The Slave of Prokopion

Carried from the Pruth frontier deep into Asia Minor, John was brought to Prokopion (Greek Prokopi; Turkish Ürgüp) in Cappadocia, into the household of a Turkish cavalry officer (an agha / sipahi), and set to tend the stable. This file describes the place, the substantial Greek Christian community of the town, the master’s household, and the condition of a Christian captive in an eighteenth-century Ottoman house.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox confessor (venerated across the Greek world; Pan-Orthodox)

Prokopion in Cappadocia

The town to which John was brought is called in Greek Prokopi or Prokopion, and is identified with the Cappadocian town known in Turkish as Ürgüp, in the region of Nevşehir in central Asia Minor — the volcanic-tuff landscape of Cappadocia famous for its rock-cut churches and cave dwellings (Orthodox Church in America, “Saint John the Russian,” oca.org — “Prokopion, Asia Minor”; Holy Shrine of St. John the Russian, Nea Prokopi, oir.gr). Cappadocia had been a heartland of Greek-speaking (and Turkish-speaking but Orthodox, “Karamanli”) Christianity since antiquity — the country of St. Basil the Great and the Cappadocian Fathers — and in the early eighteenth century Prokopion still had a considerable Orthodox Christian population living alongside its Muslim inhabitants (oir.gr; on the later Cappadocian Greek community and its persistence to the 1920s, Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger, Harvard University Press, 2006).

This Christian presence matters to John’s story. He was a slave in a Muslim household, but not in a place empty of the Church: there were Orthodox neighbors, a Greek priest, and functioning churches — including the church (and cave-chapel) of the Great Martyr George — where he could, and did, receive the sacraments (OCA, “Saint John the Russian”; oir.gr). His sanctity grew within, and was witnessed by, a living local Christian community, which is one reason his memory survived at all (see The Sources for His Life).

The Master and the Household

The traditional Life names John’s owner not by personal name but by office: he was a Turkish cavalry commander — an agha, in the Greek accounts often specified as a sipahi, a member of the Ottoman cavalry who held a landed benefice — resident at Prokopion (OCA, “Saint John the Russian,” oca.org — “a Turkish cavalry commander”; oir.gr, giving the master as an agha/sipahi). It is likely, on the tradition’s own logic, that this officer had served in the very campaigns that produced captives like John and had acquired his slave through the ordinary channels of the war (see Capture in the Pruth Campaign).

John was thus a domestic and agricultural slave in a provincial Ottoman household — a status distinct from the galley-slavery or the devşirme levy, and one in which a captive might live for years within a family’s economy, doing its labor. He was assigned to the stable, to care for his master’s horses and animals (OCA, “Saint John the Russian”; oir.gr). This assignment, humble and malodorous, became the physical setting of his whole later sanctity: the stable was his workplace, his cell, and eventually his hermitage (see The Stable and the Prayer).

The Condition of a Christian Captive

The tradition is candid that the life of Christian captives in such households could be brutal. They were subject to their masters’ will, exposed to contempt as gâvur (“infidel”), and pressed — sometimes violently — to convert to Islam, which would at once ease their condition and be counted a pious act by the household (OCA, “Saint John the Russian,” oca.org; oir.gr, on the abuse and the demand to apostatize). Some accounts add that Prokopion was a place with a hardened Muslim military element, which sharpened the pressure on Christian slaves. Whatever the precise local color — and here the devotional sources are describing a general reality as much as documenting a specific one — the structural fact is secure: John was an unfree Christian in a Muslim household under real and sustained pressure to abandon his faith.

It is against this background that his refusal (treated in the next file) has its weight. He did not confess Christ in a moment of dramatic trial before a court, as the ancient martyrs did, but over years, in the daily grind of slavery, under a low and constant pressure that most would have relieved by a single act of outward conformity. That he did not is the substance of his confession.

The Turn: From Resented Slave to Trusted Servant

The tradition also records a change over time. At first, it says, John was treated with harshness and the other slaves and servants mocked his zeal and his refusal to convert; but his patience, honesty, and evident goodness gradually altered the household’s regard for him, until even his master — whose horses and affairs prospered under John’s care — came to respect and trust him, and ceased to press him to change his religion (OCA, “Saint John the Russian,” oca.org; oir.gr). The Life presents this not as a reward John sought but as the natural radiance of a genuinely holy patience: the same constancy that made him unbreakable under pressure made him, in the end, beloved.

This arc — from despised captive to trusted and even venerated servant, respected by Muslims as well as Christians — is one of the most striking features of John’s story and a theme the later cult would seize upon: a saint who was holy within his slavery, not by escaping it (see The Holy Slave, and on the dual veneration, A Saint of the Russian and Greek Worlds).

See Also

References

  • Orthodox Church in America. “Saint John the Russian and Confessor, Whose Relics Are on the Island of Euboia.” oca.org/saints/lives/1953/05/27. (Prokopion in Asia Minor; the Turkish cavalry commander; assignment to the stable; the treatment of the Christian captive and the change in his master’s regard.)
  • Holy Shrine of St. John the Russian, Nea Prokopi (Evia). “A Brief Life of Saint John the Russian.” oir.gr. (Prokopion/Ürgüp; the agha’s household; the stable; the abuse and the growing respect.)
  • Bruce Clark. Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions That Forged Modern Greece and Turkey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. (The Greek Orthodox and Karamanli Christian communities of Cappadocia surviving into the twentieth century.)