Page 21 - SAINT HADRIAN’S CHURCH

La Chiesa di Sant’Adriano

Azzinnari, graduated in Classical Letters.

THE FRESCOES
The pictorial structure of the church, discovered by chance
during the restoration works carried out in 1939, consists of
Byzantine figures dating back to the end of 1100 or the

beginning of 1200.
They depict saints, bishops, and martyrs of the Christian
East, hermits with long beards and bishops. All with grim
and hieratic expressions. According to many scholars
of Art, the frescoes of this church are the most significant
pictorial complex of the Byzantine art in Calabria.

The paintings had been covered
with a thick layer of lime added
by the monks of the monastery
during the renovations in 1700,
probably to erase the memory of
the Byzantine elements.

The hieratic and elongated figures represented - some in
episcopal robes, all of different ages, judging from their
faces, the beards and the hair, and largely repainted -
should be sixteen, but four of them are into ruins. The
painted images of doctors and soldier saints, hermits,
bishops and martyrs bear no inscriptions which could
help their identification.

Following the iconographic elements common to other
Byzantine figures, one could identify in the right
underarches an “anargiro” (i.g. the doctor who practiced
his profession without any payment), perhaps the martyr

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