St George - St Gerontius and St Polychronia (double-sided icon)

This panel is painted on both sides, because it was made to be carried. Icons like it, from the Black Sea towns of Nesebar and Sozopol, were fixed to a pole and taken out in procession, so both faces had to count. It dates from around 1290, in the last years of Bulgarian independence before Ottoman rule closed in, when these small coastal towns were still rich in churches. One side shows Saint George, the soldier-saint. The other shows a pair you rarely meet in paint, Gerontius and Polychronia, who in the old accounts were George's own father and mother. Carried together, the saint and his parents made a whole family that moved through the streets on the feast day, seen first from one side and then, as the pole turned, from the other.