Saint Eudokimos of Vatopedi: Wall Painting at Bărboi Monastery, Iași

Eudokimos the Newly Revealed and the Finding of 1840

Against a blue ground scattered with gold stars stands a full-length, grey-bearded monk. He wears the black hood of the great schema and holds a small icon of the Virgin and Child upright against his chest. The Greek inscription on either side of his halo names him Eudokimos the Newly Revealed (Neophanes), of Vatopedi. This wall painting of Saint Eudokimos of Vatopedi belongs to the nineteenth-century decoration of the Bărboi church in Iași, the former capital of Moldavia. The church stood under the authority of the Athonite monastery of Vatopedi for almost two centuries, and when the image was painted its subject had only lately become a saint. His relics had come to light on Mount Athos in 1840, and the church in which he now appears was built between 1841 and 1844, on the site of a church put up in 1615 by the judge Ursu Bărboi, an ancestor of the Sturdza family.

The Venerable Eudokimos the Newly Revealed, whose relics were found at Vatopedi in 1840, painted among the Athonite saints in the narthex of the Bărboi church, Iași, mid-nineteenth century.

That short interval between the discovery and its representation is what makes the figure worth close attention. It shows a newly recognised Athonite cult reaching a distant dependency of the monastery within a few years, and it shows how the painter turned a story about a finding into a standing portrait.

In 1840 builders at Vatopedi were repairing the church of the old cemetery when they uncovered the remains of a monk. His hands were crossed on his breast over an icon of the Theotokos, and according to the account the remains gave off an ineffable fragrance. Who he had been, when he had lived, what form his ascetic life had taken: no one knew. The fathers of the monastery, with two bishops who happened to be there, gave him the name Eudokimos and moved the relics into the katholikon, where they are still kept. Vatopedi's own historical chronology records the discovery of the relics of Saint Eudokimos the Newly Revealed in the monastery's cemetery under the year 1840.

His hagiography is therefore almost entirely the story of how he was found. The epithet Neophanes records exactly what the sources describe: a sanctity that became known through the discovery itself, attached to a man whose own name had been lost. The narrative of the finding survives in a manuscript by the hierodeacon Meletios of Vatopedi. An akolouthia composed by Ch. M. Boussias remains unpublished at the monastery. Vatopedi celebrates his memory on 5 October with a proper service of its own.

Bărboi Monastery: The "Vatopedi of Moldavia"

Bărboi had been tied to the Holy Mountain long before 1840. In 1669 the heirs of the Sturdza founders turned the church into a monastery and dedicated it to Vatopedi. When the building was reconstructed in the 1840s, the plans came from the Greek architect Andrei Karidis, assisted by the craftsmen Atanasie and Gheorghe from the province of Sisani. Who bore the cost? Vatopedi itself, for the most part, through Metropolitan Grigore of Irinoupolis, who administered the monastery's Moldavian dependencies. In his study of 2017 in the bulletin of the Museum of History of Moldavia, Sorin Iftimi calls the monument the "Vatopedi of Moldavia". He argues that the Athonite model governed the church's architecture and also brought Athonite iconographic programmes to Iași.

The painted interior supports that argument. The first register of the double narthex, divided into mesonyktikon and lite in the Athonite manner, carries a long row of Athonite monastic saints, and every inscription in the church is in Greek. Iftimi reads these figures as models set before the Greek monks of Iași, keeping the community in constant contact with its mother house. In his enumeration, Aghios Eudokimos Vatopedinos stands on the south wall of the mesonyktikon. He is followed on the same wall by an arcosolium containing the Archangel Michael, and then by further figures, among them Gregory Palamas. Represented as well is the patron of the rebuilding: a portrait of Metropolitan Grigore, the Vatopedi hierarch who paid for the church, survives on the west wall of the narthex.

The painting has no exact date, and Iftimi's survey of the murals names no painter. Two documents set a working frame. Porfiry Uspensky, the Russian traveller, noted in 1846 that the founders were already painted on the west wall. The inventory drawn up at the secularisation of December 1863 describes the interior as painted throughout, and specifies that the painting was done with oil. Whether the phrase in the inventory applies to the whole campaign cannot be decided from so brief an entry; still, it is a reason to call the work a wall painting and to avoid the more specific term fresco. The Athonite parallel remains partly external. On the Holy Mountain itself, the katholikon of Gregoriou had been decorated in 1779 by two named painters from Kastoria, but no comparable signature is recorded for Bărboi.

Saint Eudokimos of Vatopedi in the Great Schema

Strictly frontal and noticeably elongated, the figure carries a small head high above a long body that widens slightly towards the feet, which appear in dark footwear below the hem. The painter builds the figure from three layers of dress, each in its own colour. The long under-robe is a warm ochre-orange, its vertical folds drawn in dark brown with lighter yellow along their ridges, and its hem breaks into shallow loops at the bottom. Over it hangs an olive-green mantle, open at the front and falling almost to the hem at both sides. Its folds are outlined in dark lines and picked out with clusters of fine white strokes, set like small feathers or fronds along each ridge, so that the green reads as a patterned surface more than as volume.

Across the centre, below the held icon, hangs the dark analavos of the great schema. It carries the full repertory of the habit in gold. At the top is a small cross with flaring arms. Below it a tall cross stands on a stepped base, flanked by the abbreviations ΙΣ ΧΣ above its arm and ΝΙ ΚΑ below. At the foot are a skull and crossed bones. The same highest monastic grade appears at the head, in the black koukoulion with a gold cross over the forehead and a further cross on each shoulder.

The setting is equally divided. Behind the upper body the ground is a deep blue with gold eight-pointed stars. At about the level of the saint's hands it gives way to a grey zone, crossed by dark diagonal lines and marked at the edges with small black four-lobed rosettes, which gives the figure a floor to stand on. At the upper right, the red-and-white border of an adjoining arched field cuts diagonally across the corner.

Face, Beard and Halo

Detail of the head: craquelure across face and halo, the koukoulion with its gold crosses, and the start of the Greek inscription naming the saint as Neophanes.

At close range the head is more carefully modelled than the drapery. The face is long and narrow, with a straight nose running down from brows that nearly meet, and large brown eyes under heavy lids, and faint horizontal lines across the forehead. Olive-brown flesh is lightened with ochre on the brow, the bridge of the nose and the cheekbones, and the mouth is small and closed. The beard is the most insistent passage of brushwork in the image. It falls in long grey-white strands threaded with brown, and it continues down the chest until its point disappears behind the upper edge of the icon.

The halo is a disc of ochre-gold bounded by a red ring and a white outer contour. A fine network of craquelure runs across the halo and the face. On the black hood at the saint's left shoulder there are small losses, where pale flecks show through the dark paint. The church was consolidated and restored in several campaigns, the last in 1984–1988, and during that work at least one figure in the narthex was replaced: a portrait of Patriarch Teoctist was painted in 1985 where Saint Ioannikios had originally stood. The present surface of the Eudokimos figure may therefore include later retouching, even though Iftimi judges the murals as a whole to be of high artistic quality and in good condition.

The Icon of the Virgin in His Hands

According to the account of the finding, the relics were discovered holding an icon of the Theotokos, and this is the attribute the painter gave the saint. The crossed hands of the burial, however, have been changed into a gesture of display. Eudokimos holds the panel upright with both hands at its lower corners and faces it outwards, towards the viewer.

The painted icon has a red frame and a blue ground, with the abbreviation ΜΡ ΘΥ at the top. The Virgin wears a red maphorion and inclines her head towards the Child, whom she holds on her left arm. Her right hand crosses her body towards him. Haloed and dressed in pale clothing, the Child faces forward. This is a Marian image of the broad Hodegetria kind, and the painter adds no epithet that would identify it with a particular miracle-working icon of Vatopedi. The omission is worth noting. Bărboi did own a copy of Vatopedi's Esphagmeni icon, in a silver revetment dated 1810. The painter could therefore have used a specific Vatopedi prototype, and he chose a generic Virgin and Child, keeping the finding as a narrative element without linking it to any named icon.

The Greek Inscription and the Epithet Neophanes

The inscription is written in white capitals on the blue ground and divided by the halo. The article and the epithet of sanctity stand on the left. On the right, in stacked lines, come the name ΕΥΔΟΚΙΜΟ[Σ], the epithet in the form ΟΝΕΟΦΑΝ-, with article and adjective run together, and the toponym ΒΑΤΟΠΑ-/ΔΙ-, ending in a ligature. The ends of several lines lie beyond the visible edge of the painting. Even so, the formula is clear. It gives the saint's rank, his assigned name, the epithet marking a recently revealed saint, and the monastery that claims him.

The name therefore does two things: it identifies the saint and it states his allegiance. Placed in the narthex of a Vatopedi dependency in Moldavia, the phrase "of Vatopedi" repeats the dedication of 1669 in the language of the monks who served the church. In Iftimi's list the figure appears, normalised, as Aghios Eudokimos Vatopedinos, a reminder that the painted wording and the form used in modern scholarship do not always coincide.