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Wednesday, 26 June 2019

Waiting for the Revolution, 1st July

Have an interest in the far left and Trotskyism? Perhaps a member of an organisation within these traditions, have a past activist record with them, or have developed an interest with the minutiae of left wing history? And happen to be in or near the Nottingham area on Monday 1st July between 7pm and 8.30pm? Then why not join me and Evan Smith, co-editor of Against the Grain and Waiting for the Revolution, and author of British Communism and the Politics of Race for an evening discussing Trotskyana, sectariana, far left history, Evan's work, and what the rich history of labour movement struggles in the UK and Australia have to teach us today.

The event is at Five Leaves, Nottingham's radical bookshop. Tickets are £4 waged, £2 student/unwaged and you can book your place via Hope to see you there!

John Edwards said...

Great pity that the journal Revolutionary History disappeared. Does anyone know what happened to it? The archive, particularly the obituaries of veteran Trots were often very interesting

Anonymous said...

It has come to my attention that LGBT rights have been pretty much fully embraced by all of the ruling elite, the status quo apologists and the lackeys of the established order. So I think this should be moved from the revolutionary category to the thank god some shred of decency exists in these barbaric times!

Hopefully all the talk will be about the atrocities carried out in Yemen, the defeat of the government in the high courts, the death count from austerity and the continuing Palestinian baiting that has become a national sport in the West, particularly in the most aggressive imperialistic and most overtly neo liberal nations such as the USA (the worlds Gangster) and the UK.

Also hopefully a thorough attack on Western values will be top of the agenda, both in its willful destruction of the environment and its dehumanising aspects!


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basICColor input 5.1.2 build 2377 Multilangual MacOSX

Posted By: Messer2
basICColor input 5.1.2 build 2377 Multilangual MacOSX

basICColor input 5.1.2 build 2377 Multilangual | MacOSX | 90.4 MB

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Version 5.1.2 build 2377
- NEW target: basICColor dcam mini target
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- added new reference files for basICColor scan and basICColor rescan targets
- if auto rotate should fail then open image unrotated
- force gray axis to be neutral when creating a scanner profile
- don't maintain white hue when making scanner profiles
- show alert when trying to save a new job with color temperature D65/StdA and non-spectral reference [INP-9]
- improved support for Canon EOS 5D Mark IV
- do not show illuminant and observer if the referenence is not spectral [INP-7]
- for multi target job allow primaries from the first target, only [INP-8]
- bugfix: corrected DCP profile name for Hasselblad
- bugfix: changing reference file was deselecting the target [INP-6]

System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.7 and later
Home Page - http://www.basiccolor.de/basiccolor-input-5-en/
No mirrors please

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Indicators on Best Jewelry Store You Should Know

Some jewelry shops use greater than the typical lockets, arm bands, earrings, and wedding event rings. If you currently have your engagement ring, you can still gain from a trip or two to the neighborhood shop, whether you intend to browse or prepare to purchase.

If you already have your perfect necklace, ring, bracelet, or various other shiny ornament, there might still be space for improvement. The majority of fashion jewelry shops supply engraving as a service. Some do it totally free or very cheaply when you get the product there. Even if yours is from another store or you got it years ago, you ought to have the ability to pay a sensible total up to get it inscribed. Think about having your initials, name, or birthdate etched, or maybe your wedding event date and the initials of both you and also your companion. This can make silver, gold, or other products even more meaningful than previously.

If your wedding celebration is turning up, you should understand that some precious jewelry stores market classy household merchandises. That implies you need to consider registering at such a shop if you want stylish or shiny things for your house as wedding event gifts. As an example, crystal champagne glasses, silver cups, and also great chinaware can all generally be found at such stores. If you have a china cabinet and also wish to fill with beautiful points that you can proudly show off in your home, registering at this kind of store makes sense. You might also be able to locate designs for around your house. You can trust they will be of high quality while additionally looking excellent, whether they are constructed from crystal, gold, silver, white gold, or other preferred products.

Obviously, even if you currently have your involvement ring and even your wedding ring does not imply you will certainly never need added fashion jewelry in the future. Anniversaries, birthday celebrations, as well as other important events could ask for a new pendant, ring, bracelet, and even anklet. When that time comes, you require to understand where the best fashion jewelry shops in your location are. Whether you have something in mind for on your own or a liked one, it is good to understand ahead of time where to go shopping.

Numerous facilities that offer jewels and also even more have internet sites. So, if you can not make it to the actual store to surf, you can a minimum of consider the site every once in a while. By doing this, you will certainly be prepared when the time pertains to buy what you want or what you think a loved one desires.

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The Way To Find The Best Football Betting System

Some soccer football experts would offer free soccer betting tips as part of their columns or blogs. However, not all soccer experts are actual experts who could assist you with sports betting. Some are only self-proclaimed football experts. Additionally, there are dubious websites featuring free tips that are actually blatant copies of authentic tips from experts.

Betting on totals is another way to bet on sports. Rather than betting on the winning team or who will win the game, you bet on the combined final score of this game instead. Needless to say, there are various bets you can select from depending on the sports. You just have to be sure that you are betting within your means and that you are betting an amount that you can afford to lose as well.

The actual key to success for any system is its ability to handicap a situation and identify it as rewarding. Flipping a coin and utilizing a progressive betting scheme is not a betting system.

Take whatever soccer betting system you’ve purchased from somebody else and make sure to run your own research concerning the teams you will be betting on. Never mechanically bet on a specific team without digging deep. The objective is to look for answers to key questions that will turn it into a stronger bet if it is weak.

For example, the 메이저사이트 주소 line may read like this: Toronto Blue Jays OV 7.5 -120 and the New York Yankees UN 7.5 +130. If you would like to bet on Toronto with over 7.5 runs being scored you ought to wager $120 to win $100. To wager on New York with fewer than 7.5 runs coming across the plate you may win $730 on a $100 bet. Just remember, that in baseball, when you’re betting the additional innings count for run line bets and the over/under.

You can also bet on correct scores, at-bats, hits, balls, strikes, home run leaders, and innings played etc.. Needless to say, bets can be made on division winners and World Series winners. There are a whole lot of choices when it comes to baseball betting and it is typically quite easy to get the hang of it.

Online is also a phenomenon you may need to consider when it comes to sport betting. This is whereby you get to bet on the horse that you feel is going to win via the net. Online being has become very popular as the web continues to revolutionize how is completed. With the online you can either bet on virtual horses or in a real track. Suffice to say that you won’t be on the track yourself as you place the bets. You’ll be required to cover the bets via online money transfer and cards like visa and master card.

Horse Racing Betting Guidelines For Winning Wagers

If you are a newbie to the world of horse racing and keen to learn the terms and techniques of horse betting, here are a few betting terms explained that may help your cause.

Learn whereto put your money. In sports betting, there are various bets that you can choose from and your selection is a must as different types of bets have different odds of winning and have varying risks also. You can bet on the team that will win, which is known as the right wager and you can bet also on two teams winning in different games in no particular order. You can even bet on the scores of the game at halftime or after the whole game, and many other kinds of bets. Bear in mind that the more risks you are putting your money into, the higher winnings you can get and that should be a consideration.

The following betting tip is to look for a site where you can place bet. You’ve got to be cautious in selecting the possible sites for internet betting game. Aside from the credible websites, in addition, there are scammers who will entice you to join in their website. Always seek for an online gaming website that’s credible and has already established a reputation. These sites will provide you some information regarding the various systems and types of online betting that they are using.

I use what I imagine a psychologist might call positive reinforcement – I recall times when I’ve won big time, I sit down and watch the movies of these races where my horse has won, and I read over my 메리트카지노 추천 archives and documents, all this to remind myself what’s gone before. On occasions I might consider taking a brief spell away from betting altogether, to rid negative thoughts from my head – after my grandfather died in 2001 I did exactly that, and more recently back in February of this year.

Take whatever soccer betting system you have purchased from somebody else and ensure to run your own research concerning the teams you’ll be betting on. Never mechanically bet on a particular team without digging deep. The objective is to search for answers to key questions which will turn it into a stronger bet if it is weak.

An analogy to the world of shares maybe may be that no financial advisor worth his salt would advise you throw all your capital into the stock exchange alone. The vast majority of punters don’t use any form of set aside bank. They gamble randomly with what ever money they have in their pocket at the end of the week or go in too deep with stakes far in excess of their personal security levels. A punter with a professional attitude will set aside what he could comfortably afford to spend and then determine the best use he can make of that predetermined sum of capital. With a fixed sum of funds available you now proceed to the next reason for failure.

Betting exchanges are somewhat different in that there’s more choice. For example, an exchange member might have the choice of either 9 or less, 10 to 11 and 12 or more corners.

It is very important that you’ve got useful tips you can use. Football betting is heavily based on various factors. One of them, present setting and the game stats actually matter most. For those beginners in soccer betting, forecasts and expert football predictions will surely enable you to establish what bet you must take a chance on. With careful analysis, you might have an educated vision of the possible outcome of the game.

Guru Betting Tips Review – Is This System As Good As It Seems?

When a sports investor has many and diverse betting options available for wagering on a contest, things can be somewhat confusing for the uninitiated or novice bettor. Clearly there will be choices which are sports specific, but there’ll almost always be certain general betting products which suit all manner of sporting events – something as straightforward as the straight up”win” bet – is an instance of a bet type that is common to nearly every sport.

There are a number of things you have to do so as to place your bets and win the cash. Soccer is one of the sports which have gained great betting interests from bettors. For instance, Premier League 더킹카지노 추천 allows players to place different bets on a game fixture. In the Premier League, you can place bets on goals to be scored within a particular period, for example, the first half of the match occurring. You can also place bets on the player to score most goals. More so, you can bet on the football team to win a Premier League match or the Premier League Cup.

Have you seen the sci-fi movie The Matrix? There’s a scene towards the end, where Agent Smith has our hero Neo pinned back on the track in a subway station. We can see the tube down, and we can hear the noise of an approaching train.

This is my personal preferred sports betting system. Yes, this is much different than a handicapper. The Sports Betting Champ compiled 10 years of data to create a winning system based entirely off a long history of outcomes. Sounds crazy that the past history in sports can predict future results, right? Well it’s not. It works and you’ll be amazed if you get some of the greatest upsets daily because of this gold mine.

You could also find no benefit whatsoever have to discard the entire idea. It’s all a part of building your own systems, which is the first step in being a consistent winner.

Ever seen even the strongest teams on top of a league drop to under-dogs in the bottom of league table? Causing bettors to lose lots of money? Why for example should a group like?Manchester United shed to black even when they have over 90% chance of winning? It hurts a lot lose this sort of bet.Yeah it happens. 99% of all soccer punters (bettors) THINK they know who will win the game and which team will go over or under the total and finish losing nearly all their bets and a lot of money, which leaves 1 percent. Those 1% are professionals that make a living betting on soccer and other sports.

Learn where to put your money. There are various sorts of betting and each has its own dangers and chances of doubling your money or winning the jackpot. If you go through each sort of bets, you could be overwhelmed on where to place your money and you may be blinded as the jackpot prizes goes higher. Of course, the greater prize you can get, the more risks you are getting into. You can consider having small but frequent wins in the event you can, or settle at those types of bets which have a decent prize and easier to win also.

It’s quite important that you have useful hints you can use. Football betting is heavily based on various factors. One of them, current setting and the game stats really matter most. For those beginners in soccer betting, forecasts and expert football predictions will surely help you to establish what bet you must take a chance on. With careful analysis, you might have an educated vision of the potential outcome of the game.

Wholesale Products Can Be Fun For Anyone

Dealers as well as wholesale products, will be on the minds of much more individuals these days than they were, also one year back.

It is a sign of the moments, and as all of us understand, the moments are looking instead grim. However that is specifically why Joe public is looking for wholesalers and wholesale items.

Much more people are looking to the Net with ideas of making a bit of extra money to balance out the expense of living and also some are assuming more along the lines of job protection, or the absence of it, and also taking into consideration the opportunities for self employment.

What far better time could there be, for searching down those dealers, who will take care of the little guy, that doesn’t have much capital to spend?

It is a commonly held mistaken belief that if you can not manage to pay for a truckload of items, you are out of the picture, where obtaining wholesale products is concerned. It is true that the majority of genuine wholesalers will generally not manage you unless you have thousands to spend. These are the dealers that supply the huge retail shops etc, and also they do not make much cash on each thing sold. For that reason the only method they can make it worth their while is by offering in huge amounts per order.

However the Net has been gradually exciting itself upon many dealers, and also several have now become members of dealers collectives. I am not discussing wholesale directory sites below. You require just go to eBay in order to find wholesale directory sites that will set you back a few quid and also turn out to be entirely useless to you.

No, the collectives I am speaking about are made up of genuine wholesalers, dealers who have signed up with credible business, and also who particularly deal with people and also local business who don’t have actually shed tons of capital.

You can read more concerning a few of these collectives if you see the link listed below. You require to understand who to handle as well as in many cases, that to steer clear of. There is constantly an aspect of danger when taking care of wholesalers for the first time as well as I can not stress enough, the necessity to do a correct investigation, as to their legitimacy.

The good news is, the a lot more reliable wholesalers collectives companies, will certainly veterinarian wholesalers prior to permitting them to register and begin offering to their subscribed purchasers.

However, even a few of these ‘ affirmed’ firms are not what they appear to be, and also below again, it is essential to know who you are managing. Scammers are constantly on the lookout for the trustful punter and they may also have quite excellent websites that offer the impact that they are real. Actually, they may well be nothing besides a middle-man, pretending to be a dealer or a group of wholesalers. All they do is take your money, only to purchase the products you want, from genuine wholesalers at a lower price than you are paying them. Yes, you will most likely obtain the goods, however there will certainly be little or no revenue in it for you when it’s time to offer.

Not just will you not be handling authentic dealers, but you will certainly have lost your time investing in goods that make a profit for a sneaky parasite, as well as leave crumbs for you.

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Getting My Jewelry To Work

How to Tidy and also Take Care Of Your Precious jewelry

One of the most efficient method to cleanse your fashion jewelry is to bring it to your regional jeweler. That might not constantly be possible. It always appears that on a Saturday evening, before mosting likely to supper or while obtaining clothed for a wedding, you recognize that your precious jewelry is doing not have a little its glisten and appeal.

Fashion Jewelry Upkeep Schedule
Since many people keep their jewelry in a main place, such as a precious jewelry box or secure, it is very easy to maintain a basic checklist along with it. It is commonplace for one to allow time pass before observing someday when examining their precious jewelry that a diamond is missing out on from their ring or arm band. Maintaining a straightforward checklist in your precious jewelry box can act as a pointer. All great precious jewelry that is used regularly as well as is installed with gems must be offered a jewelry expert to be checked for wear on prongs as well as closures on a regular basis. Over time, often used precious jewelry often comes in contact with coarse surface areas throughout daily wear, making it prone to disintegration as well as steel exhaustion.

Precious jewelry Erosion
” Disintegration” takes place when gold or a rare-earth element massages versus itself or various other surface areas. As rare-earth elements rub versus counter tops, stone, or mineral surface areas the soft precious metal gradually erodes. Your jeweler can recommend you of needed repair before an thing becomes damaged and is lost. This suggested safety net can prolong the life of your precious jewelry.

Fashion Jewelry Metal Tiredness
” Steel tiredness” occurs when metal is stressed by consistent knocking or bending. The most convenient method to understand this is to envision a coat wall mount being curved to and fro several times up until it damages. The impact of hitting a ring or bracelet on a doorknob or the consistent clinical depression of a springtime hold on your precious jewelry locks gradually contributes to its “metal tiredness”.

Expert Fashion Jewelry Maintenance
We recommend that everyday items such as interaction rings and also tennis bracelets be seen by a expert jeweler every 6 months, as well as every year for jewelry that is put on much less regularly. A trained fashion jewelry specialist will certainly examine prongs and also holds for deterioration. The jewelry expert will find loose rocks and set up to tighten your prongs and repair work or change worn areas.

Professional Fashion Jewelry Cleansing
Many jewelry experts will certainly clean up and also brighten your precious jewelry while you wait as well as the more advanced jewelers will have the ability to maker gloss your precious jewelry with a number of phases of compounds to recover its initial appeal. They may also be able to recover a rhodium surface on your white gold. The more very certified jewelers will certainly also be able to heavy steam clean and ultrasonically clean your fashion jewelry. Your jewelry specialist ought to understand the nature of delicate materials, gemstones, and agings in order to avoid destructive your priceless products while working on them.

House Precious Jewelry Cleansing
In order to properly cleanse your precious jewelry at home you should initially have an understanding of what your jewelry is made from.

Fashion jewelry Cleaning No No’s.
Lots of materials need to not be cleaned up in your home. Below are a couple of examples of precious jewelry that should be managed carefully.

Organic rocks or materials such as pearl, cream color, bone, coral reefs, timber, natural leather, cord, or string must not be revealed to rough detergents or soaked in liquids or ultrasonically cleaned. These generally made use of fashion jewelry materials may take in the liquids and also be harmed or tarnished completely.

Vintage or unusual artist jewelry need to not be tampered with in the house. Polishing and cleansing can destroy the patina as well as honesty of some rare fashion jewelry.

Coins should never ever be polished and cleaned up by a non-professional.

Some gems are treated with or have natural oils that can be disturbed by cleaning agents. Some stones are porous and can absorb cleaning agents or wetness. Below are a couple of gems that warn ought to be used with: Emerald green, Opal, Turquoise, Lapis Lazuli, and all of the organic rocks and also products noted above.

Chemical direct exposure can result in disaster. Soaking jewelry in chlorine-based cleansers can totally liquify a piece of fashion jewelry, leaving behind just the rocks. Furthermore, consistent direct exposure to swimming pool chlorine can degeneration the solders made use of to make jewelry. A tiny bead of mercury from a busted thermometer can draw in to gold and also contaminate all other jewelry that it is available in contact with, turning the gold white. This has been understood to render whole jewelry boxes of important precious jewelry useless. As a rule, any destructive product in family usage having acids, lye, or chemicals that you on your own ought to not be revealed to is most likely not good for your fashion jewelry.

Brightening plated steels with rough substances can put on through the plating. The micron plating solution made use of on lots of pieces of costume jewelry is thin as well as rough compounds can wear through to the underlying steels. When the base metals are revealed, they may vary in color or stain with time.

Caution should be taken when utilizing ultrasonic cleansers. Ultrasonic cleansers use high frequency waves to release makeup crud and dust from your fashion jewelry. The process includes resonance.
* Vibration causes disintegration when 2 items are rubbing against one another or the side of an ultrasonic container.
* Vibration can likewise loosen up rocks as well as epoxy or glue.
* Vibration can likewise shatter vulnerable materials such as brownish-yellow and also enamel.
* Resonance can change the color or get rid of the surface enhancement on most of the uniqueness treasures on the market place today.
* Resonance can dislodge fills from rocks that have ingredients.
As soon as you have established that your precious jewelry can be cleansed in an ultrasonic cleaner, the ideas below can help you with your safe cleaning.

* Use just suggested ultrasonic cleansing options.
* Make sure that your things are positioned so that they do not massage on each other or the bottom and side of the ultrasonic storage tank.
* Do not leave fashion jewelry neglected in an ultrasonic cleaner for expanded periods of time.
Proper Fashion Jewelry Cleaning Up in your home.
Now that you have an understanding of what you require to be mindful with, allow’s evaluate the many things you can do to take care of your fashion jewelry and also make it look wonderful. The simplest way to maintain your jewelry looking great is by cleansing it frequently. It is much easier to get rid of a slim layer of hairspray, cream, or make-up than a long-lasting build up. The more frequently you clean your fashion jewelry the easier the process.

Brightening Rare-earth Elements.
You can brighten your jewelry by obtaining a jewelers rouge towel or a velvet towel from your neighborhood jewelry expert. These are soft fabrics charged with mild polishing substances made use of to brighten jewelry. The polishing materials on the cloths are not unpleasant enough to harm your rocks or metal, however when rubbed vigorously against silver or gold will certainly give a good appeal. When you are ended up polishing your jewelry, you can cleanse it to eliminate any one of the substances left behind. Make sure to put your jewelry expert’s towel in a dust free container such as a poly bag when you are ended up. This will certainly prevent the cloth from grabbing grit and contaminant that might damage your products on it following usage.

Cleaning Diamonds Gold and also Platinum.
Gold, rubies, platinum, sapphire, ruby, and a lot of sturdy stones not detailed above in the “Do n’ts” section can be conveniently cleaned up. Just mix a option of 1/2 Windex and also 1/2 warm water. It is not necessary to produce a big batch; a fifty percent cup is typically enough. See to it the area is ventilated. Saturate the products for as long as it takes to loosen up the accumulation. Get rid of the things as well as simply scrub them with a soft tooth brush. Make certain to push the bristles delicately between the prongs and in all of the folds of the fashion jewelry. If the deposit persists repeat the procedure. Make certain to wash your fashion jewelry completely and also dry to prevent irritability of the skin. Some people like to dry out the rocks on the underside with tinned air, in order to avoid water spots. Once more, the much more frequently you clean your jewelry, the easier the process.

know more about Firefly Jewelry here.


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Graham Speake, Kallistos Ware

GRAHAM SPEAKE. ‘The Ark of Hellenism’:Mount Athos and the Greeks under Turkish Rule

Averil Cameron has already pointed out that when Constantinople eventually and inevitably fell to the Ottomans in 1453, the Holy Mountain was able to represent a symbol of the continuity of Orthodox culture – not exclusively, but none more so than, to the Greeks.321 Most of the Greek-speaking Byzantines had in fact been subjects of the sultan for decades, if not centuries, before the fall of the City. For them the year 1453 was of little significance in practical terms. Even on the Athonites the dissolution of the empire made little impact. Since 1312 the monks had been under the jurisdiction not of the emperor but of the ecumenical patriarch, and the patriarchate was to become a key plank in the structure of the Ottoman administration. While Macedonia as a whole was overrun by the Ottomans in the late fourteenth century and again, after a brief Byzantine interlude, in the early fifteenth century, the monasteries of Athos and their estates remained inviolate. The monks in their wisdom had already come to an arrangement with the sultan whereby in return for their submission to him they would receive his protection; and in 1430 a delegation of Athonites paid homage to Sultan Murat II in Adrianople. In this way they were able to secure their survival under the infidel.

Other holy mountains had been less fortunate, or less perspicacious. As Elizabeth Zachariadou has written, holy mountains were a characteristic feature of Byzantine monasticism. Most of them were located in Asia Minor (for example, Mount Olympos in Bithynia, Mount Latros near the ancient city of Miletus, and Mount Galesion near Ephesus). After the defeat of the Byzantines at Manzikert in 1071, the Seljuq Turks ravaged the newly won territory of Anatolia and, ignoring the rules of Islam, to which they had only recently and superficially been converted, saw no reason to spare the monasteries. Very few of them survived.

The decline of the monasteries of Asia Minor worked to the advantage of Mount Athos. Its monasteries were to emerge from the period of Latin rule after 1204 with an enhanced reputation for a pious way of life. They have preserved their unique character ever since. It served them well during the Ottoman conquest of Macedonia in the late fourteenth century, for the early Ottoman rulers were impressed by their spiritual authority and were anxious to fulfil the responsibilities expected of pious Muslim rulers.322

Before the year 1453 was out, a delegation of Athonites called on Sultan Mehmet II to pay their respects and in return he agreed to safeguard their rights and protect their independence. For a century and more the monks enjoyed the active support of successive sultans and the Mountain flourished as a ‘symbol of divinely ordained religious authority’.323 What did this mean in practice? Rather than attempt a broad sweep I propose to take two snapshots of Athos, in the sixteenth century and in the eighteenth century, and to observe the activities of two pairs of parallel lives.324

Sixteenth-century Athos

A clear indication of the continuing prosperity of the Holy Mountain in the sixteenth century is the foundation in 1541 of the monastery of Stavronikita. There are references in documents of the eleventh and twelfth centuries to a monastery of that name, but it had clearly become deserted, perhaps during the Latin empire, and reverted to being a cell of Philotheou. In the 1530s monk Gregorios, abbot of a monastery in Thesprotia and a close friend of Ecumenical Patriarch Jeremias I (1522–46), purchased the cell from Philotheou for 4,000 piastres and set about restoring it as a monastery. But he did not live to complete his work and shortly after his death in 1536 the katholikon and newly built cells were destroyed by fire. The Holy Community then wrote to Patriarch Jeremias, asking him personally to undertake the restoration of Stavronikita, partly out of a desire to protect Karyes and the east coast of the peninsula from attack by pirates. This he agreed to do and by February 1540 he had assembled a group of monks and appointed an abbot. He endowed the monastery with estates on Kassandra and on Lemnos, he rebuilt the katholikon (completed in 1546), and he established the brotherhood on strict cenobitic lines, even though this was a period when most monasteries had adopted the idiorrhythmic way of life. In the manner of imperial founders Jeremias had himself portrayed in a fresco in the katholikon, dressed in his patriarchal robes and holding a model of the church that he had founded. His will survives and constitutes the typikon of the monastery. In it he writes:

I appointed an abbot there and made good arrangement that there should be a coenobitic monastery, giving written instructions and laying down this canon, saying to the man chosen as abbot and to each of his successors: most reverend man and abbot of this my monastery, you shall in no way change the coenobitic rule and canon of the monastic community … you shall not acquire any worldly goods or possessions, nor shall you lay up treasure for yourself personally, not even as much as one silver coin … you shall not have any animal of the female sex for the use of the monastery, since you have renounced contact with the female … you shall not allow any beardless youth to enter the monastery under your command, even for an hour … you shall not have any different or valuable garment but shall go dressed and shod in the traditional manner like the other monks … you shall not desert your flock to go to another, nor advance to higher office … you shall put no man before the interests of the brotherhood in Christ …325

In short, this is every bit a traditional Byzantine foundation in a post-Byzantine world. But despite its generous endowments, which continued to accrue in subsequent centuries, it has remained throughout its history one of the poorest monasteries of the Holy Mountain and its population has always been small: 68 monks in 1615, 30 in 1666, 25 in 1808, 40 in 1873, 25 in 1903, 11 in 1965, 45 in 2000.

Cenobitic Stavronikita in the mid-sixteenth century was the exception to the idiorrhythmic rule. The transition to the latter had been a gradual one, and it had started before the end of the empire, but by the end of the sixteenth century every monastery had become idiorrhythmic and remained so at least until the late eighteenth century. Stavronikita was still idiorrhythmic in the 1960s when John Julius Norwich wrote of it:

in the four centuries of its existence, so brief by local standards, its funds and its inhabitants have decreased to almost vanishing point. Discounting the tragic condition of the Russian cenobion of St Pantaleimon and of other smaller Slav houses not on the establishment as Ruling Monasteries, this will probably be the first to crumble altogether into ruins and die.326

In the event this prediction was not fulfilled, though the house was close to being abandoned in 1968 when the civil governor of the Mountain invited the hermit Fr Vasileios Gontikakis to take charge of it. Fr Vasileios accepted this invitation on condition that he was appointed abbot by the Holy Community and the monastery reverted to cenobitic rule. This was agreed and in the last forty years Stavronikita has become a model of Athonite renewal, though its numbers remain small.

Largely in response to the proliferation of the idiorrhythmic way of life among the monasteries, the first sketes were founded in the second half of the sixteenth century. They too were idiorrhythmic, inevitably because each comprised a scattered community living in separate houses grouped around a central church, but the intention of their founders was to provide a more ascetic way of life than was currently available in the monasteries, and they still retain something of that reputation for austerity even today. ‘It is sometimes said’, writes R. M. Dawkins who, as Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek at Oxford, made several visits to Athos in the 1930s,

that the greatest severity of life may be found where there is the greatest freedom; even in the idiorrhythmic monasteries monks may live as hardly as any hermit. But it remains true in general that those who seek austerity prefer the sketes; they are … the special resort of the wearers of the Great Habit, who live under a rule whose severity many monks are not willing to face.327

Far from contracting, then, the number and variety of monastic establishments on the Holy Mountain increased considerably during the first centuries of Ottoman rule. True, there was no longer a Christian emperor in Constantinople to provide financial support when this was needed, but instead the monasteries were able to turn to Orthodox rulers who were not under direct rule from the Sublime Porte, notably the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, but also to a lesser extent those of Russia and Georgia. For practical purposes it was business as usual for the monks, and the monasteries prospered. Let us look at two individuals who exemplified this prosperity.

Once the buildings of the new monastery of Stavronikita had been completed, they needed to be embellished. In Byzantine times the monks of Athos had regularly called on the finest artists currently available in Constantinople to beautify their buildings and write their icons. After the fall of the empire it was necessary to look elsewhere, notably to the island of Crete, which had been under Venetian rule since 1211 and during the fifteenth century became a favoured refuge for émigré Byzantine artists and scholars. A distinct Cretan school of painting emerged, of which the most prominent representative in the sixteenth century was Theophanes Strelitzas (c. 1490–1559), a native of Candia (modern Herakleion). Some of his early work survives at Meteora, but Mount Athos was still the place where artists’ reputations were made and in 1535 he and his sons, Symeon and Neophytos, were invited to work on the katholikon and refectory at the Great Lavra. All three became monks and we know from archives of the Lavra that in 1536 Theophanes purchased a property for them near the monastery which he retained until 1559.

Needing an artist to paint the church and refectory of his brand new ‘Byzantine’ monastery of Stavronikita as well as the icons of the iconostasis, it was natural that Patriarch Jeremias should turn to the most celebrated hagiographer of the day, Theophanes. With particular reference to the icons of the iconostasis, Fr Vasileios, abbot of Stavronikita from 1968 to 1990, has written:

The maturity of our painter is evident: his lines are clear and crystallized, his colours are matched with reverence and harmony, the brush-strokes are simple, the figures are serene. The bodies are tall and slender, their movements gentle and dignified, and the composition is well-balanced. He reveals the whole inner world of each figure through the shaft of light on the dark modelling of a face. Through a small white brush-stroke and a black dot he gives to an eye an expression that a thousand words cannot describe. Wealth of simplicity and compassionate austerity characterize the art of the monk Theophanes. The contrite peace created by his iconographical world derives from the tranquillity that he possesses as a great artist and a true monk.328

With particular reference to the frescos of the katholikon at the Great Lavra, which predate those at Stavronikita, Manolis Chatzidakis has written:

This Cretan painter, whose knowledge of grammar was somewhat wanting, shows marvellous skill in arranging and adapting his compositions to suit the available surfaces, and in harmonising the elegant, Hellenising figures and serene, balanced compositions he had inherited from fifteenth-century Cretan art – now of a monumental character – all in low relief against a black background with a ground-surface of green, in dominant earth colours and subtle harmonies. He created ensembles of an impeccably Orthodox character, befitting the good taste of the monastic public he was catering for and fulfilling the expectations of his patrons … Endowed with these qualities – high art, a rich stock of iconographic material and, above all, representations of a doctrinally impeccable character – this Cretan emigrant painting radiated its influence beyond the bounds of Athos – becoming, it could be said, the official model art of the Church, whose fame endured until the late eighteenth century.329

In short, what we see here is an artist of the first rank being attracted to Athos as the place to make his name and, in so doing, setting a style that became the model for Orthodox church art for the next two centuries. At his death he left a considerable fortune. Let us now turn from visual art to the world of books.

Michael Trivolis was born in Arta to a middle-class family of Laconian origin in about 1470. The family moved to Corfu when he was about ten years old, and in about 1492 Michael moved to Italy to continue his studies, first in Florence and later in Venice. Here he fell under the influence of such leading scholars of the Renaissance as Marsilio Ficino, Aldus Manutius, and Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola as well as emigré Greeks such as Janus Laskaris, Laonikos Chalkokondylis, and Constantine Laskaris. But perhaps the most influential of all was the Dominican friar Savonarola (1452–98) whose preaching affected him deeply and persuaded him, in 1502, to enter the Dominican order. But after only two years he left the order and returned to Greece. By 1506 he had joined the brotherhood of Vatopedi on Mount Athos and adopted the name of Maximos. It is clear from his later writings that he had become disenchanted with many of the doctrines of the Latin Church and it may have been the influence of his teacher Janus Laskaris that directed him to Athos. Laskaris was fully aware of the rich contents of certain Athonite libraries from his own travels, and this may have been what led Maximos to choose Vatopedi in particular.330 Whatever the reason for the choice, it was clearly a happy one and for the rest of his life Maximos was to regard Vatopedi as his spiritual home.

The library of Vatopedi provided Maximos with the opportunity to immerse himself in the study of patristic literature, especially the works of St John of Damascus, whom he later described as having achieved ‘the summit of philosophy and theology’, and St Gregory of Nazianzus.331 He may also have enjoyed the cosmopolitan nature of Athonite society which now embraced considerable numbers of men from Russia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania, attracted by the revival of hesychasm in the late Byzantine period. Certainly this will have prepared him to some extent for his future life in Russia.

In 1516 an embassy arrived on Athos from the Russian ruler Basil III with the aim of inviting to Moscow a skilled translator of Greek. During the Byzantine period, when the Russian Church had been under the jurisdiction of the Constantinople patriarchate, the royal library had acquired a large number of manuscripts in Greek which, by the early sixteenth century, very few Russians could read. They therefore needed a scholar who could read them and translate them into Slavonic. The abbot of Vatopedi recommended Maximos because, as he wrote to the metropolitan of Moscow, he was

proficient in divine Scripture and adept in interpreting all kinds of books, both ecclesiastical and those called Hellenic [i.e. secular], because from his early youth he has grown up in them and learned [to understand] them through the practice of virtue, and not simply by reading them often, as others do.332

There is no doubt that he was also expected to raise funds for his monastery. On his way he stopped in Constantinople where we may be sure that the patriarch briefed him on the two most pressing issues of the day: the wish to restore his authority over the Russian Church and his hope that Russia might provide aid for the Greek subjects of the sultan.

Maximos arrived in Moscow in March 1518, accompanied by the Greek monk Neophytos and the Bulgarian monk Lavrentii, and was received with honour. His first assignment was to translate some patristic commentaries on the Psalms. Since he did not yet know Russian, his method was first to translate the texts into Latin, which his collaborators then translated into Slavonic. This was not an ideal procedure and inevitably mistakes were made, but in his introduction to the work when it was finally completed Maximos assured his patron that it would be a useful aid to defeating heresy. So-called ‘Judaizers’ were thought to have tampered with the text of certain passages in the Psalms, and though the heretics had been denounced in 1504, Russian society was still divided over how to respond to them and so Maximos’s work was a hot potato.

On completion of this translation Maximos expected to be able to return to Mount Athos, but this was not to be. Now he was employed in translating various biblical and patristic texts and also in correcting the liturgical books, which he found to be full of errors. ‘It became obvious to him’, writes Dimitri Obolensky,

that the howlers committed by early translators, compounded by scribal errors, had led to mistranslations which at best were absurd, and at worst heretical. Some of the most glaring he corrected himself, unaware of the trouble he was storing up for the future.333

Maximos also allowed himself to be drawn into other controversial debates. At the request of his friend Vassian Patrikeev, a former general and diplomat who had become a monk, he wrote in praise of the virtues of cenobitic monasticism as practised by the monasteries of Athos. He left unstated his opposition to the very different approach of the larger monasteries of Russia which had become immensely wealthy by their possession of enormous estates and exploitation of peasant labour. But if Maximos was restrained in his writing, his friend Vassian went to the opposite extreme in declaring:

All our books are false ones, and were written by the devil and not by the Holy Spirit. Until Maxim we used these books to blaspheme God, and not to glorify or pray to him. Now, through Maxim, we have come to know God.334

Not everyone agreed. In 1522 Daniel, abbot of Volokolamsk, one of the wealthiest of the monasteries that Maximos had tacitly impugned, was appointed bishop of Moscow and primate of the Russian Church. Most provocatively, Daniel invited Maximos to translate a book that supported monastic landownership and contained other texts of a heretical nature. Maximos declined, and went on to criticize the divorce and remarriage of the ruler, earning himself enemies both ecclesiastical and princely. In the winter of 1524/5 he was arrested on charges of heresy (for making changes to the liturgical books), sorcery, and treason (for allegedly entertaining relations with the Sublime Porte). He was also accused of maintaining that the independence of the Russian Church from the Constantinople patriarchate was illegal and of criticizing the Russian monasteries for their ownership of land and serfs. While the first three charges were clearly unjust, the last two were no doubt true and Maximos would not have denied them. The court, presided over by Grand Prince Basil III and Metropolitan Daniel, sentenced Maximos to solitary confinement in the monastery of Volokolamsk where he was put in chains, excommunicated, and deprived of the means to read and write. After a second trial, in 1531, convened to silence the prisoner’s protests at his unjust treatment, he was moved to Tver where gradually some of his privations were relaxed. He asked repeatedly to be allowed to return to Mount Athos but all such requests were refused.

Maximos was finally released from prison in about 1548, his excommunication was annulled, and he was allowed to reside in St Sergius’s monastery of the Holy Trinity near Moscow (formerly Zagorsk, now Sergiev Posad). Here he spent his last years reading, writing, and teaching and here he died, at the age of eighty-six, on 21 January 1556. His entry in the Synaxarion, a compendium of saints’ lives first put together by St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain, ends with these words:

Saint Maximus the Greek was the most prolific of all the writers of Old Russia. Opposed with good reason to the infiltration of western humanism, he conveyed the treasures of the Byzantine spirit and literature to the Russian people. Soon after his decease, he was recognized and venerated as a holy Martyr and ‘Enlightener of Russia’.335

Dimitri Obolensky, who had championed the cause of Maximos and was instrumental in his eventual canonization, concludes his portrait with a judiciously balanced assessment:

Maximos, though not a creative thinker, was at least a sound and wide-ranging scholar, with an excellent training in ancient philosophy and textual criticism; though he played an important role in the controversies that shook sixteenth-century Muscovite society, his learning was, with a few notable exceptions, above its head; and he lived in a cosmopolitan world where the Byzantine heritage, the late medieval Italo-Greek connections, and the traditional links between Russia, Mount Athos, and Constantinople were still to some extent living realities. He was one of the last of his kind.336

It was the Russian scholar Elie Denissoff who succeeded in identifying Maximos the Greek with the Greek émigré Michael Trivolis and was therefore able to suggest that his life took the shape of a diptych with Mount Athos as its hinge and Italy and Russia as its two leaves.337 This attractive image would surely have appealed to Maximos who throughout his Russian exile longed to be allowed to return to the Holy Mountain. It was not until 1997 that the final denouement of the drama was to be played out. In July of that year Abbot Ephraim of Vatopedi travelled to Moscow to be presented with a portion of the relics of Maximos by Patriarch Alexis II. After concelebrating the Divine Liturgy with the Patriarch in the church of the Intercession (St Basil’s) in Red Square, the abbot returned to Athos with the relics and placed them in the Katholikon of the Annunciation at Vatopedi. This joyful event, by which some of the physical remains of Maximos were at last laid to rest in his spiritual home some 480 years after he had left it, was seen as symbolic of the increasingly close relationship between Vatopedi and the rest of the Orthodox world.

Eighteenth-century Athos

For long periods of its history we have precious little information about what life was really like for the average monk on the Holy Mountain. Since for the most part there was nothing particularly remarkable about it, there was no reason to write it down. We only know about the stars who shine out by reason of their exceptional qualities, their enduring writings, or their adventurous exploits. ‘When exploring Athonite spirituality,’ writes Metropolitan Kallistos, ‘we are like children gathering sea shells on the margin of an uncharted ocean.’338 Certainly for the seventeenth century and the early part of the eighteenth there was a mood of gloom and despondency throughout much of the Greek world and Athos was no exception to this trend. Economic decline set in as a result of punitive taxes imposed by the Ottoman authorities, followed by intellectual decline which manifested itself particularly in neglect of the libraries and their contents. There is also some evidence of spiritual decline, though standards of asceticism were upheld and vows were strictly observed, despite the universal adoption of the idiorrhythmic system.

We gain some idea of conditions for monks on Athos at the time from the accounts of pilgrims. The Russian traveller Vasily Barsky (1702–47), for example, visited the Mountain as a pilgrim in 1725 and again in 1744, leaving copious accounts of both journeys. When he arrived at the Russian monastery of St Panteleimon in 1725, he found just four monks, two Russians and two Bulgarians; on his second visit, in 1744, he noted that the monastery was now in Greek hands, that it was idiorrhythmic, and that its buildings were in a serious state of disrepair.339 He observed Russian monks ‘wandering hither and thither about the hills, living by manual labour, eating scraps and being despised by all’, though he suggested that they only had themselves to blame for this sorry state of affairs: ‘for in Russia, where all labour is carried out by dedicated Christians, the monks live in great ease and comfort’.340 Spiritual life on the Holy Mountain had clearly reached a pretty low ebb, especially for the Slavs.

Despite the prevailing gloom, or perhaps because of it, one or two stars emerge; and as the century wore on, a veritable galaxy bears witness to an intellectual and spiritual revival in which Athos was to play a leading role. Once again we shall focus our attention on just two parallel but contrasting lives, both remarkable examples of Athonite outreach.

The initiative for the foundation of an academy of higher learning on Mount Athos in the mid-eighteenth century seems to have come from the idiorrhythmic fathers of Vatopedi under the enlightened leadership of their Prohegoumenos Meletios. The school on Patmos, which had been a major centre of Orthodox education for the Greek world in the early part of the century, was now in decline and when Cyril V was appointed to the patriarchal throne in 1748 he soon became aware of the need for a new one. The Holy Synod therefore welcomed the suggestion of the Vatopedi fathers and entrusted the task of establishing the academy to Meletios. A site was chosen on high ground overlooking the monastery and handsome buildings were erected at Vatopedi’s expense. The aim of this institute of higher learning, both religious and philosophical, was to produce suitably qualified leaders for the Church and for the Orthodox world as a whole. Its first director, monk Neophytos of Kafsokalyvia, perhaps the most learned Athonite of the time, was appointed in December 1749. But by the end of his term of office the school still had no more than twenty students and in 1753 the patriarchate appointed Evgenios Voulgaris (1716–1806) to take over as director and to provide instruction in philosophy and mathematics as well as ethics and theology.

This was an inspired appointment, and a bold one. Voulgaris was a Corfiot who had studied in Italy where he learned Latin as well as French and Italian. He was a devout deacon who had served the church in Venice, but he was also a student of modern philosophy and the sciences. Returning to Greece to teach in schools in Ioannina and Kozani, he had aroused controversy among traditionalists who were suspicious of his rationalist views and even accused him of heresy. None of this deterred the patriarchate from appointing him to Athos since he was clearly the best candidate for the post. Paschalis Kitromilides has described the Athonias, as the academy came to be known, as ‘undoubtedly the most important initiative of the Church in the field of education during the eighteenth century’.341

When Voulgaris was called by patriarchal sigil, in 1753, to improve the Athonite Academy, to ‘change and reform it’, certainly the Church’s expectation was that by modernizing the education of its leading personnel, it would be able to respond more effectively to the challenges of the times.342

With the backing of both the patriarch and the Vatopedi fathers, Voulgaris seemed destined for a stellar career that would test the extent and the strength of the encounter between Orthodoxy and the Enlightenment. For a while all seemed to go well, and in a letter written in 1756 to a former pupil, Kyprianos the Cypriot, whom he had taught in Ioannina, he wrote lyrically of the delights of the school’s location and went on to give a rather poetic description of the curriculum:

There Demosthenes struggles, encouraging the Athenians against the Macedonians; there Homer in his rhapsodies sings the heroic deeds around Ilion; there Thucydides narrates in sublime style the civil strife of the Greeks; there the father of history in Ionic style narrates earlier history and victories against the barbarians; here Plato expounds theology and Aristotle in multiple ways unravels the mysteries of nature; and the French, the Germans, and the English teach their novel philosophical systems.343

There is no reference to religious instruction (apart from Plato); and ‘the French, the Germans, and the English’ who did form part of the curriculum were presumably Descartes, Leibniz and Wolff, and John Locke. As in Ioannina, it was these ‘novel philosophical systems’ that were to be the director’s undoing.

Despite his impeccable Orthodox credentials, his serious interests in hesychasm and apophatic theology, and his receipt of a cure from a miracle-working icon of the Mother of God at Dionysiou, Voulgaris soon encountered opposition. It came first from the monks who found his teaching to be at odds with their own conservative traditions. Then his own students (who had greatly increased in numbers since his arrival at the school) divided into factions and a group turned against him. Finally in 1757 Patriarch Cyril himself was deprived of his throne and retired to Athos where he proceeded to meddle in the business of the school. Having been Voulgaris’s staunchest supporter, Cyril became his most hostile opponent and set the whole Mountain against him. Under attack on all fronts, from colleagues, students, and his former patron, Voulgaris felt obliged to resign. In a letter to Cyril dated 29 January 1759 Voulgaris cites the behaviour of the former patriarch as the principal reason for his resignation and in February he left Athos for good.

Thus ended the Holy Mountain’s experiment with Enlightenment. For the best part of a decade the Athonias had shone as a model institution, attracting pupils not only from the Greek world but from as far afield as Italy and Russia, drawn no doubt by the international reputation of its director as well as by the thirst for knowledge that characterized the eighteenth century in general. Among them were Athanasios Parios, Iosipos Moisiodax, and Kosmas the Aetolian, all of whom went on to enjoy distinguished careers as scholars and evangelists. The school itself survived for a year or two. The appointment of Nikolaos Zerzoulis, a philosopher from Metsovo who had introduced the Greek world to Newtonian physics, as successor to Voulgaris demonstrates the determination of the patriarchate to persevere with its original intention of creating a modern institute of higher learning. But he too encountered problems similar to those of his predecessor and within two years he was back in Metsovo. Those students that remained followed Voulgaris to Constantinople and the school on Athos was closed. Revisiting his alma mater in 1765, Iosipos Moisiodax described it as a ‘nest of ravens’.344

Voulgaris’s career, however, was far from being at an end. After a short stint in Constantinople, where he was invited by Patriarch Seraphim II to reform the patriarchal academy and to modernize its curriculum, in 1763 he returned to the west and continued his studies in Leipzig and Halle, immersing himself in German rationalism and publishing works of his own including his influential Logic (Leipzig, 1766). Then in 1771 came an invitation to Russia from no less a person than Empress Catherine II to join her court in St Petersburg as librarian and curator of antiquities.345 Voulgaris’s acceptance of this invitation should be seen in the context of his vision of the advantages that were to be gained from the adoption of western philosophy and science in the education system of the Orthodox world. As Kitromilides has written,

Voulgaris visualised that intellectual reform would supply the appropriate moral substratum for the attainment of political change and the re-establishment of an enlightened Christian monarchy over the Orthodox peoples of south-eastern Europe in the place of Ottoman autocracy. His predilection for a Christian monarchy eventually attached Voulgaris to the policies of Catherine the Great, who in her turn saw the expectations of the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire as a convenient vehicle for Russian imperial expansion toward the warm seas of the South.346

From 1775 to 1779 Voulgaris served as Archbishop of Kherson and Slaviansk in Novorussia, territory ceded to Russia as a result of the Russo-Ottoman war of 1768–74. In retirement he remained for some years in Kherson and Poltava before returning to St Petersburg in 1788. There he spent his old age, studying the philosophers, but remaining ever loyal to his church, until his death in 1806. Variously labelled ‘the dean of the Enlightenment in south-eastern Europe’ (by Kitromilides) and ‘the living library of polymathy’ (by Moisiadax), Voulgaris was one of the greatest intellectuals and theologians of the eighteenth-century Orthodox world. If his principal achievements lay in the extension of the political dimension of Greco-Russian cultural relations, his motivation is neatly summarized by Kitromilides:

Despite his receptivity to several of the fundamental philosophical and scientific principles of the European Enlightenment, the broader context of his thought was determined by the Orthodox tradition and by Orthodox doctrine. He thus remained within the bounds of Orthodoxy, which he saw as the common denominator to the aspirations of the Russians and the Greeks.347

My fourth and final Athonite star is Kosmas the Aetolian (1714–79). Born to a pious family of weavers in the village of Megadendron near Naupaktos, he was educated locally before moving to Mount Athos and finally enrolling as a student at the newly founded Athonias in 1749. On leaving the academy, probably shortly before the arrival there of Voulgaris, Kosmas was tonsured a monk at the monastery of Philotheou and later ordained priest. After thirty-five years of study he was finally convinced that Orthodoxy was the one true faith.

Having reached this conclusion, Kosmas felt a calling to share his faith with his fellow Greeks and asked permission of his elders to leave the monastery and travel to Constantinople. There he obtained the blessing of Patriarch Seraphim II (1757–61) to become a missionary and a permit in writing that would ensure his safe passage among local bishops and Ottoman officials. Kosmas was deeply conscious of the widespread ignorance of his fellow countrymen in matters of religion and alarmed by the rate at which they were abandoning Orthodoxy and converting to Islam. His aim was to counter this by taking his knowledge of the Bible and of the Church Fathers and of Athonite spirituality to the people of Greece and the Balkans.

Kosmas began his ministry in 1760 in the churches around Constantinople. He was clearly a charismatic preacher and attracted huge crowds who came to hear his message. Wherever he went – and in the course of nearly two decades he covered more or less the whole of Greece including the Dodecanese and the Ionian islands – he founded schools that would promote both the study of Orthodox Christianity and the knowledge of Greek as the language of the Bible and the Fathers, saying:

My beloved children in Christ, bravely and fearlessly preserve our holy faith and the language of our Fathers, because both of these characterize our most beloved homeland, and without them our nation is destroyed.348

From time to time Kosmas returned to the Holy Mountain, but only for brief periods, no doubt to recharge his spiritual batteries. But it is interesting to note that he had acquired the Athonite practice of the Jesus prayer and that this formed part of his teaching. At a time when hesychastic traditions are thought to have more or less died out on Athos, Kosmas was exhorting people to pray continually: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son and Logos of the living God, by the intercessions of the Theotokos and all the saints, have mercy on me the sinner and unworthy servant of Thee.’349 Perhaps Philotheou, a strict monastery (then as now), had succeeded in preserving spiritual traditions that had been lost elsewhere on the Mountain.

Kosmas’s missionary journeys and the impact that he made on his hearers are described in detail by his disciple Sapphiros Christodoulidis in the New Martyrologion, of which an English translation is included in Constantine Cavarnos’s book, St Cosmas Aitolos.

Wherever this thrice-blessed man went [writes Christodoulidis], people listened with great contrition and devoutness to his grace-imbued and sweet words, and there resulted great improvement in their ways and great benefit to their souls … Aided by Divine grace, he tamed the fierce, rendered brigands gentle, made the pitiless and unmerciful compassionate and merciful, the impious pious, instructed those who were ignorant in divine things and made them attend the church services, and briefly he brought the sinners to great repentance and correction, so that everybody was saying that in our times there has appeared a new Apostle.350

By the Greeks he was labelled ‘Isapostolos’, ‘equal to the Apostles’, but he was equally revered by Muslims who were deeply moved by his sermons, his piety, and the miracles that occurred wherever he went. There is no doubt about the spiritual effect that his missionary activities aroused, but Kitromilides, doyen of the study of eighteenth-century Greece, is surely wise to be cautious about the anachronistic contribution some see him as making towards the arousal of Greek national consciousness.351 He concludes his survey of the initiatives of the Great Church in the mid-eighteenth century thus:

The activities [of the Church] in the sectors of education [in the hands of Voulgaris], pastoral care [in the hands of Kosmas] and administration [in the hands of Patriarch Samuel I] … appear to aim at safeguarding the Orthodox community as a whole, and do not seem to issue from any nationalist motives or from expediencies of secular power politics. For this reason, the systematic effort that has been made in Greek historiography to elevate Kosmas the Aetolian to this status of ‘awakener of the nation’ and to dub him a ‘national apostle’ of the political interests of Hellenism in the Balkans is not only a misinterpretation but also a suppression of the significance of the Church’s solicitude for the weal of Orthodoxy.352

On the contrary, Kosmas belonged to the school of thought that regarded Turkish rule as a punishment sent by God for the sins of the Greeks: ‘And why did God bring the Turks and not some other race? For our good, because the other nations would have caused detriment to our Faith.’353 This line of thought, by which the hierarchs of the Church could be seen to have identified their own interests with those of the Ottoman government, was to manifest itself later in the declaration of Patriarch Anthimos of Jerusalem, causing great resentment in the ranks of the embryonic nationalist intelligentsia in the decades before 1821:

Our Lord … raised out of nothing this powerful Empire of the Ottomans in the place of our Roman [Byzantine] Empire which had begun, in certain ways, to deviate from the beliefs of the Orthodox faith, and He raised up the Empire of the Ottomans higher than any other Kingdom so as to show without doubt that it came about by Divine Will.354

As Richard Clogg comments, ‘The argument advanced by the Patriarch Anthimos of Jerusalem in 1798 that Christians should not challenge the established order because the Ottoman Empire had been raised up by God to protect Orthodoxy from the taint of the heretical, Catholic West was by no means untypical of the views of the hierarchy at large.’355 Indeed it was being propounded by Kosmas the Aetolian thirty years earlier.356

In fact Kosmas was careful always to ask permission to preach not only of the local bishop but also of the Turkish authorities wherever he travelled. Having obtained it, he did not hold back from references to the Antichrist, the end of the world, and (despite his belief in the Ottoman empire as the bulwark of Orthodoxy) the liberation of Greece which he predicted would come about within three generations. Not surprisingly, such comments aroused the suspicions of the authorities who were easily persuaded that Kosmas and his followers were associated with the declared aims of the Russian government to liberate the Orthodox peoples of south-eastern Europe from the Ottoman yoke. One day, when visiting the Albanian village of Kolikontasi, he was seized by agents of the local pasha and, realizing that the moment had come for his work to be crowned with martyrdom, he gave thanks to Christ for deeming him worthy of so great an honour. The next day, 24 August 1779, he was hanged from a tree beside the road to Berat. ‘Thus’, comments Christodoulidis, ‘the thrice-blessed Kosmas, that great benefactor of men, became worthy of receiving, at the age of sixty-five, a double crown from the Lord, one as a Peer of the Apostles and the other as a holy Martyr.’357

Kosmas’s tomb became the site of many miracles, and in 1813 Ali Pasha of Ioannina, whose glittering career the saint had predicted thirty years before, built a church and monastery there in his honour. Having been officially canonized by the patriarchate of Constantinople in 1961, his relics are now the object of fervent veneration by the Orthodox and a symbol of the restoration of the faith in the land of Albania.

So we see that the power of Athos as symbol of continuity for the Orthodox lives on even today. If after the fall of the Byzantine empire the Holy Mountain represented a symbol of the continuity of Orthodox culture, it has never lost sight of this role. If the symbol was shining with all the brilliance of a new creation in the sixteenth century, it had lost none of its lustre in the eighteenth, and in the twenty-first century, when the need for it is greater than ever before, it shines just as brightly as ever.

Similarly, throughout its history Athos has never ceased to attract men of outstanding ability, endowing them on their arrival with the full panoply of its own spiritual gifts, then sending them out into the world to live and work to God’s praise and glory. The careers that we have briefly charted above have been among the most celebrated: Theophanes the artist, drawn to Athos to make his name, only to find his work raised to the status of a model for the art of the Church for centuries to come; Maximos the scholar, lured by the prospect of studying the famed contents of Athonite libraries, only to find himself exporting the treasures of Byzantine spirituality and culture to the Russian people; Voulgaris, one of the greatest intellectuals and theologians of the eighteenth-century Orthodox world, appointed to Athos to mastermind the pet project of the patriarch, then translated to the court of Catherine the Great with a vision to re-establish an enlightened Christian monarchy over the Orthodox peoples of south-eastern Europe; finally Kosmas, the humble monk, blessed with a compulsive missionary urge to enlighten his fellow Greeks, equal of the Apostles and holy martyr. It would be hard to imagine a starker contrast than that between Voulgaris, doyen of the Enlightenment, and the arch-traditionalist Kosmas. That both could be accommodated on Athos at more or less the same time is testimony to the Mountain’s astonishing vitality in the second half of the eighteenth century. These are just four examples from an endless stream of witnesses to the power of Athos to preserve and transmit its traditions, ‘at once landmark and generator of spiritual movement, known to fourteenth-century writers as “the workshop of virtue”’.358

Athos has survived because it transcends national borders. It remains the centre of spirituality for all the Eastern Orthodox Churches. As could be said of all the lands of Byzantium (and according to Anthony Bryer can be said by a villager in north-eastern Turkey to this day), ‘this was Roman country; they spoke Christian here.’359 It is no accident that all four of the stars whose careers we have traced have been Greeks. Apart from a brief period of Slav domination at the turn of the nineteenth century, Greeks have always formed a majority on Athos. But three of them died outside the borders of modern Greece, and all of them exerted an influence that spread throughout the Orthodox world. Between them they transmitted the elements of Greek art, Greek scholarship, Greek philosophy, and Greek language to a world that was ravenously hungry for them. Not without reason is Athos celebrated as ‘the ark of Hellenism’. This is the principal legacy of the post-Byzantine Greeks on the Holy Mountain.

Batalden, S. K., Catherine II’s Greek Prelate: Eugenios Voulgaris in Russia, 1771−1806 (New York, 1982).

Bryer, A., ‘The Roman Orthodox World (1393–1492)’, in J. Shepard (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire c. 500–1492 (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 852–80.

Cavarnos, C., The Holy Mountain, 2nd edn (Belmont, MA, 1977).

––, St Cosmas Aitolos, 3rd edn (Belmont, MA, 1985).

Chatzidakis, M., ‘Byzantine Art on Mount Athos’, in Treasures of Mount Athos (Thessaloniki, 1997).

Clogg, R., A Concise History of Greece (Cambridge, 1992).

––, ed. and trans., The Movement for Greek Independence 1770−1821: A Collection of Documents (London, 1976).

Dawkins, R. M., The Monks of Athos (London, 1936).

Denissoff, E., Maxime le Grec et l’Occident: Contribution à l’histoire de la pensée religieuse et philosophique de Michel Trivolis (Paris, 1943).

Fennell, N., The Russians on Athos (Oxford, 2001).

Gothóni, R., Tales and Truth: Pilgrimage on Mount Athos Past and Present (Helsinki, 1994).

Grishin, A., ‘Bars’kyj and the Orthodox Community’, in M. Angold (ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 5: Eastern Christianity (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 210–28.

Icons at the Monastery of Stavronikita Painted in 1546 by Theophanes the Cretan (Athens, n.d.).

Kitromilides, P., An Orthodox Commonwealth: Symbolic Legacies and Cultural Encounters in Southeastern Europe (Aldershot, 2007).

––, ‘Orthodoxy and the West: Reformation to Enlightenment’, in M. Angold (ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 5: Eastern Christianity (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 187−209.

Hieromonk Makarios of Simonos Petra, The Synaxarion: The Lives of the Saints of the Orthodox Church, trans. C. Hookway, vol. 3: January, February (Ormylia, 2001).

Norwich, J., J., and R. Sitwell, Mount Athos (London, 1966).

Obolensky, D., ‘Italy, Mount Athos, and Muscovy: The Three Worlds of Maximos the Greek (c. 1470−1556)’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 67 (1981), 143–61.

––, Six Byzantine Portraits (Oxford, 1988).

Patrinelis, C., A. Karakatsanis, M Theocharis, Stavronikita Monastery: History, Icons, Embroidery (Athens, 1974).

Shepard, J., ‘The Byzantine Commonwealth 1000−1500’, in M. Angold (ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 5: Eastern Christianity (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 3−52.

Speake, G., ‘Janus Laskaris’ Visit to Mount Athos in 1491’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 34: 3 (1993), 325−30.

––, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise (New Haven, CT, and London, 2002).

Vaporis, N. M., Father Kosmas, the Apostle of the Poor: The Life of St Kosmas Aitolon together with an English Translation of his Teaching and Letters (Brookline, MA, 1977).

Ware, K., ‘St Nikodimos and the Philokalia’, in D. Conomos and G. Speake (eds), Mount Athos the Sacred Bridge: The Spirituality of the Holy Mountain (Oxford, 2005), pp. 69−121.

Zachariadou, E. A., ‘Mount Athos and the Ottomans c. 1350−1550’, in M. Angold (ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 5: Eastern Christianity (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 154−68.

* * *

See above, p. 27.

E. A. Zachariadou, ‘Mount Athos and the Ottomans c. 1350–1550’, in M. Angold (ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 5: Eastern Christianity (Cambridge, 2006), p. 155.

Averil Cameron, above, p. 26.

For a more general survey of Athos under Turkish rule the reader is referred to the chapter on ‘Ottoman Athos’ in my book Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise (New Haven, CT, and London, 2002), pp. 113–56.

C. Patrinelis, A. Karakatsanis, M. Theocharis, Stavronikita Monastery: History, Icons, Embroidery (Athens, 1974), pp. 23–4.

J. J. Norwich and R. Sitwell, Mount Athos (London, 1966), p. 146.

R. M. Dawkins, The Monks of Athos (London, 1936), pp. 150–1.

Introduction to Icons at the Monastery of Stavronikita Painted in 1546 by Theophanes the Cretan (Athens, n.d.).

M. Chatzidakis, ‘Byzantine Art on Mount Athos’, in Treasures of Mount Athos (Thessaloniki, 1997), pp. 21–8 (pp. 24–5).

See G. Speake, ‘Janus Laskaris’ Visit to Mount Athos in 1491’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 34: 3 (1993), 325–30.

See D. Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits (Oxford, 1988), pp. 201–19 (p. 206).

Ibid., p. 208.

Ibid., p. 211.

V. S. Ikonnikov, Maksim Grek i ego vremya, 2nd edn (Kiev, 1915), p. 409, quoted in Obolensky, op. cit., p. 213.

Hieromonk Makarios of Simonos Petra, The Synaxarion: The Lives of the Saints of the Orthodox Church, trans. C. Hookway, vol. 3: January, February (Ormylia, 2001), p. 252. But it was not until 1988 that the Moscow Patriarchate formally added Maximos to the calendar of saints.

Op. cit., p. 219.

E. Denissoff, Maxime le Grec et l’Occident: Contribution à l’histoire de la pensée religieuse et philosophique de Michel Trivolis (Paris, 1943). Hence the title of Obolensky’s 1981 Raleigh Lecture on History, ‘Italy, Mount Athos, and Muscovy: The Three Worlds of Maximos the Greek (c. 1470–1556)’, published in the Proceedings of the British Academy, 67 (1981), 143–61, which preceded the publication of his book, Six Byzantine Portraits, by seven years.

K. Ware, ‘St Nikodimos and the Philokalia’, in D. Conomos and G. Speake, eds, Mount Athos the Sacred Bridge: The Spirituality of the Holy Mountain (Oxford, 2005), pp. 69–121 (p. 74).

N. Fennell, The Russians on Athos (Oxford, 2001), p. 58.

V. G. Barsky, Travel Diary (St Petersburg, 1793), pp. 296, 300. For Barsky’s two journeys to Athos see further R. Gothóni, Tales and Truth: Pilgrimage on Mount Athos Past and Present (Helsinki, 1994), pp. 73–80, and A. Grishin, ‘Bars’kyj and the Orthodox Community’, in Angold (ed.), Eastern Christianity, pp. 210–28.

P. Kitromilides, ‘Initiatives of the Great Church in the Mid-Eighteenth Century: Hypotheses on the Factors of Orthodox Ecclesiastical Strategy’, Ch. V in An Orthodox Commonwealth: Symbolic Legacies and Cultural Encounters in Southeastern Europe (Aldershot, 2007), p. 5.

Ibid., p. 3.

Quoted by P. Kitromilides, ‘Orthodoxy and the West: Reformation to Enlightenment’, in M. Angold (ed.), Eastern Christianity, p. 203.

I. Moisiodax, Apologia (Vienna, 1780), p. 128; quoted by P. Kitromilides, ‘Athos and the Enlightenment’, Ch. VII in An Orthodox Commonwealth, p. 261.

See S. K. Batalden, Catherine II’s Greek Prelate: Eugenios Voulgaris in Russia, 1771–1806 (New York, 1982).

P. Kitromilides, ‘Europe and the Dilemmas of Greek Conscience’, Ch. XI in An Orthodox Commonwealth, p. 5.

P. Kitromilides, ‘From Orthodox Commonwealth to National Communities: Greek-Russian Intellectual and Ecclesiastical Ties in the Ottoman Era’, Ch. VI in An Orthodox Commonwealth, p. 13.

N. M. Vaporis, Father Kosmas, the Apostle of the Poor: The Life of St Kosmas Aitolon together with an English Translation of his Teaching and Letters (Brookline, MA, 1977), p. 146.

C. Cavarnos, St Cosmas Aitolos, 3rd edn (Belmont, MA, 1985), p. 71.

Neon Martyrologion, 3rd edn (Athens, 1961), pp. 202–3; quoted in C. Cavarnos, The Holy Mountain, 2nd edn. (Belmont, MA, 1977), p. 58.

P. Kitromilides, ‘Orthodox Culture and Collective Identity’, Ch. II in An Orthodox Commonwealth, p. 141 n. 22.

P. Kitromilides, ‘Initiatives of the Great Church in the Mid-Eighteenth Century’, Ch. V in An Orthodox Commonwealth, p. 6.

Id., ‘Orthodox Culture and Collective Identity’, Ch. II in An Orthodox Commonwealth, p. 23.

Anthimos, Patriarch of Jerusalem, Didaskalia Patriki (1798), quoted in R. Clogg, A Concise History of Greece (Cambridge, 1992), p. 13.

Ibid. See also R. Clogg, ed. and trans., The Movement for Greek Independence 1770– 1821: A Collection of Documents (London, 1976), pp. 56–62.

The same view is stated by St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain who in his collection of the Holy Canons entitled Pedalion (‘Rudder’) writes, ‘Divine Providence has set a guardian over us’, that ‘guardian’ being none other than the Ottoman empire. See K. Ware, ‘St Nikodimos and the Philokalia’, p. 81.

Cavarnos, St Cosmas Aitolos, p. 45.

J. Shepard, ‘The Byzantine Commonwealth 1000–1500’, in M. Angold (ed.), Eastern Christianity, pp. 3–52 (p. 36).

A. Bryer, ‘The Roman Orthodox World (1393–1492)’, in J. Shepard (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire c. 500–1492 (Cambridge, 2008), p. 853.

Источник: Mount Athos. Microcosm of the Christian East / Graham Speake, Kallistos Ware - Oxford–Bern : Lang AG Peter, 2011. - Pp. IX, 216. ISBN: 3039119958

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text:
I Am The Door

In John 10:7 we find a third of the seven “I AM’s” of the book of John. Jesus is the door of the sheep. He is the only authorized path for us to enter in. He is also the one who serves to keep us safe and secure. Jesus mentions that there had been other teachers, but that they were thieves, trying to lead God’s people away from the truth. No doubt, there have been many more since.

When we come to Jesus as the only true path to God, He makes us three promises. First, we will be saved (v. 9). Outside the safety of Jesus’ protection, there as a lion seeking our souls (1 Peter 5:8). He saves us from that destruction and then keeps us safe.

Second, we will find pasture (v. 9). This reference calls to mind the words of Psalm 23. Jesus promises to provide for our needs. While this certainly has some physical implications, more importantly, He provides all of our spiritual needs.

Finally, He will find abundant life (v. 10). He doesn’t just promise life. He promises that it will be abundant. This speaks both to the eternal nature of it, but also to the rich fullness of a life lived in Christ!

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text:
October 9th, 2006

running, bomb tech

Saturday at work...

I made tables and queries. One for the phone goons, one for Management. Yay, Management. I had trouble with joins and rather a lot of Mountain Dew. Two liters is a lot. I troubleshot. Tea was the antidote. I sort of had lunch, but I had more happy conversation. Happy conversation leaves Lunatic happy with Darkside, herself, and the whole world. Work can see the difference on my face.

I still need to make the thing y2k compliant. Comply, curse you! I wrote random stuff in between things, and I enclose it now:

What LJ would probably rather see in sponsored communities, something that would generate genuine interest rather than astroturfing: blogging from developers of movies about creative decisions involved in the movie. Outtakes. Symbolism of elements of the movie. Animators’ notes. Tips from the cast and crew on how to get into the industry if you want to. Direct the staff to make LJs, and post notes to the community, spend fifteen minutes a day answering random comments. Have the people paid to Astroturf go between the people working on the project and the people curious about it. Like I do, unpaid, between LJ support behind the scenes and random LJ peoples.

Would it be OK to do an Insiders Report on LJ support doings? Like, Tales from the Break Room? Emphasis on common things that break and how to fix them, common misconceptions and how to clear them up, rather than things that would get me in trouble, such as the routine publishing of QDB type material. (JD: LJ-dude head toys as a concept still cracks me up, ditto with RSS feed.)

Lunch break: called the Darkside. Not many people, especially not many men, to whom I can say “If I do anything that hurts you, hit me over the head and let me know, and I’ll stop.” Most people – almost all people – would get a “let me know and we’ll work something out.” For him, unless it’s something like breathing, I will *stop*. I made an apology for a thing. It was … painlessly wrenching, like a chiropractic adjustment of some sort that leaves one gasping and exhausted but feeling so much better.


text:
Pieces of Interest from COMP for the Week of June 8 – MedPhys Slam Update/COMP AGM/Computed Tomography Rhyming/Virtual ASM Conference T-Shirt

Published by Sarah McCabe

Published on June 08, 2020

  • The COMP AGM 2020 will be taking place virtually on July 16, 2020.
  • Due to the virtual meeting format, some changes have been made to this year’s Medphys Slam.
  • Get your virtual conference t-shirt!


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Standard Trope: Quelle Surprise

(HTML TAG: shock-SHOCK) that people are worried and surprised at the National Endowment for the Arts’ (NEA) effort to get artists to line up and support Dear Leader Doctor Zero.

What. The. FUCK. Did. You. Expect? It’s a government-supported arts organization! Subversion? Gib mir ein freckin’ break!

Idiots! These are the same people who would probably inveigh against private patrons of the arts insisting on control over content — comparing them snarkily to the Medicis, as though that were a bad thing.

Of course, being an artist supported entirely by private means — in the hurly-burly of the commercial marketplace — I have nothing but scorn for so-called “ahtistes” who whore themselves to the state. But that’s just me.

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This’ll Be All Over

BUT AS A BIT OF fan — er — reader service, here are the lyrics.

A caller to Beck’s show asked folks to reference this in reflection of Obama.

“You Haven’t Done Nothing”

We are amazed but not amused
By all the things you say that you’ll do
Though much concerned but not involved
With decisions that are made by you

But we are sick and tired of hearing your song
Telling how you are gonna change right from wrong
‘Cause if you really want to hear our views
“You haven’t done nothing”!

–Stevie Wonder

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The early 1950s were marked by the world premières of Prokofiev’s Symphony no. 7 (1952), Poulenc’s Piano Concerto (1950) as well as his Stabat Mater (1951). The most recent offering of The Rest is Noise series at the Southbank Centre encouraged us to place these pieces not just in the 1950s, but also in a wider political and cultural context. Such encouragement came in the form of a spoken introduction, a suggestive programme note, and the distribution of an LPO-themed red-top newspaper. For all the timelines and juxtapositions, the point which really contextualised the programme for me was a passing comment from the lady sat next to me; she enrolled at Reading University to study music in 1952, and had been enjoying these pieces of music ever since.

Much is made of Poulenc’s propensity to amuse, but what scholars call amusing is often better described as “light”. Poulenc’s piano concerto is fairly light, and it was treated as such by pianist Alexandre Tharaud. He handled the famous opening melody with a delicate athleticism, wherein the high notes were pinched above the reduced string section, and the middle register supported their Hollywood-sweet sentiment. Admittedly it would have been better to have heard all of Poulenc’s clever finger-work above an occasionally overzealous horn section, but on the whole Tharaud had the mood right, responding well to the very slight chromatic turns of the second movement with a focused phrasing which seemed to insist “this isn't Eric Coates”.

The third movement, in both F sharp major and F sharp minor, features the flicks and passing notes we would expect of Mozart, but of course it was presented as a kind of ironical novelty. Interjections from the heavy brass added a theatrical element to the finale, but the orchestra’s lively efforts weren’t able to lift the piece out of its strict rondo, or distract from its knowing smirk.

Just as immediate, but far more substantial was Prokofiev’s Symphony no. 7 which followed. Originally conceived as a piece for children before being matured for adults, the symphony has all the fully-formed melody and ingenious orchestration that the composer was and remains known for. Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin stimulated an immense gear-shift in the LPO, instilling a serious tenacity which had rightly been absent in the Poulenc. Each of the many textural changes which underpin the structure of the first movement was dispatched with perfect timing and commitment. The heavy brass was given a lot to do, and in particular the tuba player made his presence felt with a series of weighty entries.

The symphony’s fourth and final movement is a culmination of the increasing diversity of the first three. Block-orchestration results in unusual combinations, with surprising solos. The ensemble worked well with these opportunities: for instance, a bassoon line contrasted fantastically with the material that both preceded and succeeded it. In this way the symphony is varied, and its performance here was accomplished.

Poulenc’s Stabat Mater is a different challenge altogether, and indeed it requires a much longer list of performers. The Stabat Mater is one of the most mournful and moving texts frequently set to music. Poulenc’s setting requires a large choir, a solo soprano, and an orchestra to be both powerful and sprightly. The writing takes in Bach-like chorale sections, an a capella dirge, and a number of sudden, deathly silences. Soloist Kate Royal and the London Philharmonic Choir clicked their way through the holy syllables with togetherness and clarity, and but for a few minor intonation issues in the Cujus Animam Gementem, the choir were faultless. The tenor’s exposed blue notes in Vidit Suum were particularly well managed as they highlighted an interesting harmonic corner as Jesus “dies in desolation as he gave up the spirit”. Eventually, and after much desolation, the text of the Stabat Mater exhausts itself, and similarly Poulenc’s music calms. The orchestra fittingly wound itself down and stilled its dynamism to reveal the Amens.

This concert covered a lot of emotional ground; from the irony and lightness of the Piano Concerto, to the promise of salvation through Christ’s suffering, via the artful intensity of Prokofiev, all of which was well organised and balanced by Nézet-Séguin. It may well be that the programme makes sense for contextual or historic reasons, but my own impression is that it showed the different things that music can be.