Showing posts with label basilica. Show all posts
Showing posts with label basilica. Show all posts

Monday, January 19, 2009

And there was much embarrassment



A 14th century wall painting in the narthex of the 12th century church Our Lady of Asinou, on Cyprus. The depiction is of the Gnashing of Teeth, which was one of the group torments in Hades.

They look more sheepish than tormented, though, if you ask my humble opinion, kind of like their bosses just caught them in the sauna, when they were all supposed to be at the weekly board meeting.

Source: "The Church of Our Lady of Asinou". Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation and the Holy Bishopric of Morphou in Collaboration with the Department of Antiquities. Nicosia, 2002.

Monday, January 5, 2009

When you run out of tinker toys...


This is one of the strangest churches I've visited. From Wiki:
"The Basilica of St. Ursula in Cologne contains the alleged relics of Ursula and her 11,000 companions.[13] It contains what has been described as a "veritable tsunami of ribs, shoulder blades, and femurs...arranged in zigzags and swirls and even in the shapes of Latin words."[14] The Goldene Kammer (Golden Chamber), a 17th century chapel attached to the Basilica of St. Ursula, contains sculptures of their heads and torsos, some of the heads encased in silver, others covered with stuffs of gold and caps of cloth of gold and velvet; loose bones thickly texture the upper walls.”[15][16] The peculiarities of the relics themselves have thrown doubt upon the historicity of Ursula and her "11,000 maidens." When skeletons of little children, ranging in age from two months to seven years, were found buried with the sacred virgins in 1183, Hermann Joseph, a Praemonstratensian canon at Steinfeld, explained that these children were distant relatives of the eleven thousand.[17] A surgeon of eminence was once banished from Cologne for opining that, among the collection of bones which are said to pertain to the heads, there were several belonging to full-grown mastiffs.[18] The relics may have proceeded from a forgotten burial ground.[19]"