medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Euphrosynus the Cook is a principal character in one of the many brief moral anecdotes called (at least when they are in Greek) "beneficial tales". In this narrative a priest at a monastery, dreaming one night that he was in a paradisiacal garden, was surprised to see there the monastery's cook Euphrosynus, a very humble person universally thought to be of no account. In the dream Euphrosynus gave the priest three apples, which latter the priest found with him when he later awoke. The priest shared his experience with the other monks. His hidden sanctity revealed, Euphrosynus left the monastery and was not seen again by the monks. Thus far Euphrosynus' so-called Bios, one version of which (BHG 628) is incorporated in the Bios of St. Blasius of Amorion (BHG 278) and thus will be older than the end of the ninth century. Another version (BHG 628c) occurs under today (11. September) in the Synaxary of Constantinople, where Euphrosynus is commemorated as a saint; in this account there was but one apple and it had healing properties from which the monks benefited. Copied separately, the tale occurs in monastic miscellanies from at least the late twelfth or early thirteenth century onward.
11. September is Euphrosynus' feast day in Byzantine-Rite churches. He has yet to grace the pages of the Roman Martyrology (had he done so in previous centuries his lack both of known historic existence and of an early cult honoring him almost certainly would have caused him to be dropped in the revision of 2001).
Some period-pertinent images of St. Euphrosynus the Cook:
a) as depicted in an earlier fourteenth-century fresco (betw. 1335 and 1350) in the parecclesion of St. Demetrius 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/3mxqbqj
http://tinyurl.com/3uu7msj
The facing saint on the other side of that window recess is another example of concealed sanctity, St. John the Calybite.
b) as depicted by Theofanis Strelitzas-Bathas (a.k.a. Theophanes the Cretan) in an earlier sixteenth-century fresco (1527) in the katholikon of the monastery of St. Nicholas Anapafsas in Kalambaka (Meteora dist.) in northern Greece:
http://pandektis.ekt.gr/pandektis/handle/10442/86307
http://tinyurl.com/zhpkzct
http://tinyurl.com/joyd5jq
Best,
John Dillon
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