An Explanation of the Icon of the Holy Great Martyr George

Dear brothers and sisters, here is an explanation of the icon of the holy great martyr George.

The image of the holy martyr spearing the dragon in icons, especially those of Saints George and Theodore, comes from Greek mythology.

Since ancient times Greek mythology had told the story of a sea monster that came out of the sea to attack people.

Every year the people offered it a young virgin as a sacrifice. When there were no more girls left in the city, it was the princess’s turn to be sacrificed. Then a hero named Perseus came on a winged horse, holding in his hand the head of the sorceress Medusa, who turned to stone anyone who looked at her. He held her face up before the terrible dragon, which turned to stone, and he saved the city.

Greek legends and mythology had a great influence on people’s hearts, and people kept waiting for the hero the story spoke of. In the time of the pagan persecution the hero George appeared, and people said: he must be the hero the story talks about. So the story was carried over into the icons of the saint and took on a symbolic Christian meaning.

In fact, there is nothing wrong with this, for Saint Basil the Great says that we should take the good ideas of the pagans and baptize them with the mind of Christ. From then on the saint was painted this way. The horse symbolizes the community of believers who helped the saint defeat paganism, represented by the dragon trying to swallow the girl, who symbolizes the Church. The horse’s tail is tied up as a sign that it is ready for battle. The saint kills the dragon calmly, as if doing an easy task, to show that it is God’s power that does the fighting, not he. As for the pool of black water, it symbolizes hell, as everyone knows.

In some icons there is a figure holding a bucket behind the saint on the horse: this is “the cupbearer boy”. This tradition is known from the thirteenth century onward and goes back to the time when the island of Crete was under Arab rule. One of its rulers loved to drink wine, even though it was forbidden to him, so he took as his cupbearer a young Christian boy whom pirates had kidnapped from the Greek island of Mytilene (Lesbos), to serve him his cup.

The boy’s mother begged Saint George in her prayers to bring her son back. The saint rode off on his horse, snatched the boy just as he was serving the emir his drink, set him behind him on the horse and brought him back to his mother.

That is why the boy is shown behind the saint, in Arab dress, holding the wine jug in one hand and the cup in the other. The Aleppo school of icon painting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Nehmeh, his son Hananiya and his grandson Girgis the painter) painted many icons of Saint George with the cupbearer boy behind him, holding in his hand the curved Arab sword with which he cuts off the dragon’s head. People came to call Saint George “the patron of young boys”.

Fr. Gérard Abi Saab