emerges finally is that Coptic vestments are, with slight differences, the same as those of the Byzantine rite. The differences are hardly greater than in the shape and use of Roman vestments in the West. This is true of all Eastern rites. We may say, once for all, that the vestments we know as Byzantine[1] are, with slight local variations, common to all Eastern Churches. The Coptic forms are as follows:
They are of any colour and almost any material. In poorer churches one sees cheap calicoes with dreadful sprawling flowers printed all over them; richer vestments are of silk (more usually satin) or velvet with gold and silver embroideries or braid. White with coloured patterns, pink and red are favourite colours; but sky-blue, apple-green, mauve, are not uncommon. In general, modern Levantine taste is very bad. They see no incongruity in the tawdriest designs and flimsiest material. One of the shocks the Western traveller must expect is to see a venerable Pontiff chanting his ancient liturgy vested in calico covered with large pink roses. The remains of ancient Coptic vestments often show exceedingly beautiful embroidery in colours, all the more exquisite because it is faded and tarnished.
The deacon wears a sticharion (our alb, but coloured)[2] with a girdle (the Byzantine (
Greek characters)),[3] which is not a rope, but a belt of coloured stuff (silk or velvet) with clasps. From his left shoulder hangs a stole ((Greek characters)).[4] During the liturgy he winds this around his body as does his Orthodox rival. He wears a small round cap.[5] Clerks and singers also wear a sticharion and a narrower orarion wound around them, again just as in the Byzantine rite. The priest who celebrates wears a rather handsomer sticharion and girdle. But the Coptic priest, unlike the Byzantine, has an amice.[6] This is the only Coptic vestment unknown to the
- ↑ See, for instance, Orth. Eastern Church, 405-408.
- ↑ Ar.: tūniyah; Copt.: potīrion, mappa. Butler, ii. 109-117.
- ↑ Ar.: zunnār; Copt.: zounarion. Butler, ii. 124-127.
- ↑ Ar.: baṭrashīl; Copt.: ōrarion, sḥordion. Butler, ii. 127-143.
- ↑ Illustrated in Butler, ii. 211.
- ↑ Ar.: shamlah, ṭailasān; Copt.: ballīn, efouti. Butler, ii. 117-124.
Roman and Sarum use. His work is a mine of general information about ecclesiastical antiquities in general. Unfortunately the authorities he quotes (Rock, Marriott, Bloxam, Bock, and my brother E. F. K. Fortescue) are all a little out of date; so that much of what he says is antiquated.
