medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (27. July) is the feast day of:
1) Seven Sleepers of Ephesus (d. 250 or 251, supposedly). The Sleepers of Ephesus, usually but not always seven in number, are said in a story that is at least as old as the early sixth century to have been Christian youths who were walled up in a cave outside of Ephesus (variant: Arabissos in Cappadocia) by the order of the emperor Decius, who instead of actually dying slumbered for some three hundred years, who woke up in the reign of an emperor Theodosius (the numbers suggest Theodosius II, r. 401-450), who proclaimed the truth of the resurrection of the dead and who, having done so, then returned to their cave, where they promptly died and were buried.
These sleepers have a Passio in Greek (BHG 1593-1599), in many Eastern languages (BHO 1012-1022), and in Latin (BHL 2313-2320; the first is by St. Gregory of Tours, who worked with a Syrian informant). Their are numerous other medieval accounts based on the Passio as well as versions of the story that are by no means so specific. Two of the latter are a) in the _Qur'an_, at Surah 18 ("The Cave") and b) at Paul the Deacon, _Historia Langobardorum_, 1. 4 (with a location in far northern Germany at the edge of what must be the world-encircling Ocean).
A late antique burial cave near the ruins of ancient Ephesus in today's İzmir province in Turkey has since the sixth century been venerated as the Sleepers' resting place. Here's the Sacred Destinations page on it:
http://tinyurl.com/mhh4nz
Another view:
http://tinyurl.com/mdettq
In Eastern churches these saints have usually been celebrated on either 22., 23., or 24. October. In the Latin West the two most common dates have been today and 27. June.
2) Pantaleon of Nicomedia (d. early 4th cent., supposedly). We know nothing of the actual life of the megalomartyr P. (also Panteleimon), called "of Nicomedia" in modern scholarship to distinguish him from P. of Bisceglie, one of the companions of that Apulian city's legendary early martyr-bishop Maurus. His hagiographic legend in Greek (BHG 1412z-1418c) and in Latin (BHL 6429-6446) makes him a physician of Nicomedia who learned that the only important medicine was the cure of souls, who nonetheless was given the grace to operate many miraculous cures of the body, and who underwent a "classic" passio (including colloquies with the emperor followed by a series of ineffective tortures followed by decapitation) supervised by the emperor Maximian (i.e. Galerius).
In Eastern-rite churches P. has been celebrated on various days in late July, especially today (his feast day in the Byzantine Rite). The earlier ninth-century Marble Calendar of Naples, with its admixture of Eastern and Western feasts, also places his celebration on this day. But in the Latin West P.'s late antique and medieval feast day was often 28. July (so the [pseudo-]Hieronymian Martyrology; also Florus, Ado, and Usuard). From the sixteenth century onward the Roman Martyrology has commemorated P. under today's date.
Some visuals:
a) Ano Boulari (Mesa Mani), Lakonia, church of Ag. Panteleimon (991/2). An illustrated, English-language account follows that of the same settlement's Ag. Stratigos on this page:
http://www.zorbas.de/maniguide/deepc.html
Portrait of P. (at left; very late tenth-century) in the church's right apse:
http://www.zorbas.de/maniguide/scans/anbo.jpg
b) St.-Pantaléon, Gordes (Vaucluse), église Saint-Pantaléon (said to go back to the fifth century but in its present form largely an originally twelfth-century church). A page of expandable views:
http://tinyurl.com/mfq9xt
Other views:
http://tinyurl.com/mxhy8l
http://tinyurl.com/mvp2h4
http://tinyurl.com/mrhq9x
c) Köln, former abbey church of Sankt Pantaleon (consecrated, 980; expanded, mid-twelfth century; heavily damaged in World War II; restoration completed, 1962). An illustrated, German-language account of the building's history is here:
http://www.romanische-kirchen-koeln.de/125.html
Views (west front; early sixteenth-century Lettner):
http://www.kunsttrip.nl/steden/keulen/St%20Pantaleon.htm
http://www.deutsche-staedte.de/koeln/stpantaleon.html
Other views:
http://www.romanische-kirchen-koeln.de/810.html
http://www.romanische-kirchen-koeln.de/index.php?id=829
d) Venice, basilica di San Marco, cappella di San Pietro, earlier twelfth-century (?) mosaic on outer wall, P. at right:
http://tinyurl.com/nqygq9
e) Nerezi Lartëm (Skopje), Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, church of Sv. Panteleimon (twelfth-century). Illustrated, English-language accounts are here:
http://tinyurl.com/62c5ls
http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/photo917025.htm
Other views:
http://campus.belmont.edu/honors/Macedonia/Nerezi.html
f) Mödling (Niederösterreich), an illustrated, German-language page on the originally late twelfth-century (after 1182) Pantaleonskapelle:
http://www.othmar.at/kirchen/karner/karner.html
Another view:
http://tinyurl.com/lamdnc
g) Losa de Mena (Burgos), Castilla y León, ermita de San Pantaleón de Losa (late twelfth-/early thirteenth-century):
Illustrated, Spanish-language accounts:
http://www.arteguias.com/romanico_merindades.htm
http://tinyurl.com/6z487v
http://tinyurl.com/jdlyn
http://www.celtiberia.net/verlugar.asp?id=124
Other views:
http://tinyurl.com/6bu2wp
http://tinyurl.com/6xhdu8
h) Dolianova (CA), Sardinia, (ex-)cattedrale di San Pantaleo (1160-1289):
http://www.stilepisano.it/immagini4/index12.htm
http://tinyurl.com/67foz4
http://tinyurl.com/6qnc6y
i) Pieve a Elici di Massarosa (LU), Tuscany, chiesa di San Pantaleone (a thirteenth-century replacement for an early medieval predecessor on the same site). Illustrated, Italian-language account:
http://www.luccaterre.it/scheda.php?id=2807〈=it
More views (greatly expandable):
http://tinyurl.com/pgqs6w
j) Chartres, cathédrale de Notre-Dame, Saint Pantaleon window (1220-25):
http://tinyurl.com/gjx64
Detail (P. before the emperor Maximian):
http://tinyurl.com/jx83f
k) St. Catherine's Monastery, Sinai, icon of P., with scenes from his Bios (thirteenth-century):
http://www.nasledie-rus.ru/img/580000/580319.jpg
l) Maria Enzersdorf (Niederösterreich), Burg Liechtenstein, relief of P. (thirteenth-century; said to have come from Venice):
http://tinyurl.com/ny8fnv
m) Thessaloniki, church of Ag. Panteleimon (thirteenth-century):
http://tinyurl.com/6dybud
n) Sopoćani in, depending on one's view of the matter, either the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija, monastery church of the Holy Trinity, portrait of P. (wearing light blue over purple) among the healers in the south choir (later thirteenth-century):
http://tinyurl.com/5jybbr
http://www.kosovo.net/sop006.jpg
o) Same, portrait of P. in the frescoes of the chapel of St. Stephen Protomartyr (fourteenth-century):
http://tinyurl.com/5tgufb
http://tinyurl.com/64uqcs
p) Courmayeur (AO), Valle d'Aosta, chiesa parrochiale di San Pantaleone twelfth-/fifteenth-century, later rebuilt):
http://tinyurl.com/kxxu3
http://tinyurl.com/k7lu7
(menu on the right in this last page takes one through stages of building on the site)
q) Unkel (Lkr. Neuwied), Rheinland-Pfalz, Pfarrkirche St. Pantaleon (thirteenth-/early sixteenth-century):
http://tinyurl.com/n7ke4y
http://tinyurl.com/l7hbsh
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/13126853.jpg
A view of its earlier (second quarter) wooden reliquary shrine for a relic of P., painted in the later fifteenth-century, is no, 3 here:
http://tinyurl.com/m3vtoo
3) Celestine I, pope (d. 432). Previously archdeacon of Rome, C. was elected that city's bishop without opposition in September 422, succeeding pope St. Boniface I. He seized the Novatianist churches within his see, rebuilt the basilica that would late become Santa Maria in Trastevere, and attempted with uneven success to act as final arbiter in ecclesiastical disputes elsewhere in the Western portion of the empire. Late in his pontificate C. supported St. Cyril of Alexandria's campaign against Nestorius that resulted in the latter's condemnation at the First Council of Ephesus (431). He was buried in the cemetery of Priscilla. Today is his _dies natalis_.
4) Clement of Ohrid (d. 916); also Gorazd, Naum, Sava, and Angelarius (d. early 10th cent.; G. perh. d. 885/886). These Slavonic-speaking disciples of Sts. Constantine/Cyril and Methodius are generally considered the founders of the organized church in Bulgaria. Their grouping comes from C.'s late eleventh-century Bios by St. Theophylact of Ohrid's (BHG 355). The two best known are C. and N., who were among Methodius' earliest missionary companions in Great Moravia and whose later work was based on Pliska and on Ohrid in today's Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. C., a prolific commentator and translator, has also been viewed traditionally as the deviser of the Cyrillic alphabet (probably a product of the Pliska Literary School directed by N. after C.'s move to Kutmichevitza in 886). Both C. and N. founded monasteries at/near Ohrid that have survived and preserved their memory; both have Lives in Old Church Slavonic.
English-language summaries of these saints' achievements are here:
http://www.mymacedonia.net/language/clement.htm
http://www.mymacedonia.net/language/naum.htm
Remains of C.'s late tenth-century monastery church of St. Panteleimon at Ohrid have been found beneath its much rebuilt successor dedicated both to C. and to P.:
http://www.ohrid.org.mk/eng/crkvi/pantelej.htm
C.'s present tomb in the latter church:
http://tinyurl.com/5tssfy
Remains of N.'s monastery church at today's Sveti Naum, some thirty kilometers south of Ohrid, have been found beneath that institution's much photographed early modern buildings:
http://www.ohrid.org.mk/eng/crkvi/sv_naum.htm
Two illustrated, English-language pages on Ohrid's late thirteenth-century church of Sv. Bogorodica Perivlepta (Sv. Kliment):
http://www.ohrid.org.mk/eng/crkvi/sv_bogorod.htm
http://www.culture.org.mk/eSVBOGPEROH.HTM
C. in a late thirteenth-century wall painting in that church:
http://tinyurl.com/5cndyk
C. in a thirteenth-century relief icon in the Gallery of Ohrid Icons in Sv. Bogorodica Perivlepta at Ohrid:
http://www.ohrid.org.mk/eng/ikoni/32.htm
C. in a fourteenth-century icon in the same collection:
http://www.ohrid.org.mk/eng/ikoni/22.htm
N. in two fourteenth-century icons in the Gallery of Ohrid Icons in Sv. Bogorodica Perivlepta at Ohrid:
http://www.soros.org.mk/archive/G02/sm0808.htm
http://www.ohrid.org.mk/eng/ikoni/23.htm
Best,
John Dillon
(Pantaleon of Nicomedia lightly revised and Clement of Ohrid et al. reprised from last year's post)
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