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Submerged 1. The Monastery of St. Philip the Great

Messina is a city of three millennia of history. Much of his past is destroyed, forgotten, buried, submerged. One of these is the lost cities of Byzantine Messina, a place closer to Constantinople than in Rome, where the current language was Greek, the Church has practiced the rite greek and monasteries were Basilian. The city of the Strait and the entire territory of Valdemone were filled in the eighth century by the arrival of Eastern monks fleeing persecution iconoclast, who brought with them traditions, arts and ceremonies.

hermitages, monasteries and convents were built throughout southern Italy, radiating from a central main identified almost exactly the same with the city of Messina, then a crossroads of peoples and nations. Here as elsewhere, the guidelines for the distribution of major monastic centers followed the lines of communication, especially as our streets and our typical torrents. This strategy of irradiation, reasoned and planned, obeying the logic of the ecumenical Basilian centers, as well as to specific instances of an economic organization as the control and exploitation of vast areas of agricultural lands and valleys, with the creation of collective points centralization of rustic property such as warehouses, mills, millstones and mills.

map of the village of San Filippo Superiore

The monastery of St. Philip the Great , fully follows this logic and is a perfect example of this regional strategy. Founded seven miles south of downtown, " out of the woods door" along the torrent of Pistunina or Contesse , it was built around the cave, still be visited, which is believed to have been inhabited around the fourth fifth century by St. Philip Agira. The monastery was declared free and exempt from all secular and ecclesiastical 1100, although the official date of founding (or re-establishment of Norman) and May 1145, as we said a diploma of Roger I.

In the book " Messina noble" is described as the monastery to an abbey " for beauty and comfort of rooms, to the cool gardens and fountains, the site plan and leading to the air healthy , is required for the most beautiful place among the other Abbadi, S. Basil in Sicily, "and indeed it was considered the fairest of the Basilian monasteries arose in Sicily.

The Monastery of St. Philip was able to centralize its facilities and appliances around the population of the valley, contributing decisively to the creation of the village of St. Philip, the land reclamation and cultivation, the planting of plant species, the organization of production and trade (even those related to sericulture, peculiarissimi the history of our city), the settlement of the residential complex, the coordination "political" and cultural area, all this took place in the name and under the supervision of the monks.

Between 1328 and 1336, as stated by the fourteenth century papal registers and records of visits made dall'archimandrita Nympho, the Monastery of San Salvatore, in the general decay of monasticism in Sicily greek, San Filippo continued to enjoy the conditions are not too uncomfortable. In the fifteenth century, it, like so many other sites of religious rite greek, passed into the hands of commendatory abbots, and then undergo a major restructuring following the 1783 earthquake.

Today the monastery, after having long been private property, he joined the city-owned property. Purchased and abandoned to decay for years, the structure has unfortunately lost most of the furniture which had been forwarded to the public good and many of its parts are cadute in rovina.

Nonostante questo, il Consorzio Itinerari Basiliani che lo gestisce sta di recente compiendo un’opera di riscoperta e rivalutazione storica, documentaristica e architettonica, organizzando e coordinando studi, ricerche e iniziative di carattere scientifico e divulgativo, anche in collaborazione con la Cooperativa MediArte.

Il livello di interramento del cortile centrale e lo stato di alcune pertinenze promettono comunque una messe di dati archeologici importanti, che potranno venire fuori a seguito di future campagne di scavo.

Who was Saint Basil?

St. Basil the Great, Bishop and Doctor of the Church, was born around 330 in Caesarea of \u200b\u200bCappadocia. It was definitely a "family tradition" because his grandfather was a martyr and a grandmother, both parents and three brothers saints. In the 49 years of his life, after teaching rhetoric and visiting the great ascetics of his time in Egypt, Palestine and Mesopotamia, became Bishop of Caesarea and devoted himself to the administration of its territory and the organization of charitable activities. His "citadel of charity" or "Basiliade" were centers which function as the inn, hospice, orphanage, hospital and leper colony that gave him a strong influence on the people of his diocese. The appellation "Great", officially bestowed by the Catholic Church distinguishes it as one of the main characters of Christianity.

The Basilian and the Rule

Basilian Rule, in brief, the representation of monastic life as the ideal state to achieve perfection in Christ. After meeting the various forms of monasticism and hermitage of his time to the origins of Christianity, Basilio decides that the best way for the man of God is not that isolation, but that of the Monastery, a community of monks with autonomous cells and places of meditation, but with places of prayer and work collectives. In this way, in fact the monks were able to correct their defects and to support each other in times of distress. Basil also wished that the monks were an integral part of community life, so they also exercised his pastoral ministry and lived in districts close to residential areas, ongoing relationship with the world as well as the absolute. The manual labor and craft practices were considered essential. I designed and built by Byzantine monks only their houses, their places of worship and the structures of Basiliade, weaving clothes, blankets and tapestries for themselves, their churches and the needy, manufacture shoes and footwear, farmers their medicinal gardens or agricultural land in the surroundings of their convents.