The Feast and the Cult

The neomartyrs in the Church’s worship: the collective Synaxis of the Holy New Martyrs, kept on the Third Sunday after Pentecost, for which St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite composed a common service; the individual feast-days; and the material and popular cult — relics, icons, shrines, and the neomartyrs’ large place in the piety of modern Greece and the Balkans, including the recent translations of relics and the national honors paid them.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Collective Synaxis

The neomartyrs are honored not only on their individual days but together, in a collective commemoration. The Synaxis of the Holy New Martyrs who suffered under Ottoman rule is kept on the Third Sunday after Pentecost, and it was for this feast that St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite composed a common service (Akolouthia) in praise of all the neomartyrs — set within, and issued alongside, his Neon Martyrologion (the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of the Turkish Yoke, Third Sunday after Pentecost; Nikodemos, common service for the New Martyrs; and the liturgical tradition summarized at “Synaxis of the Holy New Martyrs under the Turkish Yoke,” and the service text preserved in the Athonite and Greek usage). The placement is telling: the First Sunday after Pentecost is the Synaxis of All Saints, and the neomartyrs are given their own collective Sunday close behind it, gathering into one liturgical act the whole company that no calendar of individual days could contain — including the “countless” unrecorded whom the Church honors without enumerating (see Numbers and What Can Be Verified). The feast is kept especially in the Athonite and Greek tradition that produced the Martyrologion, and the neomartyrs are also gathered into the various national and local “All Saints” commemorations — of Mount Athos, of the several Orthodox lands — under which their memory is carried in the service-books.

That St. Nikodemos both compiled the collection and composed the service is a single fact with two faces: the neomartyrs entered the Church’s worship and the Church’s memory through the same Kollyvades labor, and the feast is, in effect, the Neon Martyrologion turned into prayer (see The Neon Martyrologion). The liturgical cult and the documentary collection are one enterprise of the eighteenth-century renewal.

The Individual Feasts

Alongside the collective Synaxis, each neomartyr is commemorated on his or her own day, and the individual feasts are the living texture of the cult. Among those treated in this collection: St. George of Kratovo on 11 February; St. Philothei of Athens on 19 February; St. Kyranna of Thessaloniki on 28 February; St. Argyre of Prousa on 30 April; St. Nicholas of Sofia on 17 May; St. Theodore of Byzantium on 17 February; St. Michael Paknanas on 30 June (though martyred 9 July); St. Akylina of Zagliveri on 27 September; St. Constantine of Hydra on 14 November; St. George of Ioannina on 17 January; and St. Cosmas of Aetolia on 24 August (the days as fixed in the synaxaristic tradition and the individual acta; see the files in Sections 04–05 and 07, and St. Cosmas of Aetolia). Each day carries its own hymnography, and in the martyr’s home place its own local observance, procession, and, where relics survive, its own reliquary devotion.

Relics, Icons, and Shrines

The material cult of the neomartyrs is vigorous and, in the nature of the case, often centered on relics recovered at the moment of martyrdom. Because many martyrs were burnt and their ashes scattered — St. George of Kratovo on the pyre, St. Nicholas of Sofia’s body burnt after his killing — the surviving relics are frequently partial, a portion snatched from the fire or the scattering by a watching Christian, and treasured for exactly that reason (Orthodox Church in America, “Great Martyr Nicholas of Sofia”; Serbian Orthodox Church, “The Holy Martyr George of Kratovo”; see The Slavic and Balkan Neomartyrs). St. Philothei’s relics rest in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Athens, of which she is a patron; the neomartyrs’ relics are distributed among the monasteries of Athos, the churches of their home cities, and the shrines built at the places of their deaths (the modern veneration; and the individual cults). Their icons follow the martyric type — the palm, the cross, the instrument of death — and often depict the local martyrs together, as in the joint images of the two Sofia martyrs (see The Slavic and Balkan Neomartyrs).

The cult has continued to grow and move in the present. In 2024 a Bulgarian hierarch gifted relics of St. George of Kratovo to the martyr’s hometown in North Macedonia — a living translation of relics across the modern Balkan Churches (OrthoChristian.com, 2024). St. George of Ioannina has been honored in modern Greece well beyond his region, recognized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate and taken as a patron of the Greek Presidential Guard (Sanidopoulos, “Life and Veneration of Saint George the New Martyr of Ioannina”; see The Representative Male Neomartyrs). St. Cosmas of Aetolia, glorified in 1961, is among the most beloved saints of the modern Greek and Albanian Churches, his shrine restored in Albania (see St. Cosmas of Aetolia).

The Neomartyrs in Modern Piety

The neomartyrs occupy a large and particular place in the piety of modern Greece and the Balkans, and understanding that place requires the honesty of Section 08. On the one hand, their veneration is genuinely popular and genuinely devotional: they are the local saints of a hundred towns, the patrons of trades (St. Michael Paknanas of gardeners) and cities (St. Philothei of Athens), the confessors whose fidelity is held up in preaching and catechesis as the pattern of a faith worth a life. On the other hand, their memory has at times been enlisted in the national narrative — read as heroes of a religious-national resistance to the “Turkish yoke” — a framing that the historiography has qualified and that the Church’s own scholars have criticized (see The National Narrative and the Ottomanist Revision). The collection’s closing counsel, in keeping with §4.1, is that the neomartyrs are best venerated as what they are: not as symbols of a nation’s grievance, but as witnesses to Christ — men and women who, at the boundary where the law turned lethal, would not deny him, and whom the Church keeps, one feast-day at a time, as her own. Venerated so, they belong not to a nation but to the whole Church, as their pan-Orthodox company already declares.

See Also

• The Neon Martyrologion — the collection that became, in the same hands, the feast’s service
• The Representative Male Neomartyrs and The Slavic and Balkan Neomartyrs — the individual cults and their feast-days
• Numbers and What Can Be Verified — the “countless” whom the collective Synaxis honors
• The National Narrative and the Ottomanist Revision — the national framing of the cult, held honestly
• The Neomartyrs and the New Martyrs of Russia — the sibling company and the closing assessment

References

• Nikodemos the Hagiorite, St. Common service (Akolouthia) for the Holy New Martyrs, in the Neon Martyrologion. Venice, 1799. (The service for the Synaxis on the Third Sunday after Pentecost.)
• Orthodox Church in America. “Great Martyr Nicholas of Sofia (Bulgaria).” oca.org. (The relics recovered from the burning.)
• OrthoChristian.com. “Bulgarian hierarch gifts relics of St. George of Kratovo to the martyr’s hometown in North Macedonia.” 2024. (The 2024 translation of relics.)
• Sanidopoulos, John. “Life and Veneration of Saint George the New Martyr of Ioannina (+1838)”; “Synaxis of the Holy New Martyrs under the Turkish Yoke.” johnsanidopoulos.com. (The feast on the Third Sunday after Pentecost; the modern veneration of George of Ioannina.)
• Serbian Orthodox Church. “The Holy Martyr George of Kratovo.” spc.rs. (The relics and cult.)
• Vaporis, Nomikos Michael. Witnesses for Christ. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (The individual commemorations.)