07 — Relics and the Cult

Where the witness of St. Theodore the Recruit became a living cult: the great Pontic shrine at Euchaita on which the historical case for the saint rests, and the spread of his veneration outward from that town across Byzantium and into the Latin West. These two files trace the cult from its center to its circumference — the crowded martyrium Gregory of Nyssa describes around 380, the town that took the by-name Theodoroupolis and the modern Avkat/Euchaita fieldwork, and then the diffusion of the cult through Constantinople and the kollyva miracle, the joint career of the “two Theodores,” and the Western afterlife at Venice — keeping secure data, traditional report, and legend carefully apart.

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

The firmest ground we have for St. Theodore the Recruit is not a vita but a place and a cult. Whatever can be securely said of the historical martyr is mediated through the shrine at Euchaita, where Gregory of Nyssa preached his encomium within perhaps seventy or eighty years of the martyrdom, before a congregation of pilgrims, in a sanctuary already adorned with painted images of the martyr’s passion. This section takes the cult as its subject in its own right: first the cult-center, the small Pontic town that a soldier-martyr made into a pilgrimage city, an episcopal and then metropolitan see, and a palladium against the barbarian; then the cult’s diffusion, by liturgy and relic and image and empire, from that town to the whole Orthodox world and to a city of the Latin West where Theodore was the first patron before St. Mark. Throughout, the discipline is the one the material requires — distinguishing what Gregory and the archaeologists secure from what the synaxarion and the Passio report and from what the relic-claims and the Venetian statue leave open.

Files in This Section

File Description
Euchaita, the Cult Center Euchaita in Helenopontus (modern Avkat/Beyözü, north-central Turkey) as the great cult-center: Gregory of Nyssa’s crowded shrine, painted images, and invocation against the barbarian (c. 379–381); the by-name Theodoroupolis and the rise to a metropolitan see; the annual feast and panegyris; Theodore as military protector of Pontus against Goth, Arab, and Persian; and the Avkat/Euchaita Archaeological Project (Haldon et al.). Secure data, traditional report, and legend kept distinct.
The Cult Across Byzantium The spread of the cult beyond Euchaita: the Constantinopolitan link through the kollyva miracle and Archbishop Eudoxios; Theodore as a widely-invoked soldier-saint with multiplying relics and dedications; the joint diffusion of the two Theodores (Tyro and Stratelates) and the blurring of their identities; and the Western cult, above all Venice, where San Teodoro was patron before St. Mark. Well-attested dedications kept apart from weakly-attested relic-claims (Brindisi and others), with [Disputed] notes on the Venetian identification.

See Also

References

  • Gregory of Nyssa. On St. Theodore (De Sancto Theodoro). In Patrologia Graeca, Vol. 46, cols. 736–748. Ed. J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1858.
  • Haldon, John, Hugh Elton, and James Newhard. Archaeology and Urban Settlement in Late Roman and Byzantine Anatolia: Euchaïta-Avkat-Beyözü. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
  • Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les légendes grecques des saints militaires. Paris: Picard, 1909.
  • Walter, Christopher. The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.
  • The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Ed. Alexander P. Kazhdan. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
  • The Lenten Triodion. Trans. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1978.