The Ethnomartyr

The meaning the Church and the Greek tradition have given to Kosmas’s death: martyr in the strict sense — a Christian killed for his faith and his Christian work — and “ethnomartyr” (ethnomartyras), the particular Greek category for those whose death for the faith was also, in the national memory, a death for the enslaved nation. This file distinguishes the two meanings, treats the ethnomartyr concept with care, and keeps the martyr (the Church’s category) prior to the ethnomartyr (the nation’s).

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (canonized 1961)

Martyr in the Strict Sense

Kosmas died at the order of an Ottoman-Albanian lord, on a charge engineered by his enemies, for a life of Christian preaching (see Arrest and Execution). In the Church’s reckoning this makes him a martyr in the proper and ancient sense: a Christian put to death in hatred of the faith and of the Christian work he did. The Church received him as such, and his glorification in 1961 was the glorification of a martyr — not chiefly of a national hero (see Glorification 1961; Nomikos M. Vaporis, Father Kosmas, the Apostle of the Poor, Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977, pp. 33–40). The witness (martyria) of his death completed the witness of his preaching: he had urged the people to take up the Cross, and he took it up himself to the end.

This is the primary and the load-bearing category, and it must be kept first. Kosmas is a saint because he was an apostle and a martyr; his cult rests on his life and death in Christ, not on the modern nation. The order matters because the second category — the ethnomartyr — has so often been allowed to eclipse the first.

It is worth being exact about what the ancient category requires, for it is the test Kosmas passes. A martyr in the strict sense is one put to death in odium fidei — in hatred of the faith, or of the Christian life and work that the faith commands — and not merely one who dies a Christian, however holy, of natural causes or in some cause of his own. The witness lies precisely in the cause of the killing: the martyr is slain because of Christ. By that measure Kosmas qualifies plainly. He was killed not for a crime, nor for a private quarrel, but for a life given wholly to Christian preaching, the conversion of morals, and the building up of the Church among an enslaved people; the very grievances his enemies held against him — that he disrupted ungodly commerce, that he gathered crowds to repentance, that he strengthened the Christian community — were grievances against his Christian work (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 33–40). The pretext under which he was condemned, a political charge of sedition, does not unmake the martyrdom, for the Church has always read through such pretexts to the substance: many of the ancient martyrs too were condemned on charges of disloyalty to the state, and the Church named the charge a pretext and the death a martyrdom (Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos, 1971).

The Concept of the “Ethnomartyr”

The Greek tradition also calls Kosmas an ethnomartyr (ἐθνομάρτυρας, “national martyr”), a term that arose to describe those of the Tourkokratia whose death for the Christian faith was also remembered, in the national memory, as a death for the enslaved Greek nation (the category is standard in modern Greek usage for figures of the Ottoman period; on Kosmas’s place in it, Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 36–40; Constantine Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos, Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1971). Because under Ottoman rule the Greek faith and the Greek nation were so closely identified — the Church being the chief carrier of Greek identity through the centuries of servitude (see Orthodoxy Guide: The Ottoman Period) — a death for the one was readily read as a death for the other, and the ethnomartyras category gave that double reading a name.

To grasp why faith and nation were so nearly fused in this usage, one must remember what the Church was to the Greeks under the Tourkokratia. For the centuries between the fall of Constantinople and the War of Independence there was no Greek state, no Greek government, no Greek army; what held the Greek-speaking Orthodox together as a people was the faith and the institutions of the Church — the liturgy, the calendar, the language of worship and letters, the parish and the monastery (see Orthodoxy Guide: The Ottoman Period). To be Greek, in that long night, was very largely to be Orthodox, and to keep the faith was to keep the people in being. In such a world the distinction between a death for the faith and a death for the nation could hardly be felt, because the two were carried in the same vessel; the ethnomartyras category is the linguistic deposit of that fusion (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 36–40).

Applied to Kosmas, the term has real warrant. His preaching did strengthen Greek communal identity, his schools did spread Greek letters, and his death did remove a great pillar of Greek Christian life (see Education, Faith, and Nation). In the long national memory, formed especially after the War of Independence and the founding of the Greek state, Kosmas became one of the great ethnomartyrs — a saint whose religious witness and whose contribution to the survival and awakening of the nation were remembered together. The warrant is genuine and ought not to be denied in the name of a fastidious separation that the period itself did not know: Kosmas did labour for a people, and that people did remember him as one who had given his life among them and for them (Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos, 1971).

Keeping the Categories in Order

But the ethnomartyr reading must be handled with care, and the two categories kept in their proper order, because the second can distort the first. The danger is real and well attested: in strong nationalist hands, Kosmas the martyr of Christ becomes Kosmas the martyr of the Greek nation, his religious mission re-read as a national one, his “prophecies” mined for irredentist forecasts (see Reception and Misuse), and his faith made the instrument of the nation rather than the nation a consequence of his faith (the danger is discussed in the critical literature; see Saint and National Symbol). This inverts Kosmas’s own priorities, which put the salvation of souls first and everything else after (see Education, Faith, and Nation).

The inversion is subtle precisely because it keeps all the same facts and merely reverses their order. Both readings affirm that Kosmas preached, founded schools, strengthened his people, and died at Ottoman hands; the difference lies in which is cause and which effect. In the Church’s reading, the religious mission is the substance and the national good is its by-product: Kosmas sought the salvation of souls, and a stronger, more literate, more cohesive Christian people followed from that as fruit follows from a root (see Education, Faith, and Nation). In the nationalist reading, the order is flipped, so that the religion becomes the means and the nation the end — and at that point Kosmas’s own priorities have been stood on their head, for he subordinated everything, including the welfare of the nation, to the one thing he never subordinated, which was the soul’s salvation in Christ (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 36–40).

The honest course, and the one this collection takes, is to keep the martyr prior to the ethnomartyr: Kosmas died for Christ and for his Christian work, and that is the foundation; that his death also belonged, in the national memory, to the story of the Greek nation is true and may be honored, but as a consequence and not as the substance. The Church glorified an apostle and martyr; the nation remembers an ethnomartyr; the two readings can coexist only if the religious one is allowed to remain primary. This is not a verbal nicety but a matter of fidelity to the man: to call Kosmas an ethnomartyr while forgetting that he was first a martyr is to honor a figure he would not have recognized, and to lose precisely the thing for which he died.

There is a further reason to keep the martyr prior, which is that the martyr belongs to the whole Church while the ethnomartyr belongs to one nation. A martyr of Christ is venerated by Orthodox of every tongue, for the faith he witnessed is not Greek but catholic; his death speaks to a Slav or an Arab or an Albanian believer exactly as it speaks to a Greek (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 36–40). It is no small irony that Kosmas, who is honored as the national martyr of the Greeks, died on what is now Albanian soil, among a population not all of whom were Greek, and is venerated by Orthodox far beyond the Greek world. To read him only as the Greeks’ ethnomartyr is therefore not merely to invert his priorities but to shrink his reach; the martyr’s witness is universal where the national memory is particular, and the larger reading contains the smaller without being contained by it.

The Witness That Endured

In the end Kosmas’s death did what martyrdom does: it sealed and spread his witness rather than ending it. This is the ancient paradox of martyrdom, that the killing of the witness multiplies the witness; the enemies of Kosmas removed the man and thereby fixed his work, for what a living preacher might have been thought to exaggerate, a martyr’s death set beyond dispute. The schools he had planted went on teaching, the crosses he had raised still stood over the villages, and the memory of his preaching, far from fading with him, deepened into reverence (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 36–40; see Education, Faith, and Nation). Within a few years his disciple Sappheiros Christodoulides had written the Life that gathered the account of his death and began his cult, so that the witness passed from the road and the gallows into the written and liturgical memory of the Church (Christodoulides, early Life; see The Didaches and The Cult and the Shrine).

From that point the trajectory is the ordinary one of a martyr’s cult. The place of his burial at Kolkondas in Albania became a place of pilgrimage; the relics recovered from the river were venerated; an Akolouthia was composed and his memory kept on the day of his death, 24 August; and after long centuries the Ecumenical Patriarchate glorified him formally in 1961 (see The Cult and the Shrine and Glorification 1961). That glorification, it bears repeating, was the canonization of a saint and martyr, and the order this file has insisted upon is the order the Church itself observed in receiving him (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 33–40). The ethnomartyr of the Greek lands was, first and last, a martyr of Christ, and it is as that that the Church keeps his memory.

References

Vaporis, Nomikos Michael. Father Kosmas, the Apostle of the Poor. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977. (Kosmas as martyr and ethnomartyr; the relation of his religious mission to the national memory.)
Cavarnos, Constantine. St. Cosmas Aitolos. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1971. (The martyr and the ethnomartyr categories.)
Menounos, Ioannis. Κοσμᾶ τοῦ Αἰτωλοῦ Διδαχές (καὶ Βιογραφία). Athens: Ekdoseis Tinos, 1979. (Critical biography and the basis of the cult.)