Sakkos

The sakkos entered the church from the palace. It began as a garment of the Byzantine emperors, and it was given, as an honour, to the patriarch of Constantinople, who at first wore it only on the greatest feasts of the year. From there it moved outward and downward in the ordinary manner of court privileges: to the other patriarchs, then to certain metropolitans as a personal grant, then to metropolitans generally, and by the seventeenth century to every bishop of the Byzantine rite.

What it displaced tells the same story from the other side. The older episcopal vestment was the phelonion, and specifically the polystavrion, the phelonion covered with crosses, which was what a bishop wore before the sakkos arrived. As the sakkos spread the phelonion settled downward to become the vestment of a priest, which is what it is today. Two garments changed places over several centuries and neither change was ever legislated in one act.

The result is a vestment whose history is a record of an empire's honours passing into ecclesiastical use and then outliving the empire entirely. Every Orthodox bishop in the world now wears, as the ordinary mark of his order, a robe that was once a gift from a Christian emperor to one particular bishop as a mark of favour.

The garment is a wide tunic reaching below the knee, with short wide sleeves, open down each side and fastened there with buttons or with small bells on cords. The bells are a deliberate quotation. Exodus describes the robe of the high priest as having bells of gold alternating with pomegranates around the hem, so that he should be heard when he goes into the holy place, and the sakkos takes that up openly.

Its name pulls in the opposite direction. Sakkos is sackcloth, the coarse garment of mourning and penitence, and the commentaries take the vestment as a reminder of humility and, in a common reading, of the purple robe put on Christ in mockery before the crucifixion. A garment that began as an emperor's tunic is therefore explained in church as a robe of humiliation, and both readings are offered together without either being withdrawn.

It is worn with the epitrachelion beneath it, and over it the omophorion, and with the epigonation at the side, the pectoral cross, the panagia and the mitre. In Russian practice the ensemble is heavier and more elaborate than in Greek use, and the differences between national traditions are visible at a glance in the shape of the mitre and the cut of the sakkos rather than in anything doctrinal.