Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

THE VIRGIN MARY AND RHOMBUS 439again, and its descendants have ever since preserved the samepeculiarities of colour."The half-destroyed fishwhich recovers life meets us also inthe behef which unto this day lingers in some towns on theBlack Sea, but on the Rhombus,not on the Sole, is the miraclewrought.According to a Russian legend,the tidings of the Resurrectionwere brought to the Virgin Mary,when at food : incredulous and asone of little faith she flung theuneaten half of a Rhombus intothe water, bidding it, were themessage true, come back to lifewhole ! Anddid.lo ! this it instantlyPictures of the Virgin, commemoratingthe incident arepainted on a Rhombus, nailed toa board, thoroughly dried, andornamented with a background ofgold. A great ceremonial markstheir removal to a shrine hermeticallysealed. The custom,no doubt, sprang from the beliefthat fishing enjoyed the special protection of the HolyMother. 1Mahometan tradition abounds with fish lore ofthe oddestkind. The commentators of the Koran vie, indeed, with theTalmudists in the curious subjects to which they often devoteserious study, and in their grotesqueness of invention. Thelearned Rabbi el Bassam seems to have spent fifteen wholeyears in the vain endeavour to discover the name of the chefwho made the pottage for Esau !The story of the fishes, who made a point of coming everySaturday morning to tempt the Hebrews to the sin of catching^ See Keller, op. cit., p. 3G9.JONAH ENTERING THE WHALE'SMOUTH.From a 14th Century MS. inH. Schmidt, Jona, p. 94, fig. 16.