by Krista West
11 In a capitulation to North American clerical fashion of the twentieth century, priests or deacons might wear a black shirt with a clerical tab collar under the cassock, but this usage is beginning to wane.
12 There has been some confusion about the practice of subdeacons wearing the inner cassock beyond the church confines in recent years. Because the office of the subdeacon is limited to the sphere of the Altar of a specific church, his use of clerical garments should be limited to that location. Subdeacons do not wear cassocks, kontorasa (clerical vests), or other clerical garments anywhere besides the church in which they serve. Much confusion and embarrassment has ensued when a layperson approaches a subdeacon clad in clerical attire to request a blessing and must be rebuffed. It is necessary that the service of the office is considered foremost and that clerical garments are not abused by wearing them for personal aggrandizement.
13 The adjective “secular” is used to denote those clergy (married or widowed) who live “in the world,” i.e., clergymen who are not monks.
14 Orthodox faithful in North America are sometimes puzzled by this liturgical use of the exorason by members of the laity, particularly when it is worn by women chanters. In this regard it is helpful to note that the narrow-sleeved version of the exorason is essentially the traditional Greek Orthodox Christian version of a choir robe. In Greece the chanter’s exorason is often made distinctive by the placement of galloon or colored, decorative banding upon the collar.
15 There are even a few photos from the late nineteenth century showing Russian hierarchs wearing ryasas made from elegant black brocades.
16 Since many people in North America are unaware of the origins of the kontorason, its use is sometimes usurped by members of the minor clerical orders who think of it simply as vest. This practice arises out of ignorance and should be curtailed.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Paraments of Paradise
Architecture, liturgy, hymnody, as well as vestments and liturgical furnishings, processions, icons, relics, and reliquaries were created to echo and amplify one another as palpable founts of holiness so that worshippers might fully enter into a holy realm.
Kathleen McVey1
Paraments Defined
No survey of the liturgical vesture of the Orthodox Christian Church would be complete without a discussion of those vestments used to furnish and adorn the interior of the church building. From very early in the history of the Church, it was expected that beautification would not be limited solely to the adornment of the clergy, but that the church building itself would also be endowed with beautiful textiles that would convey the glory and majesty of the Holy Trinity worshipped therein. In practice, the church building is seen as a distinct spiritual entity, complete with its own suitable garments, specifically known as “paraments.”2 The use of such paraments manifests a rich symbolic tradition as, together with the vestments of the clergy, they serve to express visually two major theological tenets of the Church: that the salvation of mankind through the crucified and risen Lord is actually experienced in the Eucharistic Liturgy and that the earthly church building makes manifest the reality of the Kingdom of Heaven.
The paraments of an Orthodox Christian church include the holy table cloths, liturgical veils (such as the chalice and diskos covers, aer, and epitaphios), liturgical cloths with specific, practical uses (such as the antimension and eiliton), decorative veils (such as the podea and other drapings for icons and icon stands), free-standing banners with embroidery and iconography, decorative hangings displayed on walls and pillars featuring embroidery and/or iconography, and, finally, cloths of various types and sizes which adorn auxiliary church furniture such as the proskomedia table, the tetrapodion table and the like. All of these cloths and veils are used to edify, educate, and beautify, and some of the finest existing examples of Orthodox Christian textiles (in particular embroidered work) are shown to great advantage in the remarkable paraments produced in earlier historical periods. In the outfitting of the Orthodox church building we encounter once again the Byzantine celebration of the sense of sight. The highly ornamented textiles of the Church’s parament tradition have been designed to awe the beholder with their technical perfection and the richness of their threads and, at the same time, spiritually encourage the viewer by their subject matter, which often features scenes from the life of Christ and depictions of the Great Feasts.
Early Christian Worship and Its Influence on Church Textiles
Before we can consider these wonderful textiles in detail, some attention must be given to the early history of Christian worship. For many people, mention of the early Church brings to mind the image of a small band of Christians, constantly persecuted and in hiding, without a permanent place of worship. In this imagined scenario, early Christian worship is exceptionally simple and only marginally liturgical. However, this popular image has come under serious scrutiny in recent times, especially as a result of the important archaeological discoveries at Dura Europos in the early decades of the twentieth century. This border city, captured by the Romans in AD 165 and held until AD 256 when it was abandoned following a Sassanid Persian siege, was built in what is present-day Syria. It is unique among archaeological finds in that it was covered by sand storms shortly after its capture by the Persians and the entombing sands marvelously preserved the ruins of Dura Europos, leaving not only buildings but even such details as wall paintings largely intact. Among the buildings excavated in the early twentieth century are a mithraeum (a temple to the god Mithras, whose cult was popular among Roman soldiers), a Jewish synagogue, and a Christian church. The co-existence of these three separate buildings devoted to worship have illuminated our understanding of the general approach to religious tolerance in pagan Rome. Just over a century after the life of Christ, rather than evidence of a constantly persecuted, always-on-the move band of destitute Christians, we find a small, yet well-appointed Christian worship space (built within the framework of an existing house), complete with an adjacent room suitable for meetings and meals, not unlike many missions in North America today. The walls of the house church are adorned with iconography, much of which is in a fine state of preservation due to the building being filled with rubble just prior to its capture.
From the discovery of this building with its iconographic decorations as well as from fragments of scrolls with Christian Eucharistic prayers which were also found in the ruins, a more complete picture of early Christian worship has emerged. Despite periodic waves of persecution by the pagan Roman authorities at various locales throughout the empire, we find evidence in Dura Europos of an established Christian community, secure enough in its Roman surroundings to permanently adorn its worship space.3 Even at this very early date, between the second and third centuries, we discover Christian church architecture that is dedicated to liturgical worship and features much of the same sort of adornment—albeit on a far smaller and more modest scale—that went on to grace such architectural masterpieces as Agia Sophia in Constantinople, the famous Byzantine churches of Thessaloniki and the katholika of Mount Athos.
During this same period of late antiquity, textiles were ubiquitously used as hangings and curtains in well-appointed homes since they could function not only as a means of decoration, but also as screens and doors. Ancient buildings, typically made of stone, could be cold and spare and textiles warmed, beautified, and demarcated space even within relatively modest dwellings. If one considers the late antique world’s use of textiles in conjunction with the evidence of Dura Europos, it is easy to surmise how early Christians would have instinctively turned to woven and embroidered textiles to adorn and beautify their churches, whether the setting was a modest house church in a border town like Dura Europos or, eventually, the grand space of a great cathedral. This awareness of the common use of textiles in daily life along with a fuller understanding of early Christian worship must inform our exploration of historical paraments. While it is difficult to make any absolute assertions based upon ext
ant pieces, we can begin to visualize a more historically correct picture of the important role textiles played in Christian worship from the very beginning.
The Standardization of Orthodox Christian Paraments
As time went on and persecutions ceased with the legalization of Christianity in AD 313, Christians found themselves living within an empire in which church building and beautification gained momentum and then flourished, reaching a zenith under Justinian with the construction of Agia Sophia in Constantinople in AD 532–537 (after earthquake damage in 553 and 557, its rebuilding was completed in 562). The Church now had full and unfettered opportunities to express its theology of the physical church building as the Kingdom of Heaven on earth and did so with enthusiasm, not only in the great cathedral of Agia Sophia, but in churches throughout the Byzantine Empire. The attention given to the architecture and adornment of Byzantine churches was not haphazard, but rather reflective of a considered and systematic program pursued by a society that endeavored to proclaim its faith in the might and glory of God by utilizing the media of woven and embroidered textiles, which it was accustomed to encounter in daily, civic life. Such focus on material adornment was not merely a type of outward religious demonstration, but was deeply rooted in a symbolic system in which the physical elements of the church embodied complex layers of mystic metaphor. The esteemed liturgical scholar Robert Taft illustrates the functioning of this system of symbols with a particularly rich example:
The precise genius of metaphorical language is to hold in dynamic tension several levels of meaning simultaneously. In this sense, one and the same Eucharistic table must be at once Holy of Holies, Golgotha, tomb of the resurrection, cenacle [chamber of the Last Supper], and heavenly sanctuary of the Letter to the Hebrews.4
This thoroughly Christian worldview imbued each piece of furniture used within the church with a symbolic meaning, and by extension, the adornments of such furniture as well. The cloths placed upon the altar were no mere fancy drapery, but became in very essence the shroud of the lifeless Christ, the napkin covering His face, and, finally, the glorious robes of the resurrected King.
Giving full weight to the importance of the physical space and furnishing of the Byzantine church, it becomes apparent that the cloths and draperies used for adornment would have assumed standardized forms rather early in the Church’s history, a development parallel to the early standardization of liturgical vesture described in Chapter Two. Despite the lack of extant liturgical cloths prior to the eleventh century, we know of such standardization from writings on liturgical practice, most notably those of St Germanos, Patriarch of Constantinople from AD 715 to 730.
In his work, On the Divine Liturgy, St Germanos gives a very thorough list of the various vestments and paraments used in the liturgy and their associated symbolism, and from this list we observe two things pertinent to a study of Orthodox Christian paraments: first, the historic names and specific functions of certain liturgical items, and second, the multi-faceted approach to symbology common to the liturgical piety of his day.5 It is important to remark upon this multi-faceted approach to symbology because in the study of paraments one finds multiple symbolic meanings attached to the various liturgical cloths and veils and it is imperative that we comprehend that such seemingly conflicting meanings can co-exist harmoniously within the liturgical imagination of the Church, and indeed, that they are a marked feature of Orthodox Christian theology. Taft further elucidates this idea:
The problem of later medieval liturgical allegory consists not in the multiplicity of systematically layered symbols, such as we find here [in St Germanos’ writings] and in patristic exegesis. The later one-symbol-per-object correspondence results not from the tidying up of an earlier incoherent primitiveness, but from the decomposition of the earlier patristic mystery-theology into a historicizing system of dramatic narrative allegory. All levels—Old Testament preparation, Last Supper, accomplishment on Calvary, eternal heavenly offering, present liturgical event—must be held in dynamic unity by any interpretation of the eucharist. To separate these levels, then parcel out the elements bit by bit according to some chronologically consecutive narrative sequence, is to turn ritual into drama, symbol into allegory, mystery into history.6
Delving into the history of Orthodox Christian paraments will frequently uncover seemingly disparate symbological associations with the various pieces, but we can proceed with confidence knowing that such overlapping symbological associations can coexist mystically and harmoniously within the Church.
A Walking Tour of the Church
We will now embark upon an imaginary walking tour of an Orthodox church building to visualize the paraments therein and become familiar with their names and purposes before discussing them individually in more depth.
Immediately upon entering the doors of the church, we encounter in the narthex icons displayed on proskynitaria, or icon stands.6 The adornment of these icons takes the form of decorative veils (referred to simply as icon stand covers or proskynitarion covers) which are typically long, rectangular pieces of brocade or velvet placed under the icon and draping down the front of the stand (and often down the back as well).
Moving forward from the icons in the narthex, we come into the nave of the church and as we look around, we see additional proskynitaria with variously decorated covers, but we also view large banners, free-standing on tall poles, in various positions around the church, most often somewhere near or on the ambon (in present-day usage, the elevated floor area just in front of the iconostasion). There can be a great deal of variety in banners, but one of the most typical styles is made from burgundy velvet with an icon (either painted on canvas or embroidered) in the center of the banner and three long, narrow fabric pendants draping down from the bottom half of the banner. Other banners may dispense with the tail-like pendants and be a straightforward square or rectangle made from velvet or brocade, but the universal feature of banners is a central icon surrounded by some kind of textile adornment. While these banners remain stationary during most liturgical services, their poles can be removed from their stands and the banner may then be carried in processions upon appropriate occasions throughout the Church year.
As we approach the iconostasion (icon screen), we now have our first glimpse within the altar (the sanctuary area behind the iconostasion) of the holy table, and it is here that we must devote the majority of our focus. To begin with, there are two layers of adornment placed upon the holy table at its consecration, hidden from view thereafter. First, four small linen cloths are placed upon the corners of the holy table, each having either the name or the image of one of the four evangelists stamped upon it (in current usage paper icons are often substituted). Second, a finely woven linen cloth called the “katasarkion” is placed over the holy table and cinched tightly over the top edges of the table with cords. Because the holy table is symbolically understood to be the tomb of Christ, the katasarkion represents the burial shroud of Christ, and, in a further layer of meaning, is sometimes also referred to as the baptismal garment of the altar table. After being positioned during the consecration, the katasarkion is never removed from the consecrated table. Once the katasarkion is in place, the next cloth laid on top of the holy table is the endytei, more simply referred to as the “altar cloth.” This cloth (or set of cloths as is sometimes the case) has the widest scope for variety of embellishment of all Orthodox Christian paraments and should be the finest piece of textile artistry, among both the vestments and paraments, in the entire church building, thereby visually underscoring the Orthodox Christian theological emphasis on holy table as the throne of Christ as He is present in the Eucharist. Usually made of the finest brocade or velvet, the altar cloth is ornately finished with galloon (metallic trim), fringe, and often tassels at the corners. Frequently a top cloth, hanging down six to twelve inches from the top of the table, is placed over a bottom cloth which reaches all the way to the floor.
Once vested with the corner evangelists, katasarkio
n, and altar cloth (or cloths), the fully dressed holy table has the Gospel book enthroned front and center. When the table is not in use for a liturgical service, the Gospel book is covered by its own veil (“Gospel cover”), a square or rectangle of fabric made to match or complement the altar cloth. With the celebration of the Divine Liturgy, additional paraments will come into use: the eiliton, antimension, and the chalice veil set (which comprise two small kalymmata veils and one aer), all of which will be described in more detail in the section below.
As we turn to leave the church to end our tour, we are finally arrested by the sight of the stunning epitaphios in its traditional position on the west wall of the nave. The epitaphios is a large liturgical veil which has its origins in the aer (described below) and which is used ceremonially on Great and Holy Friday. It is the most prominent of all the pieces of embroidered iconography in the Orthodox Christian Church, featuring an image of the lifeless body of Christ, either alone surrounded by angelic symbols, or with a full complement of mourning figures—a composition known as the “threnos” (“lamentation”).
With this introduction to the position and names of each of the paraments complete, it now remains for us to consider them separately in detail, examining their history as well as their current usage. We will begin with the paraments used liturgically and then work our way outwards to those serving a decorative function.