Nipson anomēmata mē monan opsin
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Nipson anomēmata mē monan opsin (Ancient Greek: Νίψον ἀνομήματα, μὴ μόναν ὄψιν), meaning "Wash the sins, not only the face",[1] or "Wash my transgressions, not only my face",[2] is a Greek palindrome[fn 1] which was inscribed upon a holy water font outside the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople:[3]
The phrase is attributed to Saint Gregory of Nazianzus.[2]
The inscription can also be found in the following places:
- above the Hagiasma ("Holy Spring") of the Church of St. Mary of Blachernae in Istanbul;
- around the baptismal font at St. Mary's Church, Nottingham;
- around the baptismal font at St. Michael's Cathedral in Barbados;
- the font of several churches in Paris, e.g.,
- at St. Menin’s Abbey, Orléans;
- at Dulwich College;
- at the following churches of the UK: Tewkesbury Abbey (Gloucestershire), Worlingworth (Suffolk), Harlow (Essex), Knapton (Norfolk), St Martin, Ludgate (London), St Ethelburga's Bishopsgate and Hadleigh (Suffolk);
- at the Vlatadon Monastery, Thessaloniki, Greece.[4]
See also
Footnotes
- ^ The Romanization is not a palindrome because the Greek letter ψ (psi) is transcribed by the digraph ps. The modern diacritics, which are not symmetrical, are usually omitted from inscriptions of the sentence.
References
- ^ Barry J. Blake, Secret Language: Codes, Tricks, Spies, Thieves, and Symbols, Oxford University Press, 2010, ISBN 0-19-957928-8, p. 15.
- ^ a b Alex Preminger, Terry V.F. Brogan, and Frank J. Warnke, The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 3rd ed., Princeton University Press, 1993, ISBN 0-691-02123-6, p. 874.
- ^ R. Langford-James, A Dictionary of the Eastern Orthodox Church, Ayer Publishing, ISBN 0-8337-5047-X, p. 61.
- ^ "< palindromo > ... Wash the sins, not only the face | Flickr - Photo Sharing!". Flickr. 2012-07-20. Retrieved 2013-10-01.