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146 Kostas P. Kyrris 14

tion objected the Arsenites because he had been excommunicated by Arse-nios as a usurper of the throne from an unjustly deposed patriarch, just before he ascended it. The Josephites, however, considered him a Confessor, and his name was entered into the Calendars of the Ecumenic Patriarchate al-though hewas never venerated by the people (Macrides, pp. 79—81). He was a saint without a Vita. By contrast, Meletios the Confessor (1209—1286), who had been exiled and mutilated for his anti-Union activities, had his biographer, Makarios of Philadelphia, and he was canonised by the Synod convened by Esaias (1323—1324) after the evidence produced concerning the miracles worked by his uncomipted body (ibid., pp. 82—82). From this time onwards begins a revival of the interest in holymen after its decline in the 12.c. (supra, par. 18, 19) and with it a new flourishing of hagiography, whose dominant ideology is Hesychasm centred around Gregory the Sinaite and Gregory Palamas. A provincial case of the leadership model of saint is St. Theodora of Arta, wife of Michael II of Epiros. Like the Palaiologan saints studied above, she was no ascetic; her Life was written by the monk Job in the 13.c. (ibid., pp. 82—83). Another provincial ascetic with eventually a network of connections with the ruling classes was St. Neophytos of Cyprus, whose complex ideological developnient was recently examined in detail (C. Galatariotou, The Making of a Saint, 1991). His initial criticism of social-religious evils developed into adoptation to the bishop of Paphos and its elite, to become a protest against the Latin occupation of Cyprus (1191/2) and of Constantinople (1204); but not long after 1204 St. Neophytos used the Lusig-nan King (pTQyaę)’s services and help for the affairs of his monasterj'.

22. By adopting Christianity, the Bałkan peoples received the Byzan-tine church books and the hagiography en masse in translation. The Slavs did not exclude from veneration even saints who had been hostile to them. I. Dujcev observes that “The Miracula Sancti Demetrii Thessalonicensis” were translated into the language of the South Slavs [also in Medieval Bulga-rian by John Stavrakios: Cod. Ryl. 4/8 (61)] and the defender of Thessa-lonica against the Bulgarians in the 9—14.cc. was venerated with particu-lar ardour in literaturę and iconography, although these miracles told about wonderful acts of the 6.—7.cc. mainly directed against the Slavs and later against the Bulgarians. Byzantium venerated as martyrs many saints who had participated in its wars against the Bulgarians. Many of these Saints and Martyrs, e.g. St. Nicholas the Soldier, the Bishop Manuel of Adrinople and his companions (9.c.) or the Byzantine soldiers killed in Bułgaria in 811 during the expedition of the emperor Nicephoros, were later mentioned (in the Calendar etc.) and even feasted. Contrary to the other areas of religiouS life, however, in the Hagiography of the Greek Orthodox Church a cerlain reciprocity was established between Slavs and Byzantines. In the hagiogra-phical literaturę of the Gr. Orth. Church gradually some saints of Slav oiigin were admitted and some important from the point of view of ecclesiastical life were mentioned — events and personalities from the time — before the official conversion, but wliich contributed to the conversion, or also persons

who later on became martyrs and confessors of the Faith. Some of these

were only mentioned as saints or Hosioi, whereas about others started to

be composed independent texts or texts based on Slavic primary sources:

Lives, Encomia, Homilies, and so on, which in part have survived in Slavic