St Luke the Younger, and the Monastery of Hosios Loukas

In the Byzantine Rite, today is the feast of a Saint called Luke, a monk who lived in the 10th century, and is traditionally known by variety of epithets: “the Younger”, to distinguish him from the Evangelist; “of Steiris” or “Steirion”, the place where he died and was buried; “of Hellas”, the Greek word for “Greece”; and the Wonderworker (Thaumaturgus), in part because he is one of the first Saints who miraculously levitated. He was born in 896, and died on this day in either 946 or 953.

A mosaic portrait of St Luke in the church of the monastery dedicated to him, which houses his relics, described further below. 

He was the third of seven children born to a couple named Stephan and Euphrosyne, who had fled from the island of Aegina, about 23 miles to the south-west of Athens, and settled in the central region of Thessaly. From an early age, Luke practiced the works of charity, giving away his clothes and food to the poor, and showed a strong inclination to the ascetic and devotional life. After his father’s death, he left home to seek a monastery to enter, but was captured by soldiers who mistook him for a runaway slave, and sent back home after being badly mistreated. Some time later, his mother allowed him to travel as far as Athens with two monks who were on pilgrimage from Rome to the Holy Land, and in that city, entered a monastery. However, the abbot had a vision of his mother asking him to be sent back, and so he was.

As a dutiful son, Luke returned to his family, but only four months later, Euphrosyne accepted her son’s vocation, and allowed him to depart once again; he was then eighteen years old. He made his way to a mountain near Corinth, where he built himself a hermitage, and lived a life of great austerity, followed, as such lives as wont to be, by many miracles.

The 10th century was not a peaceful one in Greece’s history, and the disturbances of his times drove St Luke to move on several occasions. He eventually settled in the region of Boeotia, on the northern side of the Gulf of Corinth. On the slopes of Mt Helicon, at a place called Steiris, he founded a new hermitage, and in due course, as men came to live near him, this was formally established as a small monastery. He died seven years later after an illness of some months, during which he prophesied that Steiris would become the site of a great church and monastery, and a place of pilgrimage. The presence of his own relics there is one of the reasons why this prophecy came true, since he is one of the Saints whose tomb issues a stream of perfumed oil, along with such other Eastern luminaries and wonderworkers as Nicholas of Myra and Demetrius of Thessalonica.

The monastery has two churches right next to each other, which is not an unusual arrangement in the Byzantine world. The older and simpler one was founded in St Luke’s lifetime, and is the only church certainly known to have been built in the 10th century in mainland Greece. Next to it stands a much grander one called the Catholicon, a term which sometimes means the cathedral of a diocese, and sometimes, the largest or most important church within a monastic complex, as it does here. This was built in the early 11th century to house the Saint’s tomb, and is famous for amount and quality of both fresco and mosaic work, contemporary to the original construction, which is preserved within it. There are a huge number of good quality photographs of it on Wikimedia Commons; here is just a small selection. 

The exterior of the rear of the two churches, the catholicon on the left, and the older church (originally dedicated to St Barbara, but now to the Virgin Mary) on the right.

The façade of the catholicon.

The tomb of St Luke in the crypt.

A fresco in the crypt of the burial of Christ, and the appearance of the angels to the woman at the empty tomb.

Portraits of unidentified saints in one of the vaults of the ceiling. 

The interior of the catholicon; note that, as in many Greek monastic churches, the sanctuary is actually quite small.

Mosaics above the sanctuary of the Virgin and Child, Pentecost, and the archangels Michael and Gabriel.

A mosaic of the Baptism of Christ, in one of the squinches of the dome.  

Two views of the mosaics in the narthex.

Mosaics in the transepts of Christ the Pantocrator...

The Virgin and Child...

and the prophet Daniel among the lions.