ΧΡΙΣΤΙΑΝΙΚΗ ΑΡΧΑΙΟΛΟΓΙΑ

  Monk David, originally from Mesopotamia, was an ascet in the middle of the 6th century in the Monastery of Aproiton in Thessaloniki. He stayed for three consecutive years on a tree, an almond tree. Then he lived in a small room next to the Monastery. "Aproitos" according to the dictionaries of Suidas and Hesychius means "enclosed". The Monastery seems to have named its neighbor small gate of Aproiton, according to archaeologists. Or did the opposite happen? Could the gate be so named by the shut-in-lived monks. But it could also be called the small gate of the shut in citizens of Thessalonica. When the city was besieged by enemies, the small gate may have offered an easy exit for trapped citizens to send messengers for help. Today, the location of the Monastery is not known, nor of the gate of the Aproiton. Characteristic, however, for the life of Saint David is the verse of the Synaxarium of June 26, his feast day: " Ἕκτῃ ἐξεπέρησε πύλας βίου εἰκάδι Δαυΐ...

  According to the ancient Greek poet Pindar of the 5th century BC, roses grow on the Elysian Fields, the abode of Heroes and the Righteous in the afterlife. Athletes and newlyweds were welcomed in ancient times with the so-called "phyllovolia", the throwing of rose petals. For our ancestors the blood of the Heroes that fell on the earth, such as Adonis and Attis, turned into roses. The use of roses in funeral wreaths from ancient times (to the present day) named their Roman holiday season in May and June as “Rosalia”. The alternative name of the Ecclesiastical period of 50 days after Easter as "Triodion of Roses" is interesting. In several parts of Greece to this day they call the Saturday before Pentecost, that is known as Sabbath of the dead, as "Rousalia". In Latin, the feast of Pentecost is also called Festa Rosalia, while to this day in Naples, Italy, it is called Pasca rusata. A fine fresco of a maenad lovingly holding in her arms a small ...

Pisoy was a anchorite in Egypt. He was born at the beginning of the 4th century. He lived in the desert of Nitria, west of the Nile Delta. In 408, the "Mazikes", a Berber tribe, raided Skete in Nitria and killed several monks, including Moses the Ethiopian. In order to escape the raids, he fled with John Kolovos (dwarf) to Antinoopolis in Thebaid in Upper Egypt. There he met the holy Paul of Thmoeus. He remained until his death in the mountains near the Roman city. In the 9th century, Patriarch Joseph of the Copts of Alexandria transferred the relics of the two ascetics, Pisoy and Paul, to the Skete of Pisoy, back to Nitria. While mummification as practiced by the Egyptians was prohibited by law as early as the 4th century, Pisoy's body remains to this day incorruptible without treatment, as the monks say. The name Pisoy is etymologically derived from the demotic Egyptian-Coptic word ⲡⲓ ϣ ⲱⲓ (fate) In Greek texts he is known as "holy Paisius the Great". He ce...