Death and dying in a traditional icon and by the Bay of Naples

Patrick Comerford

The Church of England, in the Calendar in Common Worship, marks 15 August as a Holy Day with the simple designation ‘Blessed Virgin Mary.’ The Orthodox Church celebrates the day as the Dormition of the Theotokos, and for the Roman Catholic it is the Feast of the Assumption.

Although the Birth of the Virgin Mary is marked in the calendar of the Church of Ireland this month (8 September), many are uncomfortable about commemorations on 15 August, although we usually commemorate saints on the days they are said to have died. Perhaps this discomfort has less to do with post-Reformation debates and more to do with residual memories of how 15 August was used to counter-balance Orange celebrations on 12 July.

The icon of the Dormition was completed by El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos) in Crete, probably before 1567

The Dormition and the Assumption are different names for the same event, the Virgin Mary’s death or departure from earth, although the two feasts do not necessarily have an identical understanding of the event or sequence of events.

But, while the Assumption is only a recent doctrinal innovation in the Roman Catholic tradition, decreed in 1950, the tradition of the Dormition is much older in the Orthodox Church, where the day is a Great Feast and recalls the ‘falling asleep’ or death of the Virgin Mary.

The tradition of the Dormition is associated with a number of places, including Jerusalem, Ephesus and Constantinople. In his guidebook, The Holy Land, the late Jerome Murphy-O’Connor points out that two places in Jerusalem are traditionally associated with the end of the Virgin Mary’s earthly life: a monastery on Mount Zion is the traditional site of her death or falling asleep; and the basilica in the Garden of Gethsemane is said to be the site of her tomb.

However, the first four Christian centuries are silent about the death of the Virgin Mary, and there is no documentary evidence to support claims that the feast of the Dormition was observed in Jerusalem around the time of the Council of Ephesus in 431.

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An icon of the Dormition by Alexandra Kaouki nears completion in her workshop in Rethymnon, Crete

Traditional Orthodox icons of the Dormition depicting the death of the Virgin Mary incorporate many apocryphal elements or details from writings known as pseudepigrapha. Many icons show the apostles and other saints, including four early Christian writers, gathered around her deathbed, with Christ and the angels waiting above.

The best-known version of this icon is the work of El Greco, or Doménikos Theotokópoulos (1541-1614), painted in Crete probably before 1567.

Alexandra Kaouki at work on her icon in her workshop below the slopes of the Fortezza in Rethymnon

It was my privilege some years ago to watch a new icon on this theme in Orthodoxy being shaped and created by Alexandra Kaouki, perhaps the most talented and innovative iconographer in Crete today, as she worked in her studio below the Venetian fortezza in the in the old town of Rethymnon.

She was creating this new icon for the Church of Our Lady of the Angels, or the Little Church of Our Lady, on a small square in the old town.

It was a careful, slow, step-by-step work in progress, based on El Greco’s celebrated icon. But, as her work progressed, Alexandra made what she describes as ‘necessary corrections’ to allow her to ‘entirely follow the Byzantine rules.’

The icon of the Dormition completed by Alexandra Kaouki for a church in the old town of Rethymnon

In her studio, we discussed why El Greco places three candelabra in front of the bier. Perhaps he is using them as a Trinitarian symbol. However, Alexandra has returned to the traditional depiction of only one to remain true to Byzantine traditions.

How many of the Twelve should be depicted?

Should Saint Thomas be shown, or was he too late?

Why did she omit stories from later developments in the tradition, yet introduce women?

Alexandra completed her icon in time for the Feast of the Dormition in Rethymnon that year.

A missed date with Mrs Fitzherbert

The Hayes Conference Centre in Swanwick, Derbyshire … the planned venue for the USPG conference in July (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

One of the casualties of the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown in Britain has been this year’s annual conference of the Anglican mission agency, USPG, United Society Partners in the Gospel. I have been a trustee of USPG for over five years, and was a council member for many years before that.

In recent years, the conference has tended to take place in the High Leigh Conference Centre in Hertfordshire. But USPG was due to return to the Hayes Conference Centre in Swanwick, Derbyshire, from 20 to 22 July.

The conference, with the theme ‘Rejoice in the Lord always’: God’s People in God’s Mission, was timed to run into the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops, from 23 July to 2 August, but that too has been postponed.

Mrs Maria Fitzherbert … went through a secret marriage with the future King George IV

The Hayes has been a Christian conference centre since 1911, and I first attended a conference there in 1976. The main house at Swanwick was once the home of the Fitzherbert Wright family, a branch of the Fitzherbert family whose members, by marriage, included the famous – or infamous – Mrs Fitzherbert.

Maria Anne Fitzherbert (1756-1837) was a twice-widowed Roman Catholic who secretly contracted a marriage with King George IV that was invalid under English civil law. They were married in 1785 when he was Prince of Wales, but the marriage had not received the consent of his father, George III, although her nephew-in-law from her first marriage, Cardinal Thomas Weld, persuaded Pope Pius VII to declare the marriage sacramentally valid.

Maria Fitzherbert was the eldest child of Walter Smythe of Brambridge, Hampshire. Her first husband, Edward Weld, was 16 years her senior and died just three months after their marriage in 1775. She married her second husband, Thomas Fitzherbert (1746-1781) of Swynnerton, Staffordshire, in 1778, but was widowed once again in 1781.

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Ralph Fitzherbert of Norbury … ancestor of the Fitzherbert family and father-in-law of Thomas Comberford

A miniature portrait of Mrs Fitzherbert was among the 1,100 lots auctioned earlier this year at Matthews Auction Rooms in Kells, Co Meath. The catalogue described her as a ‘member, through previous marriage, of the Meath landowning Fitzherbert family.’ It went on to say, ‘she was a beauty of her age and the wife of King George IV, [to] whom she bore two children.’

However this portrait came into the Fitzherbert family in Co Meath, they were not descended from Mrs Fitzherbert. Indeed, any Fitzherbert living in Co Meath at the time of her secret marriage to the future king could only have been a fifth or fourth cousin of her second husband, Thomas Fitzherbert.

The lake at Swanwick … the estate was once owned by the Fitzherbert Wright family (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

On the other hand, there are many interesting connections between the Comerford and Comberford families and the Fitzherbert family in Staffordshire. The supposed Comberford ancestor of my branch of the family was Judge Richard Comberford (1512-ca 1547), a brother of Canon Henry Comberford (1499-1586), Precentor of Lichfield Cathedral.

They were the sons of Thomas Comberford (1472-1532) of Comberford, who became a member of the Guild of Saint Mary and Saint John the Baptist in Lichfield in 1495, a year or two before he married his second wife, Dorothy Fitzherbert, daughter of Ralph Fitzherbert of Norbury, near Ashbourne, Derbyshire.

This makes Richard Comberford a nephew of Thomas Fitzherbert, Precentor of Lichfield, William Fitzherbert, Chancellor of Lichfield, and Sir Anthony Fitzherbert, ancestor of Maria Fitzherbert’s second husband and of the Irish Fitzherberts.

There are signs and symbols of the Fitzherbert and Wright families throughout the house at Swanwick (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

There are no portraits of Mrs Fitzherbert in the house at Swanwick (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The Fitzherbert Wright family of Swanwick was also ancestors of the Maynell family, who inherited a large painting once in Swanwick that was donated some years ago to USPG. The painting raised £550,000 and helped support work among refugees in Greece by USPG and the Anglican chaplaincy in Athens.

However, I don’t know if there ever was any portrait of Mrs Fitzherbert in Swanwick.

See Naples and … but don’t die

The Bay of Naples … who swims north of Naples when there is an ‘R’ in the month? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

I heard once of a grand old lady who was asked late one year whether she had gone swimming that weekend.

‘No, my dear,’ she replied tersely. ‘I never swim north of Naples when there’s an R in the month.’

The saying ‘See Naples and Die’ is said to have been coined when the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies – Naples and Sicily – was at the height of its golden age under the rule of the Bourbon dynasty.

Naples and Sicily experienced a ‘golden age’ during the rule of the Bourbon dynasty (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Pompeii and Vesuvius are among the tourist attractions at the Bay of Naples (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The phrase was popularised in Northern Europe 200 years ago when it was quoted by Goethe in Italian Journey (1816/1817), where he quotes it as: Vedi Napoli e poi muori.

Goethe visited Naples and Sicily for three months, from February to May 1787, when he climbed Vesuvius, visited Pompeii, and travelled on to Taormina and other places in Sicily.

During that tour, Goethe was fascinated by the lifestyle of people: ‘Naples is a paradise; everyone lives in a state of intoxicated self-forgetfulness, myself included. I seem to be a completely different person whom I hardly recognise. Yesterday, I thought to myself: Either you were mad before, or you are mad now.’

The phrase quoted by Goethe earned a new popularity in Italy with a 1950s B-rated movie with the same title.

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I have seen the Bay of Naples, Vesuvius and Pompeii and travelled through Sicily, visiting Taormina and Mount Etna. But my planned visit to Italy this year was to neither. Instead, I had hoped to visit Puglia in June, with a few days in Bari – also known for its links with Saint Nicholas of Santa Claus fame.

I was booked to spend a night in one of the trulli or traditional dry-stone huts with conical roofs, in the town of Alberobello. Unfortunately, the Covid-19 travel restrictions frustrated those travel plans too – among many others – along with my hopes of swimming south of Naples before there was an ‘R’ in the month.

Goethe visited Taormina in Sicily during his tour of the Bourbon Kingdom of Naples and Sicily (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

My GP tells me swimming is good for my sarcoidosis, a condition on my lungs first diagnosed about 12 years ago. The first symptoms included a persistent cough, minor infections on my legs and loss of breath and balance.

It was embarrassing to preside at the Eucharist in the chapel of the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, hoping not to break into an unexpected spasm of coughing, or to find myself bowed over in the chapel seats, unable to join in singing hymns. The symptoms were further complicated when I was diagnosed with a severe Vitamin B12 deficiency.

In the years since, I have been through what seems like every hospital south of the Liffey for tests and procedures. Thankfully, my GP and consultants have brought everything under control. Although I still take an inhaler twice a day, you might not notice any symptoms – though I still worries about a coughing spasm on flights or public transport that fellow passengers may fear is an indication of Covid-19.

Hopefully, my sarcoidosis symptoms remain under control. In the meantime, I hope the Coronavirus recedes and that a vaccine or an immunisation is found.

I suppose I shall have to wait until Christmas before I see Saint Nicholas of Bari. But it would be good to swim south of Naples again – whether or not there is an ‘R’ in the month from now on. And I still hope to see the Bay of Naples once again.

This feature was first published in the August 2020 edition of the 'Church Review', the Dublin and Glendalough diocesan magazine

‘When life gives you lemons’ … do not give up on returning to Naples (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

A postponed plan to search for the Jewish heritage of Bari

Remaining Jewish gravestones in Bari … I had planned to visit Bari this week (Photograph: JGuide Europe/The Cultural Guide to Jewish Europe)

Patrick Comerford

I was supposed to be in Bari, the Adriatic port in southern Italy, this week, but my plans have been cancelled because of the lockdown and the Covid-19 pandemic.

With these changed circumstances, I have continued to take part in the weekly ‘webinar’ seminars on Sephardi history organised by the Bevis Marks Synagogue in London.

Last night, Rabbi Shalom Morris introduced Dr David Sclar, a research fellow at the Centre for Jewish Studies in Harvard. He discussed ‘(Re)Forming Identity: Books and Portuguese Rabbinicization in Early Modern Amsterdam.’ His paper drew extensively on his recent research on books in the library of the Ets Haim Yeshiva, attached to the Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam.

In many ways, last night’s seminar was a compensation for not being able to fulfil my plans to visit the Jewish sites in Bari and other parts of Puglia this week. The earliest known depiction of the Star of David as a Jewish symbol was found in Puglia on a tombstone in Taranto.

Bari was once of a flourishing Jewish centre, and tradition says it was founded by captives brought to Puglia by the Emperor Titus. Roman records of the first century tell of the Jewish communities of Bari, Oria, Otranto and Taranto. Other legends tell of Jewish captives deported from Judaea by the Emperor Titus after the fall of Jerusalem in the year 70.

Official documents from the Western Roman Emperor Honorius in the year 398 confirm there were several Jewish communities in Puglia. Many tombstone inscriptions, some entirely or partially in Hebrew, have been found throughout Puglia. However, no inscriptions survive to show that the community in Bari can be traced back to the Roman period, and the Jewish community in Bari may have developed at a later date.

The miracle-worker, Aaron of Baghdad, visited Bari in the ninth century. An epitaph dating from the ninth century commemorates Eliah ben Moses strategos and a stele of uncertain date commemorates Moses ben Eliah, a devoted teacher of the law and poet who is compared to the biblical Moses.

The Jews of Bari were included in the edicts of forced conversion issued by the Byzantine emperors in the ninth and 10th centuries. The Jewish quarter was destroyed ca 932 in mob violence and several Jews were killed.

But the community found new life soon after. Legend talks of ‘four rabbis,’ who sailed from Bari in 972, were captured at sea by Saracen raiders, and sold into slavery in Spain and North Africa. They included Moses ben Hanoch, who was taken with his young son Hanoch to Córdoba. There he was redeemed by the Jewish community, in the year 945 or 948.

After all four rabbis were ransomed, they founded famous Talmudic academies. Moses ben Hanoch became the community’s rabbi in Cordoba and through him Córdoba became the seat of Jewish scholarship. He died ca 965. The legend indicates how Bari had become known as a centre of Talmudic learning.

The women’s balcony above the entrance to the synagogue in Córdoba … Moses ben Hanoch became Rabbi of Córdoba after being captured in Bari (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

The scholars who taught at the rabbinical academy in Bari in the 10th and 11th centuries include Moses Calfo, who is mentioned in the Arukh of Nathan ben Jehiel.

Andreas, who was the Archbishop of Bari from 1062 until at least 1066, and probably later, travelled to Constantinople in 1066 and there, at some point, he converted to Judaism. He later fled to Egypt, where he died in 1078.

Bari’s reputation for rabbinical scholarship is confirmed by the adage cited by Rabbeinu Tam (Jacob ben Meir) in the 12th century: ‘From Bari shall go forth the Law and the word of the Lord from Otranto’ (a paraphrase of Isaiah 2: 3).

But for four centuries, the Jews in Bari suffered from the rival claims of the king and the archbishop to levy taxes on the Jews of the city, between 1068 and 1465. The Jews of Bari were also victims of the campaign to convert Jews to Christianity initiated by Charles of Anjou in 1290.

In 1294, 72 families were forced to adopt Christianity, but they continued to live in Bari as Neofiti or crypto Jews. These crypto Jews, known in Hebrew as Anusim, were frequently forced to live in special quarters known as Giudecca and were seen as heretics by local Christians.

There followed a century and a half of tranquillity until the Jewish quarter was again attacked in 1463. A notable figure in this period was the physician David Kalonymus of Bari. Kalonymus and his family were offered citizenship of Naples in 1479, along with exemption from commercial taxes, and he later petitioned the Duke of Bari for the same rights in Bari as he enjoyed in Naples.

After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, many Spanish and Portuguese Jews settled in Puglia, leading to a small revival of Jewish life in the area.

When the French invaded Bari in 1495, Jewish property worth 10,000 ducats was pillaged. But when Puglia fell to the Spanish in 1510, the Spanish Inquisition extended its reach to Puglia, searching for Jews, crypto Jews and Neofiti in the area, and a series of expulsions began 1511.

Most Jews and Neofiti were expelled and or tortured to death, most Jewish property was seized, and all remaining synagogues were rededicated as Catholic Churches.

The expulsion of Jews from the kingdom of Naples in 1510-1511 sealed the fate of the Jews in Bari. Although small number were readmitted in 1520, they were finally forced to leave in 1540-1541. These last expulsions brought an end to Jewish life in Puglia. Most of the remaining crypto-Jews were driven so deep underground that their presence finally came to an end too.

Some of the Jewish refugees from Puglia fled north, but most settled in Greece and the Aegean islands, and set up new congregations in Corfu, Arta and Thessaloniki. Sadly, the last remnants of the Jews of Puglia were murdered during the Holocaust.

Inside the Nuova or New Synagogue in Corfu … Jewish refugees from Puglia founded a synagogue in Corfu and continued to speak Judaeo-Greek or Yevanic (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Jewish communal life in Bari was briefly resumed during World War II, when in 1943 many Jews from other parts of Italy and from Yugoslavia took refuge in Bari from the Nazi-occupied territories. Towards the end of the war, a refugee camp was established at Bari. The beginning of the ‘illegal’ immigration to Palestine movement in Italy was in the area around Bari. During that period, Jewish soldiers, mainly from Palestine, were active in aiding and organising the refugees.

The early Jewish inhabitants of Puglia spoke Greek and Latin as their everyday languages. Later these evolved into hybrid languages known as Jewish Koine Greek and Judaeo-Latin. After the decline of the Roman Empire, Jewish Koine became Judaeo-Greek or Yevanic, while Judaeo-Latin gave way to different forms of Judaeo-Italian known as Italki.

The Jews of Puglia followed the Romaniote rite, with some of their own peculiarities and piyyutim. After their expulsion, Yevanic and Italki remained the mother tongue in the new communities in Greece. Some of the best known examples of spoken Italki were found among the Jews of Corfu.

However, Yevanic and Italki are now virtually extinct as spoken languages as a consequence of the assimilation of the Romaniote communities by the Ladino-speaking Sephardi Jews, the emigration of many of the Romaniotes to the US and Israel, and the murder of so many Romaniotes in the Holocaust.

Only two synagogues survive in Puglia, both in the Jewish quarter of Trani, about 50 km north-west of Bari. The Via della Sinagoga – now the Via Sabino – in Bari is a reminder of this former community in the Adriatic city, and there are several early mediaeval tombstones in the Provincial Museum.

The Jewish Museum in Thessaloniki … many Jews from Bari found refuge in Thessaloniki and other parts of Greece (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

A lost opportunity to visit Bari, another part of ‘Magna Graeca’

The Basilica di San Nicola in Bari … said to hold the relics of Saint Nicholas or ‘Santa Claus’ (Photograph: Wikipedia)

Patrick Comerford

Another planned city break has been lost this week due to the lockdown introduced in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Ryanair is advertising that Italy is ‘open’ from 1 July, but I was supposed to fly to Bari this afternoon [15 June 2020], with plans to stay in Bari for a few days this week and to travel throughout Puglia.

I had bought and read the guide books, and my plans included visiting the churches, spending time by the olive-green seas, enjoying the food of southern Italy, and visiting Lecce, the ‘Florence of the South,’ and some of the other beautiful towns of Puglia. I also planned to go in search of Jewish Bari too, and there were plans too to visit Alberobello and to stay overnight later this week one of the Puglian trulli or roundhouses.

Puglia is the ‘heel of the boot’ on the map of the Italian peninsula, and Bari, on the Adriatic sea, is the main city of the region. It is the second most important economic centre of mainland southern Italy after Naples, or the third after Palermo, if the Sicily is included.

This is a university city and the city of Saint Nicholas, and Bari was known to the Greeks as Βάριον and to the Latins as Barium. I was particularly interested in Bari because it was once part of Magna Graeca and the Greek-speaking world in classical times. It remained part of the Byzantine Empire until the Saracen invasions, and the church in Bari was a dependency of the Patriarch of Constantinople until the 10th century.

Greek people have been living in southern Italy for thousands of years, initially arriving in southern Italy in waves of migrations, from the Greek colonies of southern Italy and Sicily in the 8th century BC to Byzantine Greek migrations in the 15th century.

The Griko people (Γκρίκο), also known as Grecanici, are ethnic Greeks in Apulia and Calabria. They are believed to be descended from the Greek communities of Magna Graecia, although some scholars prefer to argue that they are descended from Greeks who arrived during the Byzantine period, or even as late as the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans.

Although most Greek people in southern Italy became entirely Italianised over the centuries, the Griko community preserved its Greek identity, heritage, language and distinct culture. However, exposure to mass media has progressively eroded their culture and language in recent decades.

The two distinctive Greek dialects, known as Katoitaliotika (‘Southern Italian’) and Grecanika, are mutually intelligible to some extent with Standard Modern Greek. The Griko language is classified as severely endangered, as the number of speakers has declined in recent decades. Today it is spoken by about 20,000, mainly elderly people.

The Italian-American singer Tony Bennett is descended from a Griko family. His father John Bendetto emigrated from the Griko town of Podargoni to the US, and Tony Bennett was born Anthony Dominick Benedetto in New York in 1926.

Before the East-West Schism, the Grikos were Catholics who adhered to the Byzantine Rite. Greeks from southern Italy in the Church included Pope John VII, Pope Zachary and Antipope John XVI. Today, most Griko people are Catholics.

Bari’s most famous saint, of course, is Santa Claus or Saint Nicholas of Myra, also known as Saint Nicholas of Bari. Early traditions say Saint Nicholas attended the First Council of Nicaea in 325, an legend says struck the heretic Arius across the face.

Saint Nicholas was first buried on the island of Gemile or ‘Saint Nicholas island,’ near present-day Fethiye. His body was later moved to Myra (present-day Demre), but when the city was captured by the Seljuk Turks in 1087, a group of merchants from Bari removed his body from the church and took it to Bari, where it is now enshrined in the Basilica di San Nicola.

With the cancellation of this week’s flights, I suppose I shall have to wait until Christmas before I see Saint Nicholas of Bari again.

Saint Nicholas Church on Gemile Island … was this is true burial place of Saint Nicholas of Bari? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)