Pastor of Damascus

As Great Economos of the Mariamite Cathedral and the leading preacher of Orthodox Damascus, St. Joseph was the pastor of the Christian quarter around Bab Touma — the community that would be destroyed in 1860. This file describes his parish ministry, the cathedral of al-Mariamiyeh, and the Christian quarter he served and in which he died.

Tradition: Antiochian Orthodox (Arab New-Martyr of the Patriarchate of Antioch)

The Mariamite Cathedral

The center of Joseph’s ministry was the Mariamite Cathedral — al-Mariamiyeh, the Cathedral of the Dormition of the Most Holy Theotokos — the mother church of the Orthodox of Damascus and the seat of the Patriarchate of Antioch in the city (Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch, “St. Joseph of Damascus,” antiochpatriarchate.org, on his office there). It is one of the most ancient Christian sites of Damascus, a church that Orthodox tradition traces to the earliest Christian centuries, in the quarter where the Christians of the city had gathered since antiquity. To be Great Economos of this cathedral — the priest charged with its administration and one of the senior clergy of the see — was to stand at the heart of the Orthodox community’s institutional life (see Priest, Scholar, and Preacher, on the office).

But Joseph’s role was not merely administrative. The sources remember him as the cathedral’s great preacher, the teacher whose sermons in Arabic drew and formed the faithful, and as director of the adjacent Patriarchal School — so that the Mariamiyeh was, in his person, at once the community’s liturgical center, its pulpit, and its school (Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese, “St. Joseph of Damascus,” biographical account; John Sanidopoulos, “Saint Joseph of Damascus (1793–1860),” johnsanidopoulos.com, 2013). His whole public life was bound to this one church and its people. That is why, when the massacre came, his instinct was not to flee but to make his way toward the cathedral, gathering and communing his flock as he went (see The Martyrdom of Joseph and His Flock).

The Christian Quarter and Bab Touma

The Orthodox and other Christians of Damascus lived, in Joseph’s day, concentrated in the eastern part of the walled city, in the quarter associated with the gate called Bab Touma — the Gate of St. Thomas — long the Christian district of Damascus (Leila Tarazi Fawaz, An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860, London: I.B. Tauris, 1994, on the Christian quarter and its topography). This was a densely built quarter of narrow streets, courtyard houses, churches, and workshops — home to a Christian population that included Greek Orthodox, Melkite Greek Catholics, and others, alongside the city’s ancient Jewish community nearby. It was, by the standards of the time, a relatively prosperous quarter: many of its Christian families were engaged in the crafts and commerce — silk, weaving, trade — that had grown in the nineteenth century, in part through the expanding links with European markets under the Ottoman commercial order (Fawaz, An Occasion for War, 1994, on the Christian quarter’s prosperity and its trades; on the wider economic setting, see Causes and the Historical Debate).

That prosperity is part of the tragedy. The rioting of July 1860 fell first and hardest on this quarter precisely because it was Christian and, in part, because it was prosperous — the wealth of Christian homes an object of plunder, the visibility of Christian advancement under the reforms an object of resentment (Fawaz, An Occasion for War, 1994, on the targeting of the Christian quarter; Eugene Rogan, The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 2024, on the mixture of sectarian and socioeconomic motives). The quarter that Joseph pastored — its cathedral, its school, its houses, and thousands of its people — would be burned and its inhabitants killed or scattered in the space of a few July days. His pastorate and his martyrdom are the same place seen at two moments: the Christian quarter alive under its priest, and the Christian quarter in flames with its priest dying in its streets.

A Community Under Pressure

To be pastor of this community in the middle decades of the nineteenth century was to serve a people under several kinds of pressure at once, and this shapes what Joseph’s ministry meant. There was the standing pressure of the dhimmī status — the legal and social subordination of Christians in an Islamic society (see Arab Orthodoxy Under Ottoman Rule). There was the newer, sharper tension created by the Ottoman reforms (the Tanzimat), which promised Christians a legal equality that unsettled the old hierarchy and provoked resentment among some of their Muslim neighbors (Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, on the destabilizing effect of the reforms; Fawaz, An Occasion for War, 1994). There was the intra-Christian competition after the 1724 Orthodox–Catholic schism, and the arrival of Western Catholic and Protestant missions courting Eastern Christians. And there was, in 1860, the terror rolling down from Mount Lebanon, where Druze–Maronite civil war had already killed thousands of Christians and sent refugees streaming into Damascus (Fawaz, An Occasion for War, 1994; see The Damascus Massacre, July 1860).

A pastor in such a community had to be many things: a teacher who could hold his people in the Orthodox faith against Catholic and Protestant persuasion; a scholar who could give the faith learned and Arabic voice; an administrator who could keep the cathedral and school running under the constraints of the millet order; and, at the end, a shepherd who would not leave his sheep. The Antiochian tradition remembers Joseph as having been all of these — and remembers, above all, the last: that when the community he had served for four decades was being slaughtered, he went out into the killing to bring the dying the Body and Blood of Christ (Antiochian Archdiocese biographical account; see The Martyrdom of Joseph and His Flock). The pastor of Damascus became the martyr of Damascus in the same streets.

See Also

• Priest, Scholar, and Preacher — the office of Great Economos and his preaching
• Arab Orthodoxy Under Ottoman Rule — the millet system and the pressures on the community
• The Damascus Massacre, July 1860 — the destruction of the Christian quarter
• The Martyrdom of Joseph and His Flock — the pastor’s death among his people

References

• Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East. “St. Joseph of Damascus.” antiochpatriarchate.org. (His office as Great Economos of the Mariamite Cathedral of the Dormition.)
• Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. “St. Joseph of Damascus.” Biographical account. (His preaching, his pastorate, and the events of 1860.)
• Sanidopoulos, John. “Saint Joseph of Damascus (1793–1860).” johnsanidopoulos.com, 2013. (The cathedral, the school, and the ministry.)
• Fawaz, Leila Tarazi. An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860. London: I.B. Tauris, 1994. (The Christian quarter around Bab Touma; its trades and prosperity; the targeting of the quarter in July 1860.)
• Makdisi, Ussama. The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. (The destabilizing effect of the Tanzimat reforms on the old communal order.)
• Rogan, Eugene. The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East. New York: Basic Books / London: Allen Lane, 2024. (The mixture of sectarian and socioeconomic motives in the targeting of the Christian quarter.)