ΧΡΙΣΤΙΑΝΙΚΗ ΑΡΧΑΙΟΛΟΓΙΑ

  Blessed elder Gregory from the Kellion of Panagia Krania in Provata of Mount Athos was the living example of simplicity and sweetness. Today, Saint Gregory of Palamas Sunday was celebrated his nameday. In their Kellion, according to tradition, his namesake, future Abbot of Esfimenou Monastery and Archbishop of Thessaloniki, Saint Gregory, stayed for a while. Elder Gregory was born in 1917 in Asia Minor and at the age of 10 he came to Mount Athos with his father and his younger brother, father Kallinikos, who stayed with him as a subordinate of his older brother. He had an innate simplicity and a lot of love for the young monks. Every time he came to see our Elder, he would bring chocolates in his pockets and treat us. "You are young children", he said - we were 18 years old at that time- "you like these things". Once my Elder told me and I called him on the telephone for some reason. He was alone, the other two fathers missing. "What are you doing, father?...

  The Apocryphal First Gospel of James and the Armenian Gospel of the Infancy of Christ are considered the sources that mention the Annunciation of Jesus' mother "by the well". Around 250 AD dates the first depiction of the Annunciation of the Virgin in the well. It is an “eukterios oekos”, the first form of temple in a house room. It is located in Dura Europos, an ancient city of Syria. The scene is contested as depicting the Annunciation because the Archangel is missing, but proponents of the case see precisely in the absence of Gabriel, that he is disembodied. The next confirmed representation is on a 5th century ivory cover of a gospel in Milan. The central performance is the Lamb of God and around him evangelical scenes. In the Annunciation we can see the Archangel and the kneeling Mary filling a pitcher with water from a spring that flows through rocks. In medieval imagery the element of water is believed to have been rescued by the depiction of a vase of flow...

In the mosaic map of the Holy Places of the village of Madaba in today's Jordan, a work of the 6th century, we can see next to Jericho and the Jordan River the "threshing floor of Atad, today Bethagla" with a building marking it. It is about the threshing floor of a man named Atad or Atath, where the Egyptians carried the dead body and made the funeral lament of Joseph (Gen. 50,10). In the middle of the 5th century AD in this place, a Lavra was built by the monk Gerasimus, referred to in the sources of the time as "of Kalamon" or otherwise "of Penthoukla" near the spring of partridge. "Bethagla - Beth Hagla" in Hebrew means the house of the partridge, the same Ein Eyla in Arabic. The words Hagla, Eila, Penthukla and Bethagla are obviously related, since they sound alike. They all talk about partridges. The ascet Gerasimus built his Lavra near the source of the partridge, so the name of the little bird was also given to the Lavra. The name ...