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Don’t Leave Home Without Them

Pilgrim eulogiai ensure a safe trip

By Gary Vikan

A modern airline passenger, concerned about safety, will purchase travel insurance. In ancient times, however, travel was far more dangerous, and there was no insurance. Bandits, wild animals and hostile local populations threatened those traveling by land, the standard route to the Holy Land for Byzantine pilgrims. Whether on foot or donkey, pilgrims faced the characteristic dangers of remote, unfamiliar territories and harsh climates. Winds and gales, rains and storms, 057submerged rocks and crude or nonexistent harbors all made sea travel—the choice of more affluent pilgrims—an even more dangerous venture. Without travel insurance, it is not surprising that […]

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Endnotes

1.

For more on eulogiai, see Gary Vikan, “‘Guided by Land and Sea’: Pilgrim Art and Pilgrim Travel in Early Byzantium,” in TESSERAE: Festschrift für Josef Engemann, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum, supp. vol. 19 (1991), pp. 74–92; and Byzantine Pilgrimage Art (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1982).

2.

See P. van den Ven, “La vie ancienne de S. Syméon Stylite le Jeune (521–592),” in Subsidia Hagiographica 32 (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1962 [part 1], 1970 [part 2]); and Harry J. Magoulias, “Lives of Byzantine Saints as Sources of Data for the History of Magic in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries A.D.: Sorcery, Relics, and Icons,” Byzantion 37 (1967), p. 256.

3.

Vikan, “Two Unpublished Pilgrim Tokens in the Benaki Museum and the Group to Which They Belong,” in Thymiama: In Memory of Laskarina Bouras (Athens, 1993), pp. 341–346.

4.

Vikan, “Pilgrims in Magi’s Clothing: The Impact of Mimesis on Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art,” in The Blessings of Pilgrimage, Illinois Byzantine Studies 1, Robert Ousterhout, ed. (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1990), pp. 97–107.