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POETRY
dispatches from the war against the world
BETWEEN POETRY AND PROSE
PROSE
houses for the dead
"Thank you very much for your respect toward my country and my people. As an Albanian I feel happy when foreign poets respect my country. All the best to you."
Erketa Premti
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AN ALBANIAN IKON ?
This unique and rustic ikon was bought in 1994 on the Greek island of Corfu for the sum of $300.
In fairly good condition, it was painted on a small wooden board, somewhat cracked and bowed, and looking like a piece of old, thick shelving. |
After some enquiries on my return home I found that this ikon was almost certainly not from a church, but was an unusual example of a domestic ikon depicting the fifth century Saint Simeon Stylites on his column, Saint Stylianos holding a child, and the second century Saint Onouphrios, who lived in the desert for forty years 'clad only in his hair'.
Saint Simeon Stylites (or The Elder) is quite well known in the West - if only from Luis Buñuel's famous film Simon of the Desert. He spent many years on an increasingly-higher column or pillar to escape ever more from the World - which in his case was largely the adulation of followers. He is sometimes depicted on ikons with other Stylite saints such as Daniel and Alipius, or the other Simeon "of the Wonderful Mountain".
The central figure is the main purpose of the ikon. Stylianos was an ascetic from Paphlagonia who was confused with the Stylite Saint Alipius, and was credited with conferring fertility to barren couples. On his right Saint Simeon Stylites stands - partly because the epithet Stylites is similar to, and reinforces, Stylianos, and partly because he was considered a powerful intercessor.
However, Saint Onouphrios is present in order to make the ikon really powerful and further reinforce the power of the legendary Stylianos - for Saint Onouphrios is credited with promising - just before he was carried up into heaven - that all pure prayers addressed through him would be answered.
Onouphrios, celebrated throughout the northern Mediterranean - even as far east as Sardinia - had an important shrine in Berat in southern Albania.
Thus it is possible that this unprovenanced ikon came from Albania with refugees who, since 1991, have paid large sums in cash or in kind to be landed by night on the island of Corfu only a couple of miles off the Albanian coast. It is unlikely to come from "Northern Epirus" which used to be southern Albania before it was seized and ethnically cleansed by the Greeks in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
The year after it was brought to Ireland it was stolen - perhaps not for the first time in its history, and its whereabouts remains unknown.
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