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96-492: The name Christ Antiphonitis means "Christ who responds" and a number of Greek churches are so designated. The epithet appears to derive from a miraculous icon of some kind which responded to prayers, but no account of this icon in Cyprus is known. The name is testified in the late medieval period. Writing in the sixteenth century, Stefano Lusignan in his Description de toute l'isle de Cypre (Paris, 1580) recalls that Antifoniti

192-554: A pagan or Gnostic context) in his Life of Alexander Severus (xxix) that formed part of the Augustan History . According to Lampridius, the emperor Alexander Severus ( r.  222–235 ), himself not a Christian, had kept a domestic chapel for the veneration of images of deified emperors, of portraits of his ancestors, and of Christ, Apollonius , Orpheus and Abraham . Saint Irenaeus , ( c.  130–202 ) in his Against Heresies (1:25;6) says scornfully of

288-543: A pitch accent . In Modern Greek, all vowels and consonants are short. Many vowels and diphthongs once pronounced distinctly are pronounced as /i/ ( iotacism ). Some of the stops and glides in diphthongs have become fricatives , and the pitch accent has changed to a stress accent . Many of the changes took place in the Koine Greek period. The writing system of Modern Greek, however, does not reflect all pronunciation changes. The examples below represent Attic Greek in

384-471: A beardless young man. It was some time before the earliest examples of the long-haired, bearded face that was later to become standardized as the image of Jesus appeared. When they did begin to appear there was still variation. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) said that no one knew the appearance of Jesus or that of Mary. However, Augustine was not a resident of the Holy Land and therefore was not familiar with

480-401: A blue undergarment with a red overgarment (representing a human who was granted gifts by God), and thus the doctrine of deification is conveyed by icons. Letters are symbols too. Most icons incorporate some calligraphic text naming the person or event depicted. Even this is often presented in a stylized manner. The historical tradition of icons used for purposes other than visual depiction are

576-408: A church and admonished the other bishop that such images are "opposed   [...] to our religion". Elsewhere in his Church History , Eusebius reports seeing what he took to be portraits of Jesus, Peter and Paul , and also mentions a bronze statue at Banias /Paneas under Mount Hermon, of which he wrote, "They say that this statue is an image of Jesus". Further, he relates that locals regarded

672-510: A few conventional poses. Archangels bear a thin staff and sometimes a mirror. Colour plays an important role as well. Gold represents the radiance of Heaven; red, divine life. Blue is the colour of human life, white is the Uncreated Light of God, only used for resurrection and transfiguration of Christ. In icons of Jesus and Mary, Jesus wears red undergarment with a blue outer garment (representing God becoming human) and Mary wears

768-525: A fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence. Regarding the speech of the ancient Macedonians diverse theories have been put forward, but the epigraphic activity and the archaeological discoveries in the Greek region of Macedonia during the last decades has brought to light documents, among which the first texts written in Macedonian , such as

864-530: A letter to Jesus at Jerusalem, asking Jesus to come and heal him of an illness. This version of the Abgar story does not mention an image. A later account found in the Syriac Doctrine of Addai ( c.  400? ) mentions a painted image of Jesus in the story. Even later, in the 6th-century account given by Evagrius Scholasticus , the painted image transforms into an image that miraculously appeared on

960-483: A local interpretation of the style of the late Comnenian period as it appears at Panagia tou Arakou at Lagoudera . When first studied, the Virgin Mary and prelates in the apse were damaged, but the saints in the sanctuary were well preserved. Early painting also include decons, martyrs and stylites. There was a Baptism on the south-west pillar of the nave. The remaining paintings are later in date and belong to

1056-447: A miracle in which Saint Plato of Ankyra appeared to a Christian in a dream. The saint was recognized because the young man had often seen his portrait. This recognition of a religious apparition from likeness to an image was also a characteristic of pagan pious accounts of appearances of gods to humans, and was a regular topos in hagiography. One critical recipient of a vision from Saint Demetrius of Thessaloniki apparently specified that

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1152-528: A natural progression for the image of Christ, the King of Heaven and Earth, to be paid similar veneration as that given to the earthly Roman emperor. However, the Orthodox, Eastern Catholics, and other groups insist on explicitly distinguishing the veneration of icons from the worship of idols by pagans. (See further below on the doctrine of veneration as opposed to worship.) After adoption of Christianity as

1248-405: A notably large depiction of St. George . Some time after 1975, some of the fresco paintings were stolen and sold on the international art market. The Last Judgement has been badly damaged, and the heads of the twelfth-century angels in the apse damaged and partly removed. The Tree of Jesse has also been removed. Writing in the 1930s, Rupert Gunnis noted the iconostasis painted in blue and gold,

1344-639: A part of church tradition. Thus accounts such as that of the miraculous "image not made by hands", and the weeping and moving "Mother of God of the Sign" of Novgorod are accepted as fact: "Church Tradition tells us, for example, of the existence of an Icon of the Savior during His lifetime (the 'Icon-Made-Without-Hands') and of Icons of the Most-Holy Theotokos [Mary] immediately after Him." Eastern Orthodoxy further teaches that "a clear understanding of

1440-550: A prefix /e-/, called the augment . This was probably originally a separate word, meaning something like "then", added because tenses in PIE had primarily aspectual meaning. The augment is added to the indicative of the aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect, but not to any of the other forms of the aorist (no other forms of the imperfect and pluperfect exist). The two kinds of augment in Greek are syllabic and quantitative. The syllabic augment

1536-563: A religious image or symbol on the reverse , usually an image of Christ for larger denominations, with the head of the Emperor on the obverse, reinforcing the bond of the state and the divine order. The tradition of acheiropoieta ( ἀχειροποίητα , literally 'not-made-by-hand') accrued to icons that are alleged to have come into existence miraculously, not by a human painter. Such images functioned as powerful relics as well as icons, and their images were naturally seen as authoritative as to

1632-539: A single building with a spacious dome carried on eight pillars and is the only surviving example of this type in Cyprus. A ruined and partly restored example is in Saint Hilarion Castle and there was once a similar church at the centre of the Monastery of St. John Chrysostomos at Koutsovendis before the church there was rebuilt at the end of the nineteenth century. The narthex on the western side and

1728-542: A strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, as exemplified in the poems of the Boeotian poet Pindar who wrote in Doric with a small Aeolic admixture. Thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to a lesser degree. Pamphylian Greek , spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either

1824-523: A towel when Christ pressed the cloth to his wet face. Further legends relate that the cloth remained in Edessa until the 10th century, when it was taken by General John Kourkouas to Constantinople . It went missing in 1204 when Crusaders sacked Constantinople, but by then numerous copies had firmly established its iconic type. The 4th-century Christian Aelius Lampridius produced the earliest known written records of Christian images treated like icons (in

1920-539: A very exact, but reverse mirror image of the original circular icon that was made in the 5th century and brought to Rome, where it has remained until the present. In later tradition the number of icons of Mary attributed to Luke greatly multiplied. The Salus Populi Romani , the Theotokos of Vladimir , the Theotokos Iverskaya of Mount Athos , the Theotokos of Tikhvin , the Theotokos of Smolensk and

2016-510: A vowel or /n s r/ ; final stops were lost, as in γάλα "milk", compared with γάλακτος "of milk" (genitive). Ancient Greek of the classical period also differed in both the inventory and distribution of original PIE phonemes due to numerous sound changes, notably the following: The pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very different from that of Modern Greek . Ancient Greek had long and short vowels ; many diphthongs ; double and single consonants; voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops ; and

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2112-542: Is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting , in the cultures of the Eastern Orthodox , Oriental Orthodox , and Catholic churches. The most common subjects include Jesus , Mary , saints , and angels . Although especially associated with portrait-style images concentrating on one or two main figures, the term also covers most of the religious images in a variety of artistic media produced by Eastern Christianity , including narrative scenes, usually from

2208-418: Is added to stems beginning with consonants, and simply prefixes e (stems beginning with r , however, add er ). The quantitative augment is added to stems beginning with vowels, and involves lengthening the vowel: Some verbs augment irregularly; the most common variation is e → ei . The irregularity can be explained diachronically by the loss of s between vowels, or that of the letter w , which affected

2304-429: Is also proclaimed in the language of colors". Ancient Greek language Ancient Greek ( Ἑλληνῐκή , Hellēnikḗ ; [hellɛːnikɛ́ː] ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek ( c.  1400–1200 BC ), Dark Ages ( c.  1200–800 BC ),

2400-448: Is considered by some linguists to have been closely related to Greek . Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with Armenian (see also Graeco-Armenian ) and Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ). Ancient Greek differs from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and other Indo-European languages in certain ways. In phonotactics , ancient Greek words could end only in

2496-575: Is in a context attributed to the 5th century that the first mention of an image of Mary painted from life appears, though earlier paintings on catacomb walls bear resemblance to modern icons of Mary. Theodorus Lector , in his 6th-century History of the Church 1:1 stated that Eudokia (wife of emperor Theodosius II , d. 460) sent an image of the " Mother of God " named Icon of the Hodegetria from Jerusalem to Pulcheria , daughter of Arcadius ,

2592-403: Is no century between the fourth and the eighth in which there is not some evidence of opposition to images even within the Church". Nonetheless, popular favor for icons guaranteed their continued existence, while no systematic apologia for or against icons, or doctrinal authorization or condemnation of icons yet existed. The use of icons was seriously challenged by Byzantine Imperial authority in

2688-474: Is simple and mundane: Christians lacked land and capital. Art requires both. As soon as they began to acquire land and capital, Christians began to experiment with their own distinctive forms of art". Aside from the legend that Pilate had made an image of Christ, the 4th-century Eusebius of Caesarea , in his Church History , provides a more substantial reference to a "first" icon of Jesus. He relates that King Abgar of Edessa (died c.  50 CE ) sent

2784-499: The Apostle John discovers that one of his followers has had a portrait made of him, and is venerating it: [John] went into the bedchamber, and saw the portrait of an old man crowned with garlands, and lamps and altars set before it. And he called him and said: Lycomedes, what do you mean by this matter of the portrait? Can it be one of thy gods that is painted here? For I see that you are still living in heathen fashion. Later in

2880-679: The Archaic or Epic period ( c.  800–500 BC ), and the Classical period ( c.  500–300 BC ). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers . It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance . This article primarily contains information about

2976-579: The Black Madonna of Częstochowa are examples, and another is in the cathedral on St Thomas Mount , which is believed to be one of the seven painted by Luke the Evangelist and brought to India by Thomas the Apostle . Ethiopia has at least seven more. Bissera V. Pentcheva concludes, "The myth [of Luke painting an icon] was invented in order to support the legitimacy of icon veneration during

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3072-606: The Epic and Classical periods of the language, which are the best-attested periods and considered most typical of Ancient Greek. From the Hellenistic period ( c.  300 BC ), Ancient Greek was followed by Koine Greek , which is regarded as a separate historical stage, though its earliest form closely resembles Attic Greek , and its latest form approaches Medieval Greek . There were several regional dialects of Ancient Greek; Attic Greek developed into Koine. Ancient Greek

3168-638: The Iconoclastic controversy " (8th and 9th centuries, much later than most art historians put it). According to Reformed Baptist pastor John Carpenter, by claiming the existence of a portrait of the Theotokos painted during her lifetime by the evangelist Luke, the iconodules "fabricated evidence for the apostolic origins and divine approval of images." In the period before and during the Iconoclastic Controversy , stories attributing

3264-548: The Palladium (protective image) , the Palladium (classical antiquity) , the acheiropoieta , and various "folk" traditions associated with folk religion . Of these various forms the oldest tradition dates back to before the Christian era among the ancient Greeks. The various "folk" traditions are more poorly documented and often are associated with local folk narratives of uncertain origin. In English, since around 1600,

3360-501: The Pella curse tablet , as Hatzopoulos and other scholars note. Based on the conclusions drawn by several studies and findings such as Pella curse tablet , Emilio Crespo and other scholars suggest that ancient Macedonian was a Northwest Doric dialect , which shares isoglosses with its neighboring Thessalian dialects spoken in northeastern Thessaly . Some have also suggested an Aeolic Greek classification. The Lesbian dialect

3456-603: The epic poems , the Iliad and the Odyssey , and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic and other Classical-era dialects. The origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of a lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between

3552-501: The present , future , and imperfect are imperfective in aspect; the aorist , present perfect , pluperfect and future perfect are perfective in aspect. Most tenses display all four moods and three voices, although there is no future subjunctive or imperative. Also, there is no imperfect subjunctive, optative or imperative. The infinitives and participles correspond to the finite combinations of tense, aspect, and voice. The indicative of past tenses adds (conceptually, at least)

3648-442: The 1400s. They are executed in a post-Byzantine local revival style. On the south wall was a Tree of Jesse , and on the north an elaborate Last Judgement or Μέλλουσα Κρίση. In the dome is Christ Pantocrator surround by angels. A. and J. Stylianou report that the paintings of the dome were already "badly damaged" at the time of their studies in the 1960s and 1970s. The paintings in the narthex are faded due to sunlight, but include

3744-460: The 2nd century. In the icons of Eastern Orthodoxy, and of the early Medieval West, very little room is made for artistic license. Almost everything within the image has a symbolic aspect. Christ, the saints, and the angels all have halos. Angels (and often John the Baptist ) have wings because they are messengers. Figures have consistent facial appearances, hold attributes personal to them, and use

3840-1031: The 5th century BC. Ancient pronunciation cannot be reconstructed with certainty, but Greek from the period is well documented, and there is little disagreement among linguists as to the general nature of the sounds that the letters represent. /oː/ raised to [uː] , probably by the 4th century BC. Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages , is highly inflected. It is highly archaic in its preservation of Proto-Indo-European forms. In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases ( nominative , genitive , dative , accusative , and vocative ), three genders ( masculine , feminine , and neuter ), and three numbers (singular, dual , and plural ). Verbs have four moods ( indicative , imperative , subjunctive , and optative ) and three voices (active, middle, and passive ), as well as three persons (first, second, and third) and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated through seven combinations of tenses and aspect (generally simply called "tenses"):

3936-470: The 8th century identifies Luke the Evangelist as the first icon painter, but this might not reflect historical facts. A general assumption that early Christianity was generally aniconic , opposed to religious imagery in both theory and practice until about 200, has been challenged by Paul Corby Finney's analysis of early Christian writing and material remains (1994). His assumption distinguishes three different sources of attitudes affecting early Christians on

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4032-672: The 8th century. Though by this time opposition to images was strongly entrenched in Judaism and Islam, attribution of the impetus toward an iconoclastic movement in Eastern Orthodoxy to Muslims or Jews "seems to have been highly exaggerated, both by contemporaries and by modern scholars". Though significant in the history of religious doctrine, the Byzantine controversy over images is not seen as of primary importance in Byzantine history; "[f]ew historians still hold it to have been

4128-495: The Archaic period of ancient Greek (see Homeric Greek for more details): Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί' Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε' ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ' ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ' ἐτελείετο βουλή· ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. The beginning of Apology by Plato exemplifies Attic Greek from

4224-468: The Bible or the lives of saints. Icons are most commonly painted on wood panels with egg tempera , but they may also be cast in metal or carved in stone or embroidered on cloth or done in mosaic or fresco work or printed on paper or metal, etc. Comparable images from Western Christianity may be classified as "icons", although "iconic" may also be used to describe the static style of a devotional image. In

4320-569: The Christ child and it is this composite icon that became the one historically known as the Hodegetria. She further states another tradition that when the last Latin Emperor of Constantinople, Baldwin II , fled Constantinople in 1261 he took this original circular portion of the icon with him. This remained in the possession of the Angevin dynasty who had it inserted into a much larger image of Mary and

4416-485: The Christ child, which is presently enshrined above the high altar of the Benedictine Abbey church of Montevergine . This icon was subjected to repeated repainting over the subsequent centuries, so that it is difficult to determine what the original image of Mary's face would have looked like. Guarducci states that in 1950 an ancient image of Mary at the Church of Santa Francesca Romana was determined to be

4512-545: The Dorians. The Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people – Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians (including Athenians), each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, and Cypriot, far from the center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation. One standard formulation for

4608-483: The Gnostic Carpocratians : They also possess images, some of them painted, and others formed from different kinds of material; while they maintain that a likeness of Christ was made by Pilate at that time when Jesus lived among them. They crown these images, and set them up along with the images of the philosophers of the world that is to say, with the images of Pythagoras, and Plato, and Aristotle, and

4704-436: The Greek god of healing, but the description of the standing figure and the woman kneeling in supplication precisely matches images found on coins depicting the bearded emperor Hadrian ( r.  117–138 ) reaching out to a female figure—symbolizing a province —kneeling before him. When asked by Constantia (Emperor Constantine 's half-sister) for an image of Jesus, Eusebius denied the request, replying: "To depict purely

4800-425: The Greek language, the term for icon painting uses the same word as for "writing", and Orthodox sources often translate it into English as icon writing . Eastern Orthodox tradition holds that the production of Christian images dates back to the very early days of Christianity , and that it has been a continuous tradition since then. Modern academic art history considers that, while images may have existed earlier,

4896-636: The Roman Empire probably saw the use of Christian images become very widespread among the faithful, though with great differences from pagan habits. Robin Lane Fox states "By the early fifth century, we know of the ownership of private icons of saints; by c.  480–500 , we can be sure that the inside of a saint's shrine would be adorned with images and votive portraits, a practice which had probably begun earlier." When Constantine himself ( r.  306–337 ) apparently converted to Christianity,

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4992-613: The Western church. Palladia were processed around the walls of besieged cities and sometimes carried into battle. The Eastern Orthodox view of the origin of icons is generally quite different from that of most secular scholars and from some in contemporary Roman Catholic circles: "The Orthodox Church maintains and teaches that the sacred image has existed from the beginning of Christianity", Léonid Ouspensky has written. Accounts that some non-Orthodox writers consider legendary are accepted as history within Eastern Orthodoxy, because they are

5088-550: The aorist. Following Homer 's practice, the augment is sometimes not made in poetry , especially epic poetry. The augment sometimes substitutes for reduplication; see below. Almost all forms of the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect reduplicate the initial syllable of the verb stem. (A few irregular forms of perfect do not reduplicate, whereas a handful of irregular aorists reduplicate.) The three types of reduplication are: Irregular duplication can be understood diachronically. For example, lambanō (root lab ) has

5184-477: The arcade on the south were added a later time, probably in the fifteenth century when the building was under the Latin church. The irregular shape of the dome is perhaps due to damaged sustained during the 1222 Cyprus earthquake . The Church of Christ Antiphonitis is notable for the array of frescoes on the walls and on the pillars. The oldest paintings belong to the end of the twelfth century and are thought to be

5280-419: The augment when it was word-initial. In verbs with a preposition as a prefix, the augment is placed not at the start of the word, but between the preposition and the original verb. For example, προσ(-)βάλλω (I attack) goes to προσ έ βαλoν in the aorist. However compound verbs consisting of a prefix that is not a preposition retain the augment at the start of the word: αὐτο(-)μολῶ goes to ηὐ τομόλησα in

5376-561: The church showing the Virgin Mary and dating to the fifteenth century was located in Athens and returned to Cyprus on 14 September 1998. The church is notable for the graffiti and pilgrim records scratched into the lower frescoes during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are predominantly in Greek but a few are also in the Ottoman Turkish alphabet . They are unique documents of popular history, telling us about

5472-593: The creation of icons to the New Testament period greatly increased, with several apostles and even Mary herself believed to have acted as the artist or commissioner of images (also embroidered in the case of Mary). There was a continuing opposition to images and their misuse within Christianity from very early times. "Whenever images threatened to gain undue influence within the church, theologians have sought to strip them of their power". Further, "there

5568-615: The dialect of Sparta ), and Northern Peloponnesus Doric (including Corinthian ). All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, and these colonies generally developed local characteristics, often under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects. After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BC, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed, largely based on Attic Greek , but with influence from other dialects. This dialect slowly replaced most of

5664-530: The dialects is: West vs. non-West Greek is the strongest-marked and earliest division, with non-West in subsets of Ionic-Attic (or Attic-Ionic) and Aeolic vs. Arcadocypriot, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot vs. Ionic-Attic. Often non-West is called 'East Greek'. Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age. Boeotian Greek had come under

5760-567: The divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period. They have the same general outline but differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean Greek , but its relationship to the historical dialects and the historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups already existed in some form. Scholars assume that major Ancient Greek period dialect groups developed not later than 1120 BC, at

5856-701: The doors of which are dated 1650, thus during the reign of Mehmed IV when the tax burden appears to have been lightened. The majority of the icons were of the seventeenth century with one of the Archangel Michael dated 1659. The iconostasis was removed after 1975 and some individual icons panels from it were found with a private collector in the Netherlands. The Government of Cyprus engaged in legal action to secure their restitution. Four icons were repatriated in September, 2013. Separately, an icon from

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5952-537: The earliest depictions of Christ, Mary and saints therefore comes from wall-paintings, mosaics and some carvings. They are realistic in appearance, in contrast to the later stylization. They are broadly similar in style, though often much superior in quality, to the mummy portraits done in wax ( encaustic ) and found at Fayyum in Egypt. As can be judged from such items, the first depictions of Jesus were generic, rather than portrait images, generally representing him as

6048-517: The elements a few Christian writers criticized in pagan art—the ability to imitate life. The writers mostly criticized pagan works of art for pointing to false gods, thus encouraging idolatry. Statues in the round were avoided as being too close to the principal artistic focus of pagan cult practices, as they have continued to be (with some small-scale exceptions) throughout the history of Eastern Christianity . Nilus of Sinai ( d. c.  430 ), in his Letter to Heliodorus Silentiarius , records

6144-546: The former emperor and father of Theodosius II. The image was specified to have been "painted by the Apostle Luke ." Margherita Guarducci relates a tradition that the original icon of Mary attributed to Luke, sent by Eudokia to Pulcheria from Palestine, was a large circular icon only of her head. When the icon arrived in Constantinople it was fitted in as the head into a very large rectangular icon of her holding

6240-532: The greatest issue of the period". The Iconoclastic period began when images were banned by Emperor Leo III the Isaurian sometime between 726 and 730. Under his son Constantine V , a council forbidding image veneration was held at Hieria near Constantinople in 754. Image veneration was later reinstated by the Empress Regent Irene , under whom another council was held reversing the decisions of

6336-480: The human form of Christ before its transformation, on the other hand, is to break the commandment of God and to fall into pagan error." Hence Jaroslav Pelikan calls Eusebius "the father of iconoclasm". After the emperor Constantine I extended official toleration of Christianity within the Roman Empire in 313, huge numbers of pagans became converts. This period of the Historiography of Christianization of

6432-555: The illiterate faithful during most of the history of Christendom . Thus, icons are words in painting; they refer to the history of salvation and to its manifestation in concrete persons. In the Orthodox Church, "icons have always been understood as a visible gospel, as a testimony to the great things given man by God the incarnate Logos". In the Council of 860 it was stated that "all that is uttered in words written in syllables

6528-444: The image as a memorial of the healing of the woman with an issue of blood by Jesus (Luke 8:43–48), because it depicted a standing man wearing a double cloak and with arm outstretched, and a woman kneeling before him with arms reaching out as if in supplication. John Francis Wilson suggests the possibility that this refers to a pagan bronze statue whose true identity had been forgotten. Some have thought it to represent Aesculapius ,

6624-526: The importance of Icons" was part of the church from its very beginning, and has never changed, although explanations of their importance may have developed over time. This is because icon painting is rooted in the theology of the Incarnation (Christ being the eikon of God) which did not change, though its subsequent clarification within the Church occurred over the period of the first seven Ecumenical Councils. Icons also served as tools of edification for

6720-515: The issue: "first that humans could have a direct vision of God; second that they could not; and, third, that although humans could see God they were best advised not to look, and were strictly forbidden to represent what they had seen". These derived respectively from Greek and Near Eastern pagan religions, from Ancient Greek philosophy, and from the Jewish tradition and the Old Testament. Of

6816-403: The local populations and their oral traditions. Gradually, paintings of Jesus took on characteristics of portrait images. At this time the manner of depicting Jesus was not yet uniform, and there was some controversy over which of the two most common icons was to be favored. The first or "Semitic" form showed Jesus with short and "frizzy" hair; the second showed a bearded Jesus with hair parted in

6912-406: The majority of his subjects remained pagans. The Roman Imperial cult of the divinity of the emperor, expressed through the traditional burning of candles and the offering of incense to the emperor's image, was tolerated for a period because it would have been politically dangerous to attempt to suppress it. In the 5th century the courts of justice and municipal buildings of the empire still honoured

7008-411: The middle, the manner in which the god Zeus was depicted. Theodorus Lector remarked that of the two, the one with short and frizzy hair was "more authentic". To support his assertion, he relates a story (excerpted by John of Damascus) that a pagan commissioned to paint an image of Jesus used the "Zeus" form instead of the "Semitic" form, and that as punishment his hands withered. Though their development

7104-508: The older dialects, although the Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language , which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek . By about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosed into Medieval Greek . Phrygian is an extinct Indo-European language of West and Central Anatolia , which

7200-480: The only permissible Roman state religion under Theodosius I , Christian art began to change not only in quality and sophistication, but also in nature. This was in no small part due to Christians being free for the first time to express their faith openly without persecution from the state, in addition to the faith spreading to the non-poor segments of society. Paintings of martyrs and their feats began to appear, and early writers commented on their lifelike effect, one of

7296-940: The ordinary Cypriots who visited the building. Among the dates visible are 1803, 1888, 1891, 1896, 1902, 1903, 1904, 1910, 1911, 1919, 1930 and 1958. In the 1930s, the Church of Christ Antiphonitis was the property of Kykkos Monastery. Presently it is classed as a museum and appears in the List of museums in Northern Cyprus . Antiphonitis monastery (Ιερά Μονή Αρχαγγέλου Αντιφωνητού) is listed as monastery of Church of Cyprus on its official website. Icon Autocephaly recognized by some autocephalous Churches de jure : Autocephaly and canonicity recognized by Constantinople and 3 other autocephalous Churches: Spiritual independence recognized by Georgian Orthodox Church: Semi-Autonomous: An icon (from Ancient Greek εἰκών ( eikṓn )  'image, resemblance')

7392-646: The passage John says, "But this that you have now done is childish and imperfect: you have drawn a dead likeness of the dead." At least some of the hierarchy of the Christian churches still strictly opposed icons in the early 4th century. At the Spanish non-ecumenical Synod of Elvira ( c.  305 ) bishops concluded, "Pictures are not to be placed in churches, so that they do not become objects of worship and adoration". Bishop Epiphanius of Salamis , wrote his letter 51 to John, Bishop of Jerusalem ( c.  394 ) in which he recounted how he tore down an image in

7488-487: The perfect stem eilēpha (not * lelēpha ) because it was originally slambanō , with perfect seslēpha , becoming eilēpha through compensatory lengthening. Reduplication is also visible in the present tense stems of certain verbs. These stems add a syllable consisting of the root's initial consonant followed by i . A nasal stop appears after the reduplication in some verbs. The earliest extant examples of ancient Greek writing ( c.  1450 BC ) are in

7584-400: The performance of miracles". Cyril Mango writes, "In the post-Justinianic period the icon assumes an ever increasing role in popular devotion, and there is a proliferation of miracle stories connected with icons, some of them rather shocking to our eyes". However, the earlier references by Eusebius and Irenaeus indicate veneration of images and reported miracles associated with them as early as

7680-527: The portrait of the reigning emperor in this way. In 425 Philostorgius , an allegedly Arian Christian, charged the Orthodox Christians in Constantinople with idolatry because they still honored the image of the emperor Constantine the Great in this way. Dix notes that this occurred more than a century before the first extant reference to a similar honouring of the image of Jesus or of his apostles or saints known today, but that it would seem

7776-470: The previous iconoclast council and taking its title as Seventh Ecumenical Council . The council anathemized all who hold to iconoclasm, i.e. those who held that veneration of images constitutes idolatry. Then the ban was enforced again by Leo V in 815. Finally, icon veneration was decisively restored by Empress Regent Theodora in 843 at the Council of Constantinople . From then on all Byzantine coins had

7872-463: The question of the appropriateness of images. Since then, icons have had a great continuity of style and subject, far greater than in the icons of the Western church . At the same time there have been change and development. Pre-Christian religions had produced and used art works. Statues and paintings of various gods and deities were regularly worshiped and venerated. It is unclear when Christians took up such activities. Christian tradition dating from

7968-459: The rest. They have also other modes of honouring these images, after the same manner of the Gentiles [pagans]. On the other hand, Irenaeus does not speak critically of icons or portraits in a general sense—only of certain gnostic sectarians' use of icons. Another criticism of image veneration appears in the non-canonical 2nd-century Acts of John (generally considered a gnostic work), in which

8064-556: The saint resembled the "more ancient" images of him—presumably the 7th-century mosaics still in Hagios Demetrios . Another, an African bishop, had been rescued from Arab slavery by a young soldier called Demetrios, who told him to go to his house in Thessaloniki. Having discovered that most young soldiers in the city seemed to be called Demetrios, he gave up and went to the largest church in the city, to find his rescuer on

8160-517: The syllabic script Linear B . Beginning in the 8th century BC, however, the Greek alphabet became standard, albeit with some variation among dialects. Early texts are written in boustrophedon style, but left-to-right became standard during the classic period. Modern editions of ancient Greek texts are usually written with accents and breathing marks , interword spacing , modern punctuation , and sometimes mixed case , but these were all introduced later. The beginning of Homer 's Iliad exemplifies

8256-575: The three, Finney concludes that "overall, Israel's aversion to sacred images influenced early Christianity considerably less than the Greek philosophical tradition of invisible deity apophatically defined", so placing less emphasis on the Jewish background of most of the first Christians than most traditional accounts. Finney suggests that "the reasons for the non-appearance of Christian art before 200 have nothing to do with principled aversion to art, with other-worldliness, or with anti-materialism. The truth

8352-467: The time of the Dorian invasions —and that their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BC. The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to the historical Dorians . The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with

8448-492: The tradition can be traced back only as far as the 3rd century, and that the images which survive from Early Christian art often differ greatly from later ones. The icons of later centuries can be linked, often closely, to images from the 5th century onwards, though very few of these survive. Widespread destruction of images occurred during the Byzantine Iconoclasm of 726–842, although this did settle permanently

8544-431: The true appearance of the subject: naturally and especially because of the reluctance to accept mere human productions as embodying anything of the divine, a commonplace of Christian deprecation of man-made " idols ". Like icons believed to be painted directly from the live subject, they therefore acted as important references for other images in the tradition. Beside the developed legend of the mandylion or Image of Edessa

8640-413: The wall. During this period the church began to discourage all non-religious human images—the Emperor and donor figures counting as religious. This became largely effective, so that most of the population would only ever see religious images and those of the ruling class. The word icon referred to any and all images, not just religious ones, but there was barely a need for a separate word for these. It

8736-563: The word palladium has been used figuratively to mean anything believed to provide protection or safety, and in particular in Christian contexts a sacred relic or icon believed to have a protective role in military contexts for a whole city, people or nation. Such beliefs first become prominent in the Eastern Churches in the period after the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I , and later spread to

8832-480: Was Aeolic. For example, fragments of the works of the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos are in Aeolian. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric (including Cretan Doric ), Southern Peloponnesus Doric (including Laconian ,

8928-452: Was a pluricentric language , divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic , Aeolic , Arcadocypriot , and Doric , many of them with several subdivisions. Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms in literature , while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are also several historical forms. Homeric Greek is a literary form of Archaic Greek (derived primarily from Ionic and Aeolic) used in

9024-400: Was a fief belonging to his family, that his maternal grandmother Isabella Perez Fabricius founded the monastery of Antifonite and that his brother John (who had become a monk under the name Hilarion) died there. The church—built on the site of a natural spring at the head of a valley—was constructed in the twelfth century and belonged originally to a Greek Orthodox monastery. It consists of

9120-447: Was gradual, it is possible to date the full-blown appearance and general ecclesiastical (as opposed to simply popular or local) acceptance of Christian images as venerated and miracle-working objects to the 6th century, when, as Hans Belting writes, "we first hear of the church's use of religious images". "As we reach the second half of the sixth century, we find that images are attracting direct veneration and some of them are credited with

9216-668: Was the tale of the Veil of Veronica , whose very name signifies "true icon" or "true image", the fear of a "false image" remaining strong. Although there are earlier records of their use, no panel icons earlier than the few from the 6th century preserved at the Greek Orthodox Saint Catherine's Monastery in Egypt survive, as the other examples in Rome have all been drastically over-painted. The surviving evidence for

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