I was looking at some mosaics at San Marco. Can someone enlighten me what ICXC and MPOV stand for? The first one must be for Jesus, the second for Matthew or Marc. Trying to re-activate my Greek but too rusty I am afraid.
2
iviehoff
In Greek, Ιησούς Χριστός, hence you can see the comparison a bit clearer - those Cs are olf-fashioned Sigmas, and the X is a Chi. In modern Greek, only word-final sigmas look like a C, the other (non-capital) sigmas look like an o with a tail in the top right corner.
The other one is Μήτηρ Θεού, Mitir Theou, Mother of God, ie Mary. If you look at this page, the page for Mary in Greek wikipedia, you will see a mosaic of Mary with that abbreviation you saw - the P is a Rho, you have mistranscribed the Theta as an O, and the V is an Upsilon.
http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%A0%CE%B1%CE%BD%CE%B1%CE%B3%CE%AF%CE%B1
To be clear, each abbreviation gives the first and last letters of each word, in pairs.
Edited by: iviehoff
5
anonymous
It's been seven long years indeed. If I recall correctly I stepped out in 2006... been in outer space, visited a few galaxies and now back on Planet Earth.
When I changed computers years ago I could not remember my password, and despite all efforts it was impossible to have it reset because the e-mail address I had originally registered with was no longer in use either. Even RomanB was unable to help (wonder what he is doing these days?). The other day I thought I give it a try again and contacted LP. Miracles still happen and an IT wizard at LP was able to finally fix was impossible years ago. Luckily my old handle was not deleted in the meantime or taken by someone else. So, here I am.
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