Epitaphios

An epitaphios is a rectangular cloth — commonly velvet worked with gold and silver thread, though painted and printed examples exist — bearing the icon of the dead Christ laid out for burial. Around Him the fullest versions gather the mourners of the Gospel accounts: the Theotokos cradling His head, John the beloved disciple, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus with the winding sheet, the myrrhbearing women, and angels above. Around the border many epitaphioi carry, stitched letter by letter, the troparion of the Noble Joseph — the hymn of the man who took the Body down and wrapped it in fine linen.

In Slavic usage the cloth is called the plashchanitsa, "shroud." Whatever the language, the object is the same paradox made of fabric and thread: an image of God dead and buried, made as beautiful as human hands can make it. Parishes treasure their epitaphios for generations, and some of the finest surviving pieces of church embroidery anywhere are epitaphioi.

The epitaphios did not begin as Holy Week furniture; it grew out of the aer, the large veil carried over the gifts at the Great Entrance — a procession whose hymns already speak of Christ's burial. Toward the end of the Byzantine era, the image of the dead Christ spread across such veils, and the cloth gradually stepped out of the Liturgy into the services of Great Friday as an object of veneration in its own right. The oldest surviving gold-embroidered epitaphioi are dated to around 1300, among them a famous example attributed to a workshop of Thessaloniki.

The epitaphios has a hidden cousin on every Orthodox altar: the antimension, the cloth spread beneath the holy vessels at each Liturgy, is printed with the same scene of Christ's burial. The Church, it turns out, never celebrates the Eucharist except upon the image of the tomb.

The epitaphios keeps its great hours in Holy Week. At the Vespers of Great Friday it is carried out and laid in a flower-covered bier in the middle of the church, and at the evening Lamentations it is borne in procession while the faithful follow with candles; those services — the Church's funeral for her Lord — have their own entry. The faithful venerate the epitaphios as they would venerate the Lord's own shroud, typically with a prostration and a kiss, and in many parishes they pass beneath it to enter the church — going home through the tomb of Christ.

Afterward the epitaphios is placed on the Holy Table, where in many uses it remains through the forty days of Pascha until the feast of the Ascension — the Liturgy of the risen season served, quite literally, over the emptied grave-cloth. Some traditions also keep a second epitaphios: an image of the Theotokos lying in blessed repose, used at the burial services of the Dormition in August in those places that celebrate them. Outside Holy Week the epitaphios rests folded in the sanctuary, an ordinary bolt of cloth eleven months of the year — and, for a few days each spring, the center of the Church's grief and hope.