Patrick Comerford
I came back from Rethymnon earlier this week laden down with presents and gifts from friends during my five-day ‘mini-retreat’ in Crete in Holy Week and Easter.
During the weekend, I had coffee one morning in Galero, near the Rimondi Fountain, with Alexandra Kaouki (Αλεξανδρα Καουκι), one of the foremost icon writers in Rethymnon today. We had a lengthy conversation that included the theology of icons, the place of women in the church, ministry and political and economic life in Greece.
One of her gifts was one of her early icons, depicting Aghia Irini (Αγία Ειρήνη) or Saint Irene, completed in 2012.
She told me that morning how she had kept this icon at home after working on it because it had a special meaning and special significance for me. She had long felt it should only go to a special home or special person, and she held on to it all those years.
But on the morning before we met, she told me, she felt Saint Irene’s eyes were fixed on her and telling her: ‘Give me to Patrick’.
Saint Irene seemed such a special choice for me last weekend. I was back in Rethymnon to pray and remind me of my own need for spiritual peace. But Alexandra also thought it was appropriate for me, because of my campaigning past, as the saint’s name ‘Peace’, and also because I had written appreciatively in the past about Aghia Irini convent in the hills above Rethymnon.
I first got to know Alexandra Kaouki when she had a workshop on Melissinou Street, beneath the slopes of the Venetian Fortezza. She began writing icons at the early age of 20, and on that first visit she proudly showed me her first completed work. On a shelf beside her, a new icon of Saint Catherine of Alexandria was ready for the final touches, while on a second easel she was preparing to work of an icon of the Dormition.
Alexandra’s work includes icons and frescoes and is marked by its spirituality, simplicity, the expression of the figures and the brightness of her colours. She works throughout the day with care, faith and passion. There she crafts icons using traditional Byzantine techniques and the faithful to traditions of the Cretan school.
The raw materials she uses for her icons are of the highest quality, with natural and industrial woods, traditionally-prepared canvases, 22 carat gold leaf coating, mineral colours and tempera, which uses the yolk of an egg according to Byzantine and Orthodox traditions.
She believes an icon in the Byzantine tradition should not only be an aid to worship, ‘but a diachronic work of art, of beauty and aesthetics.’
Alexandra Kaouki was born in Le Mans in France in 1973. At the age of 20, she moved with her family to Athens, and there she took her first steps in the holy art of writing icons.
She is self-taught, but has also learned at the hands of well-known icon writers in Athens from 1997 to 2000. She has lived in Rethymnon since 2006, and she took her first professional steps in 2007 when she opened her first art studio in Atsipopoulo, before moving in 2013 to studio on Melissinou Street, a narrow street close to the slopes beneath the old Venetian Fortezza.
Her icon of the Four Martyrs of Rethymnon hangs over the desk of the Bishop of Rethymnon in his office, and her icons and frescoes can be seen in churches throughout Crete.
The first of her icons that I bought was a small copy of that icon of the Four Martyrs of Rethymnon, and for years it stayed on the bookshelves in my study at the Church of Ireland Theological Institute and then on a wall in the Rectory in Askeaton, Co Limerick.
Saint Irene, Saint Catherine and Saint Barbara are three saints who are often found together in icons and frescoes in Greek churches. They form a traditional grouping, such as the Apostles Peter and Paul, as an icon of Church Unity, Saint Paul and Sant Barnabas, the Cappadocian Fathers (Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus), and the Three Holy Hierarchs (Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian and John Chrysostom).
Saint Irene is one of three saints and sisters – Irene, Agape and Chioni – who were born in Thessaloniki and who were martyred there for their faith in the year 304 CE. Their names mean Peace, Love and Purity, and their feast day was earlier this month, 3 April.
The story of their martyrdom is the subject of Dulcitius, a 10th-century Latin drama by Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, the first-known female playwright.
Irene, Agape and Chione were brought before Dulcitius, governor of Macedonia, on the charge of refusing to eat food that had been offered in sacrifice to the gods. When Agape and Chionia again refused to eat this food, they were burned alive.
Dulcitius then found that Irene was keeping Christian books prohibited by the law. She declared that when the decrees against Christians had been published, she and several others fled to the mountains. She refused to name the people who had fled with her and said all she alone knew where the books were being kept. Dulcitius then ordered Irene to be stripped and exposed in a brothel. But no one mistreated her in the brothel. The governor then gave Irene a second chance, but when she refused this Dulcitius then sentenced her to death, and the books found with her were burned as well.
There is a second significant Saint Irene in the Orthodox Calendar. This Saint Irene (752-803) was a Byzantine empress and was instrumental in restoring the use of icons in the Orthodox Church.
Saint Irene was the wife of the Byzantine emperor Leo IV, and when her husband died in 780, she became guardian of their 10-year-old son, Constantine VI, and co-emperor with him. Later that year she crushed a plot by the iconoclasts or opponents of the use of icons to put Leo’s half-brother, Nicephorus, on the throne.
The use of icons had been prohibited since 730. When one of Irene’s supporters, Tarasius, was elected patriarch of Constantinople, he summoned the Constantinople in 786 and then the Seventh Ecumenical Council in Nicaea in 787 and restored the reverence of images.
Constantine VI banished his mother from court, but she later had her son arrested and blinded . From 797, she reigned alone as emperor for five years until she was deposed in 802 and exiled to the island of Lesbos. She is remembered for her zeal in restoring icons and her feast day is celebrated on 9 August.
The Monastery of Aghia Irini, about 5 km south of Rethymnon in the mountains above the town, is one of the oldest monasteries in Crete. Various accounts say it was founded sometime between 961 and 1204, and it was certainly built before 1362, when a Venetian document testifies to its existence.
The monastery was destroyed several times during the many revolutions in Crete against Ottoman rule. During the last Cretan revolution of 1897-1898, the Turks burnt the monastery, the ruined monastery was formally closed in 1900, and the ruins remained deserted throughout most of the 20th century.
At first, the monastery lands were granted to the monastery of Arsani, but in 1925 the lands were distributed among local Greek war veterans. Sister Akaterina, who brought once brought me on a tour of the monastery, told of how the Metropolitan of Rethymnon, the late Bishop Theodoros Tzedakis, had a vision in 1989 for its restoration and invited a group of nuns to form a new community at Aghia Irini.
The nuns moved into the buildings and restoration work began in 1990. At the time, Aghia Irini was a jumble of dilapidated buildings. Today, it must be one of the most beautiful monasteries in Crete, and the restoration work has received architectural and cultural awards. The church was officially opened in 2003, and was consecrated in 2011 by Patriarch Theodoros of Alexandria. The buildings include an older three-aisled church of Saint Irene, Saint Catherine and Saint Euphemia.
In their shop, the nuns sell traditional handicrafts of weaving and needlework, their own almond-flavoured drink, candles, religious books and icons, including unusual icons written on odd pieces of ceramic.
To outsiders, the Orthodox Church can sometimes seem behind the times in its attitude to women, exemplified in debates about the ordination of women or the exclusion of women from Mount Athos. But the exclusion of women from Mount Athos is more about protecting and honouring the celibacy of the men in the monastic communities.
The work of iconographers like Alexandra Kaouki and the work of the women at Aghia Irini leave me confident that the Orthodox Church has the capacity to move forward in time in the debates about the place of women in the Church.
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