On Visualizing Heavenly Origins for Particularized Icons in the Greek-Speaking World of Today

Abstract

I recall here the happy occasion of my most recent viewing, in the year 2014, of the famous ancient Myrtiá (Μυρτιά) or ‘Myrtle Tree’ growing on the hallowed grounds of an old monastery, now a nunnery, in Palianí (Παλιανή), not much more than 20 kilometers southwest of Iráklio (῾Ηράκλειον), the ‘City of Herakles’, on the island of Crete. This enormous old tree, the myriad branches of which overshadow a great part of the visual space in the courtyard of the nunnery, is sacred to ‘Holy Mary’ (Ἁγία Μαρία) the Theotókos or ‘Mother of God’, as she is venerated by Greek Orthodox Christians, and she is known more specifically to the local population by way of the epithet Myrtidiṓtissa (Μυρτιδιώτισσα), ‘Our Lady of the Myrtles’. For a classicist like me, such an epithet can be described as “particularized,” by contrast with the “generic” epithet Panagía (Παναγία), which means ‘All-Holy’, and which is a generalizing way of referring to the Theotókos, whom Orthodox Christians equate with ‘Holy Mary’ as Mother of God-as-an-infant-Christ. In the first picture here, which I use as the introductory illustration for this essay, I show an icon where the Panagía and the boy-Christ are visualized within a frame of myrtle sprays. Thus a generalized Panagía can be envisioned as a particularized Myrtidiṓtissa or Lady of the Myrtles. This particular icon is what visitors can see in the courtyard dominated by the Myrtle Tree—and what I saw most recently in 2014, when I last visited the Tree, in the context of leading an intergenerational group of participants in a travel-study program. The second picture, underneath the introductory illustration provided in the first picture, is a “zoom-out” showing the context of the first picture. We see here that the visualization of ‘Our Lady of Myrtles’ as an icon is physically linked with the space dominated by the Myrtle Tree. And then, underneath the second picture, the third picture is a freeze-frame taken from a videography showing the moment when our group enters into the space shaded by the myriad branches of the Myrtle (and I can see me too there, from behind). This third picture signals what is essential for me to show in this essay: that the link between the Myrtle and ‘Our Lady of Myrtles’ is not just physical but mental as well, since the space that is marked by the Tree is thought to be sacred, and the sacredness is aetiologized—is given meaning—in the form of a sacred narrative about what I describe, in the title of my essay, as “heavenly origins.” And this narrative is encapsulated in the particularized epithet Myrtidiṓtissa, meaning ‘Our Lady of Myrtles’. After making my argument about this epithet Myrtidiṓtissa, I will show another example of such a particularized epithet as applied to the Panagía, which I will analyze in terms of another sacred narrative about “heavenly origins.”