medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Ephraem (d. 373; also Ephraim, Ephrem, Ephram) was born into a Syriac-speaking community in the Roman garrison town of Nisibis in upper Mesopotamia, now Nusaybin in Turkey's Mardin province. His energy and learning led to his early ordination to the diaconate and to appointment as a teacher by his bishop (St. Jacob of Nisibis, d. ca. 339). Ephraem was extraordinarily productive both as an hymnographer and as a biblical commentator. The Roman cession of Nisibis to Persia in 363 entailed the removal of its Syriac Christian population to Edessa (now Şanlıurfa in Turkey), the center of Syriac Christianity.
Shortly after Ephraem's death legendary accounts of him at variance with the evidence of his writings began to circulate. One of these, which exists in several versions, has him visit St. Basil the Great in Caesarea during the persecution of Valens (variously dated to ca. 366 and to 370-372). Some of his writing was translated into languages other than Syriac, notably Greek -- and thence, in some cases, into Latin -- and Coptic, and a large corpus of pseudo-Ephraemic texts arose. Many of the latter were still ascribed to Ephraem when in 1920 pope Benedict XV proclaimed him a Doctor of the Church. Today is the day of his feast (an Optional Memorial) in the general Roman Calendar. In the originally tenth-century Synaxary of Constantinople and in calendars of modern Byzantine-rite churches his feast falls on 28. January.
Some period-pertinent images of St. Ephraem the Syrian:
a) as depicted (bottom register at far right, sharing a panel with St. Basil the Great) on a wing of a mid-tenth-century triptych in the Holy Monastery of the God-trodden Mount Sinai at St. Catherine in Egypt's South Sinai governorate:
http://sinai.princeton.edu/sinai/files/original/7144/3009.jpg
b) as depicted (dormition) in the late tenth- or very early eleventh-century so-called Menologion of Basil II (Città del Vaticano, BAV, cod. Vat. gr. 1613, p. 354):
http://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.gr.1613/0376
c) as depicted in the mid-eleventh-century mosaics in the katholikon of the Nea Moni on Chios:
http://tinyurl.com/yjjsw6u
d) as depicted (at left) in a late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century fresco in the bema of the Palaia Enkleistra ("Old Hermitage") in the St. Neophytus Monastery near Tala (Paphos prefecture) in the Republic of Cyprus:
http://tinyurl.com/2a633vl
Detail (Ephraem):
http://tinyurl.com/29ecvgo
e) as depicted in a thirteenth-century January menaion from Cyprus (Paris, BnF, ms. Grec 1561, fol. 113r):
http://tinyurl.com/2b47a8q
http://tinyurl.com/6uurx6t
f) as depicted in the mid-thirteenth-century frescoes (1259) in the church of Sts. Nicholas and Panteleimon at Boyana near the Bulgarian capital of Sofia:
http://galenf.com/Bulgaria/36/bu_0006x.jpg
https://chronographiae.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/ephraim-syros.jpg
g) as depicted (in all probability) in the late thirteenth-century frescoes (ca. 1295) by Eutychios and Michael Astrapas in the church of the Peribleptos (now Sv. Kliment Ohridski) in Ohrid:
http://tinyurl.com/zjmbt3t
h) as depicted (detail views) in the late thirteenth- or very early fourteenth-century frescoes (ca. 1300) attributed to Manuel Panselinos in the Protaton church on Mt. Athos:
http://tinyurl.com/2cszv72
http://tinyurl.com/jj39lxs
i) as depicted (at lower right; at lower left, St. John Damascene; above, St. George of Lydda) on a panel from an early fourteenth-century triptych now in the Holy Monastery of the God-trodden Mount Sinai at St. Catherine in Egypt's South Sinai governorate:
http://tinyurl.com/5ctk4u
j) as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca. 1311 and ca. 1322) of the church of St. Nicholas Orphanos in Thessaloniki:
http://tinyurl.com/2g3c6ch
Detail view:
http://tinyurl.com/6tupp8j
k) as depicted (at right; at left, St. Theodosius the Coenobiarch) in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca. 1312 and 1321/1322) in the parecclesion of St. Nicholas in 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/873xx77
Detail view (Ephraem):
http://tinyurl.com/htup7ov
l) as depicted (lower register at left; at center, St. Stephen the Younger; at right, St. Theodore the Stoudite) in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. 1313 and 1318; conservation work in 1968) by Michael Astrapas and Eutychios in the church of St. George at Staro Nagoričane in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia:
http://tinyurl.com/o2lms4w
Detail view (Ephraem at left):
http://tinyurl.com/3mfwpyp
m) as depicted (upper register in panel at lower left; dormition) in an earlier fourteenth-century pictorial menologion from Thessaloniki (betw. 1322 and 1340; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gr. th. f. 1, fol. 26v):
http://image.ox.ac.uk/images/bodleian/msgrthf1/26v.jpg
n) as depicted (at left, in colloquy with an enthroned St. Basil the Great) in a mid-fourteenth-century copy, from the workshop of Richard and Jeanne de Montbaston, of the _Legenda aurea_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (1348; Paris, BnF, ms. Français 241, fol. 47v):
http://tinyurl.com/zxnmq46
o) as depicted (in red; at left, a seated St. Basil the Great) in the later fourteenth-century Breviary of Charles V (ca. 1364-1370; Paris, BnF, ms. Latin 1052, fol. 389r):
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84525491/f787.item.zoom
p) as depicted in the late fourteenth-century frescoes (either between ca. 1371 and 1389 or ca. 1397-1398; cleaned and conserved, 1960) on the north wall of the church of the Presentation of the Theotokos at the Nova Pavlica monastery in Pavlica (Raška dist.) in Serbia:
http://tinyurl.com/23tbur6
q) as depicted (at left; at right, St. Arsenius the Great) in the late fourteenth-century frescoes (1389; restored in the early 1970s) in the monastery church of St. Andrew at Matka in Skopje's municipality of Karpoš:
http://tinyurl.com/nftkmrp
r) as depicted (dormition) in a mid-fifteenth-century icon in the Iviron monastery on Mt. Athos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/65486023@N00/7905714/lightbox/
s) as depicted (at left; with other monks; image greatly expandable) in a late fifteenth-century copy of a collection of his writings in Latin translation and of others' writings in Latin (San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, ms. HM 1068, fol. 1r):
http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/ds/huntington/images//002910A.jpg
t) as depicted (at far right) in a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century fresco (ca. 1480-1515) in the altar area of the Dormition cathedral in the Moscow kremlin:
http://assumption-cathedral.kreml.ru/pi/c7m0/i56/tsUSStAPr10-b.jpg
Detail view (Ephraem):
http://assumption-cathedral.kreml.ru/pi/c7m0/i56/tsUSStAPr02-b2.jpg
Best,
John Dillon
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