Menas East and West

The veneration and depiction of St. Menas of Egypt across the three worlds that received him: in Coptic art and the Coptic Church, where he is the supreme wonderworker-martyr and the object of a vigorous twentieth-century revival; in Byzantine and Greek iconography and the synaxaria, where he keeps the soldier-martyr type and the 11 November feast; and in the Latin West, where the cult travelled with the pilgrim ampullae as far as the Rhineland, leaving Western dedications and martyrology-entries in its wake. This file traces how the two-camel iconography moved with the flasks, what became of the saint’s image in later and modern art, and where the historical record forces a careful distinction between the Egyptian soldier-martyr and the homonymous “St Menas” figures with whom he is confused.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Coptic (Great Martyr; Wonderworker)

A Cult That Travelled

Menas is, with the possible exception of the Holy Land saints, the most widely diffused single saint of the early-Christian Mediterranean, and he is so for a concrete reason: his blessing was portable. The terracotta ampullae mould-made at Abu Mena carried the holy water or oil of his shrine — and, stamped on their faces, his image — into the hands of pilgrims who took them home across three continents (the flasks and their distribution are owned by The Menas Flasks; Kaufmann, Die Menasstadt, 1910; Vikan, Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art, 2010). Where the flask went, the saint went, and with the saint went his iconography; the two-camel image is found in the ground from Egypt across to the Levant and Palestine, Asia Minor, Carthage and North Africa, Italy and Rome, Constantinople, the Rhineland, Gaul, and Britain (Kaufmann 1910; Vikan 2010). The diffusion of the cult is thus the diffusion of the image, and the history of Menas East and West is in large part the history of where his flasks were carried and what veneration grew up around them when they arrived (the diffusion as a whole is owned by The Spread of the Cult).

In Coptic Art and the Coptic Church

Menas is, first and most enduringly, the saint of the Copts: in the Coptic Orthodox Church he is among the most beloved of the martyr-wonderworkers, venerated under his Coptic name Mina and commemorated on Hathor 15 (corresponding to 11 November), and his cult has an unbroken life from late antiquity to the present (Grossmann, “Menas, Saint,” in The Coptic Encyclopedia, 1991; on his place in Coptic Christianity, Menas in Coptic Christianity). In Coptic art of the first millennium he keeps the two-camel orant type described in the companion file — on the flasks above all, but also on textiles, in wall-painting, and in carved relief — and the image functions as his fixed and recognizable portrait throughout the Egyptian sphere (Kaufmann, Zur Ikonographie der Menas-Ampullen, 1910; Grossmann 1991; see The Saint Between Two Camels).

The most striking modern chapter is the twentieth-century revival. Under Pope Cyril VI (Kyrillos VI, patriarch 1959–1971) — who bore a particular devotion to St Menas and took his monastic name from him — a new Monastery of St Mina was founded in the Mariout (Mareotis) desert near the ancient site, and with it came a flowering of new Menas imagery in the modern Coptic idiom (Grossmann 1991; the revival is owned by Menas in Coptic Christianity). Modern Coptic icons of Menas, produced in the revived neo-Coptic style associated with the school of Isaac Fanous and his successors, characteristically retain the ancient diagnostic: the young soldier-martyr is still shown frontally, often still as an orant or with his hand raised, and — the unmistakable sign — still flanked by the two camels, now rendered in the bold, flat, large-eyed manner of the modern Coptic revival (on the revival imagery, Grossmann, Coptic Encyclopedia, 1991). The continuity is itself remarkable: a fifteen-hundred-year-old type, born on a fifth-century pilgrim flask, is reproduced essentially unchanged in the icons hung in Coptic churches today, so that the modern worshipper and the late-antique pilgrim venerate the same image of the same saint.

In Byzantine and Greek Iconography

In the Byzantine and Greek-Orthodox world Menas was received as a Great Martyr and a soldier-saint, and his feast is kept on 11 November, the day he shares — in the Byzantine synaxaria and menaia — with other commemorations of that date (on the feast, Feast and Cult). The flasks reached Constantinople and the Aegean world early, and the saint entered the Byzantine repertory of warrior-martyrs alongside George, Demetrios, Theodore, and Procopius (Vikan 2010; on the soldier-martyr type, The Confession in the Amphitheatre). In Byzantine iconography Menas is shown in the manner of the military saints — the young or youthful soldier in martial dress, sometimes holding the cross of martyrdom — and where the specifically Egyptian two-camel composition is not used, he is identified by inscription and by his place among the soldier-martyrs (Vikan 2010; Grossmann 1991). The Byzantine synaxaria preserve the notice of his martyrdom and the memory of his great shrine; through them, and through the menaion, the Greek-speaking Church carried the commemoration of the Egyptian martyr into its liturgical year, where it remains.

It is in the Byzantine and Greek sphere that the homonym-problem becomes acute, and it must be addressed plainly. The synaxaria and the iconographic tradition know more than one “St Menas,” and the figures have at times been confused or conflated. [Disputed: the relation between the Egyptian soldier-martyr Menas of Abu Mena and the so-called Phrygian Menas (Menas Kallikelados, "the beautifully-speaking") is contested: some scholarship treats the Phrygian Menas as a distinct saint whose legend was later drawn toward, or partly fused with, that of the Egyptian martyr, while others regard the doublet as a hagiographic split or conflation of a single figure; the question is not settled, and the detailed treatment of the identity and the Egyptian-vs-Phrygian origin problem belongs to Section 02 — see [The Confession in the Amphitheatre](../02-the-soldier-martyr/the-confession-in-the-amphitheatre.md) — which owns it. This file flags the conflation only as it bears on iconography and veneration.] Distinct again, and not to be confused with either, is St Menas, patriarch of Constantinople (in office 536–552), a sixth-century hierarch commemorated on his own day (25 August) and shown in the vestments of a bishop, not the dress of a soldier — a wholly different person from the soldier-martyr of the Mareotis (Grossmann, Coptic Encyclopedia, 1991, distinguishes the martyr from the homonyms). The iconographic markers keep the persons apart where the names do not: the soldier between two camels is the martyr of Abu Mena; the bishop in patriarchal vesture is the Constantinopolitan; the careful reader checks the dress, the attributes, and the feast-day before reading any “St Menas” as our martyr.

In the Latin West

That the cult of an Egyptian martyr should have reached the Latin West at all is one of the most vivid demonstrations of how far the ampullae travelled, and the evidence is again material before it is textual. Menas flasks have been excavated well into the Western provinces — in Italy and at Rome, in Gaul, and most famously in the Rhineland, where finds at and around Cologne (Köln) attest the arrival of the saint’s blessing on the northern frontier of the old Empire (Kaufmann, Die Menasstadt, 1910; Vikan 2010). The Cologne ampullae are the classic Western witness: clay flasks of the two-camel saint, made at Abu Mena, found a continent away on the Rhine — proof that a pilgrim, or the chain of trade and travel that linked the Mediterranean, brought the eulogia of Menas from the Egyptian desert to the German river (Kaufmann 1910; on the spread, The Spread of the Cult). [Disputed: for the Western finds generally — and the British finds in particular — the route and circumstances of arrival are debated: whether they came with returning pilgrims, with the Mediterranean trade in oil and wine, or by some combination, and in some cases whether a given find is an ancient deposit or a later collector's import, are questions the find-literature treats as open (Kaufmann 1910; Vikan 2010). The fact of the diffusion is secure; the mechanism in any single case is often not.]

The textual traces in the West are slighter but real. The saint’s memory entered Western martyrologies — his commemoration appears in the martyrological tradition that fed the later Roman Martyrology — and Western dedications to a “St Menas” are found, though here too the homonym-problem intrudes, since not every Western “Mennas” or “Menna” dedication can be securely traced to the Egyptian martyr rather than to a local or homonymous figure (Grossmann, Coptic Encyclopedia, 1991). What the Western evidence establishes beyond dispute is the reach of the cult: a soldier-martyr of the Mareotis, dead around 309 and buried in the Egyptian desert, was carried by clay flask and pilgrim memory across the whole Mediterranean and beyond the Alps to the Rhine, which is a fact about the unity and the traffic of the late-antique Christian world as much as about the saint himself.

How the Iconography Travelled

The mechanism that carried Menas East and West was, throughout, the flask — and with the flask, the image. Because the two-camel type was stamped into the very vessel of the blessing, the iconography could not travel without travelling as an icon: the pilgrim who carried home a flask of holy water carried home, inseparably, a portrait of the saint who blessed it (Vikan 2010; Hahn, Strange Beauty, 2012, on pilgrim eulogiae as image-bearing blessings). This is why the diffusion of the cult and the diffusion of the iconography are one and the same history. The flasks were cheap, durable, and small; they were the perfect engine for spreading a fixed sacred image across a continent, and they did so on a scale no monumental art could match (Vikan 2010; on the loca sancta souvenir, Hahn, “Loca Sancta Souvenirs,” 1990). The result is that the same image — the orant soldier between two crouching camels — turns up, recognizably, in the soil of three continents, the most travelled saint’s portrait of the early Christian world.

Later and Modern Icons

After the Arab conquest and the long decline of the great shrine, the production of the flasks ceased and the Mediterranean-wide cult contracted, but the veneration of Menas never died, least of all among the Copts for whom he remained a chief intercessor (Grossmann 1991; on the cult’s later life, Feast and Cult). In the Eastern Orthodox and Coptic traditions alike he continued to be painted in the soldier-martyr type, and in the twentieth century the Coptic revival under Cyril VI gave the image a vigorous new life: modern Coptic icons of Mina, in the neo-Coptic style, reproduce the ancient composition — the frontal young soldier, frequently the orant gesture, and the unmistakable flanking camels — for churches and homes across the worldwide Coptic diaspora (Grossmann, Coptic Encyclopedia, 1991; the modern revival is owned by Menas in Coptic Christianity). The icon a Copt venerates today is, in its essentials, the image a fifth-century pilgrim pressed to his lips on a clay flask — a continuity across fifteen centuries that is itself a small testimony to the stability of the tradition.

Distinguishing the Saints

Because so much confusion has attended the name, it is worth gathering the distinctions in one place, for the reader’s safety. Our saint is Menas of Egypt, the soldier Great Martyr of the Diocletianic persecution (d. c. 309), buried at Abu Mena in the Mareotis, feast 11 November / Hathor 15, shown as the young soldier between two camels. He is to be distinguished from: the Phrygian Menas (Menas Kallikelados), whose relation to the Egyptian martyr — distinct saint, fused legend, or hagiographic doublet — is contested and is treated in Section 02 (see The Confession in the Amphitheatre); and from St Menas, patriarch of Constantinople (536–552), a sixth-century bishop with his own feast (25 August), shown in episcopal vestments (Grossmann 1991). Iconography is the surest guide where the names fail: the dress, the attributes, the camels, and the feast-day together fix the person. The careful student, meeting a “St Menas” in a synaxarion, a dedication, or a painted panel, asks first which Menas — and lets the soldier between his two camels answer for the martyr of the Mareotis.

References

Kaufmann, Carl Maria. Die Menasstadt und das Nationalheiligtum der altchristlichen Aegypter. Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1910. (The excavation report, with the Western and Rhineland finds and the diffusion of the flasks.)
Kaufmann, Carl Maria. Zur Ikonographie der Menas-Ampullen. Cairo: Finck, 1910. (The foundational iconographic study of the type.)
Grossmann, Peter. Abû Mînâ I: Die Gruftkirche und die Gruft. Mainz: von Zabern, 1989; and “Menas, Saint” / “Abu Mina,” in The Coptic Encyclopedia, ed. Aziz S. Atiya. New York: Macmillan, 1991. (The Coptic veneration, the modern revival, and the distinction of the homonymous saints.)
Vikan, Gary. Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art. Rev. ed. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2010. (The standard study of pilgrim eulogiae, the spread of the flasks East and West, and the Byzantine soldier-martyr context.)
Hahn, Cynthia. Strange Beauty: Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400–circa 1204. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2012; and “Loca Sancta Souvenirs,” in The Blessings of Pilgrimage, ed. R. Ousterhout. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. (Pilgrim eulogiae as image-bearing blessings and loca sancta souvenirs.)
Frankfurter, David, ed. Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt. Leiden: Brill, 1998. (The pilgrimage context and the diffusion of the cult.)
Drescher, James. Apa Mena: A Selection of Coptic Texts Relating to St. Menas. Cairo: Société d’archéologie copte, 1946. (The Coptic Passio and Miracles.)