Explainer

Creed

Explaining Christmas

4 January 2024

11 min read

The Three Kings in Renaissance Florence

Alison Harpur explores the significance of Epiphany in Italian Renaissance art and how it reflects the life of the city.

Alison Harpur

Alison Harpur is an art historian, specialising in Italian Renaissance art, her further interests include theological methodologies for the history of art.

A round nativity scene depicts a procession of visitors including the Three Kings.

The Adoration of the Magi, Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi.

National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

We’re nearly at the end of the first week of January, as I am writing this, and the festivities of Christmas feel like a distant memory already. Although the traditional Twelve Days of Christmas run from Christmas Day until 5 January, by now we have probably put our Christmas jumpers back in the wardrobe and returned to the usual routine. But while sparkling decorations may already have been consigned to the cupboard until next Christmas, it is in these early days of the new year when Christians traditionally celebrate three of the most memorable characters of the Christmas story: the Magi, also known as the Three Kings or the Three Wise Men.

We associate the Magi with children’s nativity plays in the joyful days of December, and with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh that look very much like they were cardboard boxes before they were covered with gold paint and sprinkled with glitter. But celebration of the Magi and their presentation of gifts to the newborn Jesus is actually commemorated on 6th January, the feast of Epiphany, when the light of God’s revelation breaks through the dreary January days.

The Magi were interpreted as symbols of the Three Ages of Man (youth, middle age, and old age) and, before the discovery of the Americas, of the three known continents (Africa, Asia, and Europe).

Epiphany

In the Bible, Matthew says that news of Jesus’s birth was revealed to wise men in the East, who interpreted the appearance of a star as a symbol that the King of the Jews had been born. They travelled to Jerusalem in search of the newborn King, where they encountered Herod, the King of Judea, who was (perhaps not surprisingly) concerned to learn of the birth of an apparent rival to the throne. Herod sent the wise men on to Bethlehem, with instructions to inform him when they found the newborn King, so that he could also go and worship him. We later discover, of course, that Herod’s real intention had been to find Jesus and kill him, in an attempt to remove the threat to his own power. As the wise men proceeded to Bethlehem, the star they had seen went ahead of them and rested over the birthplace of Jesus. There they discovered the newborn Jesus, with his mother, Mary, and they worshipped him, presenting him with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Warned in a dream not to return to Herod, the wise men left Bethlehem and returned home.

Matthew doesn’t specify how many wise men visited Jesus, but Christian tradition has settled on three, corresponding to the number of their gifts. We are probably very familiar with these gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh from nativity plays and thousands of Christmas cards. But we may be less familiar with their traditional symbolism in relation to Jesus: gold for his kingship, frankincense for his divinity, and myrrh to foreshadow his sacrificial death. Stories about the Magi also developed in later literature, and the wise men were given the names of Caspar, Balthasar, and Melchior. The Magi were interpreted as symbols of the Three Ages of Man (youth, middle age, and old age) and, before the discovery of the Americas, of the three known continents (Africa, Asia, and Europe).

The Washington Adoration of the Magi is not a serene depiction of the biblical kings’ devotion, but the exuberant splendour of a busy Renaissance court.

We are familiar with representations of Epiphany from paintings such as the Adoration of the Magi in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which was painted in Renaissance Florence around the middle of the fifteenth century. It was probably painted by Fra Angelico (c.1395–1455) and Fra Filippo Lippi (c.1406–1469), two of the most important Florentine artists of this period, who were also friars in the convents of San Marco and Santa Maria del Carmine respectively. The circular painting, or tondo, represents the Virgin Mary seated in a rocky but verdant landscape, tenderly supporting the Christ Child on her lap, with Joseph standing at her side. Behind them, a bulky ox lies in front of the stable where Christ was born and an ass eats hay from the manger where we presume Christ was laid. Kneeling among the delicately painted flowers in the foreground are the three Magi and their attendants, presenting their gifts to Christ in adoration. Sumptuously dressed in robes of blue, bright red, and pale lilac, decorated with gold, the Magi wear costumes that would have been understood in fifteenth-century Florence to allude to the exoticism of the East.

But the Magi are not the only ones who have come to worship Christ in this painting. Behind them, crowds of people stream downhill through an archway, many of them holding out their hands in gestures of awe and reverence. Some of them look upwards towards the star that was said to have rested over the birthplace of Christ. The Washington Adoration of the Magi is not a serene depiction of the biblical kings’ devotion, but the exuberant splendour of a busy Renaissance court or, in the case of fifteenth-century Florence, a bustling mercantile republic.

Florentine citizens would perform as the Magi and their retinue, processing across the city in elaborate costumes, a rare opportunity to diverge from the strict regulations... that dictated who could wear what in everyday life.

The Magi and the Medici in Renaissance Florence

Epiphany was a hugely significant celebration in fifteenth-century Florence. This was partly because the feast of the Magi on 6th January coincided with another religious celebration, the Baptism of Christ by St John the Baptist, who was Florence’s patron saint. But Renaissance Florence was also a prosperous centre of banking and trade, and the manufacture of luxury goods, and it was populated by wealthy and powerful men who sought to articulate religious devotion through association with the Magi. The Washington Adoration was probably in the collection of the powerful Medici family, who established their position in Florence through banking. They were prominent devotees of the Magi, and they were enormously influential, not least through their cultural patronage.

Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464) spent vast amounts of money on artistic and architectural projects in Florence. He sponsored the renovation of San Marco during the 1430s and 1440s, commissioning Fra Angelico to paint frescoes throughout the Dominican convent where he was based. Cosimo even had his own personal cell in San Marco, which was painted with an Adoration of the Magi, perhaps by a young Benozzo Gozzoli (c.1421–1497), who was then an assistant to Fra Angelico. San Marco was dedicated, as we might expect, to St Mark, and also to the early Christian martyrs Cosmas and Damian, who were patron saints of Cosimo de’ Medici. But the newly renovated building was ceremonially dedicated not on the feast of St Mark, but on the feast of the Magi, on 6 January 1443.

The Confraternity of the Magi

San Marco was the centre of devotion to the Magi in Renaissance Florence. The confraternity of the Magi, which met at San Marco, was a lay religious group whose members included the Medici family. Confraternities would meet regularly for worship and prayer, and would often perform charitable works. Their membership transcended some of the traditional divides of Renaissance Florence, with artisans and tradesmen meeting together alongside bankers, doctors, and lawyers.

One of the most important activities of the confraternity of the Magi was the organisation of festive processions in honour of the Magi on Epiphany. Florentine citizens would perform as the Magi and their retinue, processing across the city in elaborate costumes, a rare opportunity to diverge from the strict regulations known as sumptuary laws that dictated who could wear what in everyday life. The architectural fabric of Florence was also incorporated into the procession. Herod’s palace was represented by the Baptistery, opposite the Cathedral, or by the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of Florentine government which was later known as the Palazzo Vecchio. The ceremonial route of the procession wound its way through Florence, past the Medici palace on the Via Larga (now Via Cavour), to its destination in “Bethlehem”, which was (of course) San Marco.

Epiphany was not the only time when Florentine citizens took part in processions honouring the Magi. They were also incorporated into the elaborate festivities associated with the feast of St John the Baptist, Florence’s patron saint, which lasted for several days in late June and often included extravagant processions. A Florentine chronicler, whose writings were published and discussed by the art historian Rab Hatfield, recounted the procession of the Magi during the feast of St John the Baptist in 1428, describing “eight horses, covered with silk, with eight pages dressed in silk and with pearls and heraldic ornaments and with shields, their faces angelic, riding one after the other with their livery. And after them, on a great and beautiful horse, came an old man with a white beard, dressed in a gold brocade of crimson and a peaked cap of crimson full of large pearls and with other ornaments of the greatest value, like a king such as those among the Christians.”

Similarly, celebration of the feast of the Magi on Epiphany also embraced broader aspects of Florentine civic devotion. The same chronicler who recounted the feast of St John the Baptist described a multitude of performative themes during the celebration of Epiphany in 1429: “And after lunch there were about seven hundred costumed men on horseback, among whom were the three Magi and their retinue, honourably dressed. And of the striking things they had with them, there were three giants and a wild man and, upon a car, a man impersonating David, who killed the giant with the sling.” It is hard not to read the description of this procession, with giants and a representation of David riding a festive float, and not imagine a scene like the Triumph of David by Pesellino (1422–1457), currently in the National Gallery’s exhibition devoted to this Florentine artist.

Given the traditional association of the Magi with the Three Ages of Man, it is no coincidence that Gozzoli portrayed three generations of the Medici family among the followers of the Magi.

The Journey and Adoration of the Magi

The broader visual and material culture of these festive processions informed how Florentine artists designed their paintings, and how contemporary viewers responded to them. There are many fifteenth-century Florentine paintings of the Adoration of the Magi in our galleries and museums. In the National Gallery in London, there are similar bustling scenes of devotion in Botticelli’s Adoration of the Kings (another tondo) of around 1470–1475 and an Adoration by Botticelli and Filippino Lippi (the son of Filippo) from the same period.

One of the most well-known paintings of the Magi from Renaissance Florence was painted on the walls of the Medici Palace chapel in 1459 by Benozzo Gozzoli, the same artist who probably painted the Adoration of the Magi in Cosimo’s personal cell at San Marco. Gozzoli’s frescoes in the Medici Palace chapel represent not the Adoration of the Magi, but the Journey of the Magi, with Caspar, Balthasar, and Melchior on horseback, winding their way towards Bethlehem through the landscape depicted on the walls of the chapel. The Magi are accompanied by a vast retinue of followers, which includes portraits of the Medici family and their allies, including Cosimo de’ Medici, his adult son, Piero (1416–1469), and his grandson, Lorenzo (1449–1492). Given the traditional association of the Magi with the Three Ages of Man, it is no coincidence that Gozzoli portrayed three generations of the Medici family among the followers of the Magi, tying the religious narrative to the contemporary realities of Florentine life.

The altarpiece in the Medici Palace chapel was painted by Filippo Lippi, who painted at least part of the Washington Adoration of the Magi. The original altarpiece is now in Berlin, and the painting currently displayed in the chapel is a fifteenth-century copy. It represents the Adoration of the Christ Child with the Infant St John the Baptist (Florence’s patron saint) and St Bernard of Clairvaux (the medieval saint to whom the chapel in the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of Florentine government, was dedicated). Although the altarpiece had a definitive religious function, the inclusion of those two saints was also distinctly political. But the Magi are not shown in adoration before the Virgin and Child in Filippo Lippi’s altarpiece, nor does Gozzoli show them at their destination in his frescoes. We are left with their journey towards Christ. Perhaps the place of the Magi in adoration before the Virgin and Child was taken by the Medici family themselves during the performance of liturgy in the chapel.

When we look at the processions and sumptuous costumes of the Magi in these paintings, we may recall the descriptions of contemporary processions by Florentine chroniclers. When the original viewers of these paintings looked at them, they would probably have seen them through the lens of the religious festivities that they observed and participated in on their own streets. Many of the artists who painted the works we see today in our galleries and museums also designed the ephemeral decorations for Florentine civic processions, and the relationship between art and performance would probably have been reciprocal.

The feast of Epiphany was hugely important in fifteenth-century Florence. Delving into the history of its celebration sheds light on Renaissance paintings of the Magi, reminding us that the visual and material culture of religious imagery in this period expanded with exuberance beyond churches and palaces throughout the city’s streets. As we consider the significance of Epiphany in these cold, dark days of early January, we can remember the festivities that accompanied the feast of the Magi in Renaissance Florence, and the ways in which the paintings of the Magi that we see in our museums, galleries, churches, and chapels reflect a much broader visual and material culture of civic devotion.

Further reading:

Cristina Acidini Luchinat, The Chapel of the Magi: Benozzo Gozzoli’s Frescoes in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, Florence (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994)

Diane Cole Ahl, Benozzo Gozzoli (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996)

Rab Hatfield, ‘The Compagnia de’ Magi’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol.33, 1970, pp.107-161

Dale Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000)

Jeffrey Ruda, ‘The National Gallery Tondo of the “Adoration of the Magi” and the Early Style of Filippo Lippi’, Studies in the History of Art, vol.7, 1975, pp.6-39

Article

Coptic Church

Creed

Identity

Middle East

20 January 2024

11 min read

God in the garbage: Egypt's unlikely megachurch

Cairo's Church of the Zabballeen is the largest Church, and one of the most unusual in the Middle East. Graham Tomlin tells its story and that of the remarkable priest who inspired it.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

a view from the bottom of a huge cave to the sky, up row upon row of seating tiers.

To drive through Iz-Zurrayyeb, a poor area on the outskirts of Cairo is to enter a maelstrom of noise, garbage, dust and dirt. At first glance, it looks a grim place to live. There is rubbish everywhere. Cans, plastic bottles, cardboard, wood, rags, tins. Much of the refuse of the city of Cairo – about 3000 tons every day - ends up here.

Yet the most surprising thing is what you find when you reach the heart of this community, one of the poorest in Egypt – an enormous 20,000 seater Church, the largest church in the Middle East – built into a cave in a sheer rock face.

The story of this community goes back to the 1940s, when groups of Coptic Christian rural dwellers from Upper Egypt started migrating to the city of Cairo when life on their land became more and more difficult. These immigrants initially continued pig-farming, buying the city’s waste to feed their pigs, until they found a more lucrative way to live: by collecting the waste of the city’s residents, sorting it carefully and salvaging things of value to be sold. Feeding waste to their pigs and processing the pork to sell to the Christian population of Cairo also brought in some much-needed income.

Around 1970, some of the Zabballeen (or ‘garbage collectors’) as they were called, were evicted from the parts of Cairo where they were scattered, and moved together to an abandoned quarry on the outskirts of the city. As a result, they settled in Iz-Zurrayyeb, under the cliffs of Mokattam mountain and started establishing what is sometimes called Garbage City. They built a shanty-town there, with rudimentary dwellings, keeping pigs and eking out a living recycling refuse.

The Zabballeen recycle about 80% of the waste they collect, an astonishing result when you consider most western cities which struggle to reach 25%. It is a remarkably efficient system. At night the men (mostly) go out into the city streets, collecting as much garbage as they can. Each family co-operative has a particular area of the city where they are entitled to collect waste.

There is some competition to get the wealthier areas – as is true anywhere in the world, rich people’s garbage offers better pickings than those of the poorer areas. Rather than being paid to collect the waste, the Zabballeen pay a fee to the Wahiya, a group of Muslim migrants to Cairo who arrived before the Christian Zabballeen, and who own the rights to much of city’s the garbage.

They then take it back to their neighbourhood, packed tightly into large parcels, tied together with rope, precariously perched on the top of motorised bikes, carts or lorries. The rubbish is then deposited in the front entrance yard of the house, and sorted, usually by the women and young girls.

The sorting is fiercely well-organised. Cans, plastic bottles, cardboard, food waste are all separated. The food waste is fed to the pigs (the Zabballeen, being almost entirely Christians, are happy to keep pigs, unlike their Muslim neighbours). Cans and bottles are packed tightly together by locally made crushing machines into neat, easily transported bales to be sold to firms that can reuse the material. Rags and paper are put aside for reuse in local craft production. Some within the community reprocess waste and produce sellable items themselves - especially in the plastics recycling business - running big recycling units, producing coat hangers, plastic bags and other goods.

Iz-Zurrayyeb street scenes

A child walks between bags of rubbish in a pile

A motor-trike passes a green wall and stairs.

A suspended basket hangs above a narrow, rubbish strewn street.

You would have thought the government might have been delighted at a system of waste disposal with these spectacular recycling results. Yet the city authorities seem to make life hard for the Zabballeen at every point. They used to carry the rubbish back to the neighbourhood by donkey and cart, but the authorities thought these were unsightly, didn’t project a modern image of the city and left donkey poo on the streets, so in the late 1980s, banned them.

The Zabballeen were compelled to sell what land they still owned, or take out loans to small lorries and motorised trucks to ferry the waste instead. The problem is that the streets of Garbage City, running between the high blocks of flats that the residents live in, are too narrow. They were built for donkeys and carts, and so at rush hour, the place becomes like a parking lot, a nightmare of honking horns, vehicles inching slowly past each other with millimetres to spare on either side.

Then there was swine flu. When the pandemic hit the world in 2009, despite the fact that no pig in Egypt ever caught the disease, the government ordered every pig in the country to be slaughtered. This was a disaster for the Zabballeen. Their whole carefully crafted system for dealing with garbage depended on pigs eating the food waste. They could no longer bring the waste back to the city as the rotting food would make the place unbearable. As a result, rubbish began to pile up in the streets of Cairo until the Zabballeen were able to restore their stock of pigs and start again.

The Zabballeen’s way of life is threatened even now. In 2003, the Egyptian government entered into multi-million dollar contracts with international companies to collect Cairo’s waste, presumably because they would do it in a tidier and less obtrusive way, despite the fact that these companies are only required to recycle 20% of the waste - the remaining 80% gets dumped into landfills. Many Cairo residents still prefer the old system run by the Zabballeen, as the new companies charge them more, and fail to offer the personalised door-to-door collection that the Zabballeen did.

Public piety - posters of priests and a pope

A motor-trike passes along a narrow street past a poster of a priest and a pope.

A street seller stands at a booth below a poster of a priest.

A woman walks through a narrow crowded street.

In the 1960s, alcoholism, violence and drug use were rife in Iz-Zurrayyeb, as in many areas of extreme poverty across the world. Yet in the early 1970s, something began to stir.

Ferahat Ibrahim was a young Christian printer living in Cairo, a passionate evangelist, part of an independent Coptic group that ministered among the poor of Egypt. He got to know Qidees, the man who collected rubbish in the neighbourhood where he lived, and spoke to him about faith in Jesus Christ. Qidees urged him to come to speak to his family and friends in the community at Mokattam mountain.

Reluctantly, Ferahat agreed to do so. One day, while praying there, a storm blew up, and from among the mass of paper swirling in the wind, a single leaf torn from a book drifted from one of the piles of rubbish to land at his feet. It was a page from the Bible in Arabic – Acts chapter 18, to be exact. Picking it up, he read some words originally addressed by God to St Paul: “Do not be afraid; keep on speaking, do not be silent. For I am with you, and no one is going to attack and harm you, because I have many people in this city.”

Taking this as a divine calling, he began to go from house to house, preaching a simple message that God loved everyone without exception - including garbage collectors, the possibility of a new beginning and a call for people to repent, to change their ways in response to the love of God revealed in Jesus. Although he was not ordained, Ferahat never questioned the Coptic Orthodox baptism of these Christians, though recognised that in many cases their faith was no more than nominal and needed reviving. He would pray for people’s healing, or where he suspected something darker at work, would engage in the exorcism of evil spirits. Gradually, more and more people began to meet, looking for places to gather.

Being Coptic Orthodox by origin, as the church grew, they decided they wanted a priest, but not just any priest. They wanted Ferahat. So in 1978, with the support of the Coptic Pope Shenouda, he became Abuna Sima’an - an ordained priest of the Orthodox Church. He also began to recruit others from within the community as fellow workers in this fast-growing church. He remained ministering among the Zabballeen until he died just last year, in October 2023. 40,000 people turned up for his funeral.

Gradually, more and more people joined the fledgling church. Over time the whole neighbourhood changed. As drug and alcohol use diminished, money was freed up to be spent on healthcare and strengthening family life, education and a thriving children's centre. One of the first buildings that went up was a new Church to meet in. Inspired by the sight of a proper solid building among their flimsy dwellings, shacks and tents were replaced with brick-built apartment blocks that enabled the sorting to happen on the ground floor while families lived in cleaner apartments above.

The community persuaded the government to connect water, electricity and sewage facilities. Fr Sima’an’s wife Souad Hanna started a school that has in time become a launchpad for further teachers in the area. A centre began to provide for people with disabilities, rather than leaving them begging on the streets.

Sorting rubbish with no gloves leads to regular bouts of tetanus, and rates of sickness in the city are high. Nothing if not inventive, they built their own hospital. Pooling money raised from their work, and with the aid of a Finnish foundation, they built a state-of-the-art facility. Unlike the streets of the neighbourhood, the hospital is clean, modern, efficient and is as good as hospitals you’d find in any modern city.

The rocky area in which they live contains a number of caves. As the church building became too small, some of these began to be used as meeting places for worship. One cave filled with large rocks was painstakingly cleared, and hollowed out further by the residents to provide a 5000 seat auditorium for public worship. As more and more people came to church, even this was just not big enough, so they started to work on proper seating in another cave. This one now has seating for 20,000 people. It is the largest church building in the middle east.

Unlike most megachurches of this size, it is not Pentecostal but Coptic. The ancient Coptic church in Egypt, which claims its origin in St Mark’s visit to Egypt to preach the gospel after the Resurrection of Jesus, went through a revival in the 1960s which still carries on today. Monasteries which had been reduced to a few old monks living an austere life in ramshackle monastic houses, much like many such communities in the west today, suddenly found young men applying to be members of these ancient communities, many of which go back to the fourth century.

The walls of the Zabballeen cave churches have lovingly sculpted reliefs of biblical stories, usually relating to the need for repentance, or Jesus’ miracles relating to the poor – healing blind men, the paralysed or the woman whose period would never stop.

The streets of the neighbourhood are festooned with posters of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the Coptic Pope Tawadros, and Abuna Sima’an (the unlikely equivalent is an English low-income area festooned with pictures of the local vicar!). The Coptic community in Egypt has been through troubled times. In the mid-2010s, a wave of bombings by Islamic fundamentalist groups killed and injured many Christians. 5% of the population of Egypt are Christian, yet the Zabballeen wear their faith on their sleeves. Their Christianity is not hidden. It is out on display. Presumably because it makes the difference between hope and despair.

The cave churches

A screen dominates the centre of a church in a cave with amphitheatre seating.

A church amphitheatre within a cave with a carved cross on a supporting pillar.

A bible scene is carved into the wall of a cave, below which is seating.

a cliff with carved and painted Christian scenes.

In an election year in the UK, political parties will offer their solutions for urban regeneration, and how to address areas where levels of crime, alcohol and drug abuse and the related mental health issues are rife. The story of the Zabballeen doesn't provide easy answers but it does suggest that there is a deeply spiritual dimension to these problems and that a revival of the faith that western culture has gradually been shedding for the last few hundred years might actually be a key to community transformation.

When people have a bigger reason to live, something deeper than just getting richer, something that gives them a purpose for building family life, investing in healthcare, education and the things that build good community, then things begin to change. Deep transformation of this kind needs a transcendent purpose, not just social programmes dreamed up by politicians.

We hear much these days about the demise of the church in the Middle East. And much of that is true – in many places, the Christian church has been harried down to much smaller numbers through the pressure of intimidation and the possibility of emigration. Yet that’s not the whole story. Here is a church thriving in the most poverty-stricken and unlikely of circumstances.

In the west we tend to think of Christianity as a western religion and one for the respectable and relatively well-off. The story of the Zabballeen tells a very different story, one that is much more representative of the church across the world. Dynamic Christianity thrives not in places where people have everything they need, but in places where they know they need help. Here is Christianity in the raw, thriving among people who have few possessions and who seem to be, in language that St Paul used to describe himself ‘the scum of the earth’.

Their story is a powerful reminder of the ingenuity of locally based initiatives rather than corporate imposed solutions. It also says something about the transforming power of Christianity in places of great poverty and need. Walk around areas of desperate poverty in western cities and you often find people beaten down by life. Despair hangs in the air when a community struggles with problems of debt, alcohol and drug abuse.

There is very little of that on Mokattam mountain. There is an energy, vibrancy and purpose about the place, despite the grim living conditions. A friend who lived for a number of years in Garbage City tells me he loved living there because of the warmth of the friendships and the spirit of the place. That may be partly due to the sheer industry and ingenuity of these people, but not just that. It seems to rise up from a faith that gives hope and purpose in a place where you’d least expect to find it.