medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Leo Luke of Corleone (in Italian both Leone Luca and Leoluca; d. late 9th / very early 10th century?) is a Sicilian Greek with a Latin Vita (BHL 4842; no witnesses earlier than the sixteenth century) evidently based on a Greek source of an undetermined nature (no formal Bios survives). His cult seems to have begun in Calabria and to have spread to his homeland perhaps no earlier than the fifteenth century.
According to the Vita, Leo (his baptismal name) was born to a family that raised cattle and sheep at Corleone in Sicily about the time that the island first became troubled by "Vandal" raids, i.e. by attacks from North African Muslims. His parents dying while he was still young, he entered religion at the famous monastery of St. Philip at Agira. Further Muslim incursions caused him to leave Sicily for Calabria. There he joined a monastic community in the mountains of northern Calabria, was given the name Luke, travelled with the community's abbot first to the monastically settled wilds of the Merkourion (today usually located along the headwaters of the river Lao) and then to a place called Vena, where in time he succeeded to the abbacy of a re-established community. After a lifetime of signal piety and the performance of various miracles he died at a great old age at Vena and was buried in the community's church of the Theotokos.
Though it has some points of similarity with the Bioi / Vitae of other Italo-Greek monastic saints, this account rings true as that of the local saint of a particular monastic community in Calabria. Most of the geographic referents are from northern and central Calabria and no mention is made of any of the other monastic communities that we know from the Bioi of other saints (e.g. Fantinus the Younger, Nilus of Rossano) existed in the Merkourion at about this time. At some point Leo Luke's cult became associated with Monteleone, the town that succeeded early medieval Vibona -- said to have been destroyed in a Muslim raid in 983 -- and that is now Vibo Valentia (VV).
When Leo Luke's Vita came into being is unknown. But it is probable that this occurred in the late eleventh or twelfth century, after the Norman-led conquest of this previously East Roman area and during the subsequent expansion within it of Latin Christianity. It is unlikely to be later: the Vita does not mention Monteleone by name (that designation is first attested from the year 1239). By the mid-sixteenth century, when both Calabria and Sicily were under Spanish rule, Leo Luke's cult had spread to Sicily. In 1575, having liberated Corleone from a pestilence, Leo Luke was proclaimed protector and patron of that town. Not surprisingly, he is also the patron saint of Vibo Valentia.
Immediately outside Vibo Valentia, on a hillside in the town of San Gregorio d'Ippona, is the restored church of Santa Ruba. (There is no St. Ruba; the best guess is that _Ruba_ here is the remnant of a localization _alla Rupa_, i.e. "at the Cliff".) Originally the church of a small early eleventh-to-thirteenth-century Greek-rite monastery, some of whose remains are to be seen in the surrounding park, it was re-worked in the early seventeenth century and has a baroque interior. Much of the medieval exterior survives, including the cupola, whose construction has parallels with those of other Greek churches of Byzantine Calabria. Some views:
http://it.worldmapz.com/photo/320093_en.htm
https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7392/9897802584_9d84ef06c2_b.jpg
http://www.incalabriatiguidoio.it/Itinerari/Pizzo-ViboV-Zungri/Santaruba.JPG
Prior to restoration:
http://dsmvibo.altervista.org/S.%20Ruba.jpg
In 2006 mineralogical investigation of calcareous grottoes in the vicinity of Santa Ruba led to the discovery of what was once a cave church adjacent to the former monastery. Inside was a tomb with human skeletal remains that after testing were announced as those of a very elderly person who lived around the year 1000. That chronological datum notwithstanding (the Leo Luke of the Vita will have been about a century earlier), the initial assumption was that the remains are Leo Luke's and that the grotto in question was his community's first church at Vena. For an Italian-language newspaper account with photographs, see:
http://tinyurl.com/2y9vcg
Two other Italian-language accounts, the second with a rather better picture of the grotto, are here:
http://www.italiamedievale.org/sito_acim/contributi/san_leoluca_3%282%29.pdf
The presumed relics of St. Leo Luke (sometimes described as those of an unknown monk) on display in the grotto:
http://www.turismoincalabria.net/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/SAN-GREGORIO-78.jpg
Best,
John Dillon
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