In the Footsteps of St. Demetrios

In the Footsteps of Saint Demetrios

For over 1600 years the early Christian martyr Demetrios has been celebrated as patron and protector of the city of Thessaloniki. Accounts of his earthly life, however, are all short and relatively late, with the earliest dating from the ninth century CE. Among the most compact is the version of the liturgical calendar of Constantinople (the Synaxarion) that is printed in modern service books of the Byzantine rite:

He lived in the reign of the Emperors Diocletian and Maximianos and was from the city of Thessaloniki, a devout Christian from the start and a teacher of the faith in Christ. But when Maximianos visited Thessaloniki, the Saint was arrested as being well known for his beliefs. The Emperor was extremely proud of a certain Lyaios and urged the people of the place to come out and meet him in combat (Lyaios was a man of huge stature and excelled in strength those who came against him). A certain young man, Christian by faith, named Nestor, went to Demetrios, who was in prison, and said, “Servant of God, I intend to compete against Lyaios. But pray for me.” Demetrios signed his forehead with the sign of the Cross and said, “You will both beat Lyaios and bear a Martyr’s witness for Christ.” At these words Nestor took courage and opposed Lyaios, cast down his arrogant boasting and slew him.

Because of this the Emperor was humiliated and after investigation having found out what had happened, he gave orders that first Demetrios should be run through in the side with lances, as he was the cause of Lyaios’ slaughter. This being done the Saint at once gave up his life and after his death became the cause of many wonders and cures. Then, at the Emperor’s order, Saint Nestor was beheaded. (trans. Archimandrite Ephrem Lash)

Most scholars today agree that the “Maximianos” who ordered the executions of Demetrios and his disciple Nestor was the Roman Emperor Galerius. Having ruled in Thessaloniki during 299–303 CE, Galerius is known to have visited the city again after 304 when he and his Co-Emperor Diocletian declared that it was a capital offense for Christians to refuse to perform pagan sacrifices. According to local tradition, Demetrios’s martyrdom took place in a bath complex located north of the city’s forum. By the end of the fifth century this site was home to an impressive basilica that in two phases—one decades before and the other soon after a fire in 620 CE—came to be richly decorated with mosaics of the saint. James Skedros has observed that these images, like the accounts of early sixth-century events in the Miracles of St. Demetrios collected in the early seventh century by Archbishop John of Thessaloniki, portray veneration of the martyr as “a cult of intercession, of miracles, and of teaching.”

Demetrios, the healer and protector of children, became internationally renowned as a military saint defending Thessaloniki only after an Avar-Slav siege of the city in 586 CE. Three centuries later the Thessalonian church singer John Kaminiates, in a text devoted mainly to describing the Arab siege and brief capture of Thessaloniki in 904 CE, provides the first known reference to St. Demetrios as Myrovlytes (“myrrh-streaming”). This epithet denotes the production from his relics of a healing holy liquid (myron), the distribution of which became central to pilgrimage at his basilica from the mid-eleventh century and remained so, as Charalambos Bakirtzis has noted, for centuries after the church’s conversion into a mosque (the Kasimiye Camii) in 1493.

St. Demetrios and the Public Liturgy
of East Roman Thessaloniki

Kaminiates prefaces his narrative of the Arab sack of 904 with a glowing description of Thessaloniki as a vibrant commercial city at peace whose inhabitants were united, both with the angels and each other, on feast days through the chanting of psalms. He describes this singing as taking place primarily in three large churches: those of the Holy Wisdom (the provincial city’s domed cathedral of Hagia Sophia), the Ever-Virgin Mother of God (the Acheiropoietos basilica), and the “altogether glorious and triumphant martyr Demetrios.” Although Kaminiates neglects to name any of the chants, the Thessalonian psalmody strongly resembles that of contemporary Constantinople and its Great Church of Hagia Sophia.

Like the imperial capital, tenth-century Thessaloniki had maintained essentially intact a form of public Christian worship that had been typical of major Roman cities during the later fourth and fifth centuries. Services in these late antique “cathedral rites,” as they are sometimes called in modern scholarship, were sung nearly throughout and featured the hierarchically ordered participation of the entire community. Among the higher clergy, bishops and priests intoned presidential prayers and gave blessings. Deacons not only assisted the celebrants in the administration of the Eucharist and baptism, but also frequently were chanting scriptural readings, intercessory litanies, and commands regulating the assembly’s behavior (for example, «Ὀρθοί!»=“Stand up!”). Deacons in late antiquity sometimes served also as soloists and choir directors, performing leadership roles in choral foundations otherwise entrusted primarily to a small cadre of highly skilled cantors (psaltai) supplemented by a larger choir of readers (anagnostai). Supplementing them on various occasions were a variety of guest vocal ensembles. At the Great Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople these included a choir of deaconesses, monastic choirs (both male and female) and the boys’ choir of the imperial orphanage. Congregations also joined regularly in the singing of chants structured to encourage their participation. Not only did the entire assembly respond musically to the prayers, blessings, and intercessions of the higher clergy, its members also participated in the singing of simple refrains that punctuated some forms of biblical psalmody and hymnody (notably the kontakion).

One unlikely witness to the maintenance of late antique liturgical norms in medieval Thessalonian celebrations of St. Demetrios is the Timarion, a twelfth-century satire. It opens with a description of the Demetria, an international trade fair held annually in Thessaloniki to mark the martyr’s feast day of 26 October. When the anonymous author of the Timarion describes in passing its festal services, a reader familiar with the Spanish pilgrim Egeria’s account of vigils in late fourth-century Jerusalem cannot but help to notice that Thessaloniki had retained the ancient practice of having choirs of male and female ascetics singing alongside cathedral clergy during a popular vigil service:

The divine ceremony is observed with three all-night vigils by many priests and clerics, who are divided into two choirs and perform hymns to the Martyr. The Archbishop presides….

Then the feast was celebrated with total precision…as a more divine sort of psalmody was heard, bringing greater joy with its rhythm, order, and artistic alternation. Not only did men chant hymns, but also righteous women and nuns in the transept to the left of the sanctuary were likewise divided into antiphonal choirs.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century Archbishop Demetrios Chomatenos of Ochrid reports that only three churches in the East Roman (Byzantine) had regularly maintained this ancient form of daily Christian prayer, by then known popularly as the “Sung Office” (asmatike akolouthia): the cathedrals of Constantinople, Thessaloniki, and Athens (Panagia Atheniotissa=the Parthenon). Orthodox Christians elsewhere used the Divine Office of the Holy City of Jerusalem (the Hagiopolites) with its system of eight musical modes and vast repertories of hymns for its evening and morning services of, respectively, vespers and matins (orthros). The Fourth Crusade of 1204, however, led to imposition of the Roman rite in all three churches. Orthodox worship resumed first at Hagia Sophia Thessaloniki in 1224. It would be nearly another two generations before Justinian’s Great Church would follow suit, doing so only after the imperial reconquest of Constantinople in 1261. The Parthenon, on the other hand, remained a Latin cathedral until the Ottomans captured Athens in 1458.

The relative brevity of Crusader rule in Thessaloniki is one possible reason that its people managed to restore daily observance of the ancient “Sung Office” at its cathedral of Hagia Sophia. Substantial elements of the old rite were also restored, especially for services led by the city’s Archbishop, at its two other public (katholikai, literally “catholic”) basilicas of St. Demetrios and Acheiropoietos. To support this restoration, Thessalonian scribes copied manuscripts that in some cases are today the only surviving sources for the melodies for the Constantinopolitan cathedral rite’s daily, weekly, and yearly cycles of archaic antiphonal psalmody. In Constantinople itself, on the other hand, the celebration of daily (in actuality, mainly evening) prayer according to the original rite of the Great Church during the period 1261–1453 was limited to a handful of feasts.

The “Sung Office” retained a modicum of vitality during its Thessalonian twilight, which ended with the city’s Ottoman conquest in 1430. Thessaloniki’s cathedral of Hagia Sophia maintained the old rite more or less intact as composers and hymnographers continued to adorn its services with new works. A few were settings of psalms and canticles of the pure “Sung Office,” but the majority were compositions in musical genres borrowed from what had become the dominant liturgical traditions of the Hagiopolites. The latter were not uniform, with Thessalonian churches pursuing a range of approaches to the celebration of the Divine Office of the Holy City. The great public basilicas of Acheiropoietos and St. Demetrios used versions that overlapped to varying degrees with the “Sung Office.” Monasteries, on the other hand, came to follow the communities of Mount Athos in adopting variations on the Palestinian monastic rite of Saint Sabas.

The last decade of medieval cathedral liturgy in Thessaloniki is very well documented thanks to the voluminous writings of Saint Symeon, who served as the city’s Archbishop from 1416 or 1417 to his death in 1429. He was a native of Constantinople who had obtained his monastic formation at the capital’s spiritually influential community of Kallistos and Ignatios, leading ascetics known collectively as “the Xanthopouloi.” St. Symeon’s posthumous reputation had long rested mainly on his theological commentaries analyzing the major services of the Byzantine rite, which circulated extensively in manuscripts before they were first published in 1683. During the 20th century, scholars began to rediscover another substantial series of works regulating and enriching the public liturgy of Thessaloniki. Concerned primarily with worship at his own cathedral of Hagia Sophia, they also include orders of service, hymns, and prayers for services that were celebrated elsewhere in his presence.

One the first of these rediscovered documents to be published was St. Symeon’s “Exact Order of the Feast of St. Demetrios.” Contained in the manuscript Athens National Library of Greece (EBE) 2047, it describes in detail the services for Thessaloniki’s patron that were held between the evening of 25 October and the morning of 26 October. Folios in this manuscript before and after the “Exact Order” supply further information about how Thessalonians celebrated the feast of St. Demetrios during St. Symeon’s archiepiscopacy. This includes the full texts of hymns chanted at Hagia Sophia to honor the martyr both on his actual feast day of 26 October and during a preparatory “Holy Week of St. Demetrios.” Most of the textual and musical models for the chants of this “Holy Week” come from the services of the Byzantine rite celebrated annually between Palm Sunday and Easter. Yet some, as Ioannes Phountoules noted in the preface to his practical edition of these texts, are based on hymns sung in the days of preparation leading up to Christmas (25 December) and the Dormition of the Mother of God (15 August).

The dozens of new hymns that St. Symeon composed for the Thessalonian “Holy Week of St. Demetrios” represent the final stages in a process of liturgical development going back centuries. Homilies, accounts of the martyr’s posthumous miracles, and other texts such as the Timarion cited above witness in general ways to the celebration of the martyr’s feast over several days. Ioannes (John) Stavrakios, a deacon and archivist of the Metropolis (Archdiocese) of Thessaloniki during the last quarter of the thirteenth century, made important contributions to the creation of “Holy Week” imitating that before Easter, only some of which have been published. Having appeared in print multiple times since the late eighteenth century, the best known is a kanon— a multi-strophic hymn for the Hagiopolite morning office—that Stavrakios modeled musically and textually on the Paschal Kanon traditionally attributed to St. John of Damascus. Notable among the unpublished hymns is a reworking of the 9th-century nun Kassia’s famous Holy Wednesday hymn “On the Sinful Woman.”

Chanting in the Footsteps of St. Demetrios

This concert draws on the three celebrations of Constantinopolitan cathedral vespers that were served consecutively in Thessaloniki on the evening of 25 October during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries CE. The first was at the cathedral of Hagia Sophia, the second at a large church of the “Refuge” (Katafyge) of the Mother of God that may or may not have been Acheiropoietos, and the final one at the basilica of St. Demetrios. These services had the same basic structure, with sung elements excerpted for this performance noted in bold print:

• Opening Blessing and Litany
• First Antiphon: Psalm 85 with refrain “Glory to you, O God”
• Small Litany and Final Antiphon (Psalm 91:13) with refrain “Alleluia”
• Lamplighting Psalmody with hymns and Entrance of the Higher Clergy into the Sanctuary
• Responsorial Psalm (Prokeimenon) of the Day of the Week
• Litanies
• Three Small Antiphons
• Concluding prayers and blessings
• Dismissal hymn (Apolytikion) of the Saint
• Processional hymnody to the next church

The three services differed in the choice of musical modes for their psalmody, as well as in the extent to which the “Sung Office” was filled out by hymns composed according to the traditions of the Holy City of Jerusalem. At Hagia Sophia the cathedral’s clergy served vespers according to their usual practice for the feasts of saints, after which they processed chanting hymns to the Marian church of the Refuge. There they met the archbishop and “all of the clergy of all of the public churches with their precious (processional) crosses and all the people” for a concelebration of “Sung” vespers that was relatively free of borrowings from the Hagiopolites. The final iteration of vespers at St. Demetrios was musically the most magnificent of the three. The opening psalmody was sung as at vespers on Easter Sunday in Mode 1, which St. Symeon describes as being “more radiant” and thus “more appropriate for the feast.” As had occurred previously at the cathedral, the singers augmented Constantinopolitan Entrance Psalm (140) and its single refrain with Hagiopolite psalms verses and hymns. The Three Small Antiphons were chanted “melodically and slowly” (ᾀσματικῶς καὶ ἀργως) and the service’s dismissal was extended by the performance of kalophonia: virtuosic “beautiful sounding” chant in which a sacred text occasionally dissolves into passages of abstract music sung to vocables such as “anane,” “tototo,” and“terirem.”

A complete performance of all three medieval services of evening prayer and their connecting processional chants would take six or more hours. At this concert we will follow a shorter route to walk musically through the basilicas and streets of medieval Thessaloniki “in the footsteps of St. Demetrios.” Chants assigned to the higher clergy and professional cantors (psaltai) of the city’s public churches are sung by the members of Cappella Romana. In Los Angeles the UCLA Chamber Singers join Cappella Romana for the refrains and responses allotted in Thessalonian rubrics to choirs of readers and/or the congregation. All of the music for this program is performed from unpublished editions of medieval chants edited by Dr. Ioannis Arvanitis (Ionian University, Corfu), Dr. Spyridon Antonopoulos, or myself. Dr. Arvanitis’s editions of Small Antiphons 1 and 3 were previously performed in 2001 at a celebration of Festal Vespers According to the Rite of Hagia Sophia in the chapel of St. Peter’s College, Oxford. The rest of the music is receiving its first modern performances with these concerts.

We join “Sung” Vespers in progress after the completion of its opening Psalm 85. A Small Litany introduces the setting of the Final Antiphon before the Entrance in Mode Plagal 2 that was sung at both Hagia Sophia and the “Refuge” of the Mother of God on the evening of 25 October. Without additional prayers the choirs proceed immediately to an abbreviated version of the order for Lamplighting Psalmody followed at the cathedral and St. Demetrios. It opens with the archaic entrance psalmody of the Constantinopolitan cathedral rite, which provides only a single refrain knowns as the “kekragarion” (a name derived from the psalm’s opening Greek words: Kyrie ekékraxa) for interpolation between the verses of Psalm 140. The choirs of high and low voices recall the testimony of Kaminiates and St. Symeon that antiphonal groups of men and women chanted for the martyr’s feast.

After the entrance of the higher clergy into the sanctuary, the choirs complete the Constantinopolitan psalmody and proceed to chant additional psalm verses (stichoi) borrowed from the Palestinian Book of the Hours (Horologion) with a selection of Festal Stichera (=hymns usually attached to biblical verses). St. Symeon’s “Exact Order” for the feast mandates the performance of six stichera at Hagia Sophia and up to ten at St. Demetrios. From these we have chosen four by Thessalonian hymnographers, none of which appear in the service books of the modern Byzantine rite. The first two are from a set of six texts that Stavrakios wrote to be sung to the model melody “What garlands of praise,” a hymn for Saints Peter and Paul (celebrated 29 June). The following pair are by St. Symeon and set to the tune of another hymn for apostles.

The Lamplighting Psalms conclude with doxology and two stichera that are idiomela, hymns composed with unique melodies. The first is called a Doxastikon because it follows “Glory to the Father…” (“Doxa Patri…”), while the second after “Both now and for ever…” is a Theotokion honoring the Virgin Mary as Mother of God (Theotokos) usually chosen from the those contained in the Hagiopolite Great Octoechos (Book of the Eight Modes). For the Doxastikon St. Symeon appoints “Today the universal festival of the Champion,” a widely distributed hymn for St. Demetrios in Mode plagal 2 that is attributed in modern service books to an anonymous Constantinopolitan (Byzantios). The Archbishop likewise agrees with standard modern practice in following it with a standard Theotokion in the same mode. 

For this program we have chosen instead to perform a virtuosic Doxastikon that proceeds through all eight musical modes before returning to cadence in Mode 1. The scribe of its earliest known source (the 14th-century manuscript Sinai gr. 1228) attributes it solely to Stavrakios. Later copies of this hymn are in manuscripts currently at the National Libraries of Greece and credit Stavrakios only with its text, assigning its music to his contemporary Demetrios Beaskos, referendarios of the Metropolis of Thessaloniki. Both the text and the music of this hymn for St. Demetrios are clearly meant to recall the famous eight-mode Doxastikon sung at the vespers on the eve of the Dormition of the Mother of God. Yet the composer of its music, whether Stavrakios or Beaskos, changes the route through the cycle of the modes by proceeding first through all four authentic modes and then their plagals. The anonymous Dormition chant, on the other hand, pairs each authentic mode with its corresponding plagal (1, Plagal 1, 2 , Plagal 2, etc.) Be that as it may, since the Doxastikon for St. Demetrios finishes in Mode 1, the following Theotokion must be sung in the same mode. We therefore end our Lamplighting hymnody with a sticheron for Saturday vespers from the Great Octoechos attributed to St. John of Damascus.

At an actual service, the psalmody accompanying the entrance of the clergy into the sanctuary would be followed by a blessing from the celebrant introducing a solemn performance of the prokeimenon of the day. The cantors performed this musically florid responsorial psalm clustered around the ambo, a raised platform in the nave from which designated soloists would chant the prokeimenon’s verses. The final sequence of cathedral psalmody in “Sung” Vespers followed the Ektene, a litany proclaimed by the deacon to which the congregation responded fervently with triple exclamations of “Lord, have mercy.” These were the three Small Antiphons, consisting of Psalms 114, 115, and 116 with each psalm preceded by a Small Litany and a prayer. The refrains of the psalms should be familiar to all those acquainted with the Eucharistic Divine Liturgies of the modern Byzantine Rite. They are, respectively, “At the prayers of the Mother of God,” “Son of God, risen from the dead/wonderful in Your Saints,” and the Trisagion Hymn “Holy God, Holy Strong, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.” For this performance we sing only Small Antiphons 1 and 3 using their festal melodies. The Trisagion is particularly grand, fully justifying St. Symeon’s description of the festal refrains as “asmatikos.” Indeed, the syllables extraneous to its brief text that contribute to the extension of its musical phrases were typical of chants contained in the Asmatikon, the musically notated book of elaborate choral chants for the Rite of the Great Church. The Dismissal Hymn (Apolytikion) of St. Demetrios then marks the conclusion of vespers with a hymn so frequently repeated that it would surely have been known to all those gathered to celebrate the martyr’s feast (as remains the case in Greece today).

The chanting of psalms and hymns to St. Demetrios continued on the streets of Thessaloniki during the processions that linked the three celebrations of his vespers. St. Symeon explicitly names only a few of these chants, among which is the kanon that he modeled on that for Palm Sunday. In its place we offer the first and final odes of the 13th-century kanon that Stavrakios composed in imitation of the Paschal Kanon of St. John of Damascus.

According to St. Symeon, our final hymn, the Doxastikon for Hagiopolite vespers “Your most godlike and blameless soul,” was chanted upon arrival at the doors of the martyr’s basilica. We sing first the ordinary version of the hymn in Mode Plagal 4. Liturgical manuscripts attribute its text and music variously to “Byzantios” or “Anatolios,” which could be either a proper name or an indication of its geographic provenance somewhere in the East of the Roman Empire. We follow this without interruption by its (re-)arrangement as a kalophonic Anagrammatismos by St. John Koukouzeles (ca. 1280–ca. 1341), the leading figure in the late medieval artistic renewal of Greek ecclesiastical chant that Edward Williams called “a Byzantine ars nova.” Koukouzeles opens by recapitulating the sticheron’s final sentence “Guard the city…” in a different musical mode (Plagal 2). He then reinforces the older hymn’s pleas to St. Demetrios to “guard the city” by asking him also to “fight alongside our kings.” Like the author of the underlying sticheron, Koukouzeles leaves the identity of the city in question open. Having probably spent time in Thessaloniki during a musical career that reportedly began at the imperial court in Constantinople and ended with him as a monk on Mount Athos, he may well have intended his listeners to think of both the empire’s capital and its second city as being protected by St. Demetrios in politically troubled times. 

Alexander Lingas