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THE IDEOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL DIMENSIONS OF HAGIOGRAPHY IN SOUTH-EAST EUROPE, PARTICULARLY IN THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE

KOSTAS P. KYRRIS (Cyprus)

1.    The immense hagiographical production of Byzantium and the S.E. Europę is permeated by Old and New Testament and Oriental ideas, models and patterns which, although adapted to local national and cultural menta-lities and realities, preserved much of their original character and ideology. From the genuine martyrs’ acts, the epic passions, the saints’livesor encomia, the popular lives of ascetics and bishops or monks — the biographies of the martyrs of Iconoclasm and Islam, the patriarchs’ lives and the hagiographic romance, the lives of missionaries and so on, from the Palestinian martyrs by Eusebios of Cesareia and the Religious History by Theodoretos down to the Greek and Bulgarian hesychasts lives by Callistos and Gr. Camblak and the Neon Martyrologion of Nicodemos Hagioreites (1794), the same ideology with very subtle variations is being put forward. This is a religious ideology adopted by all Christian nations or peoples once they are baptised. E.g. des-pite political differences and wars and ecclesiastical rivalries and splits bet-ween Bulgarians and Greeks, their hagiography is ideologically the same and both feast and adore basilically the same saints of Christianity: the splits did not lead to the former’s rejection of the Byzantine corpus of saints and hagiography. The same is tnie for the other Bałkan Christian peoples. Although most saints are-said by their biographers to have been of noble or ‘‘middle class” extraction andrather fewof really humble origin, and although we can distinguish Iow- and high-level saints, the former being active lar-gely among humble people, once they choose to become holymen all of them follow the same or similar ways of life and behaviour based on early Christian models and concepts; and generally all of them appeal eąually to both rich and poor, civil and military officials and the anonymous Iow and middle class people, at least in theory. Saints' lives have been the spiritual food of all Bałkan Christians and the main source of their morał edification and religious leaming and culture, besides church mass and iconography.

2.    The most important concept in hagiography is the struggle between Good and Evil. It emanates from the Gospel and the Old Testament. Good is everything Christian, of course the Orthodox version of Christianity, and it incorporates all Christian virtues such as love, philanthropy, clemency, poverty, control of passions, piety, belief in Jesus Christ and the Trinity, and the like, all of them or some of them carried to extremes by the holy fnen and women through prayer and contact with God. The Evil is the king-

Rev. Etudes Sud-Est Europ., XXXIII, 1—2, p. 133 — 151, Bucarest, 1995