Death on Lesbos (c. 740)

The end of the life: returning to Crete from Constantinople, where he had gone on the business of his church, the aged Andrew fell ill aboard ship and died at Eresos on the island of Lesbos — saying, the tradition holds, “it is here that I must give my soul to God” — and was buried with honor behind the altar of what is now the Basilica of St. Andrew at Eresos. His repose is conventionally placed around 740, though the sources disagree, and is commemorated on July 4.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

The Last Journey

Andrew died as he had lived, in the service of his church. The accounts agree that he had travelled from Crete to Constantinople on ecclesiastical business — the affairs of his see calling the old archbishop once more to the capital — and that he died on the return voyage, before reaching home (OCA, Lives of the Saints, July 4; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Andrew of Crete”; Sanidopoulos, “The Tomb of St. Andrew of Crete in Eressos of Lesvos,” 2018). As the ship made its way back toward Crete, it put in near the island of Lesbos, and there, at the harbor of Eresos (Eressos), the aged and ailing bishop reposed.

The tradition preserves a saying attributed to him at the end: as the ship neared Eresos and he felt his death upon him, Andrew is said to have declared, “It is here that I must give my soul to God,” and to have reposed at that place (Sanidopoulos, “The Tomb of St. Andrew of Crete,” johnsanidopoulos.com, 2018). [The deathbed saying is reported by the hagiographical tradition surrounding the tomb at Eresos and is received here as such, per METHODOLOGY §3.5, rather than as documented utterance.] So the poet of repentance died far from his see, on a small island in the northern Aegean, on a journey home he did not complete.

The Business at Constantinople

The accounts agree that Andrew’s last journey was undertaken on church business at Constantinople, though they do not specify its nature (OCA, Lives of the Saints, July 4; Sanidopoulos, “The Tomb of St. Andrew of Crete,” 2018). That an aged archbishop should make the long and arduous sea-voyage from Crete to the capital — and attempt the return — tells us something of the seriousness of his office to the end: the affairs of his church, or of the wider Church, were worth the risk of the journey to an old man. The capital was the seat of the patriarchate and of the imperial administration on which the islands depended, and a metropolitan’s business there might concern anything from the affairs of his see to the wider questions of the Church in a period — the years around 730 — that was beginning to be troubled by the first stirrings of iconoclasm (see Before the Iconoclast Storm). The sources do not let us say more; what they preserve is the simple, moving fact that Andrew died in harness, on the road of his duty, returning from the service of his church.

The Date

The year of his death is the most disputed fact of his biography. [Disputed: the sources give three dates for Andrew’s repose — 712, 726, or 740 — and do not agree; the OCA Life records “712 or 726,” the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium favors c. 740, and the tradition surrounding the tomb at Eresos commemorates a death in 740 (OCA, Lives, July 4; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v.; Sanidopoulos, “The Tomb of St. Andrew of Crete,” 2018). The latest date, c. 740, is the most widely adopted in modern scholarship and is consistent with a death in old age after a long episcopate; the earlier dates would require either a much shorter life or a death soon after the 712 synod. This collection adopts c. 740 as its working date while recording the disagreement.] The day, however, is fixed by the Church’s calendar: he is commemorated on July 4 (see Veneration).

The Weight of the Date

The disagreement over the year is not a trivial antiquarian puzzle; it changes the shape one assigns to the life. If Andrew died in 712, then his repose came in the very year of the Monothelite synod, and his whole career as bishop and hymnographer would have to be compressed before it — leaving no room for the long Orthodox afterlife the tradition assumes, and making the supposed 713 recantation impossible. This early date is generally rejected for just these reasons; it likely arose from confusion with the date of the synod. If he died in 726, he lived about fourteen years past his fall, time enough for a substantial penitential maturity but a shorter old age. If he died in 740 — the date favored by modern scholarship and by the tomb-tradition at Eresos — he lived nearly three decades past 712, into very great old age, a long Orthodox episcopate crowning the brief lapse (OCA, Lives of the Saints, July 4; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v.; Sanidopoulos, “The Tomb of St. Andrew of Crete,” 2018).

The collection adopts c. 740 because it best fits the convergent evidence: the antiquity ascribed to the Great Canon, the tradition of his great age, the firm anchor of his activity at the 712 synod, and the local memory at Eresos. But the honest statement is that the year is genuinely uncertain, and the disagreement is recorded here rather than resolved by fiat.

The Tomb at Eresos

Andrew was buried with honor at Eresos, at the church that is today known as the Basilica of St. Andrew (Agios Andreas), his grave traditionally placed behind the holy altar of the early-Christian basilica there (Sanidopoulos, “The Tomb of St. Andrew of Crete,” 2018). His relics rested at Eresos for many centuries. According to the local tradition, in the nineteenth century Cretans came and translated the greater part of his relics back to Crete, his own see, leaving behind only portions, which are now kept at the Lesbian monasteries of Ypsilou (Hypselou) and Leimonos (Sanidopoulos, “The Tomb of St. Andrew of Crete,” 2018). In 1938 a chapel dedicated to St. Andrew, containing his tomb, was built at Skala Eresou, and the local metropolis fixed the annual celebration of his feast there on July 4 (Sanidopoulos, 2018). The ruined basilica and the tomb at Eresos remain a place of pilgrimage and a tangible link to the saint’s last hours.

Why Eresos

There is a poignancy in the place that the tradition has felt and dwelt upon. Eresos is a small harbor on the western coast of Lesbos, far from the great centres of Andrew’s life — Damascus, Jerusalem, Constantinople, Gortyna — and far even from his own see, which he was straining to reach. The bishop who had served the cathedral of the capital and governed the church of a whole island died, an old man, at an obscure landing on a passage he did not finish, among people who were not his own. The hagiographical saying placed on his lips — “It is here that I must give my soul to God” — turns that obscurity into acceptance: the place did not matter, only the giving of the soul to God, which can be done as well at a small harbor on Lesbos as anywhere (Sanidopoulos, “The Tomb of St. Andrew of Crete,” 2018). For the author of the Great Canon, whose deepest theme is that the soul’s true homeland is not any earthly place but God Himself, to die on the way home, having given his soul to God short of his own city, is a fitting end rather than a sad accident.

That Eresos then kept him — built a basilica over his grave, made it a place of pilgrimage, and centuries later parted only reluctantly with the greater portion of his relics — shows how the obscure landing became, through his death, a holy place in its own right. The bishop who could not reach Crete sanctified Lesbos instead.

The Shape of a Life

The death at Eresos closes a life that had spanned the early-Byzantine world from Damascus to Crete and had touched its central events — the Sixth Council, the Monothelite crisis of 712, the dawn of iconoclasm — while producing the supreme hymn of Orthodox repentance and a major body of festal hymnody and preaching. That a bishop so bound to the great centres should die on a small island, on an unfinished voyage home, has its own fittingness for the author of the Great Canon, whose whole theme is the soul’s journey toward a homeland it has not yet reached. Andrew gave his soul to God at Eresos; the Church, gathering up his memory, gave back to him the veneration of the saints (see Veneration).

References

Sanidopoulos, John. “The Tomb of St. Andrew of Crete in Eressos of Lesvos.” johnsanidopoulos.com, July 2018. (The death at Eresos on the return from Constantinople; the deathbed saying; the burial behind the altar of the Basilica of St. Andrew; the nineteenth-century translation of relics to Crete; portions at Ypsilou and Leimonos; the 1938 chapel; the July 4 feast; the disputed dates 712/726/740.)
Saint Andrew, Archbishop of Crete. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, July 4. (Death on the return from Constantinople, on Mytilene/Lesbos; “712 or 726”; relics translated to Constantinople in some accounts; feast July 4.)
Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. A. Kazhdan. Oxford University Press, 1991, s.v. “Andrew of Crete.” (Death c. 740; the dating.)