Fief Churches

Church of Ag. Adrianos, near Nauplion.

I recently became interested in fief churches after I realized I had identified three in the vicinity of Nauplion. I will have more to say about fiefs later on, but fief churches are one way to identify fiefs. We have too little information on fiefs, although we have a great deal of information on landholdings in general, and I have written several entries here about that information.  For example:

Cosmina

Mapping the Territory, 1

Mapping the Territory, 2

A visit to the Nauplion area early this month allowed me the provisional identification of a few more.  I have not worked out a satisfactory set of criteria for identification: in most cases I find rebuilding has obliterated architectural distinctions I would have expected, and in one case I have the before-and-after photographs that would prove it.  Take Ag. Thomas at Midea about which I have written. Here you see the north end of the cross-vault in 1978, looking through to the arched south windows.  I marked on the photograph the cross made with 8 or so inserted bowls, such as are found on Ag. Triada at Merbaka. I was unable to tell if the bowls were still in position and only whitewashed.

Ag. Thomas, Midea

Now the south side with its 8 or so bowls.  The bowls are characteristic of Frankish churches, though the church would have been built by Greek labor and we see this in the arches and dentil ornamentation. This little 13th-century church is perched on a small hill that looks across the plains from Midea to Nauplion.

Ag. Thomas, Midea

Now for the improved modern version of the church.  All traces of the cross-vault have been removed, with the molding, the arches, and the plates:

Ag. Thomas, Midea

It would be unrecognizable as the same building were it not for my photographs.

Another identification as a fief chapel is the presence of Western frescos, and I have written about the two I found here.  One is at Ag. Marina at Kazarma, an endearingly clumsy chapel with a 14th-century fresco behind the iconostasis of a man in red and a woman in white.

Rear view of Ag. Marina, Kazarma.

and then at Ag. Sotira where far up to the right when you first enter is the remains of a fresco with Westerners looking up to a Franciscan-style cross.  The fief of this church has been through a number of incarnations, and I suspect perhaps a little piracy might have been involved, given its private landing beach.

Roof of Ag. Sotira, Asine.

I reported these frescos to the Archaeological Service in 08-09, but nothing has been done towards their study or preservation.  Nor has anything been done for the fortified tower at Ag. Sotira which was 4 stories high in 1978, but is now down to 3 stories.

A church need not have been built by Franks or Venetians to have become a fief church, though I suspect there was very little pre-emption of religious space in terms of fiefs.  As an example, here is the tiny church at Plataniti from about 1100, I Metamorphosis,  and then the newer clumsily-Western-built church a stone's throw away.

12th C, Plataniti.

13th C, Plataninti.

I wasn't able to stand where I could get a complete shot of the facade of I Koimisi, but I did get one of its two surviving bowls.

I think the church at the top of this entry, Ag. Adrianos, was built as a fief church, although it has been so improved and restored and rebuilt and hedged and locked against visitors, that it is difficult to say.  These are the only two pictures I was able to get because of the barricades.

Ag. Adrianos, Ag. Adrianos-Katsingri

It was, however, the church on the fief where Cyriaco went in the previous entry to find his Mycenae.  A fresco in it gives a restoration date of 1713, and it is mentioned in a Venetian document of 1696.  My interest is more in the earlier fiefs, but fiefs were assigned again when the Venetians came in 1686.

Another church documented then, and in 1500 is Ag. Paraskevi on the side of the road up Palamidi.  It, too, has been restored almost beyond recognition and given new bright frescos although I think it is distinctively Western-built.

Ag. Paraskevi, Palamidi.

Ag. Paraskevi, Palamidi.

It was, once, a Santa Veneranda, being out in the area where the Albanians were living, though I think it was built well before they arrived.  We have a 1500 reference to the Strada S. Veneranda, which was the road from Nauplion out to the side of Palamidi and over the hill to Karathona beach.

As a final church, Ag. Nikolaos at Iria, near the coast, and also in an area that became Albanian.  It has the date of 1381 carved over the western entrance.

Ag. Nikolaos, Iria.

There are certainly more churches in the Argolid to identify and I may have been reckless about some of these. I can only hope for the opportunity of another visit.  Meanwhile, I would be grateful for more information and corrections from readers.

(My thanks to Hermes Car Rental in Nauplion (down from the bus stop) for the darling little red car that was such a delight to drive to these churches.)

PS, Part Two: Chapels

Starting again with the topic of clothes: I had mentioned the fresco of a Western woman in a small church used for the burial chapel, Ag. Marina, of a fief near Nauplion. I discovered a cache of my photographs that had gone missing, and in them I found her husband.

This may not seem particularly exciting, since all you can see of him is part of his red robe, and a bit of elbow and arm to the left of the hanging lamp, and a faint outline of thighs and knees just below the middle of the picture. Here she is again, below, in what was once meant to be a white dress. Both pictures have been Gimped to lighten them up and increase the contrast considerably. The man in red and the woman in white are reaching out towards each other, a common gesture in such paintings.




So in this tiny, badly-built, ruinous chapel, we have portraits of a husband and wife. Excavation might find a tomb. Excavation might ruin the place. Cleaning the frescos plus a little faith-healing might produce evidence of another burial or two, and even another portrait.

This husband and wife would have had a house in Nauplion, and one out on the fief. What small information we have on Nauplion's houses indicate that the houses were underwhelming, embarrassing if the city had to house a high-level visitor. We know even less about the fiefs, but this one is made out of steep hills and valleys, the ancient Greek fortress of Kazarma, and a Mycenean bridge where the main road from Nauplion to the east coast of the Argolid runs through. Cyriaco rode out there to visit and sketch the antiquites. Probably the fief produced wool, honey, and olive oil. That is what is produced in those hills today.

* * * * *

More Gimping and enlarging turned up a provocative image from another chapel, Metamorphoses. Most of the visible frescos are firmly dated to 1570 by a painted inscription. On the wall to the right of the entrance is a fairly conventional scene of the saint-making process, with body parts about to happen. In contemporary Venetian documents, this is called tagliar a peci, cutting to pieces, and can mean anything from a knife wound to what you think it means.

This whole fresco is clearly 16th century, even without the inscription that dates it. But the top of this 16th century scene peters out over an earlier scene which could provide a great deal of information for the history of the chapel.

All that remains of that earlier scene is a group of men, wearing what appears to be Western dress, being directed by a young man in the center to look at Christ on the cross. The later painter has nicely managed so that the mountains of his scene support the older scene and give Christ's feet a place to rest -- which suggests a damaged but respected older fresco. A combination of small hints in various sources have made me think there was a small Franciscan monastery somewhere in the Nauplion area in the 15th century, and this partial fresco is suggestive of Franciscans to me. I would be grateful for any information here -- on iconography, Franciscans, whatever.













The historical sequence of events, then, would have the monks, maybe Franciscans, maybe not, leaving --at the latest -- in 1540 with the Ottoman takeover of Nauplion. A new landowner allowed the abandoned monastery to be taken over by the Orthodox, and Michael Fantalouris paid for new frescos in 1570, for the benefit of his soul, he said.

I hope his soul was received kindly.

Ag. Marina at Kazarma

Ag. Marina is in a valley behind the fortress of Kazarma, up the road from the Mycenean bridge. The chairs suggest how very small it is. It was probably built as a burial chapel -- we'll get back to that later. The next photo suggests that there was a collapse of the roof or wall at the rear -- too small to call it an apse -- so that it was clumsily, very clumsily, rebuilt.

The inside has a minute narthex, with an arched entrance to the chapel. The chapel has a stone iconostasis with an arch in the center and another arch on the side. None of these three arches is symmetrical or has the same arc or height. One almost has the impression that the builders had themselves never actually seen an arch before.

Thirty years ago, Ag. Marina was nearly hidden in its valley by damp green grass and shrubbery -- after rains, water came down the hillside all around it. The inside smelled of mold and the candles were too damp to light.

Since then, a dirt road has been put through which channels the water away from the chapel, the grass is regularly cut, and someone keeps the paint around the front door fresh. It has acquired electricity and those chairs.

It was completely frescoed but damp and age and incense and smoke have long since turned the frescos black though ghosts of images remain.
Chunks of plaster have fallen off from old age, and others have fallen where nails were hammered in to support icons.

Fooling around with Gimp on the pictures I tried to take of the wall brought to light a reddish robe over a white gown, possibly of Christ, and of a woman in a white dress of the kind non-Greek women wore in the 14th and 15th centuies. There is too much damage for me to say whether or not she is facing someone, but it was usual to represent an unmarried woman in white in her tomb portrait. This portrait is on the rear of the iconostasis -- not at all a conventional place for such, but that was one of the only two areas in the church with enough space.

This woman in white is a tremendous addition to the historical materials of the Argolid. Otherwise, I have found only five named women in the 15th century: Soi, a serf; Kyria Malaksos, a priest's wife; Maria Buriano, defrauded in an investment; Maria de Cavaza, a land-owner, and producer and dealer in her own linen and wool business; Magdalena de Finctis, Ms. Cavaza's sister-in-law. To be so few, they are a nice variety. Six more unnamed women are mentioned in passing, and there are references to "families."

Ag. Marina was most likely built as a burial chapel for a fief. There are a number of these small chapels around the Argolid, and they will, slowly, allow us to work out general impressions of the locations of the medieval fiefs -- some of them we know had about 200 acres.

But unlike medieval chapels and churches on main roads or beside towns, Ag. Marina has never been formally identified, and it certainly has not been tidied and restored. I am not much interested in disrupting its life. I like the unmatched chairs in front -- a good place to eat lunch or rest when you are hiking, or pruning the olives across the road, but I would like to see those frescos, and the fragments of the others, cleaned up and protected.

[Ag. Marina is continued here.]