WHAT OTHERS HAVE TO SAY Here's what one visitor to the Church of Bet Mercurios wrote about the painting shown above:

"The other painting [in Bet Mercurios] is of the evil King Oleonus, who is in the process of being killed by St. Mercurios."

"Oleonus is wearing Roman looking clothes and leather armour. His intestines are graphically leaking from his wound. The big thing sticking out from under his shirt is his shoe, which is oddly placed due to his bent leg in his death throes."

"Some odd looking soldiers coming up to assist had been identified as dog headed by one guide book, but our guide said they were sheep, which they look like."

[Graham in AddisTribune 2000/04/21] www.nai.uu.se/library/resources/dossiers/local_history_of...

According to the Bradt Guide Ethiopia by Phillip Briggs (4th ed., November 2005):

"There is also a recently restored painting displayed in the church, in which a most beatific-looking Saint Mercurios is depicted among a group of dog-headed men, his sword trailing through the guts of the evil King Oleonus."

books.google.com/books?id=5WisgHYXFb8C&pg=PA350&l...

MY OWN INTERESTING DISCOVERY ABOUT "KING OLEANUS"

Now that others have had their say, let me add my five cents' worth and discuss the principal figures.

St. Mercurios St. Mercurios (aka "St. Mercurius," "St. Merkorewos," and "St. Marcorios"), after whom the Church of Bet Mercurios in Lalibela is named, was an early Christian martyr who served the pagan Roman emperor Decius with distinction as a soldier. Mercurios was a Scythian, though in this painting he looks decidedly Ethiopian.

Mercurios' outstanding record of military service did not protect him from the persecutions Decius initiated against Christians in the year 249 of the Common Era. Refusing the abandon his faith, Mercurios was beheaded in the year 250.

"King Oleonus" Now we come to the other figure, who the guidebooks identify as "King Oleonus."

I entered "King Oleonus" into Google, certain that a cornucopia of hits was only moments away, including, as always, Wikipedia's treatise on the subject. I was looking forward to learning all about Oleonus' kingdom and, more importantly, how he came to have his fatal encounter with St. Mercurios.

Alas, it was not to be. If you Google "King Oleonus," or just "oleonus," as I did, your research will be fruitless if you're trying to learn about a historical figure associated in some way with St. Mercurios. If the words "King" and "Oleonus" appear together on the Web other than in the title of this painting and only this very painting, they managed to evade Google's prying algorithms. Ditto for "Oleonus" in the same context. Until now, that is.

Undeterred, I decided to search for information about paintings of St. Mercuios slaying anyone. Bingo! One of the first hits took me to Web site "Exploring Africa," which is produced by the African Studies Center at Michigan State University.

I arrived at a page dealing with Ethiopia that included a section on Ethiopian Religious Iconography. There, I found a photograph of a painting titled "Saint Mercurius Slaying Julianius" by the contemporary Ethiopian artist Adamu Tesfaw. exploringafrica.matrix.msu.edu/students/curriculum/m14/pi...

Executed in a more conventional Ethiopian style, Adamu Tesfaw's "Saint Mercurius Slaying Julianius" contains the same elements as the painting shown above, right down to the two religious figures standing in front of a tower. The photo on the Web page is quite small, but you can find a larger version on Adamu Tesfaw's own site at: www.h-net.org/~etoc/Pages/adamu_a2.html

Then came the marvelous "aha" moment, when I realized that "Oleonus" is the Amharic form of the name "Julianus." "Julianus" and "Julianius" are probably variations of the same name.

Eagerly, I Googled "Julianius," only to discover that I was dealing with none other than the Roman emperor known as "Julian the Apostate."

According to Wikipedia, "Flavius Claudius Julianus, known also as Julian or Julian the Apostate (331/332 – 26 June 363), was Roman Emperor . . . of the Constantinian dynasty. He was the last non-Christian Roman Emperor, and expended much energy during his reign attempting to supplant the growing power of Christianity within the empire with officially revived traditional Roman religious practices." (Emphasis added.) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_the_Apostate

One step forward, two steps back. If St. Mercurios perished as a martyr in the year 250, how could Mercurios have had anything to do with a Roman emperor born sometime around the year 330, at least 80 years after Mercurios' death?

The breakthrough came when I returned to the Wikipedia page on "Saint Mercurius" and paid closer attention to a small painting in the upper right corner of the page. The text identifies the piece as a "Coptic icon portraying a vision of Saint Basil, with Saint Mercurius killing the Pagan Roman Emperor Julian." (Emphasis added.) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Mercurius

So there really was a connection between St. Mercurios and Julian the Apostate, though in sacred mystical time rather than in real time.

The Puzzle Solved!

After taking a break, I returned to the Web site of the Orthodox Church in America, which I had visited earlier in search of information about St. Mercurios. Scrolling idly down the page past the point where I'd stopped before, I was astonished to find the complete story behind this painting:

"Even after his death [St. Mercurius] the warrior of Christ performed a soldier's service for the good of the earthly Church. St Basil the Great . . . once prayed before an icon of the Most Holy Theotokos [Mary, the mother of Jesus], upon which St Mercurius was depicted as a soldier holding a spear. He asked God not to permit the emperor Julian the Apostate (361-363) to return from his war against the Persians and resume his oppression of Christians. The image of the holy Great Martyr Mercurius, depicted on the icon beside the image of the Most Holy Theotokos, became invisible. It reappeared later with a bloodied spear."

"At this very moment Julian the Apostate, on his Persian campaign, was wounded by the spear of an unknown soldier, who immediately disappeared. The mortally wounded Julian, as he lay dying, cried out, 'Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!'"

"The Most Holy Theotokos, through the prayers of St Basil, had sent St Mercurius to defend the Christians from the apostate Julian."

ocafs.oca.org/FeastSaintsViewer.asp?FSID=103383

COLOR, STYLE, AND THE DOG-HEADED MEN Is there anything else to say about this painting? Well, yes, there is.

Color and Style First, there's the matter of the painting's colors and style, which do not have much in common with the Ethiopian Christian Orthodox religious paintings I saw elsewhere in Ethiopia.

As for the colors, it almost looks like the white-balance feature in my digital camera was set incorrectly, skewing the colors towards reds and yellows. Well, a look at the photo's top and left side will dispel that notion. There you'll catch glimpses of printed fabric that look spot-on accurate insofar as their tonal accuracy is concerned.

The painting looks as if it has been exposed to direct light so long that fugitive pigments (e.g., blues and greens) have vanished, while the reds and yellows have faded. That sounds good, but if you've been viewing my photos of Bet Mercurios and the other rock-hewn churches at Lalibela, you'll know their interiors are not drenched in sunlight. So perhaps the missing colors are the victims of time not light, having deteriorated over the centuries.

Finally, there's the possibility the artist simply opted not to use the palette of bright and varied colors usually found in Ethiopian Christian Orthodox religious art.

On the matter of style, the most Ethiopian aspect of the piece is the figure of St. Mercurios, armed with a lance, riding his black horse. As mentioned earlier, St. Mercurios, despite his origins in the part of Eurasia known as Scythia, looks Ethiopian. Turn the horse so it's facing the other direction, paint the horse white, substitute a dragon for Julian the Apostate, and horse and rider could pass for St. George and his steed slaying the dragon.

What is unusual about the painting's style are the lengths to which the artist went in depicting the principal characters in appropriate period clothing. Compare their attire with their garments in Adamu Tesfaw's interpretation of the same story, which is rendered in what I think of as a more traditional Ethiopian style. www.h-net.org/~etoc/Pages/adamu_a2.html

The unusual colors and style make me wonder whether this piece might have been painted by a European artist, or at least an artist from somewhere in the Christian Orthodox world outside Ethiopia. The other possibility is the artist was an Ethiopian influenced by foreign artistic traditions.

I'm a photographer not an artist, so I need to be careful here, but I can't conclude this discussion without mentioning that there's something odd about the way the Emperor's figure has been rendered. Julian's legs seem too thick and too long in relation to his torso, as do his arms. The perspective of the sword arm seems to be off, too.

So what? Well, the quality of the work in the image of the Emperor Julian isn't on a par with the rest of the painting. My theory is the artist was well-versed in executing certain images that are part of the Ethiopian Christian Orthodox iconographic repertoire. I think he was especially familiar with painting saints and other figures on horseback, and had probably produced such paintings many times. The horse and rider are very well rendered.

On the other hand, this could well have been the artist's first attempt at painting the Emperor Julian in his death throes, and he may not have had an example of this scene in front of him when he painted it. He could have been relying on his memory of a Mercurios vs. Julian painting he'd seen once before, or he might have been rendering the Emperor's figure without the benefit of past exposure to this element of Orthodox Christian iconography.

The Dog-Headed Men If you're wondering what all the talk about the dog- (or sheep-) headed men in this painting is about, join the club.

First, it's a bit of an exaggeration to say, as Mr. Briggs did in his Bradt Guide Ethiopia, that St. Mercurios is depicted "among" a group of dog-headed men. The beings in question are a small group of small creatures (I count three lances) in the background immediately to the right of the saint's cape on the right margin in this photo. I don't see any others like them elsewhere in the painting.

At first, I was inclined to regard allegations of dog-headed men as a simple misreading of the painting. Mightn't they just as easily be soldiers wearing helmets with full face masks? Well, they might be, and I would have left it at that if I hadn't seen Adamu Tesfaw's painting of St. Mercurios Slaying Julian the Apostate. www.h-net.org/~etoc/Pages/adamu_a2.html

There, standing in ranks behind St. Mercurios, is a group of armed creatures who clearly aren't human soldiers. They don't have human heads or human feet. While they aren't wearing their flea collars, if you had to place them anywhere in the animal kingdom, it would be among the Canids. In other words, dogs.

Well, if St. Basil can obtain the Virgin Mary's intercession on behalf of the nascent Christian faith, and if together they can summon the late St. Mercurios, more than 80 years dead, to kill the Emperor Julian in the midst of battle in Persia, thereby preventing Julian from resuming his persecution of Christians, why shouldn't dog-headed men have had a role in the adventure? Anything is possible.