Mother Thessaloniki

by Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis

Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis (1908–1993) was a painter and writer known for his in depth study of Byzantine tradition and as a courageous defender of Orthodoxy in the modern world, “the one person who in theory and practice embodied, in the most radical way, devotion to the ‘popular spirituality’ of the Orthodox Church . . . that ‘bravest confessor’ of the Byzantine tradition [presenting] the unshakeable ‘constants’ of our spiritual life, in the midst of the unrelenting ‘progressiveness’ of the modern world.” (Archbishop Stylianos) Pentzikis, the most modern of Greek writers, the most distinctly Greek, assembles his pieces so that, beginning in alienation, with the recalcitrance and transience of things, the casual cruelties of space and time , they reach out, through the luminous Orthodox immanences of the past, the reverberations of historial memory, towards an inclusive density of present experience. And the wonder, the beauty, lies in the way that we sense, looming in the endlessly modulating density of style, the Orthodox presence of the city. Pentzikis “identified himself so closely with his native Thessaloniki that a [study] on his work may well start with an introduction to this city of Northern Greece. Thessaloniki represents Greece and, beyond that, the world of man which Pentzikis has come to accept with its shortcomings. In [Mother Thessalonkiki]. . . he identifies the parts of his body with the areas and historical periods of Thessaloniki. “[His work] . . . rests, however, on Christian faith, and more particularly Greek Orthodox faith. Its premise is that man is not an independent and self-reliant being but one who cannot act or even exist without the protection and guidance of God and his Saints venerated in a multitude of icons.” (George Thaniel, Homage to Byzantium)

Cover type: Soft
145 pages
Edition #1 published in 1998 by Kedros Publishers.
ISBN: 960-04-1425-4