medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Phanourios (in Greek also Fanourios; in English occasionally latinized to Fanurius) is a saint whose late-appearing cult may have its roots in the fourteenth century when, according to his earliest miracle account (BHG 1510; preserved in the mid-sixteenth-century Vat. Gr. 1190), a fourteenth-century Cretan priest, stopping off at Rhodes while on a mission to recover colleagues captured by Muslims and held in Asia Minor, received assistance from Phanourios, then locally venerated there. The priest brought Phanourios' cult back to Crete. A different version of the story, dating from the earlier seventeenth century, preserves details that are thought more historically accurate and identifies one of its leading personae with a Cretan abbot of the earlier fifteenth century. The chapel in the city of Rhodes dedicated to Phanourios is said to have been built in 1426; an inscription shows that it was frescoed in 1431.
Phanourios is unrecorded prior to his fourteenth- or fifteenth-century discovery. Modern accounts make him a megalomartyr (which, if correct, would date Phanourios to somewhere in the first four centuries of the Common Era). As his iconographic tradition closely resembles one of St. George of Lydda, the prevailing scholarly view is that Phanourios is in origin that saint and that an icon of George identified by his cult name Phanerotis ("The Revealer") was misread as one of the previously unknown Phanourios. The latter name too is similar to Greek words for "become visible" and "reveal". It will thus surprise few to learn that Phanourios has long been especially venerated as a revealer of lost property (e.g. farm animals or household objects). Phanourios has yet to grace the pages of the Roman Martyrology. His feast in Greek and other Orthodox churches falls on 27. August.
Some period-pertinent inages of St. Phanourios the Newly Revealed:
a) as depicted by Angelos Akotantos in an earlier or mid-fifteenth-century icon (ca. 1426-1450) in Agia Aikaterini Collection in Heraklion:
http://tinyurl.com/j2a45ap
b) as depicted by Angelos Akotantos in a mid-fifteenth-century icon (before 1451) in the church of Agia Aikaterini on Folegandros:
http://tinyurl.com/zv9rces
c) as depicted by Angelos Akotantos in a mid-fifteenth-century icon (before 1451) in the church of the Megali Panagia on Patmos (Google Books image from Carol M. Richardson, _Locating Renaissance Art_ [Yale University Press, 2007], at right on p. 197):
http://tinyurl.com/kpo4x2
d) as depicted by Angelos Akotantos in two less well preserved mid-fifteenth-century icons (before 1451), both kept in the katholikon of the Vrontisi monastery near Zaros (Heraklion prefecture) on Crete:
http://tinyurl.com/42vtzkr
http://tinyurl.com/3g4yfsx
Best,
John Dillon
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