings underneath now ran deeply and were troubling.

2, The Diptychs dispute of 1009: A dispute between Pope Sergius IV and Patriarch Sergius: The Pope’s name not included in the list of those patriarchs regarded as Orthodox and prayed for in Constantinople. The Papacy was making claims to universal jurisdiction, and relations deteriorated further through political events: the Norman invasion and conquest of Byzantine areas of Italy, especially Sicily (‘the Sicilian Vespers’).

3, The Great Schism of 1054: In 1054, Cardinal Humbert and two other Papal legates burst into the Church of Aghia Sophia in the middle of the sacred liturgy, placed a bill of excommunication on the holy table, and, on leaving, the cardinal shook the dust from his feet. A distressed deacon who ran after him begged him to take back the bull; Humbert refused, and it was dropped in the street.

Note: Patriarch Cerularius anathematised Humbert, but not the Pope. Friendly relations could continue.

4, The Crusades: The Crusades made the division definitive. They introduced a new spirit of bitterness and hatred, exacerbated in 1098 when Antioch was captured, in 1099 when Jerusalem was captured, and more particularly in 1204, when Constantinople was captured by the Fourth Crusade and sacked. Rival Latin Patriarchs were installed in these cities, and even remained in Jerusalem after Saladin recaptured the Holy City in 1187.

The Church could struggle at times to see itself as one, and there still could be efforts at reconciliation: in 1106-1107, a Roman pilgrim in Jerusalem noted Greeks and Latins worshipping in harmony at Easter. But the establishment of a Latin Patriarchate in Byzantium, and the division of the city so that Genoese, Venetians and other westerners could each claim their own quarter marked the permanency of the rift.

Three failed efforts at reunion:

Then there were three failed efforts at reunion.

Council of Lyons, 1274: During the reign of Emperor Michael VIII (1259-1282), the Orthodox Church sent delegates to the Council of Lyons, 1274, but the agreement reached there was so disagreeable to the Orthodox that the Emperor’s sister declared: ‘Better that my brother’s Empire should perish than the purity of the Orthodox faith.’

The two churches continued to grow apart: in the West, theology was marked by Scholasticism; in the East, Byzantine theology was shaped by the Hesychast controversy, the mystical tradition, and the emphasis on inner stillness.

Council of Florence, 1438-1439: This council was attended by the Emperor John VIII and the Patriarch of Constantinople. The Florentine Union proposed unanimity in matters of doctrine, and mutual respect for legitimate rites and traditions peculiar to each church.

But the reunion agreed at Florence was no more a reality than the union reached at Lyons, over a century and a half later. Many of the Byzantine clergy who signed the agreement at Florence later claimed they had been put under undue pressure and revoked their signatures when they returned home. One Greek leader, Lukas Notaras, proclaimed: ‘I would rather see the Muslim turban in the midst of the City [Byzantium] than the Latin mitre.’

When Constantinople came under the final, fatal siege, the West did not respond, and the New Rome was captured by the Turks on 29 May 1453. The last liturgy in Aghia Sophia united Orthodox and Latin Christians, supporters and opponents of the Florentine Union.

Dialogue and divisions continue:

Council of Brest-Litovsk, 1596: This council marked a Rome-ward movement of many Orthodox in areas that are now part of Ukraine, Poland, Hungary and Romania, and the formation of the Greek Catholic Uniate church. This new church accepted the Council of Florence and retained their Byzantine liturgy, icons, married clergy, &c. But there were sad consequences in the embittered relations between Rome and the Orthodox Churches of Eastern Europe. Although the Greek Church briefly became open to the influence of Roman theology, but under the Patriarch Cyril Lukaris, who had been one of the delegates, the church also took a dramatic turn away from Rome, taking an interest in Calvinism.

1725: In 1725, a large part of the Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch submitted to Rome. This too created a new anti-Rome impulse, with the Patriarchs of Constantinople, Jerusalem and Alexandria in 1755 declaring Latin baptism to be entirely invalid – a ruling now largely ignored and discarded in practice.

There were other efforts at reunion, including those initiated by the Nonjurors, dissenting Anglicans in England and Scotland, in the 18th century. There has even been a mutual recognition of sorts between Anglicans and the Romanian Orthodox Church, and, very briefly, between Anglicans and the Patriarchate of Alexandria, which is a Byzantine church too.

Can there be reunion today?

Among Roman Catholics and Anglicans, I think we have been approaching the prospect of unity with the Orthodox Church from a perspective that is alien to them.
The recent Vatican documents on inter-communion, say the Orthodox cannot be excluded from communion, and that Roman Catholics are free to receive communion in Orthodox Churches.

But that is not the reality from the Orthodox perspective. Anglicans have rejoiced in various statements that appeared to move the Orthodox Churches towards recognising our orders.

But once again, we were approaching the topic from the wrong end. Can we only have unity when there is unity in faith, and then will there be a unity of sacramental life, a unity in diversity, and diversity in unity?

Do we share the same faith?

Is the filioque a barrier?

Are the Papal claims a barrier?

Are our models of episcopate a barrier

Let us take a break before we consider the riches Byzantine icons and spirituality have to offer us today.

Next, 8: icons and Byzantine spirituality.

20 February 2004

A miracle of hope for
Romania’s pensioner underclass

At Precupeti Vecchi Church in inner city Bucharest with Father Gheorghe Tudor (centre) of the Romanian Orthodox Church and the Revd James Ramsay (right) of the Anglican Church of the Resurrection

Letter from Bucharest
Patrick Comerford


The main shopping streets of Bucharest are now lined with elegant boutiques and department stores, with fine restaurants, full banking services and even casinos vying with each other.

The elegance and prosperity in the heart of the Romanian capital are a sharp contrast to the visible poverty when I first visited the city immediately after the collapse of the Ceausescu regime, or the struggling economy I witnessed when I returned during the 1996 election campaign.

But today Romanian society faces new problems because of the continuing devaluation of the Romanian currency and spiralling inflation. According to the president of Volksbank Romania, Mr Laurentiu Mitrache, the average income of working families is 3-4 million lei (€100) a month, leaving them unable to meet living costs, despite Romania's low prices. Old people are on fixed pensions, which have not kept pace with inflation and have lost their spending power due to devaluation. He told of one couple - a retired judge and a retired pharmacist - living on a monthly pension of €60. A priest told of a parishioner who is a former energy minister and is now living on €40 a month.

According to Mr Mitrache, many pensioners, unable to pay their electricity and heating bills or buy enough food, have been forced to sell their apartments and move out. The new underclass in Romania is made up of these once-respectable old people, now a regular sight, quietly and humbly begging in streets, in the subways and on the steps of the Metro stations.

Until the revolution in 1990, the churches in Romania were not allowed to engage in social witness and outreach. Today, despite their best intentions, most Orthodox parishes are unable to begin social projects because of a shortage of money, space and organisational skills.

However, at the inner city parish of All Saints' Church, the Romanian Orthodox parish priest, Father Gheorghe Tudor, has built an old people's centre and started a project that includes three-storey sheltered housing and a food programme. The project began two years ago and is now feeding up to 100 people three times a week, with a further 25 families receiving food parcels with food donated by local restaurants. The sheltered housing will provide a new home for 20 old people on fixed pensions who have lost their apartments and short-term respite for old people who cannot afford to pay for their heating and lighting.

Romanian tradition expects a wake and burial within three days of death, but many old people find their flats are too small for the traditional Romanian wake, and too hot during the summer months to allow mourners to file through the cramped rooms.

Now the new mortuary chapel built by Father Gheorghe serves these needs too. The modern chapel interior is decorated in traditional Orthodox style, and all the work and craftsmanship have been provided by voluntary local labour.

“The closer you are to people, the closer you are to God,” Father Gheorghe says. However, a lot of work remains before the project building is complete. Present priorities include the installation of heating, at an estimated cost of $10,000. He puts the total cost for completing the building at $50,000, with an annual running cost of $36,000.

The project is only one of a handful of such projects so far in the Romanian Orthodox Church. However, Father Gheorghe believes it could inspire similar outreach and witness - a hope echoed by a neighbouring parish priest, Father Mihail Spatarelu of the Church of the Dormition, who is also Project Co-ordinator of AIDRom, the Ecumenical Association of Churches in Romania.

The project at All Saints is also attracting ecumenical interest. The Anglican Church of the Resurrection, just off the busy shopping streets and close to many of the Romanian capital's embassies, has a unique record as the only Anglican church to maintain a presence in the Eastern Bloc throughout the post-war years of communism. The chaplains during those bleak days have included the Rev Dr David Hope, now Archbishop of York, and the Rev Ian Sherwood, a former curate of the Saint Patrick's Cathedral group in Dublin.

In the 1980s, Ian Sherwood found his flat had been bugged by Ceausescu's secret police. Today, the Anglican Church in Bucharest finds itself working in a more open climate. Father Gheorghe's determination has moved the present chaplain, the Rev James Ramsey, to work more closely with his Orthodox neighbours. “The project is a sign of discipleship in Christ, a miracle of the love of God,” he says.

This ‘Letter from Bucharest’ was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on 20 February 2004.

16 February 2004

Byzantine Studies, Kilkenny, 2004:
6: Byzantine Literature and the Arts

Tertullian asked, ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Liberal Studies Group,

Maynooth University Campus

Saint Kieran’s College, Kilkenny,

Monday, 16 February 2004

6,
Byzantine Literature and the Arts

The recovery of learning in another mediaeval society

Outside the Augustaeum, in Constantinople, one would notice a statue of Justinian wearing what was known at the time as the armour of Achilles. But the Emperor carried no weapon. Instead he held in his left hand the symbol of power of the Christian Roman Emperor, the globe, which signified his dominion over land and sea, and on the globe was a cross, the emblem of the source of his rule.

Justinian as Achilles was a natural example of the fusion of classical culture with Christianity in the Eastern Roman Empire. This fusion began before Justinian's time, but was to continue to be one of the distinguishing marks of education and literature in the age of Justinian. Along with the legal and architectural splendours, the reign of Justinian also saw a flowering of literature such as the Greco-Roman world had not enjoyed for many years.

The earliest Christians avoided the worldly learning of the Greeks with their ‘philosophy and deceit,’ and saw no way in which the blasphemous literature could be brought into any sort of relationship with Christian teaching. This reaction of many Christians, as late as the second century, could be summed up in Tertullian’s famous phrase: ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’

In time, however, Christian thinkers began to realise that there was much to be carried over into Christian teaching from the Classical Greeks. Socrates and Plato, for example, often seemed to approximate Christian thought. Likewise, many of the writings of Aristotle could be fit right into the teachings of the Church. Indeed, after the adoption of Christianity people such as Saint Basil and the other fathers of the Church, all trained in Greek literature, were able to show that Pagan literature contained a wealth of teaching that was in accord with the philosophies, dogmas and symbolisms of Christianity.

It is true that such literary themes as the loves of the Olympians, and the witty humour of Aristophanes, represented views of life that Christianity came to replace. However, the fathers of the Christian Church and other later thinkers had the insight to perceive that it was possible to make some basic distinctions, and separate those elements from classical literature that were not in accord with Christianity, keeping all the rest.

The writings of the Fathers of the Church, and many others after them show an established conviction that was vital for the future of the Byzantine civilization, and indeed, all Christian cultures. This conviction brought about the establishment of a ‘new’ Christian culture, one utilising all the best writings of the classical Greek thought and fusing it into the writings and teachings of the Orthodox Church. The process of such a fusion took centuries, and its final step was not to be completed till the age of Justinian.

Even after Christianity had grown to the point where numbers of prominent people were Christians, public life was still in the hands of people who had a classical education. By this time, the educational system had come to be viewed as the embodiment of the ancient heritage, political and philosophical as well as literary. In the Greek East, even under Roman subjugation, Greek literature kept alive for centuries the tradition of the political, philosophical and artistic achievements of the classical Hellenic world.

For a Greek Christian to give up all the classical teachings simply because parts of them were indelicate would have meant losing a great deal. It would have meant, had he chosen to accept only the teachings of the early Christians, that he would be cut off from a major part of his cultural heritage. Most people were not prepared for this.

It was into a world founded on this ideology that Justinian came. Indeed, Justinian immediately recognised the meaning of the classical spirit and set himself to absorb it and be absorbed by it. The Greek language itself also fascinated him and he took great pleasure in composing state papers in it, although he had a skilled secretariat for this purpose. A humorous anecdote in this vein comes to us in Procopius’s Secret History, where he tells us rather wickedly that the Emperor took great pleasure in performing public readings of his works, in spite of his provincial accent, which he never lost when speaking Greek (of course, who was to tell the Emperor that his accent was provincial?).

Justinian decided to put an end to the idea of Paganism as heresy. He saw, however, that there was a major problem in the manner in which Pagan writing was being taught in the schools and universities. In particular, it was being taught in two different ways.

In the schools of Constantinople, Gaza and Alexandria, the classics were being taught by teachers who were themselves Christians. Procopius was typical of such Christian teachers steeped in the classics. He and his pupils and colleagues composed great ecclesiastical works based on the classical style. The theatres of Gaza were often filled with Christian professors who would give public exhibitions in which they declaimed before enthusiastic audiences their rhetorical compositions. Another such teacher, alive in Justinian’s day, was John Philoponus. His works included both theological treatises and polemics, as well as commentaries on Aristotle.

One centre of learning that even until Justinian’s time had never associated itself with Christianity was Athens. There the professors were still Pagan and were teaching the classics from entirely the Pagan point of view. This was found unacceptable. Not the fact that they were teaching classical works, but that they were not Christians. Justinian gave them the opportunity to become Christian but they refused. As a result, Justinian closed down their schools in 529, his second year as emperor. Of course, one could still continue to study the classics at Alexandria, Gaza, or Constantinople, where the teachers were Christians. Most of the Athenian professors went as refugees to the court of the King of Persia.

However, in time, they found conditions there even worse and they petitioned to be allowed to return home. For better or for worst, this action of Justinian’s was to be symbolic of what the ‘new’ Christian education and literature, based on the classics, was to be like.

The poetry of Byzantium

As well as his interests in law-giving, architecture, sculpture and philosophy, Justin was a poet: one of his hymns is incorporated into the Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, and was included in the Romanian Orthodox liturgy I took part in yesterday.

Much of the new poetry of Byzantium, as might expect, was religious, some of it was part of the effort to recover the Hellenic world and the world of Greek philosophy. Later poetry would continue to maintain Byzantine cultural expressions despite Frankish and Ottoman occupation

The favourable atmosphere of Constantinople produced a number of distinguished literary figures in Justinian’s time. Many of their works were largely influenced by the teachings of Aristotle, Plato and other ancient Greek philosophers and play writers, whom they had all studied. Indeed, men in public life were frequently scholars and poets.

The work entitled The Greek Anthology, for instance, preserves selected specimens of the verses of nine such poets. Included in this list is John the Lydian, who wrote some autobiographical passages about the scholarly side of the government, and also a history of the Persian war. Procopius the historian and Paul the Silentiary were also in this list of distinguished scholars at the time of Justinian.

Procopius studied at Gaza, then a university town, and learned to mimic the style of the great Greek historians such as Herodotus and Thucydides. In 527 he went to Constantinople where he was to assume new heights as the leading historian of the day, as well as a legal adviser to Belissarius, the most brilliant of Justinian’s generals. He also wrote a panegyric in which Justinian’s vast construction program was described with the resources of literary art. After Procopius’s death another of his works, The Secret History, was published, in which he libelled the Emperor Justinian who, he believed, had failed to do justice to his hero Belissarius.

[*** hand out excerpt from Paul the Silentiary ***]

While Procopius went back to the classic Greek historians, Paul the Silentiary went back to Homer. He wrote a famous description of Aghia Sophia in 887 hexameters, about the length of one of the longer books of Homer. Homer became the vehicle for the praise of the noblest church in the empire. Like Procopius’s earlier work, Paul’s monograph on Aghia Sophia reflects a real Christian feeling via the subtlety and similes of the Homeric style. It was not only for his praise of Aghia Sophia that Paul is known for, however. In his day and later Paul was one of the most appreciated writers of occasional verses in the Classical style.

The 78 of his epigrams that are preserved in The Greek Anthology show that he was an accomplished practitioner of the classical style, with an intimate knowledge of classical literature and a delicate feeling for language and meter.

In the age of Justinian, Greek classical literature was a part of the ancient heritage, and Christianity, as a custodian of this heritage, was well able to absorb the classical literary tradition so long as it was understood that the tradition now played a vital role as an element in the new and larger Christian way of life that Hellenism and the entire Eastern Roman Empire had gradually evolved into.

Justinian knew that true patriotism and national pride would come from the teaching of the record of achievements of ancient Greece. Indeed, the Greek-speaking citizens of the empire were very conscious of their decent from the Greeks of ancient times who had produced the likes of Homer, Thucydides, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. They saw no essential discontinuity between themselves and classical Greece. It was now Justinian’s responsibility to see that the essential base of such a classical pedagogical system was maintained. Classical literature had proven its worth over many centuries, and was to survive alongside with Christianity. In the Christian Roman Empire Justinian hoped to shape what one could read and learn, and teach the classics, but only if he or she was Christian first

Other Byzantine arts

This inter-mingling of creativity in the architecture, poetry, piety and folksongs of Byzantium is reflected in the anonymous poem or folksong translated as The Last Mass in Santa Sophia [refer to handout]. The architecture of Byzantium provided the space for mosaics and frescoes, and inspired the poetry and literature of this great civilisation. But apart from architecture, literature and poetry, the Byzantine world of art was creative in many other fields too.

The Byzantine museums in Athens, Thessaloniki, Mystras, and on the islands, or the exhibitions such as the Treasures of Mount Athos, organised as part of the programme for Thessaloniki’s Year as European Cultural Capital in 1997 contain rich display of Byzantine works in sculpture, painting, marble, wood carvings, mosaic floors and tiles, frescoes and wall paintings, illuminated manuscripts, paper icons, portable icons, religious vestments, liturgical vessels, jewellery, decorative tiles, architectural embellishments, pottery, coins, objects worked in silver and other precious metals …

The architecture of Byzantium was to be seen not only in Constantinople but also in Alexandria, for long the second city of the Empire, in the Palace of the Grand Masters, for long associated with the Knights of Saint John or the idiosyncrasies of Mussolini, but the citadel of the fortified Byzantine city of Rhodes from the late seventh century to 1309.

Byzantine culture survives:

After the last mass in Aghia Sophia and the fall of Byzantium, Byzantine culture did not come to an end. Byzantium did not disappear when Constantinople fell to the Turks and was transformed into Istanbul. There was a cultural continuity with Byzantium in the cultural lives of Cyprus, until it fell to the Turks in 1571, and on Crete, the island of Candia, for almost another century after that

With the arrival of a new wave of scholars, artists and writers from Byzantium after 1453, in Crete, then the island of Candia, Byzantine culture was guaranteed its survival and prosperity on the island and its capital, Kastro (present-day Iraklion) until it was captured by the Turks in 1669.

And so, for example, the link between Byzantine literature and Renaissance literature, between late Byzantium and late Venice, the place where West looks East and East looks West in early modern Europe, is provided by the Cretan poet Vitsentzos Kornaros (1553-ca 1613/14), an immediate contemporary of El Greco, whose poem Erotokritos, is the best-known and the most admired work of Cretan Renaissance literature.

This 10,000-verse epic is more than a poem, it is a love story, it is a great work of fiction, it is narrative poetry and drama. In this poem, we find the balance of Greek culture is found in the balance between Athens and Byzantium, the city of philosophers and the city of emperors. It has inspired poets and musicians into the 20th century, such as this track from the Cretan songwriter Paradosiako.

[*** play track from Erotokrtios ***]

To put it into its cultural landscape, this poem is almost contemporaneous with Edmund Spencer’s The Fairie Queen (1596). It was written after 1595 and before 1610 in Kastro.

The tradition of Byzantine iconography was not only maintained, but it was nurtured and developed, for example among the exiles from Byzantium who found refuge in Crete, especially in the school that grew up in a church in Kastro (present-day Iraklion) associated with the Byzantine monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai.

There the leading writer of icons was Mikhailis Damaskinos (ca 1530-1591), whose better-known works include the Last Supper. The best-known of his pupils was young Domenikos Theotokopoulos (1541-1614). A contemporary of Cornaros, he left Crete at the age of 26 in 1597 and moved first to Venice and Rome and then to Toledo in Spain, where he earned fame as El Greco. Many western critics have tried to explain his style by suggesting various eye diseases, but, undoubtedly, he was totally influenced in his work by the Byzantine style of iconography brought from the City to Crete. His pictures are theological rather than religious in character; they make a clear distinction between the divine world and the material world, which are seen as separate but mutually accessible areas. But more of that in two weeks time!

On other islands, the Byzantine tradition of iconography was maintained by painters such as Nikolaos Koutouzis and Nikolaos Kantounis on Zakynthos.

Byzantine art, from the past and today, can be seen in museums and galleries throughout Greece, the most notable being those in Athens, Thessaloniki and Rhodes, but especially in Mystras, and it is also worth visiting the Byzantine museums in Zakynthos, Chania, Chios, Spetses and many other islands to see not a tradition from the past but a living tradition that is part of a living creativity and spirituality today

The poetry of Byzantium continued too.

Byzantium in literature and poetry today:

On our first morning [2 February 2004], I read W.B. Yeats’s poem, Sailing to Byzantium. But while Yeats was romancing about Byzantium as an El Dorado or Tír na nÓg of the past, Byzantium continued to be a living presence, a place of the present, in Greek poetry after the last mass in Aghia Sophia.

In the geography of the Greek poet, Byzantium was not the only Byzantine city. Alexandria, which had been won and lost so many times in the Hellenic and Byzantine conflicts, came to symbolise the sensuality of all Greeks. This had been primarily a Greek city from the days of Alexander the Great until the rise of Nasser and the Suez Crisis in the mid-20th century, and the cycle of the loss and redemption of Alexandria represented the losses and the hopes of all Greeks.

Alexandria was the second city of Byzantium, it was the sensual Byzantium, and the loss of Alexandria, for Byzantines, as for Hellenes before them and modern Greeks after them, symbolises the loss of cultural riches, the loss of cultural diversity, the loss of sensuality and pleasure, the very pain of losing love itself

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, who romanticised the Hellenic and Byzantine world, wrote many of his poems on themes provided by Byzantium. Anna Komnina (1083-1146) was ‘a power hungry woman’ driven by the consuming regret of never having managed to gain the throne; Anna Dalassini is eulogised for never having uttered ‘those cold words “mine” or “yours”.’ Cavafy discovers a remnant of royal Byzantine pride in the fact that John Kantakuzinos and his wife Irini chose to wear bits of coloured glass in place of jewels during their coronation, which came at a time when ‘our afflicted empire was extremely poor.’ And Cavafy comments on the occasion:

… I find
nothing humiliating or undignified
in those little pieces of coloured glass.
Just the opposite: they seem
a sad protest against
the unjust misfortune of the couple being crowned,
symbols of what they deserve to have,
of what surely it was right they should have
at their coronation – a Lord John Kantakuzinos,
a Lady Irini, daughter of Andronikos Asan.


In the poem, ‘Theophilos Paliologos,’ Cavafy laments the fall of Byzantium in 1453, and with it the death of Hellenism as the mediaeval world knew it. But Cavafy was from Alexandria, and the loss of Alexandria to the Byzantine world symbolised the loss of sensuality and pleasure, the loss of the lover, the loss of life itself.

This is beautifully expressed in his poem ‘The God abandons Antony.’ In this poem, Antony was losing Alexandria to Caesar, just as 20th century Greeks would mourn the loss of Byzantium – the poem was written in 1911, just 10 years before the disastrous attempt by Venizelos to recapture or liberate Constantinople – the loss of Byzantium, or perhaps even the looming, inevitable cultural loss of Alexandria too.

[*** distribute the handout (say the translation is by Edmund Keeley and the Irish-born Greek scholar Philip Sherrard), play the reading (the narrator is the Cypriot-born actor John Ioannou). *** ]

The poem has influenced many other modern poets and songwriters. Compare it with the poem on the other side of the sheet by Leonard Cohen.

[*** Play track 7 from his 2001 album Ten New Songs ***]

Appendix 1:

‘The god abandons Antony,’ CP Cavafy:

At midnight, when suddenly you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive – don’t mourn them uselessly:
as one long prepared, and full of courage,
say goodbye to her, to Alexandria who is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceive you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty promises like these.
As one long prepared, and full of courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion,
but not with the whining, the please of a coward;
listen – your final pleasure – to the voices,
to the exquisite music of the strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

‘Alexandra Leaving,’ Leonard Cohen

Suddenly the night has grown colder.
The god of love preparing to depart.
Alexandra hoisted on his shoulder,
They slip between the sentries of the heart.

Upheld by the simplicities of pleasure,
They gain the light, they formlessly entwine;
And radiant beyond your widest measure
They fall among the voices and the wine.

It’s not a trick, your senses all deceiving,
A fitful dream, the morning will exhaust –
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving.
Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost.

Even though she sleeps upon your satin;
Even though she wakes you with a kiss.
Do not say the moment was imagined;
Do not stoop to strategies like this.


As someone long prepared for this to happen,
Go firmly to the window. Drink it in.
Exquisite music. Alexandra laughing.
Your firm commitments tangible again.

And you who had the honor of her evening,
And by the honor had your own restored –
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving;
Alexandra leaving with her lord.

Even though she sleeps upon your satin;
Even though she wakes you with a kiss.
Do not say the moment was imagined;
Do not stoop to strategies like this.


As someone long prepared for the occasion;
In full command of every plan you wrecked –
Do not choose a coward’s explanation
That hides behind the cause and the effect.

And you who were bewildered by a meaning;
Whose code was broken, crucifix uncrossed –
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving.
Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost.

Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving.
Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost.

Next 7, Byzantine theology and Church life (1 March 2004).