Sunday 24 October 2010

Παντοκράτωρ / Pantokrator.

Greek monasteries.

In Eastern Christianity, the most widely used Christogram is a four-letter abbreviation, ICXC — a traditional abbreviation of the Greek words for "Jesus Christ" (the first and last letters of each of the words ΙΗΣΟΥΣ ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ — written "IHCOYC XPICTOC" with a transliteration of the lunate sigma common in medieval Greek as "C"). On icons, this Christogram may be split: "IC" on the left of the image and "XC" on the right, most often with a bar above the letters, indicating that it is a sacred name. It is sometimes rendered as "ICXC NIKA", meaning "Jesus Christ Conquers." "ICXC" may also be seen inscribed on the Ichthys. In the traditional icon of Christ Pantokrator, Christ's right hand is shown in a pose that represents the letters IC, X, and C.

Ichtys (or Ikhthus). ἰχθύς / ΙΧΘΥΣ

This word means in ancient Greek "fish". The symbol of the Ikhthus is commonly represented with two intersecting arcs, in order to make it look like a fish. This symbol was a secret symbol used by the first Christians. The letters of the word fish bear in fact another meaning. Ikhthus is in reality a word formed from the first letters of several words:
"Jesus Christ, God's son, Savior" in ancient Greek "Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, Θεοῦ ͑Υιός, Σωτήρ" (to be pronounced: Iēsous Christos, Theou Huios, Sōtēr).

The symbol of the Ikhthus was also represented as a wheel (which represents the wheel of the gold chariot or the tiller of a boat). This symbol of a wheel contains the letters ΙΧΘΥΣ superimposed that result in a wheel with eight sticks.

Saturday 16 October 2010

Kingdoms of soul-cleansing.



Yesterday I wasn’t feeling that great. “How could you man? This is Athens! Come at the party with us!” would be what my roommates or some Erasmus student would have told me. But I decided to keep this for myself. There was that party yesterday, but I didn’t want to go, not that I wasn’t in the mood to be with other people, I just felt like I just wanted to remain calm and do whatever I wanted to. So I’ve been listening to some music and at some point I decided to go out.

Yeah I’ve been out for the night, but alone, on my own. And it was just fine really. I really wanted to talk a walk through the city, lose myself in Athens and just let my feelings go and fly.

That is not typically the type of evening or night that people have here, especially the other students but I really miss it: being on my own and just walk. Lucky me, it wasn’t raining or anything. I just took my coat and the second after I was walking toward unknown direction. I didn’t even take any maps. And I was thinking: "Today is not already over, and after all, the day ends when I say it does".
I don’t know I arrived at Syntagma Square just for the changing of the guard. Syntagma Square is, well at least I believe, my favourite place in Athens. Well maybe not my favourite but this place has some meaningful signification to me, especially the bus stop.

Then I decided to go forward to the temple of Zeus, which I’ve only seen, from the Acropolis. At the entrance of the archaeological site, I understand why the people who were the first to discover this place, these poets, these writers, and these painters love this place. As you consider the columns of the temple, reaching to the sky I felt like my soul wanted to follow their lead, reaching the heights of these columns and pierce through the clouds. These magnificent places, grandiose temples and these columns are like the gates to other kingdoms. Kingdoms that are only open to people who have a strong enough will and passion to push their gates. I wanted to experience something new that night and coming to this place was a healing moment.

So yes, set sail, brides of disease. Set sail. I understood the lesson: I quit trying to run. These columns whispered me to wash away my anger and take with them my pain.
Set sail. I no longer hide. I only talk.

Sunday 10 October 2010

Athena, take care of me.



Here she is, steady, wearing a simple tunic, in front of a stela. Her right hand is on her hip while the left one hold a spear against her forehead. A helmet with a crest covers her head. One of her foot, probably the right one, is entirely on the floor, but the other one, with the held up heel, is only supported by the extremity of her foot.

It seems like she is reading something written on the stela or thinking and meditating. If we weren't sure it was Athena - but her helmet and spear leave no doubts - we could see an Athenian woman meditating at some parent's grave. We are not sure, as her position is so natural, whether the dominating feeling is melancholy or lassitude. She looks like absorbed by her thoughts and, on the contrary to the numerous other representations, virgin warrior or Olympian sovereign, she appears here surprisingly human.
This is not the kind of representation that is given in books about mythology. We prefer picturing her as the glorious Athena, born from the head of Zeus, holding the great Aegis with the head of Medusa, given by Perseus after he killed her. But this more simple Athena, this mourning Athena is the way I prefer picturing the Goddess. I've grown up under her shadow during my high school years, reading every book I could find about her and the Olympian Gods. She sometimes whispered me lots of secrets about the difficult art of charming humans thanks to the light of wisdom and not by the attraction of the body.

There is always something moving about seeing the Gods during their hours of weakness and doubts. I know that I'm saying things that haven't crossed the artist's mind. He has surely only though to his contemporaries, to his own desire to represent the Goddess. But the hand on the hip, the help up heel, the finder on the forehead, testify an unusual vision of Athena, fragile and familiar silhouette.
Let's think about it : the Goddess has come here from the sky to us, taking the appearance of a simple mortal. Is it about this question that she is thinking? About death, this end ignored by the Gods? Yes, is it this question that astonish or worry her? This mystery that the Gods will never know and that is, I could say, the privilege of humans?

Monday 4 October 2010

Acropolis, show me the way.

Isn't it curious to think that during centuries, from the end of the antic world to the very beginning of the Roman period, the Acropolis was a totally unknown place to the eyes of the Occident, absent from our images, our dreams, our memories?

During the long period of time before its discovery, or let's say its re-discovery, the Acropolis, obviously, never ceased to exist. On the contrary, the carvings of ancient times, writings of the oldest of explorers show it inhabited, busy and crowded with houses, churches and later on, mosques.
Here, at the heart of this jumble of history, lifestyles and façades, so far away from the place we know, nude, clean and clear, we can see a surge of people, the "acropolitan" people (let's call them that way to settle down the things more easily): composed of Greeks at the beginning, then Turkish, Armenian, Albanian. During centuries, they were the only inhabitants, the only admirers of the Acropolis, which, back then, was simply called the Fort or the Castle.

Let's go deeper in this time along with these practically unknown carvings or engravings, showing us this strange and forgotten history. For example, those of J. Stuart & N. Revett (that you can find on the internet), two British travellers who stayed in Greece from 1751 to 1753 and actually saw the old Acropolis in its former and ancient state.



The engravings of these two explorers depict the Acropolis as a place full of houses, streets, olive tree gardens and the flowers taking up the entire place, from the Propylaea to the Parthenon, circling this massive structure with branches.
Inside the temple, the domes of the turkish mosque are shining. Mosque which only was to be demolished in 1842. Further, in another engraving, the Erechteion behind which we distinguish a large house and a courtyard with a couple of cypress.
The old temple seems to be here, a place of meditation: an "acropolitan" seated under his portico looks at the sky with dreamy eyes while, right by his side, people wearing turbans, children and dogs are walking around as if it was a village.
We can feel the same, fifty years later when Dodwell, another British traveller, author of the book Views in Greece from Drawings, paints the Acropolis in 1805.



The houses are surrounded with walls, providing tiny courtyards of olive trees and thin cypresses. We can also distinguish a large building, just next to the Parthenon, maybe a warehouse. Shepherds are talking under the bright white light.

No doubts: it's a village. Nothing like a temple, a sacred land or anything else but a village the painter shows us with its hours of fuss and calm. Here, the antic gods are dead and buried. Ultimate traces of their presence: these columns, these faces and torsos on which the acropolitans are talking.
Lots of other travellers, authors, have seen and described this Acropolis, turned into an oriental village, into an makeshift fortress, into a bazaar saturated with marble and statues. From their writings, from their engravings, emanates the same impression both reassuring and sad: the Acropolis did not die to history during these dark centuries but humbly lived, turned into a village, a castle, a bazaar, houses, gardens. The Parthenon, itself, became the Church of the Holy Virgin then a turkish mosque. There was a life upon this rock: an everyday life, at the beginning greek, then turkish, christian, and muslim. What a story for this Holy rock of the ancient Greeks, this Byzantine Castle, this Rock of the Independence.

I'm thinking that, finally, this life above on the rock both secular and religious was maybe in accordance with the antic and former vocation of this place, with the religious Acropolis of Pericles, crowded of people, altars, trophies, cluttered with statues. Life on the Acropolis has gone on its proper way, nourished with the atmosphere of this place where Gods or one God was worshipped.
This is the war that destroyed a part of the Parthenon. Shepherds, inhabitants, merchants had nothing to do with that disaster.
Nowadays, the "acropolitans" are named "tourists". The archaeology became their new faith and the archaeologists the new priest of this secular cult. But after several centuries made of darkness and troubles, I can't stop myself from thinking of the strange destiny this place holds. Because, since it arose - just one century ago - in the occidental conscience, since it became - after 25 years of oversight - the place itself where the reason was born, it is already threatened.
When it was a city, bazaar, fortress, place of meditation, living ashes and refuge of the religions, the Acropolis was going on with its slowly life. Become the high place of the modern cult of tourism, it gives us the see-through message of its centuries, the brightness of its marbles, the purity of the soil, which gained back thanks to the excavations the virginity of its original rock; but it gives us as well the ignorance, the carefreeness, and the excess of the modern crowds.

Between this long silence and this sudden commotion, the time of ancient cults and those of modern culture, it seems like the Acropolis keeps asking us the same question as the Sphinx asked to Oedipus: whether we look at the dawn, at noon or at the nightfall we can still hear a voice murmuring: "Who edified me at the dawn of Occident, praised to the skies at the zenith of the reason, protected me at the nightfall of my gods?" The MAN. And not only the Greek man, but with him, through him, the Oriental man and the Occidental man who, during forgotten centuries, have been able, have known how to live with each others upon this rock which will never be a rock like others.

The monument I've ever preferred on the Acropolis is, on the west part of it, facing the sea and the setting sun, the small temple of Victorious Athena, Athena Nike. There was inside a wooden statue of the goddess, carved from olive tree wood, wingless so she couldn't fly away from the city, represented on her foot, offering in her right hand a fruit: a pomegranate. This statue does not longer exist obviously, no more than she existed at the time of the "acropolitans". But I see in her the clearest, the most durable symbol of the necessary continued existence of the place and this rock: this Victory carved from the olive tree, symbol of Peace and Prosperity giving for eternity the most ephemeral fruit.
And this as well, this symbol, the olive tree carved by man's hands, this gesture of offering, certainty and light, this belongs to everyone.