Axion Estin

Axion Estin is a hymn with two layers and two histories. Its core is the stanza More Honourable Than the Cherubim and More Glorious Beyond Compare Than the Seraphim, which magnifies the Theotokos, who without corruption gave birth to God the Word, above the highest of the angels. That stanza is ascribed to Cosmas the Melodist, the eighth century hymnographer raised with John of Damascus, and it circulates throughout Byzantine worship, appearing daily in the office quite apart from the liturgy. The opening layer, It is truly meet to bless you, O Theotokos, ever blessed and most pure and the mother of our God, carries the famous story.

Athonite tradition tells that in the year 980, in a cell near Karyes on Mount Athos, a visiting stranger stood beside a monk at prayer and sang these unknown words before the icon of the Mother of God, wrote them, when no paper could hold them, with his finger on a roof tile as though on wax, and revealed himself as the Archangel Gabriel. The tile, the story says, went to Constantinople as proof, and the icon before which the words were first sung was enshrined in the Protaton church at Karyes, where, named Axion Estin after the hymn, it remains the chief icon of the Holy Mountain, honoured by all twenty monasteries as their common palladium.

In the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, Axion Estin is sung immediately after the consecration, at the point where the church commemorates the Mother of God at the head of the saints, and the choir's hymn expands that commemoration into praise. On the twelve great feasts the liturgy replaces it with the proper hymn of the day, the irmos of the ninth ode of the festal canon, so its presence marks ordinary time and its absence marks festivity, a quiet calendar built into the anaphora.

The Slavonic churches sing it as Dostoino Est, and its core stanza, More Honourable Than the Cherubim, recurs at daily matins in the Magnificat refrains and in nearly every Orthodox service of intercession, making it among the most repeated Marian texts in Christianity. On Mount Athos the hymn is also a feast and a place.

The Axion Estin icon in the Protaton keeps its celebration on 11 June, the anniversary the tradition assigns to the angel's visit, when the icon is carried in procession through Karyes with the whole monastic republic in attendance. Musical settings run from simple congregational chant through the elaborate Athonite melodies to choral versions in the Russian repertoire, and new compositions continue, since a text sung at every liturgy never stops commissioning music.