The Neon Martyrologion

The great collection that transmits the neomartyrs: the Neon Martyrologion (“New Martyrology”), compiled by St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite with St. Makarios of Corinth and first published at Venice in 1799. This file treats the book as a source — its purpose as literature of encouragement and resistance, its programmatic preface, and the earlier collections it gathered up: the Ephemerides of the Grand Logothete John Karyophylles and the neomartyrological collection of the monk Kaisarios Dapontes. The biography of St. Nikodemos is deferred to his own collection; here the book is the subject.

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

The Book and Its Makers

The Neon Martyrologion (Νέον Μαρτυρολόγιον, “New Martyrology”) is the foundational primary collection of the neomartyrs of the Ottoman period. It was compiled within the circle of the Kollyvades renewal on Mount Athos and first published at Venice in 1799 (Nikodemos and Makarios, Neon Martyrologion, Venice, 1799; cited in the hub essay, The Great Church in Captivity). Its principal editor was St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite (1749–1809), the great Athonite anthologist and canonist, working — as with the Philokalia seventeen years earlier — in close partnership with St. Makarios (Notaras) of Corinth (1731–1805), who assembled materials and set the projects in motion (Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, IBMGS, 1974; and the fuller account in St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite, whose biography this file defers). The same two saints who gave the Orthodox world its great anthology of prayer gave it, in the same years, its great anthology of martyrdom — a pairing that is itself a statement about the Kollyvades program, which sought at once the recovery of inner prayer and the strengthening of a people under pressure (see The Elders and the Training).

The Neon Martyrologion gathers the acta — the passion-narratives — of the neomartyrs then known, with the liturgical offices for their commemoration, and it stands at the head of the whole tradition: it is the book from which the later synaxaria, the modern collections (including Vaporis’s Witnesses for Christ), and the popular devotion overwhelmingly descend (Vaporis, Witnesses for Christ, SVS Press, 2000, on the Martyrologion as the fountainhead).

The Purpose: Encouragement and Witness

The Neon Martyrologion was not compiled as a work of disinterested history, and to read it as such is to misread it. It was literature of encouragement and resistance, made to strengthen the faith of an oppressed and pressured people by demonstrating that the age of martyrdom was not past — that the Church still produced saints who bore, in Nikodemos’s own framing, “the same trials, torments, and death as the ancient martyrs” (Nikodemos and Makarios, Neon Martyrologion, Venice, 1799, Preface; and the summary in the resource literature on St. Nikodemos, e.g. Sanidopoulos, “Saint Nikodemos the Hagiorite (1749–1809)”). Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos, reading the collection in the same spirit, describes it as functioning as resistance literature for a subjugated Church — a book that told the enslaved that they were not abandoned and that their faith was worth a life (Metropolitan Hierotheos, “Saint Kosmas the Aitolos and the New Martyrs,” in Sanidopoulos, 2022).

The preface famously offers a set of reasons why divine Providence raised up the neomartyrs in that age — among them, to be a renewal and confirmation of the faith, a reproach to the unbelieving, an encouragement to the wavering, and a glory to the Church in her humiliation (Nikodemos and Makarios, Neon Martyrologion, 1799, Preface; discussed in Russell, “Christian identity, sharia law and voluntary martyrdom in the Ottoman Empire,” IJSCC 18, 2018). This theological program is essential to reading the collection rightly under METHODOLOGY §3.5: the Martyrologion tells the martyrs’ stories in order to edify, and its selection, shaping, and emphasis serve that end. That does not make its accounts false — many rest on close contemporary knowledge — but it does mean that the book is a devotional witness before it is an archive, and its claims are pinned here to it as such, not certified as independent forensic fact (see The Genre and What Survives).

The Predecessor Collections

The Neon Martyrologion did not spring from nothing. Nikodemos and Makarios were gathering, editing, and completing a tradition of neomartyrological compilation that already ran back more than a century, and naming its sources is part of taking the collection seriously as a source.

John Karyophylles (Ioannes Karyophylles). The earliest layer of the systematic recording of the neomartyrs is associated with John Karyophylles, the Grand Logothete of the Ecumenical Patriarchate (a leading lay official of the Church) in the seventeenth century, who kept Ephemerides — records or diaries — in which the lives and deaths of the neomartyrs of his own time were set down. St. Nikodemos drew his information for a number of the earlier neomartyrs from the Ephemerides of Karyophylles (as the resource literature on Nikodemos’s sources reports; Sanidopoulos, “Saint Nikodemos the Hagiorite (1749–1809)”). Karyophylles thus represents something close to contemporary, Constantinopolitan, patriarchal record-keeping of the martyrdoms — the firmest end of the source-tradition.

Kaisarios Dapontes (1713–1784). The most important eighteenth-century predecessor is the monk Kaisarios (Konstantinos) Dapontes, one of the most prolific Greek writers of the century, a monk of the Xeropotamou monastery on Athos, who compiled a substantial neomartyrological collection of his own. Dapontes drew on the earlier collection of the Athonite Ionas Kausokalyvites (Jonah of the Kausokalyvia skete), and added the martyria of a number of little-known neomartyrs whom he had personally encountered — notably during a period of imprisonment at Constantinople, where he met confessors at first hand (Chatzopoulos and others on “Kaisarios Dapontes’s autograph Neomartyrological Collection”; and the scholarship on Dapontes, Kaisarios Dapontes (1713–1784): Orthodoxy and Education between Mount Athos and the Danubian Principalities). Dapontes’s collection is one of the principal channels through which the eighteenth-century martyrdoms reached Nikodemos.

The line, then, runs: contemporary patriarchal and Athonite record-keeping (Karyophylles, Kausokalyvites) → the eighteenth-century compilations (Dapontes) → the great synthesis of Nikodemos and Makarios (the Neon Martyrologion, 1799) → the modern scholarly collections (Vaporis, 2000, and the synaxaristic tradition). Naming this chain is what allows a claim about a given neomartyr to be pinned to its layer, in the manner the repository applies to all hagiography (METHODOLOGY §3.5; cf. the layered inventory in St. Xenia: Methodology).

What the Collection Is, and Is Not

The Neon Martyrologion is, for the neomartyrs, what a great synaxarion is for the ancient saints: the authoritative gathering of the Church’s memory, shaped for edification, standing at the head of the tradition and drawing on genuinely early materials. It is not a critical edition of court records, and it does not claim to be. Its editors were saints and pastors compiling the acts of confessors for the good of the faithful, and they worked with the sources they had — contemporary diaries, eyewitness reports, earlier compilations, and the living memory of communities that had seen a neighbor die (Vaporis, Witnesses for Christ, 2000; Russell, “Christian identity,” 2018). The next file asks what such a source can and cannot establish, and how the answer changes where the Ottoman archival record can be laid alongside it.

See Also

References

  • Cavarnos, Constantine. St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite (Modern Orthodox Saints, vol. 3). Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1974. (Nikodemos and Makarios; the compilation of the Martyrologion.)
  • Nikodemos the Hagiorite, St., and St. Makarios of Corinth, comps. Neon Martyrologion [New Martyrology]. 1st ed. Venice, 1799. (The collection; the Preface and its reasons for the neomartyrs.)
  • 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 Martyrologion and its purpose.)
  • Sanidopoulos, John. “Saint Nikodemos the Hagiorite (1749–1809)” and “Saint Kosmas the Aitolos and the New Martyrs” (homily of Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos). johnsanidopoulos.com. (Used to locate the roles of Karyophylles and Dapontes as Nikodemos’s sources, and the resistance-literature framing; the underlying claims traced to the Martyrologion and the scholarship.)
  • Vaporis, Nomikos Michael. Witnesses for Christ. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (The Martyrologion as the fountainhead of the modern collections.)