The Power of Amusement and the Amusement of Power: The Princely Frescoes of St Sophia, Kiev, and their Connections to the Byzantine World

Author(s):  
Elena Boeck

The largest Orthodox church of the eleventh century, St. Sophia of Kiev, challenges the boundaries between the sacred and profane spheres. It unites under one roof carefully constructed representations of the sounds, movements, amusements and merriments of the Byzantine court and invocations of the stillness, silence and tears of Orthodox piety. These two irreconcilable realms were brought into dialogue for prince Jaroslav the ‘Wise’ (died 1054), a second-generation Christian who prevailed over his rivals after decades of fratricidal conflict. While in Byzantium these two spheres had long ago established a clear modus vivendi, in Iaroslav’s Rus’ their relationship was just being formulated. St. Sophia of Kiev had to adapt to its prince and Christian decorum had to accommodate to the princely patron.

1947 ◽  
Vol 37 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 70-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Hussey

John Mauropous, an eleventh-century Metropolitan of Euchaïta, has long been commemorated in the service books of the Orthodox Church. The Synaxarion for the Office of Orthros on 30th January, the day dedicated to the Three Fathers, St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian, and St. John Chrysostom, tells how the festival was instituted by Mauropous and describes him as ‘the well-known John, a man of great repute and well-versed in the learning of the Hellenes, as his writings show, and moreover one who has attained to the highest virtue’. In western Europe something was known of him certainly as early as the end of the sixteenth century; his iambic poems were published for the first time by an Englishman in 1610, and his ‘Vita S. Dorothei’ in the Acta Sanctorum in 1695. But it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that scholars were really able to form some idea of the character and achievement of this Metropolitan of Euchaïta. Particularly important were two publications: Sathas' edition in 1876 of Michael Psellus' oration on John, and Paul de Lagarde's edition in 1882 of some of John's own writings. This last contained not only the works already printed, but a number of hitherto unpublished sermons and letters, together with the constitution of the Faculty of Law in the University of Constantinople, and a short introduction containing part of an etymological poem. But there remained, and still remains, one significant omission: John's canons have been almost consistently neglected.


1990 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Constance B. Bouchard

Monastic renewal of the eleventh century used to be treated by scholars as essentially Cluniac : Cluny, as the head of an order totalling hundreds of houses, spread its reform across Europe as the tide spreads across a beach. More recently, since Kassius Hallinger demonstrated the existence of multiple centres of reform in his classic study of Gorze, it has become common to draw distinctions between ‘Cluniac’ and ‘young’ (or ‘second-generation’) Cluniac influences, and Cluny's ‘order’ has been redefined to include only priories directly dependent on Cluny's abbot, encompassing not hundreds of houses but only dozens. However, Cluny's order is still commonly treated as something new and unprecedented and Cluniac reform in the tenth and eleventh centuries as prefiguring the monastic renewal of the High Middle Ages.


Author(s):  
Frank Desby

Little has been written about the considerable changes in Greek Orthodox sacred music in America. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the two most common types of Greek music performed were Byzantine and demotika. Byzantine chants were performed as part of the Greek Orthodox Liturgy. However, in America priests and others began to compose new liturgical music, some of which abandoned the traditional Byzantine modes and single vocal line. The new music with European scales was often presented in a westernized style through choirs accompanied by organs. Based at St. Sophia Cathedral in Los Angeles, author Frank Desby (1922-1992) was part of a second generation of academically trained Greek Orthodox Church musicians who created the westernized body of liturgical music.


2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (14) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
SHERRY BOSCHERT
Keyword(s):  

1986 ◽  
Vol 31 (12) ◽  
pp. 973-974
Author(s):  
Eugene E. Levitt
Keyword(s):  

1986 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 355-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Shibley Hyde
Keyword(s):  

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