Theodore and George

Consideration is given to the two major military saints to be associated with dragon fights, Theodore Tyron and George. In contrast to the majority of their saintly peers, they fight their dragons in a duly martial fashion. However, within the span of their narratives, the physical fight itself is typically brief, desultory, and anticlimactic, a coda to a more spiritual battle that has already been won. The two saints’ traditions are contexualized in different ways. The structure and motifs of a fourteenth-century AD account of Theodore’s fight against the Dragon of King Samuel’s City is aligned with those of the dragon fight of a roughly contemporary Byzantine romance, Callimachus and Chrysorrhoe. Whilst the earliest extant narrative of George’s fight against his dragon is relatively late, eleventh-century AD, what today survives as the principal living relic of his dragon-fight, its iconography, can be shown to have its roots in the very beginning of classical antiquity.

The Icons of Military Saints in Rus’. An Attempt at Classifying Iconographic Types from before the Beginning of the 17th Century

Depictions of military martyrs were among the most popular subjects in icon painting in Rus’. Between the 11th and the 17th century local workshops adopted canonical Byzantine models and gradually developed and changed them depending on local factors and conditions. The present article attempts to classify the most common iconographic types and to describe the dynamic of the changes in the iconographic canon on the basis of a qualitative and quantitative analysis of extant and known works.

Figures of mounted warrior saints in medieval Crete. The representation of the equestrian Saint George “Thalassoperatis” at Diavaide in Heraklion

In the church of Saint George Sfakiotis, built on the outskirts of the settlement Diavaide in the Perfecture of Heraklion in Crete, narrative interest is focused on the large painting with the mounted figures of the military saints George and Demetrios. Saint George is shown together with the young pillion rider, whereas the element of water on the lower part of the scene establishes a connection between the episode of the slave?s release and a rarer variant according to which the liberator saint crosses the sea (?thalassoperatis?, trans. he who crosses the sea). The iconographic and stylistic analysis of the representation of Saint George as well that of Saint Demetrios at Diaviade reflects the artistic environment of the Eastern Mediterranean, possibly that of Cyprus, where images of equestrian military saints form part of the tradition of the island.