Of Colored Glass by C.P. Cavafy

I am very moved by one detail

in the coronation at Vlachernai of John Kantakuzinos

and Irini, daughter of Andronikos Asan.

Because they had only a few precious stones

(our afflicted empire was extremely poor)

they wore artificial ones: numerous pieces of glass,

red, green, or blue. I find

nothing humiliating or undignified

in those little pieces of colored glass.

On the contrary, they seem

a sad protest against

the unjust misfortune of the couple being crowned,

symbols of what they deserved to have,

of what surely it was right that they should have

at their coronation—a Lord John Kantakuzinos,

a Lady Irini, daughter of Andronikos Asan.

Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard

Πολύ με συγκινεί μια λεπτομέρεια
στην στέψιν, εν Βλαχέρναις, του Ιωάννη Καντακουζηνού
και της Ειρήνης Aνδρονίκου Aσάν.
Όπως δεν είχαν παρά λίγους πολυτίμους λίθους
(του ταλαιπώρου κράτους μας ήταν μεγάλ’ η πτώχεια)
φόρεσαν τεχνητούς.  Ένα σωρό κομμάτια από υαλί,
κόκκινα, πράσινα ή γαλάζια. Τίποτε
το ταπεινόν ή το αναξιοπρεπές
δεν έχουν κατ’ εμέ τα κομματάκια αυτά
από υαλί χρωματιστό. Μοιάζουνε τουναντίον
σαν μια διαμαρτυρία θλιβερή
κατά της άδικης κακομοιριάς των στεφομένων.
Είναι τα σύμβολα του τι ήρμοζε να έχουν,
του τι εξ άπαντος ήταν ορθόν να έχουν
στην στέψι των ένας Κυρ Ιωάννης Καντακουζηνός,
μια Κυρία Ειρήνη Aνδρονίκου Aσάν. 

Giorgos Sikeliotis / Γιώργος Σικελιώτης

Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis: a Reflection by Dr. Christos Yannaras

            Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis is particularly notable for his ecclesiastical realism in both his paintings and his writings.  He was a ‘modernist,’ adopting the anti-novel in the form of an interior monologue, a stream of associations with weak logical connections but with coherent successions of personal experiences and intense symbolism.  This form allowed Pentzikis to dwell on the experiential relationship with the particular, where the personal element of the relationship consciously transcends the aesthetic for the sake of the experiential immediacy of the symbolism.

By using such language Pentzikis rids his spiritual experience of any idealism.  This purification enabled him to appropriate popular ecclesiastical experience in its material and practical expression: buildings, texts, icons, and daily customs.  He identifies the Greek Orthodox tradition with its material expression of popular piety, the details of a popular faith insignificant to the "objective" observer.

For example, Greek Church buildings for Pentzikis are not simply an aesthetic interpretation of theological symbolism.  They express the relationship between the artist – and every believer – and the tangible reality of creation, which is ultimately a relationship with the Creator.  Even the hymns are not simply poetic expression of metaphysical truth but express a dense feeling of erotic experience of communion with the persons of Christ, the Theotokos, and the saints.  The physical sense of this communion is the central motif linking the chain of recollections in Pentzikis’ monologue.

Orthodoxy and the West

(pg. 261 & 262, trans. By Peter Chamberas and Norman Russell. HCHC Press, 2006)

A Place of Healing for the Soul: Patmos

http://www.amazon.com/Place-Healing-Soul-Patmos/dp/0871138506/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

In Byzantine art...

In Byzantine art, poetry, painting, and music, life appears stylized. In other words, the human body, clothes and ornaments, furniture, inside and outside spaces, houses and streets, trees and animals, are presented not for the value which they may have in the present but as intermediaries that help us perceive another life. Through the centuries we came to identify the other life with the world of the ideas, which gave way, after the French Revolution, to various monistic conceptions and has become for us shadowy and ambiguous. . . . But the other life is not a question of ideas; and if Europe has forgotten this in its wasting of the moral resources of faith, we, who during four hundred years of slavery, preserved ourselves only by the conventions of our worship, after the fall of vain ornamentation in Byzantium, are in a position to know it, since we have witnessed the resurgence of our life as freedom, without any ideological rhetoric. By simply persevering, our life was able to refill the framework which we received from our myth.

-N.G. Pentzikis

Remembrance of the dead by N.G. Pentzikis (A fragment)

The dead change the whole aspect of the city.  Everywhere you go, memory produces in you hallucinations of the smell of incense and of frankincense.  You are afraid revenants will come out… For the repose of the dead the priest at the cenotaph is reading the names.  Paper with names on it covers the top of the narrow credence table, under the “spitted lamb”, the Christ of His final humiliation.

The Birth by Tasos Leivaditis

Birth

On another night I heard him crying next door.  I knocked and went in.  

He showed me a small wooden cross on top of the bedside table. ‘You see’, 

he said to me, ‘compassion is born’.  I then bowed my head and I too cried,

         

for centuries and centuries would go by and we would not have anything 

more beautiful to say than that.

H Γέννηση

Ένα άλλο βράδυ τον άκουσα να κλαίει δίπλα. Χτύπησα την πόρτα και μπήκα. Μου ‘δειξε πάνω στο κομοδίνο ένα μικρό ξύλινο σταυρό. “Είδες – μου λέει – γεννήθηκε η ευσπλαχνία”. Έσκυψα τότε το κεφάλι κι έκλαψα κι εγώ. Γιατί θα περνούσαν αιώνες και αιώνες και δε θα ‘χαμε να πούμε τίποτα ωραιότερο απ’ αυτό.