Early Christian Churches in Anatolia

I recently came across an online article from The Independent with an account of recent archaeological work and discoveries in western Anatolia that reveal significant aspects of the early Christian churches built after the Peace of the Church and about communities in the region of the Seven Churches of Asia addressed in the Johannine text of Revelation. 

Amongst the discoveries is in a tomb at Iznik - ancient Nicea - and is the best preserved example of those few paintings which survive showing Christ as the Good Shepherd with a definitely Romanised figure of Christ. This is dated to the early to mid third century

The Good Shepherd and other paintings in the Iznik tomb

Image: MSN

It is also covered by another Independent article from late last year which can be seen at Jesus fresco found in ancient tomb sheds light on early Christianity

At the other end of the social scale are the Christian graffiti cut onto walls and, arguably, the small pilgrim flask with the figure of St George from Pergamum. Christianity had come to be, and remained, part and parcel of the life of the region.

The more recent article also looks at evidence that has emerged of the scale of the Imperial cult, and sees the emerging Christian Church as a direct counterpoint to that in the pre-Constantinian era.

The discoveries are illustrated and outlined alongside these interpretative points in the article at Spectacular archaeological finds in Turkey shed new light on origins of Christianity

There is a video with commentary about the Good Shepherd painting from africanews which can be seen at 🔎 recent early christian discoveries in Turkey   

A longer version without commentary from AP may be viewed at 🔎 recent early christian discoveries in Turkey 

 

Another video reports on excavations and conservation  of a flooded basilica site at Iznik, the site of the original city of Nicea and of the Council of 325. As I understand it a subsequent earthquake submerged the original city beneath the lake, and Nicea was rebuilt on the hill above its drowned predecessor.

The video can be be seen at 🔎 recent early christian discoveries in Turkey 

What has been revealed by these discoveries is further evidence of the extent and stability of Christian life despite occasional persecution, and underscores the point that the Persecution under Diocletian and his supporters was not merely more intense but came after a period of seeming acceptance and co-existence.

The tomb with the Good Shepherd painting also demonstrates that at least some Christians belonged to an affluent social sphere and able to appreciate and commission artworks. The world of these Christian Anatolians was clearly not just one of slaves and the downtrodden but part of Roman society, even if that society did not officially recognise them, and was sometimes hostile.

Marian Pilgrimage - an afterword

Having completed this May Pilgrimage once again here are a few thoughts to share with my fellow pilgrims, and to thank them for accompanying me.

The itinerary is not one that I came up with originally, but one which I took over from Fr Stevenson and Fr.father Hunwicke. As I have made additions, I have tried to remain consistent with the original route but the additions emphases the meandering nature. Every every year I say, I will sit down and rationalise the Pilgrimage Into one that could actually be followed around the country, but time never seems to permit, and I must admit to having developed a quiet fondness for the sheer eccentricity of where we go.

This year‘s additions have amounted to something like an upgrade of the whole Pilgrimage, adding to my knowledge as well, I hope, of my fellow pilgrims.

Inserting pictures where possible, despite the difficulties of downloading in some instances, hopefully made it more attractive and again I learned quite a bit in doing my picture research.

 

Searching online these days draws one into the clutches of AI. This certainly helped on an occasion, but it also had a tendency to sketch out devotion to Our Lady in a particular place, but then, in fact have no evidence to back it up. Researchers, beware!

Looking back over the past month, one thing that strikes me is that these shrines existed, alongside the usual daily devotions of people in their own parish churches, as I tried to highlight in the examples of Flawford and Stamford, as small localised places of devotion, whilst a few miles away there may well have been a much larger and renowned place of pilgrimage. In most cases, we know very little about what actually went on in these churches and chapels, but the evidence of Marian devotion teased out by nineteenth century scholars such as Fr Bridgett and Edmund Waterton in so many forms is very considerable. Apart from the work of Martin Gillett this topic was largely ignored by mainstream historians until another Catgolic scholar Eamon Duffy shook the complacency of academe with “The Stripping of the Altars” in 1993. I was not surprised because I had spent years exploring and leading others around the medieval churches of my home area and beyond, but unless you were a Catholic or Anglo-Catholic to most people the richness and complexity of medieval elite and popular piety was blanked out, replaced by socio-economics and a confident belief in the inevitable progressive virtues of English Protestantism. Thanks to Prof. Duffy, to J.A.F. Thompson, Nicholas  Orme, Jonathan Hughes, and others, including, paradoxically, Anne Hudson, we see not some  Chestertonian bucolic idyll, but a complex, at times conflicted but very largely, comprehensively Catholic society.

The variety of these shrines reveals something else - Our Lady was everywhere - in the rosary Edward and Little Hours at home, be it cottage or castle, but also at the at the well, in the churchyard you passed whilst travelling, at the loo cal monastery, in the cathedral or great abbey, always in the parish church, in the city centre or the wayside shrine, and especially in some places, such as “Stiffkey’s fair vale” at Walsingham. England may have been made to reject being Mary’s Dowry in the mid-sixteenth century but it did not mean that Mary renounced her dowry.

Our Lady is still here, waiting, willing….

May Our Lady pray for us and for her Dowry

    

   

Marian Pilgrimage - Our Lady of Walsingham

So finally, perhaps mentally footsore after the curious and circuitous route, and in need of a drink ( or two, or more )  at The Bull or another of Walsingham’s hostelries after making our devotions, the Pilgrimage finally arrives at its destination, England’s Nazareth, the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.

 After this possibly arduous journey there is not just the reward of arriving in the holy and blessed place that is Walsingham - and I assure readers that it is so - there are, for historic and institutional reasons two shrines, not one, and neither on the original site of the Holy House and the adjacent Augustinian Priory. All that survives above ground is the east wall and gable of the church, plus fragments of the domestic buildings, a gateway and the holy wells. Of the original Holy House and its later surrounding structure nothing is to be seen. The canons and local laypeople provided some martyrs as the shrine was destroyed, and it fell something like two generations later to St Philip Howard to record the desolation in “Walsingham Farewell”. 

 

The Slipper Chapel 

Built circa 1325 and now part of the Catholic National Shrine

Image: walsinghamvillage.org

   

The interior of the restored Slipper Chapel

Image: walsinghamvillage.org

 

The history of the restoration and development of the contemporary Catholic shrine can be read at

The history of the restoration of the Slipper Chapel and the creation of the contemporary Catholic National Shrine  - now a minor basilica - can be read at The Roman Catholic Shrine of our Lady, the Slipper Chapel • Walsingham, Norfolk

The traditional narrative that pilgrims removed their footwear to walk barefoot the Old English Mile - slightly longer than a Statute one - into the village tends to stress the idea that this was penitential. That may well be the case, but I wonder if it was also because Walsingham was seen as being holy ground.

There is more about the history of Walsingham and the tradition of pilgrimage at The history of Walsingham, Norfolk

The statue in the Anglican created in the 1920s and based upon the Priory seal

Image: stmarybonita.org

The interior of the Holy House in the Anglican Shrine 

It is the same size as the medieval one

The altar and tester are by Sir Ninian Comper

The statue of Our Lady wears a festal cope

Image: explorenorfolkuk.co.uk

There is a detailed reconstruction of what it would have been to be in Walsingham in an article by the late John Ashdown-Hill in The Ricardian This describes the pilgrimage made in 1469 by King Edward IV and his younger brother the Duke of Gloucester. It can be read at HhlhTwKnA2heZ853I

A cut-away reconstruction of the Holy House and priory church in the period 1500-35

The Holy House is shown as being wattle and daub but archaeological investigation suggests the structure was made of split tree trunks like the church at Greensted in Essex

The well house for the springs can be seen at the top left

Image: Stephen Conlin - MeisterDrucke

 My previous posts about aspects of the Walsingham shrine, including material about the possible survival of the original statue, now known as the Langham Madonna in the V&A, and my own sense of involvement and belonging at the Shrines, can be accessed from that for last year at Marian Pilgrimage - Our Lady of Walsingham 

The Langham Madonna and the modern Catholic shrine  statue

 

Image: The Living Church 

 

May Our Lady of Walsingham intercede for us and our intentions 

Jesu mercy, Mary pray 

Marian Pilgrimage- Our Lady of the Red Mount Kings Lynn

The Pilgrimage now makes its penultimate stop at the chapel of Our Lady of the Red Mount in Kings Lynn.

 

   

Our Lady of the Red Mount

Image: Kings Lynn Civic Society

The vault of the upper chapel 

Image: Facebook - Borough of Kings Lynn

A reconstruction of the original roof

Image: GetArchive

   

This remarkable building was built as a chapel for pilgrims making their way to Walsingham. First proposed in 1483 and authorised in 1485 the upper chapel was added in 1506. It was rendered redundant by the destruction free Walsingham shrine, yet it survived, as is recounted in The remarkable tale  of Red Mount Chapel

There as a well-illustrated account on the Britain Express website at Red Mount Chapel, King's Lynn

My previous notes on the chapel can be accessed through those for last year at Marian Pilgrimage - Our Lady on the Red Mount at King’s Lynn

In two of those articles I mention the Book of Margery Kempe. This ubique dictated autobiography by a Kings Lynn businesswoman and housewife recounting her pilgrimages and her spiritual insights opens windows into early fifteenth century England in ways no other work does. If you have not read it I urge readers to do so. Margery is nothing if not her own woman - likeable, infuriating, amazing, very different yet very similar to ourselves.

 

May Our Lady of the Red Mount intercede for us and our intentions 

Jesu mercy, Mary pray

Marian Pilgrimage - Our Lady of Ardenbergh in Great Yarmouth

 The Pilgrimage now makes its way into the important medieval fishing town and commercial port of Great Yarmouth, and to its extremely large parish church of St Nicholas.

Here, in the churchyard east of the church, was the now long-lost chapel of Our Lady of Ardenbergh. This, as I explain in my earlier posts, which can be accessed through Marian Pilgrimage - Our Lady “of Ardenbergh” at Great Yarmouth, was a commemoration of the part played by Yarmouth sailors in the victory at the battle of Sluys in 1340.

St Nicholas 1821

This showmen’s the church from the north-east. The chapel of Our Lady of Ardenbergh stood in the churchyard to the east of the 

 

Image: professorhedgehogjournal

 

St Nicholas Church Great Yarmouth

A print published in 1826 showing the view from the south-west

Image: rareoldprints.com

The church in 1880

Image:AbeBooks

The history of the church, and its curious plan,can be read in the Wikipedia account of its development  over the centuries in Great_Yarmouth_Minster

The drastic mid-Victorian restoration resulted in the church outwardly looking like a building of that time rather than being medieval. Bombing in WWII resulted in the church being completely burnt out. The 1950s restoration incorporated some radical changes but created a spacious place of worship, but does not feel particularly old. Unfortunately the timber and lead spire was not rebuilt.

May Our Lady “of Ardenbergh” intercede for us and our intentions

Jesu mercy, Mary pray

Marian Pilgrimage - Our Lady of the Oak at St Martin’s in Norwich

The Pilgrimage now goes into Norwich and heads for one of the city centre parishes north of the river Wensum, that of St Martin at Oak. It was in the branches of that oak in the churchyard that there stood a statue of Our Lady which from at least the reign of King Edward II attracted offerings as well as care in terms of maintaining the paintwork of the figure.

St Martin at Oak 

James Sillett (1764-1840)

Image: Norfolk Museums Service - artuk.org

St Martin at Oak circa 1909

Image: JBArchive

 

My post from last year is, like others, linked to my previous ones about the shrine. These note include some more about other statues of Our Lady that were places in trees as at Islington or visions of her in ones, as at Evesham, and, more recently, Fatima. These can all be accessed from Marian Pilgrimage - Our Lady of the Oak at St Martin’s in Norwich

The church today

As a result of bomb damage in WWII the upper part of the tower was, regrettably, not rebuilt

Image: Wikipedia 

May Our Lady of the Oak intercede for us and our intentions

Jesu mercy, Mary pray

The Fall of Constantinople in 1453

Today is the 573rd anniversary of the fall of Constantinople in 1453. I am told that as it was a Tuesday. to this day Greek people refuse to start a new project on that day of the week.

The always instructive website on Ancient Greek history and culture Greek Reporter has an interesting piece today which offers some new insights into the background, the events of the siege and the final assault from a new book by a US academic.

In particular he rejects the inevitablist interpretation of what happened and indicates that various other possible outcomes might have happened.

I am not a Byzantinust, and beyond reading something about the events of 1453 and being interested in their true place in wider European history, I can claim no expertise. However the arguments set out in the article seem well made and well worth considering.

The article can be read at Why Constantinople’s Fall Was Not Inevitable. 

The detailed Wikipedia biography of the last Byzantine Emperor whose body was never discovered can be seen at Constantine_XI_Palaiologos 

   

 

 

Emperor Constantine XI

A modern statue in Athens

Image: Orthodoxwiki

Marian Pilgrimage - Our Lady of Winfarthing and Our Lady of Weston

Moving north-eastwards the next two stops on the Pilgrimage are at the churches of St Mary at Winfarthing in Norfolk and St Peter at Weston in Suffolk.

 

My previous posts about these two shrines can be found from last year’s notes at Marian pilgrimage - Our Lady of Winfarthing and Our Lady of Weston

Nothing apart from the fact that it existed appears to be known about the devotion at Weston, which is a  simple unaisled building.

  

Winfarthing is better documented but, as my notes across the years show it suggests shall we say, a distinctive local, and community based, set of ideas in the parish. As I have written in previous years it reads like a synopsis for one or more M.R.Janes stories.

 

Winfarthing Church

 

Image: English-church-architecture 

 Weston Church

Image: Facebook - Chris Droffats on Historic churches uk

May Our Lady of Winfarthing and Our Lady of Weston intercede for us

 

Jesu mercy, Mary pray