The Tower of Donation

If, in the imagination, you cancel the houses behind the medieval tower of Ouranoupoli – which the restaurant owners, family pensions and souvenir shops of this charming little resort village would, of course, extremely dislike – then you will have an idea how lonely this tower stood here on the beach for seven hundred years, in the chain of several other Byzantine watchtowers protecting the coasts of Chalkidiki and Thessaly from Saracen and Catalan pirates. The construction of the coastal fortification system was initiated by the Palaiologos dynasty, which occupied the throne of Constantinople in 1261, expelling the Venetian invaders of 1204, reuniting the empire for the last time, and, not least, giving new glow to Byzantine art. The Palaiologos Renaissance created a multitude of wonderful frescoes and icons, and, when exported to Italy, served as a starting point for Giotto and Duccio to start Italian Renaissance painting.

The tower of Ouranoupoli was probably built as early as the late 1200s, but the first written record of it only survives from 1379, when “Ioannes Palaiologos, Despot of Thessaloniki” stayed here and granted tax relief to the area. It is not clear who this Ioannes was. In this period, “despot” means an emperor’s son who is officially declared heir to the throne and is given the rule of an important province, such as Thessaloniki. In 1379, however, the despot of Thessaloniki, that is, the heir to the throne and local governor, was the later Emperor Manuel II, who held this office from 1376 until his accession to the throne in 1391. His son, the later Emperor John VIII – a participant in the Council of Florence-Ferrara, and a model for Piero della Francesca and Benozzo Gozzoli – was only seven years old in 1379, so he could not be it. As this Ioannes is mentioned on the Greek net only in connection with Ouranoupoli, and other Byzantine historical sites are silent about him, it is possible that he is just a long-surviving error of the historical literature. But tax relief, whoever granted it, suggests that the central government admitted that they could not pay the garrison, and in return they did not demand anything from what the soldiers produced for themselves.

Ouranoupoli is today the last settlement before the border of the monastic republic of Mount Athos. The Holy Mountain rises right behind the tower. From here, the ship will leave for the port of the Holy Mountain tomorrow morning, after the passengers have passed the free COVID quick test, because the PCR test required in advance for the visa of Athos, if done outside Greece, is not accepted by the monasteries.

Barely a hundred years ago, however, this region was also owned by Athos, or rather by Vatopedi Monastery. The area around the solitary tower was uninhabited, but the monks cultivated it. It was called Prosforion, “Donations”, hence the name of the tower: Πύργος Προσφορίου, the Tower of Donation.

Both the region and the name changed in the 1920s, when the Greek government settled thousands of Pontic Greeks, expelled from northeastern Turkey, on the lands around Thessaloniki, which were partly uninhabited and partly taken from the Muslims displaced into Turkey. By government decree, the estates of the monasteries of Mount Athos were also shortened, and the borders of the monastic republic pushed inwards. In the lands of the Prosforion, all the way to the tower, the town of Ouranopoli was established.

The tower in 1967, from the excellent Athos blog

The eponymous Uranopolis, the city of heaven, was founded in 316 BC by Alexarchos, brother of King Kassander of Macedonia. Not exactly here, but somewhere around here, on the Chalkidiki peninsula. He intended it as a kind of ideal city, led by himself as the living incarnation of the Sun God. He even created for it a dialect of its own, about which the philosopher Heraclid of Lembos wrote that even the Pythian Apollo would not have been able to understand it. Incidentally, this phenomenon returned in the 1920s with the dialect of the Pontic Greeks, which had developed independently of Athenian Greek for three thousand years, so that they are mutually incomprehensible to each other, although the descendants of the settlers already speak Athenian Greek as well. Alexarchos and his successors also minted their own money in Uranopolis, which is now a sought-after treasure for numismatics. One side shows the Sun, the celestial alter ego of the ruler, and the other Aphrodite Urania, sitting on a sphere of heaven, with a star on her peaked cap.

In the 1920s, the tower also received new occupants, the British-Australian Lochs. Sydney Loch, wounded at Gallipoli, and his wife, Joice NanKivell, earned their living as freelance journalists, covering the misery in the aftermath of the war from Ireland through Eastern Poland and Romania to Greece, and helping those in need everywhere. In newly founded Ouranoupoli, they organized medical care for the refugees, as well as a traditional carpet-waving cooperative, which remained the main source of income for the locals until the tourist boom of the 1970s. Sydney died in 1955, and Joice in 1982. They both rest in the cemetery of the town, and locals still refer to them as Κύριε and Κυρία, the Lord and the Lady.

Today there is a local history museum in the tower. According to its schedule, it is open from half past nine until three in the afternoon, but in fact it is just as aleatorical as anything else here in Greece. Gergely Nacsinák, the author of the Hungarian travel guide of Athos, who has been visiting the Holy Mountain for more than twenty years as an Orthodox priest, and whose friendship has made it possible to me to be here, says he has never been able to get in there.

There are many iconic shops and restaurants on the main street leading to the tower. The uncritical interior decoration of the Kritikos tavern basically focuses on the glorification of the great pillar of orthodox, Vladimir Putin, with a series of apocryphal icons that could have been included in our previous selection.

Much more heartwarming is the confectionary run by – nomen est omen – Uncle Sekeroglu, that is, Sugar’s Son. His father, who had fled Anatolia, was the first baker of the community, and Uncle Sekeroglu has carried on his business, expanding it step by step to today’s imposing bakery and confectionery shop. He is past eighty, but he still gets up at four a.m. to sell fresh bread at the six a.m. opening. Then come the puff pastry for breakfast, and then the cakes. And now, as it is already hot and tourist are coming, he stays “open a little longer, until ten in the evening”.

Pomegranate and iron thrush. The Sevruguin legacy in the Matenadaran

Who could tell the nationality of Antoine Sevruguin? Born in Tehran from a Russian diplomat and the daughter of a Georgian aristocratic family, he studied photography in Tiflis in the 1860s just like other great Caucasian phographers, Alexander Roinashvili and Dmitry Ermakov did, but he put his knowledge to use in Persia, where he became a cour photographer for Naser al-Din Shah. He even taught the shah and the court aristocracy how to make photos, which resulted in a series of private photos from the aristocratic harems. He was given a Persian noble rank and he photographed the peoples of Persia for decades, but used a French name throughout to emphasize his independence. It was not until 2015 that his Armenian origins became known when his grandson, Emmanuel Sevrugian, a German citizen, donated the family legacy of Antonine and his son André to the Matenadaran Institute of Armenian Manuscripts in Yerevan.

Antoine Sevruguin’s family around 1900. Sitting: Antoine, his second daughter Olga, his wife Louise, his first daughter Marie. Standing: his two sons André and Sasha, and his brother Emmanuel

Antoine Sevruguin took nearly seven thousand photographs of the peoples of late 19th-century Persia, of Persians, Turks, Kurds, and the mountain tribes of the Zagros. Nowadays, when one makes so many digital shots in a ten-days Persian journey, this number seems small, but it was not when each glass negative was the only end product of a well-prepared situation of a laborious expedition. Not to mention the quality of Sevruguin’s photos, the personal encounter and “oriental charm” flowing from them.

At the recently opened exhibition in the Matenadaran, the Sevruguin/Sevrugian legacy is accompanied by only a few photos. Almost metaphorically, the exhibition is opened by two late 19th-century iron figures in the same glass cube: a pomegranate, a symbol of the Armenians, and an iron thrush, about which I have already written – but Borges had also told so – that it is a symbolic bird for the Persians.

Much of the legacy on display is paper: letters, documents, and 19th-century printed books or manuscripts, with the big-eyed, naive, child-drawing-like figures typical of the late Qajar era.

The story of Yusuf and Zuleika (the biblical Joseph and Potiphar’s wife), 1841

And some personal items from the same period: sideboard decorations, cushions, plates with the symbol of Persia, the sun and the lion. The little that a family finds worth taking with them as a keepsake into the emigration.

I will write more about Antoine Sevruguin’s photos, the unique pictorial chronicle of old Persia, in a next post, with lots of illustrations.

Persian family sleeping under a table, with a copper brazier hidden under the same table, ca. 1880-90

Manure collectors, ca. 1880

Women from Lorestan (Zagros Mountains), ca. 1880-90

Demonstration in Yerevan

As we arrive in Yerevan and would turn to Martiros Saryan Avenue with the minibus, a police car blocks our way. We have to make a large detour to the hotel. “What was here?” I ask the receptionist. “A demonstration. It was over ten minutes ago.” “Why did they protest?” “Well…” he tries to begin at something understandable to the Western visitor, “against the government. Low salaries and stuff.” “Against the Pashinyan government? Because they lost the war?” I crack it in medias res. “Of course”, he says with relief that he is not talking to a Martian.

The next day, as we are heading back from Matenadaran, the manuscript institute, to the downtown, all the main street is blocked by a jam. We can clearly hear the sounds of a demonstration in the center. We set off on foot. The intersection of Mashtots and Sayat Nova avenues is blocked by a mass of tents and flags, with groups of black crows drinking or excitedly crouching under various place names. In a circle around them, a multitude of policemen and riot police are having coffee, with their vehicles turning toward the intersection. “What is going on here?” I ask one of the cops. “Unfortunately we cannot comment, sir”, he smiles at me. I go to a crow with an armband, promoted into a peacock walking up and down between the flags. “What’s happening?” “We will overthrow the government. Pashinyan is a traitor.” “Why is he a traitor?” “Because he is a traitor”, he says and turns away from me.

A little bit after the intersection we sit down under old trees in a pub’s garden. The waitress is an Armenian from Murmansk. Some peoples can be there everywhere. Last year I was in Viiborg, still full of the wounds of the 1940 Winter War, where three Armenian restaurants lined up on the same street. “What is going on?” I hint toward the intersection. “A revolution”, she declares simply. “Against the government? But they too came to power in a revolution”, I recall the day of 8 May, four years ago, when we were waiting in the garden of the monastery of Noravank, whether the post-communist Republican Party, led by Serzh Sargsyan, would accept the election victory of the Armenian revolution led by Nikol Pashinyan. The Armenian visitors gathered around portable radios, and when the news was announced, everyone cheered and applauded. A young priest came to us, asking where we had come from, and then ushered us into the temple and blessed us all in the occasion of the great event.

“Yes”, the girl says, “but so many young people died in the war. Now their relatives rally there”, she nods toward the demonstration resounding with beautiful Armenian patriotic songs. “But they were not killed by Pashinyan, but rather by the Turks”, I try to adopt rationality. “Yes, but he sent them to the front.” Victory justifies everything, defeat questions everything. Had Pashinyan won in Karabakh, all the sacrifices would have been worth it, while by losing, he became a butcher of the youth. One-bit thinking is not the exclusive property of Hungarian voters.

The Pashinyan government is now in a hole. His pro-European liberal policy of independence has provoked resentment from the Russian leadership, while the country can only exist with Russian support in the grip of Turkey and Azerbaijan. In 2021, the Russians watched idly as Azerbaijan recaptured nearly half of Karabakh and the surrounding territories, and this was a serious disciplinary message. The Russian leadership is now clearly expecting – and certainly promoting – the Armenian people to recall themselves the pro-Russian government replaced four years ago. And the Armenian population seems to understand the message. During the current war in Ukraine, no Ukrainian flag can be seen, while Russian flags and pro-Russian inscriptions occasionally do appear. This is in a sharp contrast to how neighboring Georgia, in spite of their pro-Russian government, is full of Ukrainian flags, inscriptions and sings of standing up for the Ukrainians.

Русский корабль, иди нахуй

Demonstration against the war in front of the Russian Embassy, organized by the Russians and Ukrainians living in Brussels.

Svaneti 1. Stones

ა

I am Michael. Saint Michael, archangel. One of the seven who stand in the glorious presence of the Lord, always ready to serve Him (Tob 12:15). I am from the village of Lahili, the gorge of Latali, from the solitary Church of the Archangel of Mkheri standing on a hilltop above the gorge, opposite the village.

I am an icon, molded of silver, sheathed with gold, in the custom of the valley of Svaneti, where paint is rarer than silver, and brush than hammer, and therefore the Byzantine icons brought from the south are here imitated in silver and gold, with such abundance, that even today they fill the ninety-four churches in the valley and the surrounding mountains.

If someone should butt in with, how can I be an archangel and an icon at the same time, he is most certainly a Latin heretic raised on the breast of vain reasoning. They, indeed, have separated the image and the holy person depicted on it since their Council of Trent, asserting that veneration is only due to the latter. But an Orthodox believer does not waste his time with such hairsplitting ontology. For the khoros of the venerable Second Council of Nicaea authorizing the veneration of the holy images states that “the honor accorded to the image passes over to its prototype, and whoever venerate the image venerate in it the reality of what is there represented.” I am therefore Saint Michael, an archangel who appears to the believer as if through a pane of glass, in the form of this icon, for veneration and to anticipate heavenly realities.

It is now eight centuries since I have protected the village of Lahili, the gorge of Latali, the mount of Mkheri, the valley of Svaneti and the whole of Georgia against evil, which ceaselessly attacks from all sides, so there is plenty of work. This was beseeched of me by the Deacon Abram, way back in the golden age of Georgia, in the time of King Giorgi Laska. Whosoever wants to read of this, it is written on my back, or at least I think it is still there, because even an archangel cannot look upon his own backside.

ქ. წმიდაო მთავარანგელოზო მუხერისაო, ჴელთუქმარო, ადიდენ მეფენი ბაგრატუნიანნი, და დადიანი, და დიდებულნი და ერთობილი საქართველო და ერთობილნი სუანნი და ჴევი ლატალისა; და აღაშენე მაშენებელი შენი სოფელი ლაილისა და ყოველნი მადიდებელნი შენნი, ამენ მე მამასახლისსა ცოდვილსა და დეკანოზსა აბრამს შეუნდკენ ღმერთმან

Oh Holy Archangel of M(u)kheri, not made by human hand, glorify the Bagrationi kings, and Dadiani and the nobles and united Georgia and the united Svans and the Latali ravine and build your building village of La(h)ili and all who praise thee. Amen. Oh God, forgive me, the sinful elder and deacon Abram.

The 12th-century Church of the Holy Archangel in Mkheri and the Latali Gorge

Truly it was a glorious and rare moment in the history of Georgia when I alone was not tasked with the protection of the country, but was also joined in this by the king and the nobles, and the province of Svaneti, from its lord Prince Dadiani down to the last Svan village, was united. It was such a long time ago, that maybe it was, anyway, not so.

I was created by the icon writer Irakli up here in St. Jonah’s monastery in Yenashi. Are you struck by the term? We, the Orthodox, name the maker of holy icons as an icon writer, ხატმწერი khat^hmc^heri: he is the one who writes, წერს c^hers, and not paints, ხატავს khat^havs the ხატი khat^hi, image, like the მხატვარი mkhat^hvari, the painter. There are many reasons for this. On the one hand, this is how we took the term from the Greek, where the maker of the icon is also called εἰκονόγραφος, icon writer, although today this simply means an illustrator, and our master is rather called ἁγιόγραφος, the writer of the holy image. It is true that in the Greek there has never been any separate term for painting and writing, and the painter of secular images has also been called ζωγράφος, “a writer after life”. But the Russians also call him this, an иконописец, with the composition of икона and писать, while they call the ordinary painter a художник, in which someone who has lived for as many centuries as me, still clearly feels the ancient Proto-Germanic term of *handu-gaz, “working with the hand”. True, the icon writer also creates the icon with the hand, even the so-called нерукотворный, “not-made-by-human-hand” icon. But the decisive moment is not this, but the spiritual prototype he sees in his mind or soul and writes on the icon panel, like the writer the text, and unlike the ordinary painter who duplicates on the panel or canvas what he sees, saw or could see with his bodily eyes. This is the intellectual surplus in “writing”, as compared to “representation”. Both create visual signs, but while mere images represent themselves, the characters – just like the icons – point beyond themselves to the meanings of a higher reality. Here I pray the over-learnt egghead Western heretical readers not to bring up the fact that “mere images” are also symbols. I have also read Cassirer on symbolic forms, I know what they are talking about, but I pray them try to understand what I am talking about. Of course, that would take humility, which is not a characteristic of the heretics.

The 12th-century church of the monastery of St. Jonas in Yenashi, and a monk in front of its Holy Archangels icon

While we are at the Warburg school, everyone remembers what Wittkower wrote in Born under Saturn, that the Renaissance painter tried to break out of the medieval category of “craftsman” – which put painters and apothecaries in the same guild, since both are essentially crushing powders – by trying to prove the spiritual essence of his work in a thousand ways, until in the end all had accepted him as a visionary, a spiritual twin of the writer or the poet. In order to maintain his relatively high social status, the “icon writer” also seeks to keep distance from the artisan-painter by linking his own identity and name to the superior writing and the transcendent reality revealing itself through writing, thus becoming a kin of the writers of the Gospels and other sacred texts, a богослов, a theologian indeed. And he can also justify this with a holy text, since the already mentioned Second Council of Nicaea uses the word περιγράφει, “describe” when authorizing the visual representation of Christ and the saints.

Bees buzzing at the hives of St. Jonah monastery. Recording by Lloyd Dunn

So I was created by icon writer Irakli up there, in the monastery of St. Jonah in Yenashi, where now, eight hundred years after my creation, the great road passes. If you raised your eyebrows at the fact that the icon painter working with paint was called an icon writer, then you may as well know that the icon writer of Svaneti writes the icon, not with a brush, but with a hammer. He takes a straight pine board that has dried for seven years. He inserts narrow beech shims into its reverse to stiffen it and prevent it from twisting, and then he carves a rectangular image field into its obverse. On this he roughly forms the body in molten beeswax to serve as the representation of my bodiless person. Then he hammers a thin plate of the silver that comes from the head of this valley, the mines of Mount Shkara. He stretches it on the board and gently hammers out the outlines of my body along the wax figure. My image largely fills the image field, and where there remains empty space, he fills it out with vegetal ornaments, tendrils and palmettes. And on the frame he hammers tendrils and grid patterns taken from holy manuscripts.

Even so, he does not cover the whole frame with patterns. He leaves the four corners blank, as well as the middle of the frames of the four sides. Why? Because he knew he has only launched the icon on its worldly carreer, but he must also leave space for others so they may add the work of their own hands during the centuries to come.

In the West, it is believed that the image reaches perfection with the final brushstroke, so that nothing can be added or taken away, as the pagan Aristotle says. Such hubris! The icon, as the equally pagan Umberto Eco would say, is an open work, unlike the Western work of art. Ever since it leaves the hands of its maker, it is continuously increasing. Every believer enriches it with his prayers, which radiate back onto his offspring, and augment the value of the icon from generation to generation. God allows miracles to happen through it, which endow it with a sacred history and power. The severed hand of St. John of Damascus is placed on the icon of the Virgin, and henceforth it lives on as part of it, as the third hand of the Virgin. But even damage will become part of the icon’s history. If a Western image is attacked with a knife or a hammer, the owners immediately try to restore it to its original condition, which is considered perfect. However, the icon of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa displays the double sword-slashes of the Tatar bandits on her face so proudly that she even dripped the paint used to repair her wound; and without these scars she can no longer be imagined as the protector of wounded Poland.

And the grateful offspring express their appreciation and gratitude for the icon with a variety of additions. Painted icons are enriched with an icon cover in silver which obscures what is irrelevant and, leaving it free, highlights what is essential: the face and hands of the holy person. And in the icon, which is already made of silver, they insert precious stones for major events and historical turning points. With this in mind, the icon writer leaves empty spaces where the stones will be inserted. The stones are mostly not particularly valuable pieces, rather peasant fairings, but the owners, when meditating before the icon, can accurately recall the story of the insertion of each stone, and these stories make them truly valuable and personal family heirlooms. Have another look at me from this point of view.

This colleague of my age from the Sethi Saint George Church of Mestia has not worked hard for extra additions, although spectacular spaces have been left for them

This 10th or 11th-century Saint George from Labechin’s Church of the Holy Archangels, which, like a true Georgian man, strikes not the dragon but the Emperor Diocletian, persecutor of the Christians, now only boasts one red stone, but its frame, which has not survived, may have held more.

Well, this 11th-century Zestaponi icon of the Crucifixion and Ascension must have worked hard for its money, because in addition to the numerous small and large stones, whole brooches, typical of the 17th century, have been inserted on it over the centuries

In this series, which is just beginning, we will enrich, over the course of a year, the image of Svaneti, which we received almost ten years ago, with thirty-seven stones, thirty-seven stories, corresponding to the 33 letters of the Georgian alphabet, plus the four special letters used in written Svan. Each story will be introduced by a monologue of an old Svan icon, an ancient protector of this valley and Georgia. And the stories will tell you how we wandered and got to know the medieval churches and villages of the Svan mountains, and what we learned about them, about Georgia and about ourselves.