Monastery at Daphne / Dafni

So we took A to the monastery at Daphni. I had not been since 1991, almost twenty years ago. I remember walls and fortifications and a blurry photograph I have of the pantokrator (which I may be confusing with a pantokrator in Mystra). I did not remember the Ionic columns from the temple of Apollo and I would not then have been able to spot any trace of Gothicness on the narthex, let alone remember it. Given how much we did learn and retain while making this study tour with the school, there is no fault to be ascribed to Jimmy and the gang if we missed some of the Mediterranean Gothic...

Walking into the site today, the visitor is confronted by the massive block of the Daphni church, orange and pink in limestone and brick with its impressive drum and dome on top, all covered in scaffolding and dotted with stickers labeled ΕΜΠ and NTUA. The south door which was in front of us was locked. We headed to the west colonnaded section of the monastic complex's southern courtyard. The buildings there housed classical sculptures from the Daphnephoros sanctuary and late antique, Byzantine and medieval architectural fragments. Across the court, on the top floor, there is an exhibition on the restoration and the work being done. After wandering about a bit more, we found the phylax and much of what follows we were either told or I figured it out for myself as the phylax took us up the scaffolding.

Photos and videos are not allowed inside (rofl). No, really, they are not, so I was all fidgety and annoyed both because of the brevity of the preparation time available to take some photos while no one was looking but also by the need to keep my (now handheld) helmet-cam hidden.

On the way up, we first see two Gregories, amazingly large when at eye-level, amazingly pink-skinned and white haired in their restored splendour. Each mosaic we saw was an invitation to spend a whole afternoon there, wondering in awe at the work of the mosaicist. Opposite these was Zacharias in an arch, with his funny cuboid hat and then onwards and upwards - the guide rushing us upwards, but telling us to take our time... At conch level, we were face to face with (from NE-NW clockwise): Annunciation (amazingly tranquil and inspiring), Birth, Baptism (no willy), and Metamorphosis (badly damaged). And like the Narnian Mouse - "Further up and further in!", cried the phylax and we found ourselves face to face with sixteen prophets around the drum, again splendidly pink and white, like the Gregories or Zacharias, all of course with their golden backgrounds and with calligraphic names but also with conspicuous tubes and plastic pipes sticking out of them for the strengthening of the mosaics and eventually for the cement enemas which will serve to strengthen the walls and finally allow the walls to again take the weight of the building for themselves.

Then, finally, on the top floor of the scaffolding, we stood face to face with the pantokrator in awe, and were able to distinguish the tesserae and notice that each one is quite a large stone. Amazing indeed, but I had to let K see it too. I came down with appetite for close-up mosaic unsated and told her to go up while we played with A in the garden to the West. The narthex contains one of the four original Ionic columns from the Daphnephoros sanctuary. I am not sure where the other three are, various sources give various stories about what indeed Elgin took from here. The asymmetric gothic exonarthex is rather fun as well, with its arches not quite lining up on each side.

The need for restoration came with the famous quake of 1999, where, apparently the mosaic decoration all came to the ground. On commencement of restoration, they only replaced whatever pieces had a definite provenance, meaning that there are great chunks which will never be replaced. The opportunity to get this close to such exquisite mosaic work was amazing and I totally recommend a visit. The feeling it inspires reminds me of the feeling I had when facing some fresco work in Ochrid or facing the frescoes of the Protaton in Karyes, both pretty much contemporary with these mosaics. I want to go again...

View towards the exonarthex from the North West

View towards the exonarthex from the North West in clunky HDR

Base of the Ionic column from the exo narthex colonnade, complete with seismic sensors

Capital of the Ionic column from the exo narthex colonnade

Ionic column from the exo narthex colonnade

A visit to Naxos Archaeological museum (2009)

The Archaeological Museum of Naxos is located pretty centrally on the castle of the old town. It houses a rather fine collection of Cycladic figurines and mycenaean grave goods from the numerous LH cemeteries on the island. We went last year with K and A (seven years old at the time).

On the way up to the museum we spotted this rather nice spolion in a yard wall...

The museum is in the old town which is essentially the medieval castle of Naxos. There are many "Frankish" arches in evidence such as the one on the left and many heraldic designs of the various dukes and counts and lords who were installed after the fourth crusade (don't get me started).

The museum is housed in a Francescan building which shares this side of the square with the Ursuline building, all very tangible signs of the Catholic church's attempt to convert fellow Christians to caesaropapism on the one hand and the heresies of Rome on the other.

Strictly no photography is allowed in the museum (in clear contravention of Law 3028/2002) despite the potential for outreach. Inside, the museum houses a nice cycladic collection with good Late Helladic (second millennium BC) gravegoods and some kitsch looking Roman sculpture. In the open air part, there is assorted sculpture from all ages which is presumably not considered special enough to warrant a guard or protection from the elements. Most of the photos which follow are from the outside part of the exhibition as the lack of a guard allows some photographs to be taken.


The open air section has a large mosaic in the middle, showing the bull carrying Europa off in its centre and animal forms around the edges. In style it is not very different to mosaics from the late antique period all over the Roman empire. The outside section is really quite chaotic and without labelling. On the right, we have classical and gothic capitals rubbing shoulders without seeming to mind the millennium which separates them.

Amongst the many loose sculptural finds from all ages in the open air section, there was also this rather exciting archangel in the "stumpy dumpy" style of the late and post-Byzantine era.

On the left, above, we have various bits of sculpture with an unfinished kouros and on the right, an unfinished Kouros amongst more sculpture of various periods.


On the left, capitals from various periods and in various "styles" - note the very vernacular low relief moustachioed cubes. On the right, a rather nice capital with a medieval / late byzantine figure between two animals, reminiscent of the mistress / master of the animals motifs from many centuries before.


This is the only shot inside the museum I managed to shoot before being told that it was forbidden. It shows a rather nice seated Cycladic figurine from the end of the third millennium BC.


Korinna and Cousin A with the spolia... a walk up to the museum is an opportunity to walk through the town of Naxos and talk about the processes which lead to the incorporation of spolia in newer structures (which themselves become old).

A final few words on the museum: don't miss it. It is old-style with old style labelling and the sleepy-eyed guard will tell you (the ticket lady doesn't talk) that the reason you are not allowed to take photos is that the artefacts are unpublished (this is the case for some, not all the items).

The problem with this logic, of course, is that the excavations were in the late forties and early fifties, and the excavator is dead. This is compounded by the fact that no one in the ephor's seat since has the good sense to get up off their arses and make even a preliminary publication of the important bronze age cemeteries the grave goods of which are in the museum.

If they have enough money to waste on fancy-schmancy touch screens with exceedingly little information stored on them, all but one of which were inoperable (through either faults of design or omissions in the training of the local staff) only months after installation, then why is there no money to make a publication of the old digs? Perhaps because the kick-back off purchasing fancy schmancy touch screens sits better in the baggy pockets of ministry officials such as "bounce" Zachopoulos than the ghostly thanks of the original archaeologist...

Another (totally) final thing: don't be scared by the way the exhibits rattle and move about in their wooden cases as you walk over the creaking wooden boards of the museum. The ministry is informed. That's why they spent money on touch-screen machines that don't work.

Ravenna - Jan 2005, Part II

We made our way to the first of the two baptisteries we intended to visit.

A baptistery is that part of the church (in early times a separate building in its own right) where baptism would take place. In the early days when those yet to be baptised vastly outnumbered those already baptised most baptisms were carried out on adults, and the baptisteries reflect this in that the font is big enough for a full size adult to be baptised in it.

The two baptisteries in Ravenna were built by the two rival sects practising in the empire at the time. The preferred form at this period is an octagon, and I have heard that this is to represent each day of the period from the entry into Jerusalem until Christ's resurrection. Anyway - what we have going on in the empire at the the time the churches of Ravenna were built is two competing sects of Christianity living side by side. We're not talking sects in terms of catholics and protestants thinking they have a different dogma, we are talking about a full blown disagreement in the nature of Christ. Let me just write those words out again, because they are important and to our post Chalcedonian mindset such a thing is not a matter for debate and / or discussion.

The nature of Christ.

There, I have written it again. We are all to some extent familiar with the concept of the creed. It's that bit of the service beginning with "I believe" or "credo" (or whatever) and it is essentially an affirmation of belief. In there we see all sorts of funky stuff, used to describe Christ. Like, he is the only son of the father, he is begotten not made, of one being with the father, etc. etc.

"Fair cop, guv", you might say, but I ask you why do we have this creed with all the rhetoric and reaffirmation of Christ's divinity? What need is it addressing? What's at stake? Yes - the trinity, father son and holy ghost - fine, but why labour the point when it comes to the son's divinity?

Once upon a time, in the second city of the newly officially Christian Roman Empire, there was a chap called Arius and Arius was bishop of this city, Alexandria. As bishop of the second most important city in the empire, he had some sway. Egypt and north Africa had always cast Christianity in a strange mould of their own and there the people clung on to strange (sometimes gnostic) ideas. These are the sorts of ideas which then come out of the sands seventeen centuries later to be turned into "National Geographic" cover stories.

Against this backdrop and only a generation after Origen, comes Arius with his separation of the nature of Christ the son from that of God the father. According to Arius, Christ was not "uncreated" and not wholly God in the way that God the Father was God. Arguing that the father was greater than the son and existed before him, the Alexandrine bishop managed to drive a wedge into the divine nature of Christ, which was to have repercussions many hundreds of years after the anathemas proclaimed on him. Think about the incongruity of the terms "one who never changes" and "baby Jesus"…

Before anyone could do anything to check the progress of this idea (which may have been potentially more palatable than the standard description of the trinity to the less philosophically inclined western areas of the empire), it had spread like wildfire, to the extent that arguments would erupt in the streets of Constantinople and, more significantly, to the extent that the religious figures sent to convert the non-citizen Goths who had recently begun to work as mercenaries in the armies of Rome were followers of Arian. Not only that, but the Arian theology buttoned itself onto the existing beliefs of the Goths who worshiped a father / son deity which had the father more divine than the son.

The council of Nicea gave christianity the Nicene creed with its use of the term "consubstantial" or "homoousios" which basically put an end to Arianism in the core parts of the empire. So these beliefs were anathematized and life went on in the empire with the Arian Goths on the periphery. Theodosios in the late fifth century had seen to it that all pagan worship ceased, and made all sorts of deals with the Goths to give them land for military service, despite their Arianism.

At some point, though, the goths were tired of sitting on the other side of the Danube and the time came for them to cross the river and make a bid for Rome. They managed to take much of Northern Italy. Rather than raze and rebuild, the Goths did something politically clever, in that they allowed the local population to continue their worship as they were wont to do, and introduced a parallel hierarchy of Arian clergy to tend to the Arian Gothic elite, which managed in this way to keep itself separate from their Trinitarian subjects.

Phew

So - Italy and especially Ravenna at this time (until Belissarius, essentially) was home to a coexistence of two very different "Christian" sects.

The reason for all this blah blah blah is that a) the art of the orthodox and heretical differs in the details in a way which is interesting to note and b) many formerly Arian buildings were taken over by Trinitarians after Belissarius re-conquered Italy for Rome. Belissarius we'll talk about some other time.

Against this backdrop, we can now move into the baptistries, and it is finally time for some of what might be the last glimmer of classically inspired sculpture before the renaissance came along. K and I particularly like the guy in this image as we both independently saw in him the patron saint of ironing. I am not sure who this funky low-relief guy is, but he stands below the dome of the baptistery of the orthodox.


The first recorded extreme ironing aficionado






The baptistery of the Orthodox is of course more notable for the mosaic decoration adorning the vault depicting a belts-off-trousers-down Jesus in the water being baptised by JTB.









JTB and the skinnydipping JC groove on down in the Jordan wid da pijins(or something)









Christ is depicted as a fully grown bearded man. He is God, consubstantial, coeternal. Compare with later when we visited the slightly earlier baptistery of the Arians.









JTB and the skinnydipping JC groove on down in the Jordan wid da pijins (or something)
Doesn't JC look a little dumpier, beardless and more boyish - like he is not quite as fully divine as the Father?

So after baptistery fun in these octagonal buildings displaying the last embers of truly classical art, we were ready for a visit to a good old fashioned basilica with three naves and some processional mosaics with repetitive undistinguishable saints parading towards the Christ figure. On the north side the saints process, walking from a depiction of Theodoric's palace towards the east. On the south wall, the lady saints are walking from the harbour towards the east. Have I not mentioned Theodoric? Did I throw him out at you without any explanation? His mausoleum had a brief mention in the previous Ravenna text.

Theodoric the goth, then. He was king of the Goths who had come to scare away those who had overrun Italy at the behest of Zeno, emperor of the Romans. The Goths had then set themselves up in the ruins of the empire in the west. Taking on Roman airs and titles, playing the system from the inside and letting the roman aristocracy carry on as before. The gothic kingdom was ruled from Ravenna from the Palace pictured in the mosaics of the basilica of Saint Apollinaris. From the palace helpfully labelled "PALATIVM" in the mosaic. From the palace which is less than forty yards down the road from the mosaic depicting it.

The Palace of Theodoric, setting off point for the procession of saints depicted in the basilica of Saint Apollinaris.

Theodoric's palace, in the mosaic, featured members of his family standing in the porches. Members of the royal family with haloes (normal for imperial portraits of the time) adorning the porches. And then along came Belissarius, strong -man of Justinian and restorer of orthodoxy to an Italy suffering under the heretical Goths.

And there, in the basilica of Saint Apollinaris, first to go were the Arian Saints. Up went the Orthodox saint names... and then away go the family of Theodoric. In their place, some very fashionable curtains were put up. You can see above the curtains where the haloes would have been, but more obvious, and highlighted in green in the next image, are the body parts painted outside the gaps and over the columns. They were never taken away - it is not known why and the hands of Theodoric's family are still there to be seen by whoever should visit the church.


Same image as before with highlighted body parts

Not far from the palace and cathedral of Theodoric sits an unassuming building for which you really have to be on the look out or else very much into the back-street narrow-alley form of exploring new places. Inside is the tomb of Dante.

K emerges from the tomb of the poet

In Ravenna we discovered a very nice café type thing with good hot chocolate and also were lucky enough to catch the first day of the sales.








The next day we were off to Classe - the city named after what it did... Classe takes its name from Classis - fleet in Latin - for it is here that the imperial fleet would moor in the days when the empire was run from Ravenna.

O lamb of God...

In Classe we found the last of Ravenna'a UNESCO inscribed buildings - the church of Saint Apollinaris in Classe. More mosaics, this time curiously pastoral, to bid us good bye as we set off doen the fog filled autostrade towards Ancona - a place known to me from childhood voyages as a harbour town with no intrinsic interest.

How wrong I had been! Ancona is a harbour town - yes, it's position and what have you make it a perfect place for setting off across the Adratic to a number of destinations.

The first surprise - seeing as we had arrived about an hour early, we had time to explore - was the triumphal arches on the waterfront. I did not remember them, of course, the last time I had been through there I didn’t know what a triumphal arch represented and what the roman empire was. My sole source of information had been "Carry On Cleo" with Kenneth Williams as a rather camp Caesar acting opposite Sid William's raunchy Mark Anthony, but I digress.

Triumphal arches in Ancona with a view to the church on the top of the hill

The foreground arch in the picture as far as I can recall was set up by Napoleon. The one behind was set up by Trajan. The Ferry was delayed arriving - and therefore would be delayed in departing - by about five hours, so we had a good chance to walk about and get to know the city a little. We decided to walk up to the church on the hill overlooking the harbour and were rewarded with the exteriors of some baroque buildings on the way up and fine views from the top. Of course, all this was not really quite so exciting as the building at the top.

The old cathedral on top of the hill in Ancona

We were confronted by the rather gothic entrance with the arches all one inside the other, flanked by lions taken from somewhere I don't recall. The basilica itself was originally just a standard basilica, and took on its cruciform groundplan in about the 13th if I remember. The great thing about it is that in the basement you can see a bunch of Doric column bases from what used to be the old temple of Aphrodite which would stand above the harbour - sailors being sailors in all centuries no doubt had much to do with this choice of deity for the old temple.

The boat came, we boarded and set off again for Patras and later Athens.

The Venice / Ravenna trip was over, six days after commencing, the write up finished some five hundred and forty days after commencing. Hmm.

Now time to start writing up what came after Venice: Istanbul/Constantinople in June 2005 etc, Sikinos / Ios and Ikaria in August 2005, Meteora in September 2005, Paloumba for the epiphany of 2006, Paloumba for the first day of Lent of 2006, and Kastelorizo for the eclipse of 2006… all coming soon, oh yes.

Ravenna - Jan 2005, Part I

Here's one I prepared earlier, as they say... it follows on from the last Venice installment: Venice


Two nights and two days in fog choked Ravenna followed. Our ambitious plan was made easier by the fact that the mausoleum of Theodoric and the chapel of Aint Andrew were both closed for restoration work. That left only six (if I am not mistaken) UNESCO protected feats of the mosaicists art for us to go and gawp at. Fortunately, cameras are allowed here, although the fog cut the available light to a minimum and I had to use all my tricks to be able to shoot decent shots (not that I managed with 100% success, mind you).




Corinna wrapped against the cold as effectively as Lazarus wrapped against death on this early Christian sacrophagus

After finding our way into town in the morning, and finding a place to park - something not as easy as it sounds - we headed off to the Saint Vitale and mausoleum of Galla Placida complex where we spent quite a while walking around and marvelling at the mosaics.






I suppose I could go off on the Justinian / Theodora tangent right now and that would lead us through the Belissarius / Procopius / Narses tangents and back to the goths and all that jazz, but I'd probably forget to write about how it is that I first came to want to come to Ravenna and whether or not you can tell that Saint Vitale is an architectural copy of Saints Sergius and Bacchus in Constantinople.

One thing I was not prepared for was the material used for the windows - a sort of yellow rock cut thin enough to be translucent and used for window material in San Vitale, the mausoleum and others of the old churches we visited.



We walked across the garden to the tomb of Galla Placida where the mosaic work was far more classically roman-looking than what we are used to miscalling Byzantine. Despite the figurative art having one foot firmly in the Greco-roman tradition, the geometric designs were incredibly forward looking and modern to our eyes.



Geometric patterns on the vault of the mausoleum of Galla Palcida.





Leaving the mausoleum / Vitale area we drove to the cathedral and museum. The chapel of Saint Andrew was closed, but we managed to see the exhibits in the museum, which included some good early mosaic work and of course the amazing ivory throne of Maximian, bishop of Ravenna. I remember friends ("Hi, James!") doing late Roman art courses getting all excited about this throne of some bishop in a place I hadn't heard of, called Ravenna. This was a long time before my "Byzantine" or late roman awakening. The throne was a masterpiece of ivory work of the period and it is good to look at. We have nothing in the eastern empire of this sort (meaning the flammable sort).

We walked around the city centre of Ravenna, which is beautiful enough and hides a number of later churches which no doubt are just as exciting to those who call the 17th or 18th centuries their own.

The baptisteries and St. Apollonaris are next and they require some introduction into the whole Arian / Orthodox thing and probably also the whole Goth business. This is a different chapter.