The Virgin-Martyrs and the Pressures on Women

The pressures specific to women, and the virgin-martyrs who died under them: St. Kyranna of Thessaloniki (d. 1751), desired by a Janissary tax-collector who tried to force her conversion and marriage, beaten to death in prison; St. Akylina of Zagliveri (d. 1764), pressed to Islam through her own apostate father, beaten to death at eighteen; and St. Argyre of Prousa (d. c. 1721), falsely claimed by a Muslim suitor and dead after long imprisonment in Constantinople. The forced-marriage, abduction, and harem context is stated soberly and as the sources present it, per METHODOLOGY §4.1.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (women neomartyrs of the Ottoman period)

The Shape of the Women’s Martyrdoms

The women neomartyrs died, for the most part, at a point where the general conversion-pressure of the Ottoman order took a form specific to their sex: marriage, abduction, and the household. A Muslim man might desire a Christian woman and press her to convert so that he could marry her; might claim, truly or falsely, that she had already promised to convert; might seize her, or have her seized, into his household or the harem, from which return to Christianity was apostasy and death. The women’s acta are therefore dominated not by a debate over doctrine but by the refusal to convert-and-marry — a chastity and a fidelity to Christ defended together, to death (Vaporis, Witnesses for Christ, SVS Press, 2000, across the women’s lives; Russell, “Christian identity, sharia law and voluntary martyrdom in the Ottoman Empire,” IJSCC 18, 2018).

This material must be handled with particular care under METHODOLOGY §4.1. The sources describe real coercion — of body as well as conscience — and the honest course is neither to sensationalize it nor to euphemize it away, but to state it soberly as the sources present it, and to keep the individual Muslim men who appear in the accounts as persons, not as ciphers of a people. What the martyr resists in these lives is a specific man’s specific demand, backed by a legal order that rewarded her yielding; what she dies for is fidelity to Christ, not enmity to Islam.

St. Kyranna of Thessaloniki (d. 1751)

Kyranna came from the village of Ossa, near Thessaloniki, a young Christian woman of great beauty and piety. According to her acta, a Janissary who collected the taxes of the district conceived a desire for her and pressed her to convert to Islam and marry him; she refused his flatteries, gifts, and threats alike. He had her arrested and imprisoned, and continued the pressure in prison, where other officials and the jailer joined in trying to break her. She would not yield. On 28 February 1751 the jailer, in a fury, beat her savagely and left her hanging, dead of the blows (Kyranna of Thessaloniki, acta; Sanidopoulos, “Holy New Martyr Kyranna of Thessaloniki (+1751),” johnsanidopoulos.com; “Kyranna of Thessaloniki,” commemorated 28 February). Her tradition holds that a light was seen over her body in the prison. She is a pure instance of the pattern: a woman killed for refusing a conversion-marriage, whose martyrdom was chastity and faith defended as one.

St. Akylina of Zagliveri (d. 1764)

Akylina was a young woman of the village of Zagliveri, near Thessaloniki (in some accounts she is styled “of Thessaloniki” from the region). Her martyrdom turns on a wound within her own family: her father had converted to Islam under pressure, and, according to the acta, having in a quarrel struck and killed a Muslim, he sought to save himself by promising the authorities that his daughter too would embrace Islam (Akylina, acta; the synaxaristic tradition, commemorated 27 September). When the day came, Akylina — then about eighteen — refused utterly, before the authorities and before her own apostate father, declaring that she was born a Christian and would die one. She was beaten so severely that she died of the injuries the next day, in 1764, her mother receiving her body (the acta; synaxaristic tradition). Her life joins the theme of the women’s martyrdoms to the theme of the returned or resisted apostasy that runs through the whole company: the father who fell, the daughter who would not.

St. Argyre of Prousa (d. c. 1721)

Argyre (Argyri) was a young married Christian woman of Prousa (Bursa) in Bithynia. According to her acta, a Muslim who desired her, rebuffed, falsely accused her of having agreed to convert to Islam; on that accusation she was seized and, refusing to make the alleged conversion good, was imprisoned at Constantinople, where she endured a long captivity — many years — of pressure and ill-usage, and where she died in prison, faithful to the end (Argyre of Prousa, acta; the synaxaristic tradition; commemorated 30 April). Her relics were afterward held to have been found incorrupt. [Disputed: the year of St. Argyre’s repose. The synaxaristic tradition variously gives c. 1721 (after some seventeen years’ imprisonment) and 1725; the neomartyrological resource literature lists “+1725” (commemorated 5 and 30 April). This collection reports the death as c. 1721–1725 and does not fix a single year.] Argyre’s case is the female counterpart of the “falsely accused” path (the second of the three; see The Word and the Three Paths): a woman destroyed not by any act of her own but by a rejected man’s lie, which the legal order at the conversion-boundary made lethal (see The Apostasy Law and the Count).

What the Women’s Witness Adds

The women neomartyrs sharpen a point that the men’s lives already make. The Ottoman order did not, in general, hunt Christians to death; it made the passage into Islam easy and rewarded, and the passage out of it a capital matter — and for women that passage ran above all through marriage and the household. The virgin-martyrs died at exactly that point, defending together the two things the pressure sought to take: their bodies and their baptism. Their acta also preserve, as the men’s often do, the note that §4.1 requires — that the coercion was specific and personal, a man and a demand, not a people at war with a faith — and that the martyr’s “no” was a “no” to that demand and a “yes” to Christ (Vaporis, Witnesses for Christ, 2000; Russell, “Christian identity,” 2018). Held beside St. Philothei, who died sheltering exactly such women, they complete the picture of the female witness of the Ottoman centuries: the great foundress who protected the endangered, and the young women who, unprotected, chose death over the demanded denial.

References

Nikodemos the Hagiorite, St., and St. Makarios of Corinth, comps. Neon Martyrologion. Venice, 1799. (The eighteenth-century women’s acta.)
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 conversion-and-marriage pressure on women.)
Sanidopoulos, John. “Holy New Martyr Kyranna of Thessaloniki (+1751)”; and the resource pages for Akylina and Argyre. johnsanidopoulos.com. (The dates and circumstances; underlying claims traced to the synaxaristic tradition and the Neon Martyrologion.)
Vaporis, Nomikos Michael. Witnesses for Christ: Orthodox Christian Neomartyrs of the Ottoman Period, 1437–1860. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (Kyranna, Akylina, Argyre, and the women’s acta.)