Erzurum (Not Theodosiopolis)
After the Roman empire came apart, Erzurum—Karin—found itself in its eastern half: Byzantium. At the beginning of the fifth century the emperor Arcadius built a fortress here, named after his father Theodosius I. Thus a new name appeared: Theodosiopolis. On a sixth-century map it stands as the easternmost point of the empire.
Theodosiopolis was not only a military outpost. A considerable trade passed through it: textiles and metals came in from Persia and Armenia; grain, ironwork and the local wine went out.
That wine is worth a moment. It was praised by ancient authors and valued across Asia Minor—and modern Erzurum is one of the most conservative cities in Türkiye, where finding a glass of it is a good deal harder than it was a thousand years ago. A city can lose an industry in the way other places lose a language.
The place lived a many-tongued life: Greeks, Armenians, Syrians and Iranians living side by side, accents and goods mixing in the markets. But the state religion of Byzantium was Christianity, and of that there is a reminder in a small votive plaque of the Mother of God.
Dot by dot
Her image is roughly scratched into a stone tile, with the inscription ΜΡ ΘΥ and some odd tittles that look rather like omegas.
Those four letters are worth unpacking, since they are the standard abbreviation on every icon of the Virgin in the Orthodox world: ΜΗΤΗΡ ΘΕΟΥ, Mētēr Theou, “Mother of God.” Greek abbreviations of this kind keep the first and last letters and throw away the middle, marking the omission with a stroke above—which is precisely what our scratcher was attempting with his omega-ish squiggles. He knew the formula. He was less certain about the typography.
Judging by the marks, the whole thing was done with a sharp iron point: punching dots and then joining them with scratched lines, building the image up step by step. There is no craftsman’s hand here, but there is a believer’s persistence.
This is not a work of art but a prayer cut into stone. One can very nearly feel the strained concentration of the person scratching this little icon as a request for something absolutely necessary.
Museums are full of the devotion of the rich—the endowed chapels, the gold-ground panels, the donor portraits kneeling in the corner with their names attached. This is the other kind, and it survives far less often: a votive object made by somebody with no money, no training and no assistance, who wanted something badly enough to spend an evening making holes in a stone.
