medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (11. September) is the feast day of:
Elias the Speleote (d. ca. 960 [traditional]; ca. 930 [recent
scholarship]). Today's less well known saint of the Regno was a
Greek-speaking itinerant monk, thaumaturge, and monastic founder.
According to his late tenth-century Bios (BHG 581 plus a Latin
translation from ca. 1082), E. was born into a wealthy family of today's
Reggio di Calabria (RC) who provided him with a good religious
education. At the age of eighteen he crossed over into Muslim Sicily,
where he lived as hermit for about a year before going on to Rome.
There E. paid his respects at the tombs of the Apostles and performed
his first miracle, rendering immobile a bunch of brigands who had unwisely
elected to attack him. Returning to Calabria, he attached himself first
to a saintly abbot Arsenios and later, after spending several years at
Patras in Greece, to St. Elias of Enna, then residing at the Saline near
today's Gioa Tauro (RC). When that worthy departed for Constantinople
never to return, he left his abode in the joint charge of his companion
Daniel and of our E. (who, however, is never mentioned in the
Daniel-influenced Bios of this other Elias).
E. moved on quickly to other places in Calabria, finally settling in a
set of caves at today's Melicuccą (RC) near Seminara, where he founded
what became a large and regionally famous Greek-rite monastic community.
He died on 11. September in what the Bios unreliably says was the
ninety-sixth year of his life and was buried in a tomb that he himself
had dug in one of the monastery's caves. Many miracles were attributed
to him in his lifetime; his grave, visited by numerous pilgrims some of whom
sought relief while they slept by the tomb, was the site of many more. In
some cases the incubation lasted more than a single night.
In the eighteenth century, when the monastery had long since been closed
and most of the caves were already filled in by the action of earthquakes
and by more regular geologic processes, E.'s tomb was rediscovered and his
cult was renewed. Today it is still a place of pilgrimage, though (I believe)
incubation is no longer practiced here.
Four views of the restored main cave are here:
http://www.provincia.rc.it/pagine/itinerari.php?t=testo_foto&cat=22
An illustrated, Italian-language account of the site, informed by
archaeological findings, is here:
http://www.heliosmag.it/99/5/cenobioi.html
Further views:
http://web.tiscalinet.it/lpweb/grotta_s_elia.htm
http://tinyurl.com/235lfx
A recently published archaeological study of the monastery at Melicuccą
and of other Italo-Greek monastic sites in Calabria is Francesca Zagari,
_L'eparchia delle Saline_ (Roma: Palombi, 2006). Has anyone on the list
seen this? The chiefly North American union catalog WorldCat has no
record for it.
The later eleventh-century Latin translation of E.'s Bios includes matter
absent from the Greek text as we have it now. It has been edited by
Maria Vittoria Strazzeri as "Una traduzione dal greco ad uso dei Normanni:
la Vita latina di Sant'Elia lo Speleota", _Archivio storico per la Calabria e la
Lucania_ 59 (1992), 1-108. An important recent article on the Bios
(which latter is being re-edited by Enrico Morini of the Universitą di
Bologna) is Stefano Caruso, "Sulla cronologia della Vita di S. Elia Speleota
da Reggio", _Byzantion_ 70 (2000), 25-56.
Best,
John Dillon
(Last year's post revised)
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