Paraskeva and Sidonia: two candles on the same patch of sky

What resemblance is between Saint Sidonia from Mtskheta (Georgia) and Saint Paraskeva from Iasi (Romania), two pious virgins celebrated on the same day, October 14? Two holly brides: one was giving her rich clothes to the poor, thus bestowing them to Christ, the other received from Christ the most precious garment - His shirt, brought to Mtskheta by her brother, rabbi Eleazar -, which served to her as well as a burial and a wedding cloth. What is the link between the column of light seen in the fourth century over  Sidonia's tomb, after cutting the secular cedar that had risen from her grave, over which the famous Svetitskhoveli cathedral was build, and the mantle of light with which Paraskevi was seen protecting Iassi - as survivors remember - during the WW2 bombings? What binds together the two equally discrete virgins, both equally rushed passing the threshold of earthly life, but equally spectacular in their heavenly destiny, whose glory is ceaselessly growing and will continue to grow? The relics of one have wandered across the whole Balkan Eastern Christendom (from Epivat to Trnovo, Belgrade, Constantinople and Iasi), of the other were sealed until the end of time under the slabs of Svetitskhoveli Cathedral, to expect there the bridal coming of Christ on earth, Parusia. Two columns of light, two maidens clothed in Christ, united by the same great love.

”An Erotics of the Book” - Elena Dulgheru's graphics exhibition in Tinos (Greece)

Held in the frames of the International Writers' Congress in Tinos (Cyclades, Greece), September 17-23, 2015.

Official opening on September 19, 19.30, Tinion Hall. The exhibition was presented by the art historian and film theorist Prof. Dmitri Salynski and by the author.

Founding word
More than we can imagine, books determine our existence. Even when we stop reading them. They determine our existence, the existence of our neighbors, of our descendants, the existence of history. 

Essentially, books are an expression of love. Like utterance, even more than utterance. An expression of love, made to last even after love extinguishes or conceals.

That's how books give birth to memory, memory which is always able to reconvert into love. True books are seeds of this love: Logos spermatikos. From the sacred books of the Scripture, inscribed by the seed of the Divine Word, to the founding books of the peoples, with their songs of mourning and joy, recorded into the collective memory, and afterwards in more recent books, and up to the love letters of lovers, who are also participating, by their gestures of love and childbirth, to the construction of history; who are also writers, by the love deeds, of the great Book of Life.

This exhibition gravitates around the Book of Life, in a broad sense, as a mystery of writing and living within the Word. From the Christian sense of the great book of Salvation, to the Borgesian sense of the books that are keeping the memory of the world, and up to the apparently anodyne meanings of "the books of our personal lives", that we are also trying to inscribe, as far as we concent about eternity, into the great Book of Redemption.

The Supreme writer, He who founded the Book of Life and is always refreshes it, can not be represented through images. But the loving gesture of the divine writing into our lives is discovered in every love story that had become a legend, in each new writing and transmitting of the words of wisdom, of the revealed and revealing word. Snapshots of these acts of writing, made in solitude or in synergetic couples - as unwitnessed hierogamies - snapshots of sacred or legendary love stories and converted to other acts of writing, have been recorded by the drawings of this exhibition.

An important role in transmitting formative texts have always had minstrels; in ancient languages, their names were synonymous with that of lover or pilgrim. A journey from one story to another, endless as the Book of Life, are the "1001 Nights", one of the themes of this exhibition. Therefore, in the East, the paradigmatic model of the narrator is a woman: Scheherazade. A female-healer, redeeming the curse of her gender, but also the Sultan of his killing anger, Scheherazade brings the taming through storytelling, without abandoning her beauty and feminine charisma. An Athens of the East, her image consistently and reverberating marks the exhibition.

Europe is also an outgrowth of writing. Of the interweaving of Aryan, Semitic and Christian destinies, developed in a multimillenary story, written by man and God, that we would like to be endless. A story, whose sunset we have been warned long ago and today we fear more than ever.

This exhibition is also dedicated to Europe, to Christian, blessed by God Europe, that we do not want to lose. In the same way as to Scheherazade, with her "1001 Nights" and her weddings, which is are nothing but a mythical image of the great Book of Life and of man with God transfiguring wedding.

Elena Dulgheru

List of works

1. Woman singing under a bell
2. Woman playing a keyboard instrument
3. Writing woman (the first letters)
4. Writing woman dressed into a snail
5. Writing woman
6. Woman writing a newspaper page
7. Text - writing
8. A hand like the pen of a ready writer
9. A theme ot the book - I
10. Book being writtten
11. Semito-European Psaltery
12. Autumn letter
13. Cooking book
14. European book
15. A theme of the book - II
16. A theme of the book - II
17. 1001 Nights - I
18. 1001 Nights - II
19. 1001 Nights - III
20. Alice in the library
21. Scheherazade asleep
22. A theme of writing - Scheherazade
23. A theme of story-telling - Scheherazade
24. A primordial book - I
25. A primordial book - II
26. Erotics - a page from the Book of the Books - I
27. Erotics - a page from the Book of the Books - II
28. Erotics - a page from the Book of the Books - III
29. The grass
30. L' érotique des livres
31. An erotics of the book
32. Genesis book - I
33. Genesis book - II