“Panorama Pergamon” could be called a historical photo of the archives of the French School of Athens recently known and documenting the history of the Roman of this Asia Minor State. At the same time it gives the researcher the opportunity to perceive… the odd celebration of Easter that reached the point of intervention by the Patriarchate as at some point… knives came out!
The photo taken in 1908 by the French archaeologist Joseph Chamonard highlights the landscape of Pergamon while proves elements of the city known only by oral testimonies or even written descriptive.
In the left part of it is seen for the first time since 1922 the entire destroyed church of Saint Theodore. A monument that has so far been considered to have not been preserved or photographically. It was a classic lesbian -type basilica in its Aivali variant, with the middle aisle elevated with skylights on its sides illuminating the interior of the temple. The church of Saint Theodore was rebuilt and expanded in 1870 to an older temple mentioned from the 16th century and was there in a place of about five acres of which the four covered the Orthodox Christian cemetery.
The right part of the photo is depicted the temple of Zoodochos Pigi, the last metropolitan temple of the city. Known by other photographs, he was built in the 1870s possible by Lesbian crews. The rhythm of Lesbian Basilica and he, in the Aivali variant such as the church of Saint Theodore.
Among the Roman inhabitants of the two parishes, the Saint Theodore, who was the oldest parish of the city and the Zoodochos Pigi, which was the younger, had developed a peculiar confrontation that certainly had to do with the social and economic classes that made them up.
And this contrast was manifested every Good Friday with “Wild”, the brandy … assistant.
On Good Thursday night the men of Pergamon went to their two churches. When the Crucifixion went out to the center of the churches, they also went out in their courtyards and “widening the dead” by drinking “brandy for Christ the shouting”. That is, “they drank brandy for the pain that hurts”.
At noon on Good Friday, the Epitaphs came out for the tour between the houses of the Mahalades. At some point where the Epitaphs met, until the end of the 19th century, an unprecedented and unknown custom from the end of the 19th century. The two Epitaphs, the men who had all night drinking “cognacs”, clashed. It was the custom of “wild” among those who followed the epitaphs …
At the end of the 19th century, this “wild” evolved into a real conflict with a dead and injured. At that time, the Metropolitan of Ephesus to which Pergamon was subject to a threat to anyone who violated the mandate banned the custom of the concomitant tour of the Epitaphs. And he alternately defined an Epitaph to roam at noon and one before dark in the afternoon. The “cognacs” were not banned and even “transferred” by the parchments to their new places of installation after the 1922 destruction.
Today, nothing is saved by the two temples. The site of the Church of Saint Theodore has been built and inhabited, and a modern school has been built in the place of Zoodochos Pigi. As for the parchments, descendants of refugees in the four points of the horizon.
It should be noted that in the same photo of the archives of the French School of Athens one can see the archaeological site of the sanctuary of the Egyptian Great Gods. In the center of the temple of Serapidos where Antypas, the first bishop of Pergamon, was testified, and who was used as a church of St. John the Theologian after the Christianity of the State. On the one hand, the two round towers – the sanctuaries of Osiris and Isis, which were also used as temples of Saints Antipas and Proclus and Papylos. Until the Tamerlane years when Pergamon was destroyed. In the late 19th century, the Sanctuary of Isis was reused as a church of St. Antipas to be converted in 1922 into a mosque (curtain mosque – mosque of liberation) and as such to be used to this day.
The Armenian Church with its belfry is also distinguished. It served the needs of the small Armenian community of Pergamon. After 1922 it was destroyed.