The Word and the Three Paths

The definition of the category: neomartys (νεομάρτυς), the “new” martyr who dies for Christ in the centuries after the ancient persecutions, and above all under Ottoman rule. This file sets out the three classic paths by which an Orthodox Christian came to martyrdom — the repentant apostate who publicly returned to Christ, the Christian falsely accused of having converted to Islam, and the open confessor — and notes the pan-Orthodox and religiously mixed character of the company, including Muslims who became Christians and died for it.

Tradition: Greek / Balkan Orthodox (Pan-Orthodox in scope)

The Word “Neomartyr”

The Greek neomartys (νεομάρτυς, plural neomartyres) means simply “new martyr” — one who wins the martyr’s crown not in the age of the pagan Roman persecutions but in the later centuries, chiefly under Islamic rule, and, in the strict and dominant usage of the tradition, above all during the Tourkokratia, the period of Ottoman domination from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century (Vaporis, Witnesses for Christ, SVS Press, 2000, Introduction; “New Martyr,” OrthodoxWiki, used only to locate the terminology). The “new” is not a diminishment but a claim: that the same grace which sustained the martyrs of Diocletian’s day was at work in the Ottoman centuries, producing witnesses who suffered, in St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite’s framing, “the same trials, torments, and death as the ancient martyrs” (Nikodemos and Makarios, Neon Martyrologion, Venice, 1799, Preface; see The Neon Martyrologion).

The term is broader than the Ottoman period alone — the repository’s St. Abo of Tbilisi, martyred under the Arab emirate of the eighth century, is a neomartyr in the wide sense — but in ordinary Orthodox use, and in this collection, “the neomartyrs” without further qualification means the Orthodox Christians martyred under the Ottomans, roughly 1453–1867. Their memory is not Greek only. The company gathered by Vaporis ranges across “Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Cyprus, Egypt, Ukraine, and Georgia,” a pan-Orthodox witness cutting across every ethnic boundary of the Rum millet (Vaporis, Witnesses for Christ, 2000, Introduction; see The Slavic and Balkan Neomartyrs).

The Three Classic Paths

The hagiographic tradition and the modern scholarship agree that the neomartyrs reached martyrdom by a small number of recurring routes. Three are classic, and they are worth distinguishing precisely, because the theological questions they raise are not identical.

1. The Apostate Who Returned

The first and, in the sources, the most frequent path is that of the Christian who had become a Muslim and then publicly returned to Christ. The conversion might have come about in many ways: by the pressure of the jizya and social advantage; by the devshirme in childhood; by a moment of anger, drink, or despair; by a rash word later construed as the profession of Islam; or by outright deception, as when a Christian was declared a convert on the testimony of Muslims (Krstić, Contested Conversions to Islam, Stanford University Press, 2011, ch. 5; Russell, “Christian identity, sharia law and voluntary martyrdom in the Ottoman Empire,” IJSCC 18, 2018). Under the prevailing law, such a person was now a Muslim, and a return to Christianity was apostasy from Islam — a capital crime. The martyr of this type typically went before the Muslim authority, declared that his conversion had been null or coerced, cast off the marks of Islam, and confessed Christ, knowing the sentence. This is the path of many of the best-known neomartyrs, and it is the path that most sharply raises the question of voluntary martyrdom, since the confessor in effect sought out the death that the law prescribed (see The Canonical Caution).

2. The Falsely Accused

The second path is that of the Christian falsely accused of having embraced Islam. In a legal order where a Muslim’s testimony against a Christian carried decisive weight and where the profession of the shahada (the Islamic confession of faith), once uttered or alleged, was in principle irrevocable, a Christian could find himself charged with having “become a Turk” — through a quarrel, a false witness, a misconstrued gesture, or a drunken word — and then required to make the conversion good or die as an apostate for refusing to (Krstić, Contested Conversions to Islam, 2011; Vaporis, Witnesses for Christ, 2000). The martyr of this type did not seek death and did not provoke it; he simply refused to confirm a conversion he had never truly made, and was killed for the refusal. This path raises none of the voluntary-martyrdom difficulty; it is martyrdom in the plainest ancient sense — the demand to deny Christ, and the “no” that costs a life.

3. The Open Confessor

The third path is that of the open confessor: the Christian who, never a Muslim and under no accusation, deliberately proclaimed Christ before Muslim authority, or publicly denounced Islam, and so brought upon himself the penalty for blasphemy or for “insulting the faith” (Russell, “Christian identity, sharia law and voluntary martyrdom,” 2018; Vaporis, Witnesses for Christ, 2000). Some of these were men seized by a burning desire for martyrdom; some were provoked by conscience or by a sense of having earlier failed under pressure. This path, like the first, raises the voluntary-martyrdom question in its sharpest form, and it is the reason the Athonite fathers developed a careful discipline for testing and preparing would-be martyrs, and the reason the ancient canons’ caution against provoked martyrdom became a live issue (see The Elders and the Training).

The Mixed and Pan-Orthodox Company

Two features of the company are easy to miss and important to state. First, the neomartyrs are not only Greek. The same acta that record a gardener of Athens record a silversmith of Kratovo burnt at Sofia, a youth of the Bulgarian and Serbian lands, and confessors from Cyprus, Egypt, the Danubian principalities, and beyond (Vaporis, Witnesses for Christ, 2000; see The Slavic and Balkan Neomartyrs). The collection treats them as the pan-Orthodox witness they are.

Second — and this is decisive for the tone the repository requires (METHODOLOGY §4.1) — the company includes Muslims who became Christians and died for it. Vaporis’s collection contains “a number of accounts of Muslims who converted to Orthodox Christianity and suffered a martyr’s death because they refused to return to Islam” (Vaporis, Witnesses for Christ, 2000, Introduction). The New Martyr Ahmet (Achmed) “the Calligrapher” of Constantinople, a well-born Ottoman official who embraced Christ and confessed him openly, is the most famous of these (Vaporis, Witnesses for Christ, 2000; the acta transmitted in the Neon Martyrologion). Their presence in the sanctoral forbids any reading of the neomartyrs as a witness against a people: what the martyr dies for, and against, is not a nation but the demand to deny Christ — the same demand, and the same refusal, whether the one who makes it is a Turk, a Greek, or an Arab (cf. St. Abo of Tbilisi: A Martyr for Christ, Not Against a People). The path toward Christ, at the cost of blood, ran in both directions across the boundary that the law made lethal.

References

Krstić, Tijana. Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. (The mechanisms of conversion and apostasy; ch. 5 on the neomartyr narratives.)
Nikodemos the Hagiorite, St., and St. Makarios of Corinth, comps. Neon Martyrologion. 1st ed. Venice, 1799. (The Preface; the theology of the “new” martyr.)
Russell, Norman. “Christian identity, sharia law and voluntary martyrdom in the Ottoman Empire.” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 18, nos. 2–3 (2018): 148–162. (The three paths and the apostasy law.)
Vaporis, Nomikos Michael. Witnesses for Christ: Orthodox Christian Neomartyrs of the Ottoman Period, 1437–1860. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (The definition; the pan-Orthodox range; the Muslim converts; Ahmet the Calligrapher.)