Julian and the Defiled Market

The most famous tradition attached to St. Theodore Tyro is not his martyrdom but a miracle worked half a century after his death: the apostate emperor Julian, seeking to defile the Christians of Constantinople in the first week of Great Lent, secretly ordered the market-food sprinkled with the blood of pagan sacrifices, and the martyr Theodore appeared in a vision to the archbishop, warning the faithful to eat boiled wheat — kollyva — instead. This file sets out the narrative as the Church’s sources tell it, names the persons and the date it assigns, and is candid about the lateness and historical insecurity of the account.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; warrior-saint)

The Story the Synaxarion Tells

The narrative is preserved in the synaxarion appointed for the Saturday of the First Week of Great Lent and read at that day’s commemoration; it is summarized in The Lenten Triodion (trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware, 1978) and in the Greek synaxaria from which the Triodion’s notice derives. Its setting is the brief reign of the emperor Julian (361–363), the nephew of Constantine who, raised a Christian, renounced the faith and labored to restore the old gods — the emperor whom Christian memory would name ho Parabates, “the Apostate” (on the period, see The Pre-Schism Church).

According to the account, Julian conceived a deliberately malicious stratagem against the Christians of Constantinople. Knowing that in the first and strictest week of the Great Fast they would purify themselves by abstinence and would crowd the public markets for the simple foods permitted them, he gave a secret order: all the provisions exposed for sale in the markets of the city — bread, and the other foods on which the fasting people depended — were to be sprinkled and polluted with the blood of meats offered in sacrifice to idols (The Lenten Triodion, Synaxarion of the First Saturday; cf. the Greek Synaxarion of Constantinople). The cruelty of the plan, as the sources read it, lay in its secrecy: the Christians, suspecting nothing, would unknowingly partake of food consecrated to demons and so be defiled at the very moment they sought to be cleansed, their fast turned against them.

The plot was undone, the tradition continues, by a heavenly intervention. The Great Martyr Theodore, the soldier of Amasea who had been burned for Christ some fifty years before, appeared by night in a vision to Eudoxios, the archbishop of Constantinople. The martyr disclosed the emperor’s secret command and instructed the archbishop to warn his flock: they were on no account to buy or eat anything from the markets, for all of it had been defiled. When the archbishop objected that the poor of the city had no provisions of their own laid by and would not know how to sustain themselves through the week without the market, the saint gave the remedy that has made the story unforgettable. Let the faithful, he said, boil wheat — in Greek kollyva — and eat that; so they would still their hunger without touching the polluted food. The archbishop did as he was bidden; the people were warned, the markets were shunned, and the Christians of the city passed the week eating boiled wheat, and Julian’s design came to nothing (The Lenten Triodion, Synaxarion of the First Saturday). In thanksgiving for the deliverance, the tradition concludes, the Church appointed that the saving of the people through St. Theodore’s vision be commemorated each year on the Saturday that closes the first week of the Fast, with the blessing and distribution of boiled wheat in his honor — the origin the synaxarion gives for the kollyva of the First Saturday (on which see The First Saturday of Great Lent).

Kollyva: What the Saint Prescribed

The food at the heart of the story is itself worth pausing over, because it is not incidental to the miracle but its whole point. Kollyva (Greek kollyba, plural) is boiled wheat — whole grains of wheat softened by boiling, in later practice sweetened and mixed with honey, raisins, nuts, pomegranate seeds, and spices and heaped into a mound. The word is ancient, denoting small coins or small foodstuffs, and the dish of boiled grain to which it became attached was already at home in the Greek world as an offering and a food of the dead (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Kazhdan, 1991, s.v. “Kollyba”). What the synaxarion’s account does is to bind this boiled-wheat offering to St. Theodore and to fix its blessing on his First-Saturday commemoration.

The choice of boiled wheat in the story is providential on its own terms: wheat is a food that requires no market and no commerce defiled by Julian’s order — a household could boil its own stored grain and eat, untouched by the polluted provisions for sale. But the Church has never read the wheat merely as an emergency ration. The grain of wheat that must fall into the earth and die to bear fruit (John 12:24), the seed that is “not made alive unless it dies” and is raised a body by God’s gift (1 Corinthians 15:36–38), made boiled wheat a natural and eloquent sign of the resurrection of the dead — which is why the same kollyva blessed on St. Theodore’s Saturday is the food offered at every Orthodox memorial of the departed (the theology is developed in The Kollyva as Living Tradition). The miracle-story thus does double work: it accounts for a beloved Lenten observance, and it weds the soldier-martyr to the wheat that the Church reads as a parable of the Resurrection.

The Persons and the Problem of the Archbishop

The account names the archbishop of Constantinople to whom Theodore appeared as Eudoxios, and here the tradition runs into a difficulty that the honest reader must register. Eudoxios of Antioch did indeed occupy the see of Constantinople in Julian’s reign, from 360 until 370 — but he was a leading Arian (more precisely Homoian) prelate, one of the chief opponents of the Nicene faith in the capital, not a hero of Orthodox memory. That the Church’s own festal synaxarion should make an Arian archbishop the recipient of a great martyr’s vision is, on its face, surprising, and the surprise is itself a clue to the story’s character: the narrative is interested in the deliverance of the people and in the martyr, and it takes the reigning archbishop of Julian’s day as a fixed point of the setting without troubling over his theology. [Disputed: the synaxarion names the archbishop **Eudoxios**, who in fact held Constantinople 360–370 as a Homoian/Arian; some retellings silently substitute an Orthodox figure or leave the name vague, and the awkwardness of an Arian recipient is one of several signs that the episode is a later devotional narrative rather than a record contemporary with Julian (Delehaye, *Les légendes grecques des saints militaires*, 1909)]. The detail is preserved here, rather than smoothed away, precisely because it is the kind of friction that tells us what sort of text we are reading.

The Lateness of the Account

The story must be received for what it is. Whatever happened in the markets of Constantinople in the 360s, the kollyva-miracle is not attested in the sources contemporary with Julian, and — most tellingly — it is absent from St. Gregory of Nyssa’s encomium On St. Theodore, the one securely fourth-century witness to the martyr’s cult, delivered at the Euchaita shrine within a generation of Julian’s death (Gregory of Nyssa, On St. Theodore [De Sancto Theodoro], PG 46:736–748). Gregory praises Theodore at length, recounts his burning, and invokes his protection against the barbarian — but says nothing of any Lenten deliverance of Constantinople by a vision of the saint. Nor do the historians of Julian’s reign who chronicle his anti-Christian measures record this one. The miracle first appears, so far as the record allows us to see, in the later Byzantine synaxarion tradition and in the Triodion’s notice for the First Saturday — a setting that is liturgical and devotional rather than annalistic, and that is where its earliest attestation must honestly be placed (per the attestation-pinning discipline of METHODOLOGY §3.5; the source-critical treatment is in The Encomia and the Passio).

[Disputed: the historicity of the Julian/kollyva episode — the tradition (the *Lenten Triodion* and the Byzantine synaxaria) reports it as an event of Julian's reign (361–363); critical hagiography treats it as a later aetiological narrative attached to St. Theodore to account for an already-existing kollyva custom of the First Saturday, since it is unattested in fourth-century sources, absent from Gregory of Nyssa's encomium, and names an Arian archbishop (Delehaye, *Les légendes grecques des saints militaires*, 1909; cf. Walter, *The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition*, 2003)].

To say this is not to debunk the commemoration. The Orthodox Church does not rest the First Saturday on the forensic certainty of an event in 362; it keeps a thanksgiving in which the soldier-martyr’s protection of his people and the resurrection-sign of the wheat are joined, and the synaxarion-story is the form in which that thanksgiving is carried and taught. The historian’s verdict and the worshipper’s act belong to different registers, and the repository’s practice is to hold both without collapsing either (the method is set out in Reading the Theodore Tradition). What can be said with confidence is what the sources say: that by the middle Byzantine period the Church of Constantinople kept, on the Saturday of the first week of the Fast, a commemoration of St. Theodore Tyro and a blessing of boiled wheat, and explained both by the story told above.

References

The Lenten Triodion. Translated by Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1978; repr. South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 2002. (The Synaxarion of the Saturday of the First Week of Great Lent, recounting the kollyva miracle, the figures of Julian and the Archbishop Eudoxios, and the appointment of the commemoration.)
Gregory of Nyssa. On St. Theodore (Oratio de Sancto Theodoro / De Sancto Theodoro). PG 46:736–748. (The earliest firm witness to the cult of Theodore Tyro, delivered at the Euchaita shrine c. 379–381; it makes no mention of the kollyva miracle.)
Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les légendes grecques des saints militaires. Paris: Librairie Alphonse Picard et Fils, 1909. (The critical study of the warrior-saint legends, including the secondary and aetiological character of the developed Theodore material.)
Walter, Christopher. The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. (On Theodore Tyro and the development of his cult and legend.)
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Edited by Alexander P. Kazhdan et al. 3 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. (s.v. “Kollyba”; “Theodore Teron”; “Julian.”)
Scripture cited by book chapter:verse (John 12:24; 1 Corinthians 15:36–38).