medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Like the recently celebrated Zenobius and Zenobia of Aegae in Cilicia, Galaction (also Galation) and Episteme (also Epistemis) are absent from the early martyrologies, are not known to have received an early cult, and are the subjects of a legendary Passio that exists in premetaphrastic and metaphrastic versions (BHG 665, 666) and upon which synaxary notices of their joint commemoration today seem to depend.
According to this tale, Galaction was the son of a couple in Emesa (today's Homs in Syria) who had been childless until a monk whom they had been sheltering during a persecution persuaded the wife to convert to Christianity, whereupon she straight away became pregnant with the future saint. When this news was conveyed to the husband, he too became a Christian. When Galaction, who had been bought up as a devout Christian, was of marriageable age his father wished him to marry the pagan Episteme. Galaction at first demurred but later agreed once Episteme, perceiving the nature of his reservation, accepted baptism. The two then agreed to live chastely and apart. They separated and became hermits (in at least one version, in Sinai). In the Decian persecution Galaction was arrested; his faithful Episteme learned of this in a vision and joined him in confinement. Together they were tried, tortured, and executed.
Thus far the Passio of Galaction and Episteme, whose affinity to Greek romances is signaled by the names of Galaction's parents, Clitophon and Leucippe (the title characters of a widely read ancient specimen of the genre). Galaction and Episteme entered the Roman Martyrology under Bl. Cesare Baronio in the late sixteenth century and left it in the revision of 2001. Byzantine-rite churches celebrate them today.
Some period-pertinent images of Galaction and Episteme:
a) Galaction and Episteme as depicted (martyrdom) in the late tenth- or very early eleventh-century so-called Menologion of Basil II (Città del Vaticano, BAV, Vat. gr. 1613, p. 150; reduced, grayscale image):
http://tinyurl.com/q9gcp6r
b) Galaction (at left) and Episteme (at right) as depicted on the opening page of their Passio as transmitted in an eleventh-century menologion for November (London, BL, Add. MS 36636, fol. 34v):
http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=add_ms_36636_f034v
c) Galaction as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca. 1312 and 1321) in the inner narthex of the monastery church of the Theotokos at Gračanica in, depending on one's view of the matter, either Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija or the Republic of Kosovo:
http://tinyurl.com/ax9e2mk
d) as depicted (lower register in panel at upper left) in an earlier fourteenth-century pictorial menologion from Thessaloniki (betw. 1322 and 1340; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gr. th. f. 1, fol. 16r):
http://image.ox.ac.uk/images/bodleian/msgrthf1/16r.jpg
e) Galaction and Episteme as depicted (martyrdom) in a November calendar scene in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. 1335 and 1350) of the narthex of the church of the Holy Ascension at the Visoki Dečani monastery near Peć in, depending on one's view of the matter, either the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija:
http://tinyurl.com/23kvldr
f) as depicted by George / Tzortzis the Cretan in his mid-sixteenth-century frescoes (1546/47) in the Dionysiou monastery on Mt. Athos:
1) Galaction (full-length image): http://tinyurl.com/p653783
2) Galaction and Episteme (martyrdom): http://tinyurl.com/o6qaxz5
Best,
John Dillon
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