The Protection and Other Feasts

Beyond the four great feasts, the calendar keeps a wide circle of secondary Marian commemorations: the Protection (Pokrov), the Life-Giving Spring, the deposition-feasts of the Virgin’s robe and belt at Constantinople, the Synaxis of the Theotokos, and the many icon-days. This file pins each to its earliest named attestation and marks where a commemoration flourished in one Orthodox world and stayed marginal in another.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Alongside the Twelve Great Feasts (treated in the-great-marian-feasts.md), the Church year is dense with lesser Marian commemorations. Most fall into two families: relic- and shrine-feasts rooted in the sacred topography of Constantinople, and icon-feasts attached to particular wonderworking images. The methodological rule of this collection applies with special force here — traditions of visions, relics, and miraculous images are pinned to their earliest named and dated attestation, and never asserted as documented fact (see ../../orthodoxy/06-liturgical-life/church-calendar.md).

The Protection of the Theotokos (Pokrov) — 1 October

The feast celebrates a vision granted at the Blachernae church in Constantinople, where the relic of the Virgin’s robe was kept. According to the tradition, St. Andrew the Fool-for-Christ and his disciple Epiphanius, at prayer during a night vigil, saw the Theotokos enter the church, kneel in prayer, and then spread her veil (maphorion) over the assembled faithful as a sign of her sheltering intercession (Life of St. Andrew the Fool; ODB, ed. A. Kazhdan, Oxford, 1991, s.v. “Pokrov” and “Andrew the Fool”). The event is placed in the tenth century, the period to which the Life is generally assigned.

[Disputed: the vision tradition is Byzantine in origin — its setting is Blachernae and its saint a Constantinopolitan — yet the feast became far more prominent in the SLAVIC (especially Russian) churches than among the Greeks, an asymmetry the sources do not fully explain]. The feast’s establishment as a major celebration is credited in Rus’ to Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky around 1164, and the celebrated Church of the Intercession on the Nerl (c. 1165) is among its earliest monuments (ODB, s.v. “Pokrov”; John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 2nd ed., New York: Fordham University Press, 1979, on Rus’ devotional life). In Russia the Protection (Pokrov) ranks among the most beloved feasts of the year, whereas in Greek use it long remained minor; in modern Greece it was, in the twentieth century, transferred to 28 October to coincide with the national commemoration of 1940 (ODB, s.v. “Pokrov”). The date in the received calendar is 1 October.

The Life-Giving Spring (Zoodochos Pēgē) — Bright Friday

Kept on the Friday of Bright Week (Renewal Week, following Pascha), this feast honors a miraculous spring at a shrine outside the land walls of Constantinople, near the site later called Balıklı. The tradition holds that a soldier — the future Emperor Leo I (r. 457–474) — was directed by the voice of the Theotokos to a hidden spring, with whose waters he gave sight to a blind man; a church of the “Life-Giving Spring” was subsequently built at the site and expanded under Justinian (ODB, s.v. “Pege”). The miracles associated with the shrine were later gathered by the fourteenth-century historian and hymnographer Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos, whose account is the principal literary source and who is credited with the feast’s proper hymnography (ODB, s.v. “Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos” and “Pege”). The commemoration gave rise to the widespread icon type of the Theotokos rising from a font or basin, the Christ-child on her breast and healing waters flowing below — treated among the iconographic types in ../08-the-icons-of-the-theotokos/the-wonderworking-icons.md.

The relic-feasts: Robe and Cincture of the Theotokos

Two feasts commemorate the deposition of the Virgin’s garments in the great shrines of Constantinople, relics bound up with the imperial city’s sense of being under her particular protection.

The Deposition of the Robe at the Blachernae church is kept on 2 July. The tradition, reported in Byzantine sources, holds that two patricians, Galbios and Kandidos, brought the Virgin’s robe (esthēs) from Palestine to Constantinople in the fifth century, under the Emperor Leo I, and that it was enshrined at Blachernae, which became the foremost Marian sanctuary of the capital (ODB, s.v. “Blachernai” and “Robe of the Virgin”; Averil Cameron, “The Theotokos in Sixth-Century Constantinople,” Journal of Theological Studies 29 [1978]: 79–108).

The Deposition of the Cincture — the Virgin’s belt or sash (zōnē) — is kept on 31 August, the last day of the liturgical year. The relic was housed at the Chalkoprateia church, the second great Marian shrine of Constantinople, and its later commemoration was associated with the healing of an empress (traditionally the wife of Leo VI) (ODB, s.v. “Chalkoprateia” and “Girdle of the Virgin”). A major portion of the belt is today venerated at the Monastery of Vatopedi on Mount Athos.

These relic-cults were not private devotions but civic ones. The Virgin was invoked as the defender of Constantinople, and her garments were carried in procession in times of danger. The Avar–Persian siege of 626, from which the city was delivered while the Patriarch Sergios led the defense and the relics were paraded on the walls, became the classic instance: tradition connects the deliverance with the all-night singing of the Akathist Hymn and the addition of its triumphal proem “To you, our leader in battle” (Tē Hypermachō) (Cameron, “Theotokos in Sixth-Century Constantinople”; ODB, s.v. “Akathistos”). The siege, the Akathist, and the hymn’s Marian theology are treated in ../09-hymnography-and-veneration/the-akathist-and-the-hymns.md.

The Synaxis of the Theotokos — 26 December

On the day after the Nativity of Christ the Church keeps the Synaxis (Gathering) of the Most Holy Theotokos. The pattern is a general one in the Byzantine calendar: the day following a great feast honors the chief created participant in the mystery — so the day after Theophany commemorates St. John the Baptist, and the day after Christmas commemorates the Virgin who gave the Lord his flesh (ODB, s.v. “Synaxis”; The Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware, London: Faber, 1969, on the Nativity of Christ afterfeast). The Synaxis is thus the calendar’s most direct expression of the reason for all Marian veneration: she is honored precisely as Theotokos, the one through whom the Word was born (see ../../orthodoxy/03-dogmatic-theology/theotokos.md).

The icon-commemorations

Finally, the calendar carries a great number of feasts attached to particular wonderworking icons of the Theotokos — among the Russians the Kazan icon (kept on 8 July and 22 October) and the Vladimir icon (with commemorations on 21 May, 23 June, and 26 August, tied to the deliverances of Moscow), and many others such as the “Joy of All Who Sorrow,” the “Sign,” and the Athonite icons. Each such feast typically rests on an account of the image’s appearance, translation, or deliverance of a city, and each is properly pinned to the earliest source that records it. Because these belong to the history of the icons themselves, they are treated in ../08-the-icons-of-the-theotokos/the-wonderworking-icons.md rather than here.

The shape of the secondary calendar

Taken together, these commemorations reveal how the veneration of the Theotokos took root in place and history. The Protection and the relic-feasts grow from the shrines of Constantinople and its experience of deliverance; the Life-Giving Spring from a healing site and its icon; the Synaxis from the inner logic of the Nativity of Christ; and the icon-days from the later devotional life of the Orthodox nations, above all Russia. Where a feast flourished unevenly — Pokrov chief among the Slavs, marginal among the Greeks — the difference is itself part of the record, and is noted rather than smoothed over. In every case the honor is referred, as always, to the Son whose Mother she is.

See Also

References

  • The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander P. Kazhdan et al. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991 (articles: “Pokrov,” “Andrew the Fool,” “Pege,” “Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos,” “Blachernai,” “Chalkoprateia,” “Robe of the Virgin,” “Girdle of the Virgin,” “Akathistos,” “Synaxis”).
  • Averil Cameron, “The Theotokos in Sixth-Century Constantinople: A City Finds Its Symbol,” Journal of Theological Studies 29 (1978): 79–108.
  • John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes, 2nd ed. New York: Fordham University Press, 1979.
  • The Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos (Timothy) Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1969.