ICON TYPES YOU SHOULD REMEMBER

Another multiple icon:

(Courtesy of Maryhill Museum)

Photographing such heavily gold-leafed icons can often be tricky, particularly when an icon has warped a bit into a convex shape, as is common with so very many old icons.

In any case, if you are a long-time reader of my site, you should be able to easily identify all the icon types included.

At upper left is the “Lord Almighty” type — Jesus holding the open Gospels:

The text from Matthew 11:28 reads:

Приидите ко Мне вси труждающиися и обремененнии, и Аз упокою вы: возмите иго Мое [на себе и научитеся от Мене …]

Priidite ko mnye vsi truzhdaiushchiisya i obremyenennii, i Az upokoiu vui: Vozmite igo moe [na sebe i nauchitesya ot mene …]

“Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke [upon you and learn from me …”]

Jesus holds his right hand in the Old Believer sign of blessing, so we know this is an Old Believer icon.

At lower left is — as the inscription says — the “‘Kazan’ Most Holy Mother of God.”

The Kazanskaya/”of Kazan” icon was discussed in this previous posting.

THE PALLADIUM IS NOT JUST A THEATER

I hope you recall that it is one of the most common of Russian Marian icon types:

At upper right is a Bogoliubskaya icon of Mary — but we must be more specific about this type.  When we see a gathering of saints to her right, it is the “Moscow Bogoliubskaya” (BogoliubskayaMoskovskaya) type.  Jesus blesses from the clouds above:

The nature of the photo does not permit reading the name inscriptions on the saints (that gold leaf photography problem again), but you will find a general description of the “Moscow Bogoliubskaya” type here:

BOGOLIUBSKIY TO BILIBIN

At lower right is a very pleasantly stylized image of the popular saint “Holy Priest-martyr Kharlampiy”/Kharalampos:

Like Jesus in this icon, Kharlampiy blesses with the Old Believer finger position.  You will find a description of him here:

A TOUCHY SAINT AND THREE FORMS OF “YA”

And finally, we have the central Crucifixion:

At left are “Righteous Mary,” “Righteous Martha, and the “Mother of God” — that is, Mary, the Mother of Jesus.  At right are John the Theologian (the Apostle John) and the Centurion Longinos/Longinus.

You will find all the descriptions necessary to identify the Crucifixion type and its inscriptions here:

MORE CROSS TALK

As you can see, the sun is depicted as dark, and the moon red as blood, in keeping with these biblical excerpts:

Joel 2:31:
^“The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come.”

Joel 3:15:
^“The sun and the moon shall be darkened, and the stars shall withdraw their shining.”

At top center we see “Lord Sabaoth” — God the Father — and the Holy Spirit as a dove.  And below them are two angels bending over the Crucifixion, their hands covered as a sign of reverence:

The whole icon is very delightfully stylized.   Note how clouds are painted as a collection of curling “snail” shapes.

A TOUCHY SAINT AND THREE FORMS OF “YA”

Here is an icon of one of the “special needs” saints, Kharlampiy.  The Greeks call him Χαράλαμπος  — Kharalambos.  He was considered the fellow to pray to for protection from plagues and fevers, etc.  As with the old pre-Christian gods, it was considered risky not to properly commemorate him, because he was likely to take revenge for the slight by releasing the plague on you.

(Courtesy of Jacksonsauction.com)

The image shows Kharlampiy in the center, and at the sides are four scenes from the traditional account of his martyrdom in the 3rd century.

We are looking at Kharlampiy today for a different reason, however.  We want to to translate the Church Slavic title at the top of the icon.  The little image in the center is the icon type known as the “Not Made by Hands” image of Jesus, which I have discussed in a previous posting.

The first word is slightly worn, but nonetheless we should be able to determine that it is an abbreviation (see the horizontal curved line above it that tells us so?).

The obvious letters in it are ОБР –OBR.  The O is the old “omega” form, this letter:

If you were paying attention yesterday (didn’t you have anything else to do?), you will recall that ОБ and Р are the first three letters of the word oбразъ — obraz — meaning “image.”

Yesterday we also looked at some useful Church Slavic words based on the root cвятъ — svyat — meaning “holy.”  The next word in Kharlampiy’s inscription is another of those “svyat” words.  It is slightly abbreviated here as СВТИТЛЯ —SVTITLYA.  In full, the word is СВЯТИТЕЛЯ — SVYATITELYA.  This is an “of” form of the word Святитель — Svyatitel.  It means “archpriest,” but it is also often used for “bishop.”  You can see that Kharlampiy is wearing a bishop’s stole or omophorion.  So here we can translate it as “bishop.”  The word svyatitel is related to the verb that means “to make holy, to consecrate.”  And of course a bishop is consecrated in a special ceremony.

I hope you noticed that when I type Church Slavic, I put it into a modern Russian font that is basically the same as Church Slavic except for a few letters.  One of those letters is the Russian Я, pronounced “ya.”  But if you look at the inscription on the icon, you will see that the letter used looks very different.  It is the Church Slavic form of “ya”, shown here in upper and lower case:

There is also another Church Slavic letter that has the same “ya” sound.  It looks like this:

Sometimes writers of Slavic inscriptions use one form, sometimes the other.  But in the modern Russian font, both of these are represented by Я.

Now let’s look at the last word in the inscription.  It is the saint’s personal name, and it is written in full:

ХАРЛАМПИЯ — KHARLAMPIYA

You can see that for the final letter, the writer has used the second form of the Church Slavic “ya”:

This name, like the word SVYATITELYA preceding it, is in the “of” form.  You can see that both have a -ya ending to show this.  In its normal form, it would be written as ХАРЛАМПИЙ — KHARLAMPIY.

Now let’s put it all together to translate the title inscription:

ОБРАЗЪ СВЯТИТЕЛЯ ХАРЛАМПИЯ — OBRAZ SVYATITELYA KHARLAMPIYA
“Image [of] Bishop Kharlampiy”

Even though both Svyatitelya and Kharlampiya have the ending indicating they are in the “of” form, we only need to use “of” once when translating into English.  And we can also add the word “the,” which as you know, Church Slavic does not have.  So we can give the English meaning of this icon inscription as:

“THE IMAGE OF BISHOP KHARLAMPIY”

So you see, reading Church Slavic inscriptions is not difficult.  It is just that in learning a bit of Church Slavic, we have to keep in mind that it is one of the most useless languages in existence for most anything practical except reading icon inscriptions — and we can hardly even call that practical now, can we?  But what practical person is likely to read this site?  Or for that matter, write it?

 

 

PAGAN RITES, CHRISTIAN SAINTS: KHARLAMPIY

Today I would like to talk a bit about this icon of Kharlampiy:

(Courtesy of Jacksonsauction.com)

Kharlampiy, in Eastern Orthodox tradition, was a priest who was martyred in the year 202 at the age of 113 (others say 107; these stories often vary in details). I will not repeat his story, which is easily available elsewhere. Suffice it to say that it follows the usual form of hagiography, which should not be confused with history. The lives of the early saints, though there may be some historical elements now and then, are largely pious fictions that follow similar patterns and present similar motifs.

What I do want to emphasize is that the veneration of Kharlampiy, like that of other saints, continues the pre-Christian practice of venerating and asking favors of deities both great and minor. When Christianity declared the old gods to be “demons,” the populace needed a substitute, and that substitute was found in Christian saints such as Kharlampiy. His name is just a Slavicized version of the Greek Χαράλαμπος — Kharalampos, pronounced “khar-A-lam-bos” in modern Greek. He is a very popular saint in Greece, and is often found in Russian icons as well. Among other things, Eastern Orthodox pray to Kharlampiy for relief of mental problems. That relates to one of the “miracles” of Kharlampiy, in which he drove out a devil from a possessed person. On the island of Lesvos (Lesbos), there is a tradition of sacrificing a bull at the chapel of Kharlampiy/Kharalambos — the unfortunate victim is decorated with garlands, just as was done in pre-Christian times.

Kharlampiy is shown here robed as a bishop. In his left hand he holds a cloth supporting the Gospel book (the cloth is to show veneration when touching sacred objects). His right hand is held up with the fingers forming the sign of blessing favored by the Old Believers, who were separated from the main body of the Russian Orthodox Church in the mid-1600s over disputes about ritual forms, etc., one of which was this distinctive way of making the sign of blessing. It is a useful way to recognize Old Believer icons, which in any case are often more traditional and stylized in form than those of the State Church in the following centuries.

If we look more closely at Kharlampiy’s face, we can easily see the method of painting. The entirety of the hair, face and beard are first painted in a dark brownish color (sankir), and then the features of the face are created by superimposing layers of the same base color, only progressively lightened with the addition of white (belila), with highlights being very white. The hair and beard are painted simply by adding thin, curving strokes of white over the sankir base. A few darker details are added, and it is finished. But still the sankir base color is easily seen behind the added layers.

(Courtesy of Jacksonsauction.com)