Protection of the Theotokos

The vision at Blachernae

The church of the Theotokos at Blachernae, in the north-west corner of Constantinople by the Golden Horn, was the greatest Marian shrine of the imperial city. Founded in the fifth century — the tradition connects its beginnings with the empress Pulcheria — it housed from the reign of Leo I the precious robe (maphorion) of the Mother of God brought from Palestine, kept in the chapel of the "holy reliquary" (Hagia Soros), and it was to Blachernae that the city turned in every peril, crediting the Theotokos with its deliverance from siege after siege. It is against this background that the Church reads the vision of the Protection.

The account comes from the Life of Andrew the Fool-for-Christ, the Constantinopolitan ascetic who feigned madness for the sake of Christ (his own feast follows the next day, October 2). During an all-night vigil at Blachernae, the church crowded with worshippers, Andrew — with his disciple Epiphanius, a young man of noble house — lifted his eyes about the fourth hour of the night and saw a woman of majestic height advancing from the royal doors toward the ambo, escorted by a shining company in which he knew John the Forerunner and John the Theologian. Kneeling, she prayed a long while with tears for the world; then, entering the sanctuary, she prayed again for the people standing about. And when she had prayed, she took the veil that lay upon her head — flashing like lightning, the accounts say — and with great solemnity spread it out over all the people in the church. "Seest thou, brother, the Queen and Lady of all, praying for the whole world?" Andrew asked; and Epiphanius answered, "I see, holy father, and am in dread." As long as the Mother of God was visible the veil was seen spread over the people, radiating glory; when she had withdrawn, it too passed from sight — but, the Life concludes, she left her grace with those who were there.

The source and the question of date

The episode is a short chapter of the Life of Andrew the Fool, a lengthy Greek text transmitted under the name of Nikephoros, a priest of Hagia Sophia who presents himself as Andrew's contemporary and confidant. The Life's own chronology is famously tangled: it sets Andrew's career in the reign of Leo I (457–474), while the received synaxarion tradition places him — and therefore the vision — under Leo VI the Wise (886–912), the date usually repeated being about the year 910; modern scholarship (above all Lennart Rydén's critical edition) regards the Life as a composition of the tenth century whose fifth-century setting is literary. The Church's calendar does not resolve the question and neither does this entry: the feast keeps the vision itself, on October 1, the eve of Andrew's own commemoration. Later Russian retellings joined the vision to a deliverance of the city from besieging enemies, as at Blachernae of old; the Life itself records no siege, and the connection is devotional rather than documentary.

The feast's ascendancy among the Slavs

Byzantium, which gave the vision its setting, never made of it a general feast: no Constantinopolitan festival of the Protection on October 1 is attested in the Greek service books of the Byzantine period. It was in Rus' that the commemoration became a great feast. The establishment is credited to the holy prince Andrei Bogolyubsky of Vladimir-Suzdal (†1174), in the 1160s: the Russian "Discourse on the Protection" composed in his circle marvels that so great a wonder had remained without a festival and ordains its celebration, and the prince's devotion gave the feast its first and most perfect architectural monument — the church of the Protection on the Nerl (Pokrov na Nerli, 1165), the white-stone church standing alone in the water-meadows near Bogolyubovo, built, the tradition says, in memory of his son Izyaslav. From Vladimir the feast spread through all the Russian lands and sank deep into the people's piety: Pokrov churches and monasteries multiplied beyond counting — the cathedral of the Protection on the Moat in Moscow, better known as St. Basil's, was raised in 1555–1561 in thanksgiving for the capture of Kazan on the feast itself (October 1, 1552) — and the day, falling at the turn of autumn, gathered a whole folk calendar about it: the first snows that "cover" the earth, the season of weddings, the maiden's prayer for a protecting veil of her own. Among the Cossacks of Ukraine the Pokrova was kept as a patronal feast of the host. In Russian usage the Protection ranks as a "great feast," though not of the Twelve, and is kept with vigil; the Slavic service — troparion, kontakion, canon and all — is a Rus' composition, one of the earliest original feasts of the Russian Church.

The Greek observance and October 28

Greek observance of the feast remained, by contrast, modest: the commemoration entered Greek usage late, chiefly through Athonite and Russian contact, and the older printed Greek Menaia for October 1 carry only the Apostle Ananias and Romanus the Melodist, with no service of the Skepi. In the twentieth century the feast took on a new and national character in Greece. After the Italian ultimatum was refused on October 28, 1940 ("Ohi Day"), the deliverance of the nation in the war that followed was piously ascribed to the Protection of the Theotokos, and in 1952 the Church of Greece transferred the celebration of the Holy Protection (Ἁγία Σκέπη) from October 1 to October 28, to coincide with the national anniversary; a new service was composed (the work of the hymnographer Gerasimos Mikragiannanites), whose stichera explicitly hymn the Theotokos for delivering "the new people of thy nation" from foreign invasion as she once delivered Byzantium. The Greek Menaion service for October 28 (consulted live at glt.goarch.org) opens precisely so. Thus the one feast is now kept on two dates: October 1 in the Slavic churches and those that follow the older placement, October 28 in the Church of Greece — a difference of calendar politics and national memory, not of substance.

Meaning

The feast has no scriptural event behind it and needs none: it celebrates a standing reality of the Church's life, the intercession of the Mother of God, made visible for one night to a fool-for-Christ. The veil spread over the people is the feast's whole theology — protection, not as magic, but as the prayer of the Theotokos "to her Son and our God" — and the hymns draw the circle wide: angels, apostles, prophets and hierarchs are gathered under the same omophorion, and the Church on earth stands where the congregation of Blachernae stood, asking to be covered. It is characteristic of the feast that its seer was the least of the city: the vision of the Queen of heaven was given not to patriarch or emperor but to a slave who played the madman for Christ's sake.