Menas in Coptic Christianity

Among the Copts, St Menas (Coptic Mina; d. c. 309) is not one martyr among many but the supreme wonderworker-martyr of the national Church — the saint whose shrine at Abu Mena was once the great pilgrimage-city of Christian Egypt, commemorated in the Coptic Synaxarium on 15 Hathor (corresponding to 11 November) and named in the Coptic liturgy among the holy martyrs. This file traces that veneration: Menas’s place in the Coptic Orthodox Church and its Synaxarium, the medieval continuity of his cult after the ancient shrine fell into ruin, and above all the remarkable twentieth-century revival, when the modern Monastery of St Mina (Deir Mar Mina) at Mariout was begun in 1959 near the ancient ruins under Pope Cyril VI (Kyrillos VI) — born Azer Yusuf Atta, the hermit “Mina the Recluse,” pope of Alexandria 1959–1971, devoted to the saint from youth, buried at the monastery, and glorified by the Coptic Church in 2013. The modern monastery, a major centre of Coptic monasticism, is carefully distinguished throughout from the ancient archaeological site nearby.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Coptic (Great Martyr; Wonderworker)

The Supreme Wonderworker-Martyr of the Copts

For the Coptic Orthodox Church, St Menas occupies a place that has no exact parallel among the other great martyrs. Egypt produced a vast company of martyrs in the Diocletianic persecution — so vast that the Coptic Church dates its liturgical era from it, the Era of the Martyrs (Anno Martyrum) reckoned from Diocletian’s accession in 284 — and within that company Menas stands out not for the drama of his Passio, which is in fact one of the more conventional, but for the extraordinary scale and reach of the cult that grew up around his tomb in the Mareotis southwest of Alexandria (Atiya, ed., The Coptic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Menas the Martyr, Saint,” 1991; on the era, s.v. “Era of the Martyrs”). The shrine at Abu Mena (Karm Abū Mīna) became, by the fifth and sixth centuries, the greatest pilgrimage centre in Christian Egypt and one of the greatest in the whole Mediterranean world — a city built around a tomb, with a martyr-church and a great basilica, a baptistery, healing baths, and hostels for the crowds of pilgrims (see The Great Pilgrimage City). It was, in the phrase of its first modern excavator, the “national sanctuary” of Christian Egypt (Kaufmann, Die Menasstadt und das Nationalheiligtum der altchristlichen Aegypter, 1910 — the very title naming Abu Mena the Nationalheiligtum).

The mark of that pre-eminence is the diffusion of the saint’s image and blessing across three continents by way of the famous terracotta ampullae stamped with Menas as an orant between two crouching camels — flasks made at the shrine and carried home as eulogia, found from Egypt to Britain (see The Menas Flasks). No other Egyptian saint’s cult left so wide a material footprint. Within Egypt, Menas became the wonderworking healer par excellence, the saint to whom the sick were brought and at whose shrine they slept to receive a dream-cure (see Incubation and Healing); his Miracles, surviving in Coptic and Greek, are a collection of cures and rescues attributed to his intercession (Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946; per METHODOLOGY.md §3.5 these are reported as the collection attests them, never certified as fact). To this day the Copts call him Mina al-ʿAgayibi, “Menas the Wonderworker,” and rank him with the foremost of their martyr-saints (Meinardus, Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity, 1999; Atiya, ed., Coptic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Menas the Martyr, Saint”).

It is worth marking at the outset that this Menas — the Egyptian soldier-martyr of Abu Mena — must be distinguished from other saints of the same name with whom he is sometimes confused. He is not the Menas who was patriarch of Constantinople (536–552), a sixth-century churchman of the Justinianic age and a quite different figure; nor is he, on most reckonings, identical with the so-called “Phrygian” Menas (Menas Kallikelados), whose tradition some scholars hold to have been conflated with the Egyptian saint’s [Disputed: the relation between the Egyptian soldier-martyr of Abu Mena and the "Phrygian" Menas (Menas Kallikelados) is contested — some scholars treat the two as originally distinct cults later conflated, others as a single tradition; the question is owned by Section 02 and not adjudicated here] (see The Passio). The Coptic tradition is firmly attached to the Egyptian martyr of the Mareotis.

The Coptic Synaxarium: 15 Hathor

The fixed liturgical anchor of the Coptic cult is the entry for St Menas in the Coptic Synaxarium under 15 Hathor (Hatūr), the third month of the Coptic calendar — a date that corresponds, in the present alignment of the Coptic and Julian/Gregorian reckonings, to 11 November, the day on which the saint is also commemorated in the Byzantine and Latin calendars (Atiya, ed., Coptic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Menas the Martyr, Saint”; the Synaxarium Alexandrinum, ed. Forget, CSCO; Basset, ed. and trans., Le Synaxaire arabe jacobite, in Patrologia Orientalis). The Synaxarium reading for the day recounts the martyr’s life in the form the Coptic tradition received it: his birth to Christian parents, his service as a soldier, his withdrawal, his public confession of Christ, his tortures and beheading under the persecution, and the translation of his relics to the Mareotis where the great shrine arose — the narrative of the Passio in synaxarial compression (Synaxarium under 15 Hathor; cf. Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946). The same Synaxarium also preserves, on other days, commemorations connected with the saint — notably the consecration of his church, a feast attached to the dedication of the shrine, which the Coptic tradition keeps as a distinct memorial of the holy place itself [Disputed: Coptic sources commemorate a "consecration of the church of St Menas" on a date variously given (often 15 Baʿūna / Paoni in the summer); the precise date and the building intended are reported differently in the manuscripts, and the present file does not adjudicate].

The reading of the Synaxarium at the appointed point in the daily office, together with the naming of the martyrs in the diptychs and the commemorations of the Coptic Liturgy of St Basil and St Gregory, keeps Menas present in the regular worship of the Coptic Church, not merely on his feast but in the ordinary rhythm of its prayer (Meinardus, Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity, 1999; on the liturgical commemoration of the saints generally, see Great Feasts and the Liturgical Year). Hymns, doxologies, and a difnar (antiphonarium) commemoration for the saint belong to the Coptic liturgical books, sung on his day; the full treatment of the feast and its texts is reserved for Section 09 (see Feast and Cult).

Medieval Continuity and the Ruin of the Shrine

The great pilgrimage-city at Abu Mena did not survive into the Middle Ages as a living centre. Its decline is bound up with the wider transformation of Egypt: the disruptions of the seventh century, the Arab conquest of Egypt (640–642), the gradual contraction of the once-vast Christian pilgrimage traffic, and — on the archaeological reading — the eventual abandonment and decay of the site, so that by the later medieval period the shrine lay in ruins and its precise location passed out of common knowledge (Grossmann, Abû Mînâ I, 1989, and Coptic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Abu Mina”; the date and causes of the final decline are matters for the archaeology, treated in Archaeology versus Passio). The physical heart of the cult, in other words, fell silent.

The veneration of the saint, however, did not. Through the medieval and Ottoman centuries the Coptic Church preserved Menas in its Synaxarium, its liturgy, and its devotion, even after the shrine that had made him famous had crumbled; churches bore his name, his commemoration kept its place on 15 Hathor, and his Miracles continued to be copied and read (Atiya, ed., Coptic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Menas the Martyr, Saint”; Papaconstantinou, Le culte des saints en Égypte des Byzantins aux Abbassides, 2001, for the documented cult into the early Islamic period). The cult thus passed through a long phase in which the saint was venerated in liturgy and memory while the great material centre lay buried — a separation of cult from shrine that sets the stage for the modern revival, in which a new material centre would be raised not on the ancient ruins but near them.

The Twentieth-Century Revival: Pope Cyril VI and the Monastery of St Mina

The modern chapter of the Coptic cult of St Menas is inseparable from one man: Pope Cyril VI (Kyrillos VI), the 116th pope of Alexandria and patriarch of the See of St Mark, who reigned from 1959 to 1971 and who, more than any figure of the modern Coptic Church, restored Menas to the centre of Coptic devotion (Atiya, ed., Coptic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Cyril VI”; Meinardus, Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity, 1999).

He was born Azer Yusuf Atta in 1902 at Damanhur, in the Beheira province of the western Delta — the very region of the ancient Mareotis and the lost shrine. Drawn to the monastic life, he entered the monastery of the Baramus in the Wadi al-Natrun (Scetis) and was professed there in 1928 with the monastic name Mina — taking, that is, the name of the wonderworker-martyr to whom he was devoted from his youth (Atiya, ed., Coptic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Cyril VI”; Meinardus, Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity, 1999; on the Coptic monastic tradition into which he entered, see Monasticism). His devotion to St Menas became the defining feature of his ascetic life. For years he lived as a hermit, for a time in a disused windmill on the Muqattam hills above Cairo, where he built a small church dedicated to St Menas and became known as “Mina the Recluse” (Mina al-Mutawahhid) — the solitary who bore the saint’s name and prayed under the saint’s patronage (Meinardus, Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity, 1999; Atiya, ed., Coptic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Cyril VI”).

On 10 May 1959 the recluse Mina was enthroned as pope of Alexandria under the name Cyril VI (Kyrillos VI). It was a fitting providence, in the eyes of the Copts, that the man who took the saint’s monastic name and built his hermit-church to St Menas should become the pope under whom the saint’s great shrine was, in a manner, raised again (Atiya, ed., Coptic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Cyril VI”; Meinardus, Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity, 1999).

The Founding of Deir Mar Mina at Mariout

It was under Cyril VI, and at his initiative, that the modern Monastery of St Mina (Deir Mar Mina) was founded at Mariout (Mareotis), in the desert southwest of Alexandria, near the site of the ancient pilgrimage-city — the building begun in 1959, the first year of his pontificate (Atiya, ed., Coptic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Dayr Mar Mina”; Meinardus, Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity, 1999). The new monastery was the fulfilment of the pope’s lifelong devotion: a living monastic community raised to honour the wonderworker and to restore a centre of his cult on the ground where his shrine had once drawn the Mediterranean.

It is essential — and the Coptic and archaeological literature is consistent on this — to distinguish the modern monastery from the ancient archaeological site. Deir Mar Mina is a new foundation of the mid-twentieth century, built near but not upon the ruins of the late-antique pilgrimage-city; the ancient remains of Abu Mena — the tomb-church, the great basilica, the baths and hostels, which were excavated by Kaufmann and later by the German Archaeological Institute under Peter Grossmann, and which are inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list — are a separate place, the object of archaeology rather than of the living liturgy of the new community (Grossmann, Abû Mînâ I, 1989, and Coptic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Abu Mina” and “Dayr Mar Mina”; see The Great Pilgrimage City). The two should never be conflated: the one is a ruin under excavation and conservation, the other a thriving monastery of the contemporary Coptic Church. The modern foundation deliberately set itself beside the holy ground of the ancient shrine, not over it.

Cyril VI’s Repose, Burial, and Glorification

Pope Cyril VI reposed on 9 March 1971, after a pontificate of nearly twelve years remembered in the Coptic Church for its spiritual revival and for the renewal of monasticism (Atiya, ed., Coptic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Cyril VI”; Meinardus, Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity, 1999). His body, in accordance with his own devotion and the wish of his community, was in time interred at the Monastery of St Mina at Mariout — the house he had raised to the saint whose name he bore — where his tomb has itself become a place of Coptic pilgrimage (Meinardus, Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity, 1999; Atiya, ed., Coptic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Cyril VI” and “Dayr Mar Mina”). Thus the saint and the modern pope who restored his cult are joined at the one site: Menas in his monastery, and Mina the Recluse — Cyril VI — buried within it.

In 2013 the Holy Synod of the Coptic Orthodox Church formally glorified (canonized) Pope Cyril VI as a saint, numbering him among the holy of the Coptic Church and confirming the popular veneration that had grown around him in the decades since his death — a veneration in which the modern saint and the ancient martyr-wonderworker are bound together (Coptic Orthodox Church, Holy Synod decision, 2013, reported in the standard Coptic-church histories; cf. Meinardus, Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity, 1999, for the antecedent popular cult). The glorification of Cyril VI set, as it were, a modern seal on the revival he had led: the wonderworker of the fourth century and the pope of the twentieth are now venerated side by side at Mariout.

A Major Coptic Centre

From its founding in 1959 the Monastery of St Mina grew rapidly into one of the principal monastic centres of the contemporary Coptic Orthodox Church — a large community with churches, a substantial body of monks, and a steady stream of pilgrims drawn both to the patronage of the wonderworker-martyr and to the tomb of Pope Cyril VI (Meinardus, Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity, 1999; Atiya, ed., Coptic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Dayr Mar Mina”). The renewal of Coptic monasticism in the second half of the twentieth century — associated with Cyril VI and continued under his successors — found at Mariout one of its great expressions: a desert monastery raised in the modern age on the old monastic pattern, under the patronage of the saint who had once made the Mareotis the goal of Mediterranean pilgrimage (Meinardus, Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity, 1999; on the wider revival of Coptic monasticism, see Monasticism).

The modern revival thus closes a long arc. The cult that began at a desert tomb, swelled into a pilgrimage-city, and sent its flasks across the Mediterranean, fell silent at its centre for a thousand years while the Coptic Church kept the saint alive in liturgy and memory; and then, in the twentieth century, found a new material home in a monastery built near the old ruins by a pope who bore the saint’s name and now lies buried there. The honest distinction between the two sites — the ancient ruin and the modern monastery — is not a pedantic point but the very shape of the story: the cult did not reoccupy its old city; it was reborn beside it. What that cult had once been, in its Mediterranean reach, is the subject of the companion file (see The Spread of the Cult); what it is liturgically, of Section 09 (see Feast and Cult).

References

Atiya, Aziz S., ed. The Coptic Encyclopedia. 8 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1991. (Entries “Menas the Martyr, Saint,” “Cyril VI,” “Dayr Mar Mina,” “Abu Mina,” and “Era of the Martyrs”; the standard scholarly reference for the Coptic reception and the modern monastery and pope.)
Meinardus, Otto F. A. Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1999 (rev. 2002). (The modern Coptic Church, the life and pontificate of Cyril VI, “Mina the Recluse,” the founding of the monastery at Mariout, and the revival of Coptic monasticism.)
Drescher, James. Apa Mena: A Selection of Coptic Texts Relating to St. Menas. Cairo: Société d’archéologie copte, 1946. (The Coptic Passio and Miracles underlying the Synaxarium reading and the cult.)
Kaufmann, Carl Maria. Die Menasstadt und das Nationalheiligtum der altchristlichen Aegypter. Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1910. (Abu Mena as the “national sanctuary” of Christian Egypt; the first major excavation report on the ancient shrine.)
Grossmann, Peter. Abû Mînâ I: Die Gruftkirche und die Gruft. Mainz: von Zabern, 1989; and “Abu Mina,” in The Coptic Encyclopedia, ed. Aziz S. Atiya. New York: Macmillan, 1991. (The modern archaeology of the ancient site, to be distinguished from the modern monastery.)
Papaconstantinou, Arietta. Le culte des saints en Égypte des Byzantins aux Abbassides. Paris: CNRS, 2001. (The documented continuity of the cult of Menas into the early Islamic period.)
Synaxarium Alexandrinum (the Coptic-Arabic Synaxarium): ed. I. Forget, CSCO (Scriptores Arabici); and René Basset, ed. and trans., Le Synaxaire arabe jacobite, in Patrologia Orientalis. (The entry for St Menas under 15 Hathor.)