Most of the eastern icons of St. George depict him with a little guy sitting on the back of the horse. I've asked priests and monks who he is, but no one ever seems to know. But DeAnn Hertzog did some reading and here's what she discovered:
I did some research about the guy sitting behind St. George in Eastern Orthodox icons. I googled him and asked someone. That didn't give me any answers so I got a book from the library. Here's what it said:
"The most intriguing of these additional figures is a young boy whom we sometimes find perched on the crupper on George's charger. He is a specialty of eastern European art from quite on early period. We cannot be at all sure, however, whom this mysterious little figure is meant to represent. He may be George's servant, his 'coffee boy', as Osbert Lancaster calls him, perhaps even Pasicrates himself. But there have been a number of other interpretations. George Every, for example calls him 'a figure of Christ'. He has also been described as 'a young Paphlagonian rescued by St George when he was being carried away into slavery'. There seems to be no knowing. All we can really say is that for Byzantine painters the boy evidently provided an oppurtunity for introducing a lighter touch, almost an element of comic relief, into a subject which was otherwise so highly charged with emotion."
The book is called "Saint George:the saint with three faces" by David Scott Fox.
If you know who Pasicrates is let me know. From what I can find there were a few. It could be refering to the man who wrote down the story of George and claimed to be a contemporary of his, but actually lived much later. I don't know if this is the same Pasicrates who was a martyr from Cyprus.
I don't know who Pasicrates is. Any ideas?
