Icon Saint Romanos the Melodist

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1 October celebration

He lived either in the 6th century AD under King Anastasius I or, according to another version, in the 8th century AD under King Anastasius II. He was born in Emesa, Syria, and according to an anonymous hymn he was of Jewish descent.

He had originally served as a deacon in the church in Beirut. Then he went to Constantinople and stayed in the cells of the Temple of the Virgin Mary.

Romanos had a modest education and his poetic talent was still unknown. But he was driven by a deep faith in the venerable memory of the Virgin Mary and regularly attended the solemn vigils in the Church of Our Lady of Blachernae. At one such, on the feast of Christmas, which he attended, his soul was filled with devotion and when he returned to his cell he had a dream of Our Lady offering him a book and telling him to devour it.

Romanos, under the influence of the dream, composed the troparion “The Virgin Mary today twitches the supersoul and the earth offers the cave to the unapproachable…” for the birth of Christ. From that moment on, the poetic epiphany of Saint Romanus remained unquenched and became the most exotic and greatest melody of our Church.

Romanos wrote about a thousand compositions of which only one tenth has survived. His themes are varied. He praised almost all the saints and feasts of the Christian Church. Inexhaustible in his conceptions and wealth of ideas, he knew how to add originality to even the most commonplace subjects one might characterize.

His often graceless material (events and the lives of saints) could be transformed into a living dramatic painting. The faces of the Saints as well as of the Virgin Mary and Christ are presented perfectly vividly without anything necrotic or otherworldly.

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