Makarios Galatsanos: Icon of Saint Eudokimos of Vatopedi

No one at Vatopedi knew what this monk had looked like. The icon of Saint Eudokimos of Vatopedi, painted for the Athonite monastery by the hieromonk Makarios Galatsanos, had to supply a face, a habit and a setting for a saint who entered the life of the community in 1840 as a set of anonymous, fragrant remains. He stands full-length and frontal on a green meadow, arms opened wide, a slender cross in one hand and a prayer rope hanging from the other. Beside him, at the right of the panel, a walled monastery rises above a bay, and from the upper corner an eye enclosed in a triangle sends its rays through a ring of white clouds.

Hieromonk Makarios Galatsanos, Saint Eudokimos the New of Vatopedi, icon preserved at Vatopedi Monastery, Mount Athos. Commissioned by Gabriel, a monk-physician from Naousa; published date 1852.

The panel is still kept at Vatopedi. Its manner, with a sky instead of a gold ground, a receding landscape and heavily modelled drapery, sets it firmly within nineteenth-century religious painting on the Mountain. The monastery's synaxarion, compiled by the monk Moses the Athonite, describes it as a fine icon by the well-known painter hieromonk Makarios Galatsanos, commissioned by a Vatopedi monk named Gabriel, a physician from Naousa, and assigns it to 1852. With a painter, a donor and a date attached to it, the work can be placed within the first years of the saint's cult.

The Finding of 1840 and the Name Eudokimos

In 1840, while the church of the old cemetery at Vatopedi was being repaired, the workmen uncovered the remains of a monk. His hands were crossed over his breast, an icon of the Theotokos lay with him, and the bones gave off a fragrance that the accounts call indescribable. Who he had been, when he had lived and how he had spent his ascetic life, no one could say. The fathers — together with bishops who happened to be staying at the monastery — gave him the name Eudokimos and carried the relics into the katholikon, where they are still venerated. The number of those bishops varies with the teller. The version supplied with the synaxarion speaks of two. Elder Daniel of Katounakia, who heard the story from eyewitnesses, remembered three: Joseph, formerly of Varna, Gregory of Adrianople, and Chrysanthos, formerly of Smyrna. In his account it was Chrysanthos who proposed the name, since God's good pleasure (eudokia) had brought the relics to light.

The translation to the katholikon took place on 5 October 1840, and Vatopedi still keeps that day as his feast with a service of its own. The written tradition is slight. The narrative of the finding survives in a manuscript by the hierodeacon Meletios of Vatopedi, and a service composed by Ch. M. Boussias remains unpublished in the monastery. A later layer went further. It records a vision in which the saint gave his true name as Savvas, and monastic tradition has since linked him with a fourteenth-century monk, Saint Savva of Vatopedi. The icon takes no notice of this and calls him simply the new Eudokimos of Vatopedi.

A Portrait Without a Model: Face and Monastic Habit

The figure fills almost the whole height of the panel. His head carries the tall black cylindrical hat of an Orthodox monk, its veil falling behind onto the shoulders, and it is set against a gold halo edged by a darker ring. Within the picture field this halo is the only gold. The face is long and gaunt: deep horizontal furrows cross the forehead, the white brows rise slightly, and dark eyes are fixed on the viewer above a narrow straight nose and hollowed cheeks. From the moustache down falls a beard of remarkable length, white with grey strands, divided into locks that taper to points well below the chest.

Beneath the beard a narrow black band, the analavos, runs down the centre of the body. It is marked with a red cross on a stepped base and small red letters. Over an ochre tunic with broad sleeves he wears a wide wine-red mantle, thrown open so that it falls behind the outstretched arms and reaches the ground on both sides like a pair of folded wings. Both garments are painted with a sheen close to satin. Pale rose lights run along the ridges of the red folds, and streaks of bright yellow descend the long pleats of the tunic to the hem, where the cloth gathers on the grass around a pair of dark shoes.

A face like this is no record. The early nineteenth-century portrait of the Cretan monk Gennadios, a supplicant hieromonk painted for Arsani Monastery, could draw on a living sitter. What did Makarios have to work from? Only bones and a story. He answered with the familiar type of the aged ascetic (extreme age, an emaciated face, a beard to the waist) and gave it just enough individuality, in the furrowed brow and the level gaze, to suggest a particular man.

Cross and Prayer Rope in the Icon of Saint Eudokimos of Vatopedi

The saint's right hand, extended towards the left side of the panel, grips a tall, thin cross of dark wood low on its shaft, so that the crossbar rises to the height of his shoulder. His left hand, stretched out on the other side, lies open with the palm turned up. From its fingers hangs a prayer rope of dark knots ending in a small cross. A second, longer cord of the same kind seems to loop loosely across the lower tunic, although its course is hard to follow among the folds.

Cross and prayer rope correspond closely to the language of his hymnography, whether or not the painter knew any particular text. The troparion and kontakion published in English by the Orthodox Church in America praise him for taking up the Cross to follow Christ, and they liken the unceasing prayer he held fast to a spear with which he routed the demons. In the icon the cross is lifted in one hand, the instrument of ceaseless prayer offered in the other. The open palm is often given to monastic saints and read as a sign of renunciation and of the ascetic, virginal life. Here it also serves to present the prayer rope to the viewer.

Vatopedi by the Sea and the All-Seeing Eye

Behind the figure the ground opens into a landscape seen from a low viewpoint. Small plants are scattered across the meadow in the foreground, rolling green hills with rows of trees rise behind, and the deep blue of the sky lightens towards the horizon. On rising ground at the right stands a compact cluster of white buildings with red roofs, enclosed by walls and dominated by a tall tower. Below it lies a bay with a small sailing boat on the water. Since the inscription names Vatopedi, the complex is most naturally read as the monastery itself, reduced to an emblem, and the saint stands before the house whose ground had kept his remains.

Most unusual of all is the upper right corner of the panel. There the sky gives way to a burst of red rays on an orange field, bordered by an arc of heavy white clouds, and at the source of the rays sits a yellow triangle enclosing a single eye. This emblem of an eye within a triangle, often surrounded by rays or a halo, stands for divine providence watching over humanity. In Russian church painting it appeared from the end of the eighteenth century through the first half of the nineteenth, a borrowing from Western European culture. Here it has reached a panel painted for an Athonite monastery. The motif suits this saint in particular. His name commemorates the divine good pleasure that brought his relics to light, and the eye of providence placed above him can be read as a picture of that disclosure, a gaze from above resting on the monk it chose to reveal. The reading is interpretive, and no inscription on the panel states it.

The Inscriptions: Title, Donor and Date

The Title in White Capitals

At the upper left, in three lines of white majuscule set on the blue sky, the inscription reads Ὁ ἅγιος Εὐδόκιμος ὁ νέος ὁ Βατοπαιδινός, "Saint Eudokimos the New, of Vatopedi." Accents and breathings stand above the letters. The endings of ἅγιος, Εὐδόκιμος and νέος are shortened with a small abbreviation mark, and the final word breaks across the second and third lines and closes with a lunate sigma. The epithet "the New" has a purpose: an older Saint Eudokimos, known as the Righteous, came from Cappadocia and lived under the emperor Theophilos (829–842), and the inscription keeps the two apart. Greek usage more often calls the Vatopedi saint Neophanes, "the newly revealed." In English the name also appears as Evdokimos, and the monastery as Vatopaidi.

Gabriel's Dedication and the Problem of the Year

A line of small cursive script in dark paint runs along the lower border. The synaxarion transcribes it as «Δι' εξόδων του οσιωτάτου κυρίου Γαβριήλ Ιατρού Βατοπαιδινού του εκ Ναούσης», "at the expense of the most venerable Kyr Gabriel, physician, of Vatopedi, from Naousa." The same transcription ends with an alphabetic date, printed μωμβʹ and glossed as 1852. As printed, that numeral cannot be correct. In standard Greek notation 1852 would be written αωνβʹ, and αωμβʹ would give 1842. Until the letters are checked on the panel itself, 1852 is best treated as the published date, and it remains unsettled.

Gabriel's name appears elsewhere in the cult. A verse on the silver casing of the saint's skull names a Gabriel as the man who silvered it, and the tradition holds that a monk Gabriel, healed through the saint's prayers, gave the precious silver reliquary for the head in thanksgiving. None of these sources identifies that benefactor with the physician from Naousa who paid for the icon. Still, a monk of the same house, with the same name and the same devotion to these relics, invites the thought that the two were one man.

Hieromonk Makarios and the Galatista Painters

The painter's surname identifies him with the Galatista painters, who took their collective name from their birthplace, Galatista in Chalkidiki, and were active from the last decades of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth. The craft passed down within the family. A doctoral study by Vassa Paraskeva traces two of its members. Benjamin I and Makarios II, monks on Athos, learned painting from their uncle, the monk Makarios I. After the failed rising in Chalkidiki in 1821 they painted in Skiathos and then settled in Skopelos, returning to the Mountain at the end of 1831 or early in 1832. On Skopelos their workshop, set up in 1823 in a cell of the church of St Merkourios, is associated with Makarios the hieromonk and Benjamin the monk.

A hieromonk Makarios of Galatista, back on Athos from the early 1830s, is an obvious candidate for the painter of the Vatopedi panel. Yet the same family used the name Makarios in more than one generation, and that alone rules out a firm identification from the inscription. The family's standing as monks of the Mountain did matter. Athonite houses did not always turn to painters from their own ranks: at Gregoriou, the katholikon with its dome Pantokrator at Gregoriou was painted in 1779 by Gabriel and Gregory, painters from Kastoria. A Vatopedi icon of a Vatopedi saint, paid for by a Vatopedi monk and painted by an Athonite hieromonk, would here have stayed entirely within the monastic community.

The panel also complicates a claim often repeated in local histories of the school. Those histories present the Galatista painters as the last stand of Byzantine art against Renaissance painting. Whoever painted it, this icon keeps the essentials of an icon: strict frontality, stillness, the halo and the naming inscription. Around the figure, however, it admits a naturalistic sky, receding hills, clouds modelled in grey and white, and drapery built up through light and shade. Even the gold, which in older icons would have filled the whole ground, is confined here to the halo and the painted frame, and the frame is now worn and chipped along its edges.

(The translation was edited by A. Orfanos)