Akathist Hymn

The story

The Akathist Hymn takes its name from the Greek for "unseated": while it is chanted, the congregation stands in reverence, and only the aged and the infirm sit. In Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic services, where sitting, standing and bowing follow intricate rules, standing is required of all only for the Gospel, the Six Psalms of Matins and the akathists. The hymn par excellence is the one addressed to the Theotokos, the Mother of God, for the feast of the Annunciation on 25 March. It was long attributed to Romanos the Melodist, whose kontakia dominated the repertoire sung at Hagia Sophia, but recent scholarship rejects his authorship. Others have named Patriarch Sergius I of Constantinople, or, as J. M. Quercius argued in 1777, George Pisida, deacon and sacristan of Hagia Sophia, whose poems echo it in style and theme. No certain author can be named.

The Synaxarion ties the feast to the year 626, when Constantinople, in the reign of Heraclius, was attacked by the Persians and the Avars and was saved, it says, by the Theotokos; it also credits her with two later victories, under Leo III the Isaurian and Constantine Pogonatus. The link was disputed on the grounds that the hymn could not have been written in a day and that its twenty-four stanzas never allude to such a siege. Before the 21st century the hymn was usually placed in the 6th or 7th century; Leena Peltomaa argued from its theology for the 5th century, and most scholars now favour an early date, somewhere between the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon or, in another view, the later 5th or early 6th century. Its closing kontakion addresses Mary as the saviour of Constantinople in the siege of 626, and the hymn also served to celebrate military victories and to ask for divine protection in war.

The hymn is an alphabetical acrostic: its twenty-four oikoi, or stanzas, each begin with the next letter of the Greek alphabet. Twelve long oikoi end in long chains of greetings, the chairetismoi, each line starting "Rejoice" and the whole closing with a refrain to Mary as the unwedded bride; the twelve short ones end in Alleluia. The work is divided into thirteen parts of a kontakion and an oikos each. Even the earliest chant books with musical notation, such as the Tipografsky Ustav, write out all twenty-four oikoi, though they give music only for the first.

Since the 14th century the Akathist has belonged to the season of Lent. Divided into four parts by theme (the Annunciation, the Nativity, Christ and the Theotokos herself), it is sung at the service of the Salutations to the Theotokos on the first four Friday evenings of Great Lent and whole on the fifth, and it is included in the Matins of the fifth Saturday of Lent, the "Saturday of the Akathist"; the service is called Chairetismoi in Greek and Madayeh in Arabic. In monasteries of the Athonite tradition the whole hymn is sung nightly at Compline. In the Slavic churches the akathist grew into a genre of its own, with many newer akathists to saints modelled on the old one, while the Greek, Arabic and Russian Old Rite traditions allow only the original in formal worship. Three icons of the Theotokos on Mount Athos bear its name: at the Dionysiou Monastery, a gift of the Emperor Alexios III Komnenos, which tradition says Patriarch Sergius carried around the walls of Constantinople in 626; at Hilandar, where the icon was untouched by a fire in 1837 while the monks chanted the Akathist before it; and at Zographou.

What it says

A hymn in praise of Mary, the Mother of God. Stanza by stanza it retells the Annunciation, the birth of Christ and the mystery of the Incarnation, and greets Mary in long litanies of joy, before thanking her, in its closing kontakion, as the defender who saved her city. The mood is festive, wondering and grateful.

The words

The words of this song are in the public domain, but no free, reliable edition of them has been found yet to import them from, and the Institute never types a song’s words from memory. “What it says” above tells what they are about.