medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
In the surviving record Samson the Hospitable (fl. 4th cent.?; also Sampson, also S. the Hospitaler or, with his Greek epithet merely transliterated, S. the Xenodochos) first surfaces in a novel of Justinian I from 3. November 537 referring to a master of Constantinople's hospice of Samson of blessed memory. According to Procopius (_De aedificiis_, 1. 2. 13-16), Samson had established this hospice "in early times"; the building itself had been damaged by fire in the Nika riots of 532 and Justinian had rebuilt and enlarged it. Crediting him with numerous healing miracles, Samson's legendary tenth-century periphrastic Bios (BHG 1615) says that he was laid to rest in the church of St. Mocius, where the ill were wont to anoint themselves with exudate from his myrrh-streaming body. Less plausibly, the Bios makes him a relative of Mocius, has him ordained priest by the patriarch Menas (536-552), and claims that he miraculously saved his hospice from the Nika fire (so, yes, Samson is a member of the sanctoral fire brigade).
A novel of Manuel I Comnenus from March 1166 includes today, because of the veneration of the holy thaumaturge Samson, among those when the courts are not in session. In 1200 Anthony of Novgorod venerated at Samson's hospice the saint's staff, stole, and (other) priestly vestments. We have an encomium of Samson by the late thirteenth-/early fourteenth-century theologian and hagiographer Constantine Acropolites (BHG 1615d). In both the Synaxary of Constantinople and the Metaphrastic Menologion Samson is celebrated on 27. June, as he is today in churches employing the Byzantine Rite. This is also his day of commemoration in the Roman Martyrology.
Herewith a computer-generated reconstruction of Samson's hospice as rebuilt by Justinian:
http://www.byzantium1200.com/sampson.html
Some period-pertinent images of St. Samson the Hospitable:
a) as depicted (at left; at right, St. Cyrus [another healer]) in the earlier thirteenth-century frescoes (1230s) in narthex of the church of the Ascension in the Mileševa monastery near Prijepolje (Zlatibor dist.) in Serbia:
http://tinyurl.com/2d48d5n
Detail view (Samson):
http://tinyurl.com/2buxq4r
b) as depicted (at left; at right, St. Diomedes the Healer) in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca. 1311 and ca. 1322) of the church of St. Nicholas Orphanos in Thessaloniki:
http://tinyurl.com/3uadwcr
c) as depicted in a June calendar portrait in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca. 1312 and 1321/1322) 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/zcle5tg
d) as depicted (panel at lower left) in an earlier fourteenth-century pictorial menologion from Thessaloniki (betw. 1322 and 1340; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gr. th. f. 1, fol. 45r):
http://image.ox.ac.uk/images/bodleian/msgrthf1/45r.jpg
e) as depicted (at left; at right, the martyrdom of the healing saints Cyrus and John) in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. 1335 and 1350) of the narthex in 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/yfzgkf5
f) as depicted (roundel at right; roundel at left: St. Panteleimon [another healer]) by Theofanis Strelitzas-Bathas in the earlier sixteenth-century frescoes (1527) in the katholikon of the monastery of St. Nicholas Anapafsas in Kalambaka (Trikala regional unit) in northern Greece:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GXbx67aJMzI/UhX8wNZTn6I/AAAAAAAAKE4/PlJwTdRoooY/s1600/CIMG6251.JPG
Best,
John Dillon
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