The Transfiguration

The Transfiguration, kept on 6 August, commemorates the event on a mountain (tradition names Tabor) where, before three of his disciples, Christ is described as transfigured, his face and clothing shining, and Moses and Elijah appearing with him, while a voice from a cloud declares him the beloved Son. In Christian reading it is a disclosure of Christ's divine glory granted before the passion, a pledge of the glory to come.

The feast has particular weight in the Christian East, where it is one of the twelve Great Feasts and where the "light of Tabor" became the centre of a major theological controversy. In the fourteenth century the hesychast monks of Mount Athos, defended by Gregory Palamas, held that this uncreated divine light can genuinely be experienced by the purified, a position affirmed by councils at Constantinople and now standard in Orthodox theology. The day also carries a harvest custom, the blessing of grapes and first fruits. In the West the general observance was fixed in 1457 by Pope Callixtus III in thanksgiving for a victory over the Ottomans, so the same feast anchors a subtle mystical theology in the East and a more incidental history in the West.

Tradition has named Mount Tabor as the site of the Transfiguration since at least the fourth century, and a church has stood on its summit commemorating the event for much of Christian history, but the Gospel narratives themselves do not name the mountain, and some modern biblical scholars have pointed out that the episode immediately preceding it in the text is set near Caesarea Philippi, close to Mount Hermon, a considerably higher and more remote peak, leading a minority of scholars to argue that the original setting intended by the Gospel writers may have been Hermon rather than Tabor, a possibility the strength of the ancient and continuous Tabor tradition has never seriously displaced in actual church practice.

Whatever the original geography, the blessing of grapes and first fruits attached to the feast has particular resonance in historic wine-producing Orthodox regions, most notably Georgia, whose winemaking tradition is among the oldest continuously practised in the world and where the Transfiguration falls squarely within the grape harvest season, giving the church's blessing of the year's fruit a direct and practically timed connection to the agricultural calendar of a wine-producing culture in a way the feast's more abstract theological content, the uncreated light and the hesychast controversy, does not on its own suggest.