History · Guide
Byzantine Hymnography
Byzantine hymns are the empire's greatest poetry. The troparion, the kontakion of Romanos, the kanon of Andrew of Crete and John of Damascus, and how the forms fit the liturgical day.
The best poetry written in Greek between the classical period and the modern one was written for the church, and it was written to be sung. Byzantine hymnography is a body of several thousand texts, composed over roughly a thousand years, of which a substantial proportion is still in liturgical use in Orthodox churches every week.
It is also poetry of a kind that classical scholarship long refused to take seriously, because it abandoned the quantitative metres of ancient Greek verse. Byzantine hymns are built on stress accent and syllable count — the way English, Italian and modern Greek verse works — and this was for a long time treated as a decline rather than an adaptation to a language whose pronunciation had changed.
Why Hymns Mattered
In a society where most people could not read, the hymns were the principal vehicle of doctrine. A congregation that could not follow a theological treatise learned the two natures of Christ, the meaning of the Incarnation and the significance of a given feast from what it heard sung, week after week, for a lifetime.
The hymnographers understood this and wrote accordingly. Byzantine hymns are densely doctrinal, full of Old Testament typology, and frequently polemical — the hymns for the Sunday of Orthodoxy celebrate the defeat of iconoclasm in terms no listener could miss.
The Forms
Troparion
The oldest and simplest unit: a short stanza, originally inserted between verses of a psalm, later standing alone. Troparia are the building blocks of everything else, and the dismissal hymn of a feast — the apolytikion — is a troparion.
The earliest datable example that is still sung is Ho Monogenes, “Only-begotten Son,” attributed to Justinian I and dated to 535–536. Whether the emperor actually wrote it is unknowable; that it was promulgated under his name, and that it is a compact statement of Chalcedonian Christology, is not in doubt.
Kontakion
A long verse sermon in stanzas, sung after the gospel reading. A developed kontakion has a short prelude (prooimion) in a different metre, followed by eighteen to thirty stanzas (oikoi) all sharing a metrical pattern and a refrain, with the first letters of the stanzas forming an acrostic — usually the poet’s name.
The form’s master, and probably its importer from Syriac tradition, was Romanos the Melodist, working in Constantinople in the sixth century. About sixty of his kontakia are accepted as genuine, and at his best he is a dramatic poet of real power, giving speeches to Mary, to Peter, to the Devil, to Adam.
The kontakion’s dominance lasted about two centuries. In modern practice only the prelude and first stanza are normally sung, with the rest omitted — which means the form survives as a stump.
The great exception is the Akathist Hymn, which is sung complete.
Kanon
From the eighth century the kontakion was displaced by the kanon, a suite of eight or nine odes attached to the nine biblical canticles (the songs of Moses, Hannah, Habakkuk, Isaiah, Jonah, the Three Youths, the Magnificat, and the rest).
Each ode has a model stanza (heirmos) setting the metre and melody, followed by several stanzas following it. The second ode, based on the harsh song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32, is omitted except in Lent.
The kanon is less dramatic than the kontakion and more theological and allusive, working by layering scriptural types. Its major practitioners were Andrew of Crete, whose Great Kanon runs to about 250 stanzas and is sung in Lent; John of Damascus, whose Easter kanon is the most joyful text in the Byzantine repertory; and his foster-brother Kosmas of Maiouma.
Other forms
Stichera are stanzas inserted between psalm verses at vespers and matins. Exaposteilaria, theotokia (stanzas addressed to the Virgin), katavasiai and a dozen other categories fill out the office. The system is elaborate, and mastering it is a professional skill.
The Books
The texts are distributed across a set of liturgical books, each covering a different cycle:
| Book | Contents |
|---|---|
| Octoechos | The eight-week cycle of resurrection hymns, one week per mode |
| Menaion | Twelve volumes, one per month, for fixed feasts and saints’ days |
| Triodion | Lent, from the pre-Lenten Sundays to Holy Saturday |
| Pentekostarion | Easter to the Sunday of All Saints |
| Horologion | The fixed parts of the daily hours |
A given service combines material from several of these simultaneously — the day of the week from the Octoechos, the saint from the Menaion, the season from the Triodion — which is why Byzantine liturgical practice requires a specialist to assemble. The relationship of the books to the church calendar governs the whole structure.
The Eight Modes
Byzantine hymnody is organised in eight musical modes (echoi), cycling in an eight-week rotation. Each mode has a characteristic set of melodic formulas rather than being a scale in the western sense, and hymns are composed to fit an existing model melody rather than each receiving its own setting.
The system is attributed traditionally to John of Damascus, though its roots are earlier and the attribution is probably a convenient simplification. Its musical workings are described in Byzantine music and its survival in Byzantine chant today.
The Poets
Most hymnographers were monks, and several were women — the best known is Kassia, a ninth-century abbess of Constantinople whose hymn for Holy Wednesday, on the woman who anointed Christ’s feet, is one of the most admired texts in the repertory and is sung in every Orthodox church during Holy Week.
A story is attached to her: that she was a candidate in a bride-show for the emperor Theophilos, that he approached her with a remark about the evil that came through woman (meaning Eve), that she replied that better things also came through woman (meaning the Virgin), and that he passed her over for the answer. The anecdote comes from later chroniclers and is unverifiable; that a woman composed hymns still sung twelve centuries later is fact.
Other major names: Sophronios of Jerusalem, Theodore the Studite and his brother Joseph, Joseph the Hymnographer (credited with an implausible number of kanons), Symeon the Metaphrast.
Reading a Byzantine Hymn
Three habits make the texts much more legible.
Watch for typology. Old Testament events are read as prefigurations: the burning bush is the Virgin, the passage of the Red Sea is baptism, Jonah in the whale is the three days in the tomb. A hymn frequently consists of nothing but a string of these.
Expect direct address and invented speech. The hymnographers put words into the mouths of biblical figures freely, and a kontakion of Romanos may be largely dialogue.
Notice the paradoxes. Byzantine hymnography loves antithesis: the uncontainable contained, the ancient of days become an infant, the giver of life laid in a tomb. This is not ornament; it is the doctrine of the Incarnation expressed in the only way the poets thought adequate to it.
Kassia
The best-documented woman writer in Byzantine literature deserves more than a paragraph, and her surviving work justifies it.
Kassia (c. 810 – before 865) was born into a Constantinopolitan family of rank, founded a convent in the city around 843, and served as its abbess. Something between twenty-three and fifty hymns are attributed to her, of which about two dozen are securely hers — the largest body of work by a named woman in the Byzantine corpus, and among the very few in medieval Europe.
Her hymn for Holy Wednesday, on the sinful woman who anointed Christ’s feet, is sung in every Orthodox church during Holy Week and is the most admired single text in the repertory. It is written in the woman’s voice, and it is remarkable for its directness: she speaks of the night that is for her the goad of licentiousness, dark and moonless, and asks to kiss the feet that Eve heard in paradise and hid from.
Kassia also wrote epigrams, and a body of gnomic verse survives under her name — sharp, often bitter aphorisms about fools, misfortune and the wealthy, quite unlike the hymns in register.
The bride-show story — that the emperor Theophilos rejected her for a quick answer about Eve — comes from later chroniclers and cannot be verified. What is verifiable is that a ninth-century Byzantine woman composed liturgical poetry that is still sung twelve centuries later, and that the church that preserved it has never treated her authorship as a difficulty.
The Canon That Is Still Sung
Setting out where the major texts actually occur makes the system concrete for anyone attending an Orthodox service.
| Text | When it is sung |
|---|---|
| The Akathist Hymn | Fifth Friday evening of Lent, and in sections through Lent |
| The Great Kanon of Andrew of Crete | First week of Lent (in four parts) and fifth Thursday (entire) |
| The hymn of Kassia | Holy Tuesday evening |
| The Lamentations at the Tomb | Holy Friday evening |
| The Easter Kanon of John of Damascus | Paschal matins |
| Ho Monogenes | Every Divine Liturgy, all year |
| The Cherubic Hymn | At the Great Entrance, every liturgy |
An Orthodox Christian attending services through a year hears a substantial portion of the surviving Byzantine hymn repertory, largely unchanged in text since the fourteenth century. That is an unusual relationship between a body of medieval poetry and a living audience.
The Translation Problem
Byzantine hymnography is very difficult to translate, and knowing why explains a good deal about why it is undervalued in English.
The texts depend on features that do not survive transfer: the metre is syllabic and accentual and fits a specific melody, so a translation that keeps the sense loses the singability; the theology is compressed into compound words that Greek forms easily and English does not; and the dense typological allusion assumes a listener who knows which Old Testament figure is meant by “the bush that was not consumed.”
Translators have responded in three ways. Some produce singable verse and sacrifice precision. Some produce literal prose that cannot be used liturgically. Some, notably in the English-language Orthodox churches, aim at a middle register in deliberately archaic English.
The disagreements are practical rather than academic — congregations sing these texts weekly — and there are several competing English versions of the standard books, each with its partisans.
Anyone reading Byzantine hymns in English translation for the first time should try two versions of the same text side by side. The gap between them is a reasonable measure of what is being lost.
- Romanos the Melodist — the master of the kontakion
- The Akathist Hymn — the one kontakion still sung entire
- Byzantine Liturgy — the services these texts belong to
- Byzantine Music — the modes and the notation
- The Byzantine Church Calendar — the cycles the books follow
- Byzantine Literature — hymnography’s place in Greek letters
- Byzantine Chant Today — the living tradition
Related articles
- Romanos the Melodist
Romanos the Melodist wrote dramatic verse sermons in sixth-century Constantinople. His kontakia, the legend of his calling, his dialogue technique, and why most of his work is no longer sung.