Deesis

Deesis and saints In Greek, Deesis means supplication, plea. Since the time of early Christianity, prayer requests have been included in liturgical texts: the Eucharistic thanks-giving prayer, supplication prayers in which the Church resorts to the intercession of the Mother of God, John the Baptist, angels, apostles, martyrs, and saints, who bring the prayers of the faithful to Christ. The depiction of Deesis, known since the 6th-7th c. was solidified in several variants since the 10th c. after the period of the iconoclasm, starting with the basic version with the enthroned Christ-Pantocrator the Almighty and the greatest intercessors for humanity, the Mother of God and John the Baptist, turning to him (see S.12824MŁ), and ending with the Great Deesis, expanded to include archangels, apostles, martyrs, and selected saints (S.12788MŁ; S.12830MŁ). The displayed icon of Deesis is a fragment of a cast metal triptych (central wing preserved) popularised in the community of the Old Believers. In addition to the classic three-person 'trymorphon' - the enthroned Pantocrator, the Mother of God, and John the Baptist - at the bottom, there are the selected saints: Leontius of Rostov, St. Nicholas, as well as Zosimas and Sabbatius of Solovki. St. Nicholas, the bishop of Myra, was the patron of travellers, among others, and was always greatly revered in Rus. Living in the 11th c., Leontius, a monk of the Kiev Monastery of the Caves, was supposedly martyred after he became the bishop of Rostov-on-Don and began converting the deeply pagan province. Among the Old Believers, who opposed liturgical reform, the 15th-century saints Zosimas and Sabbatius, the founders of the hermitage and then monastery on the Solovetsky Islands on the White Sea, were presented as models of monastic life. The monastery they founded, which opposed the Moscow reform of Patriarch Nikon, captured by the Tsar's troops in 1676, was seen as a stronghold of Orthodox tradition. Teresa Bagińska-Żurawska https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9243-3967