Illness and Healing: The Ministry Cycle in the Chora Monastery and the Literary Work of Theodore Metochites, lecture by Nektarios Zarras (University of Münster),  University of Vienna, June 11, 2018, 6:30 pm

Nektarios Zarras will interpret the Ministry cycle in the narthexes of the Chora monastery in accordance with Theodore Metochites’ innermost thoughts and deliberations, which are defended passionately in his writings. Persistently recurrent in Metochites’ oeuvre are his beliefs on the bounty of knowledge and the insuperable superiority of the spiritual world, in contrast to the denigration of man’s intellect, which results from the abandonment of the ideal life. Images depict these two opposing conditions, as man’s experience of the divine and the daemonic, as the struggle between Good and Evil and as health and sickness.

Nektarios Zarras has been Senior Visiting Lecturer at the Universities of Patras and of the Aegean. He is currently an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Fellow at the University of Münster working on the project: Identity and Patronage in Byzantium.