The Full Catastrophe by James Angelos

Author:James Angelos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2015-06-01T16:00:00+00:00

5

The Apostate

Our Lady was seized with trembling, and the icons wept tears.

“Be silent, Lady and Mistress; and you, icons, weep not. Again in years and times to come it will be ours once more.”

—Song of Hagia Sophia

One night in the year 982, the archangel Gabriel descended from heaven for an earthly visit, according to Orthodox Christian tradition. Disguised as a monk, the angel arrived on Mount Athos, a secluded mountain peninsula dotted with Byzantium’s most revered monasteries, to partake in a pre-dawn vigil before an icon of Mary and Jesus. “It is truly meet to bless thee, O Theotokos, thou the ever-blessed and most pure, and the Mother of our God,” the archangel chanted with such celestial melody that a monk beside him understood he was in the presence of a heavenly being. The archangel then vanished, and for a time, according to some tellings, the icon emitted a divine light.

On a sunny, hot October Saturday in 2012, the same icon was delivered from Mount Athos to the shore of the northern city of Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest metropolis, aboard a Greek navy gunboat. The occasion was the coming 100th anniversary of the city’s liberation from the Ottoman Empire, and the monks of Mount Athos, a few hours’ boat ride away, had it seen fit to enhance the festivities by contributing one of their most venerated icons for a few weeks’ residence in the city. There on the paved harborside to receive the icon were a military marching band, scores of Greek soldiers in navy whites and army fatigues standing in formation, and various politicians. I stood sweating among a crowd of a few thousand Greek citizens who had gathered around the city’s most prominent landmark, the cylindrical, turreted Lefkos Pyrgos, or White Tower, built to fortify Thessaloniki during Ottoman rule. After an Ottoman surrender during the First Balkan War, the city came under Greek control in the fall of 1912, on a day that seemed fated, as it fell on the feast day of the city’s patron saint, Demetrios, a Roman military commander martyred there for his Christian faith in the early fourth century.

On an elevated stage sat the nation’s highest-ranking clergy, all clad in black hats and robes. Flanking the clerics were two scruffy men adorned in the customary revolutionary bandit garb—the pleated kilts and pom-pom shoes. They wore tired expressions, as if having been rented out for such festivities one too many times. Offshore, a few clerics emerged from the cabin of the gunboat, their frocks fluttering violently in the wind, followed by a pack of sailors carrying the icon. The revered object was enclosed in a wooden and glass case and framed with white flowers. The sailors strained from the weight of the contraption as they boarded a smaller coast guard boat that bobbed alongside the navy vessel. The priests, the sailors, and their holy cargo then puttered toward the harborside. The crowd waited in silent anticipation as the faint, windswept din of techno music echoed from

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.