In the late Roman period Amaseia was one of the principal cities of Pontus, and Christianity took root there early, in a region where few such centres existed in the interior of Anatolia. The city's Christian past can be traced through three separate strands: the surviving sermons of Bishop Asterius, who preached from the pulpit at the end of the fourth century; the memory of Bishop Basil, put to death under Licinius; and the story of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, which arose in the neighbouring country. All three are associated with Amaseia, but they differ greatly in their value as historical evidence. When one adds the cult of the soldier Theodore Tiron, said to have been martyred in the city, a handful of archaeological finds brought to light in recent years, and the account of Amasya's own historian, Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin Yasar, woven out of local tradition, the early Christian age of Amaseia becomes a layered picture resting both on documents and on memory.

The Rise of Amaseia as a Christian City

After the era of the Pontic kings, Amaseia passed under Roman rule and kept the character of a rocky, walled city that Strabo had described well into the imperial age. According to some sources it was the seat of a Christian metropolitan bishop from the third century onward. When it became the capital of the late Roman province of Helenopontus, the sees of Amisus, Andrapa, Euchaita, Ibora, Sinope, Zaliche and Zela were counted among the suffragans of the metropolis. In the tenth century the metropolis of Amaseia ranked eleventh among those of the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

In his Amasya Tarihi (History of Amasya), written in the early twentieth century, Hüsameddin places the visible emergence of Christianity in the city at a later date. In his view Christianity appeared in Amasya only at the beginning of the fourth century, and he therefore dismisses as "fancy" the Greek and Armenian traditions that disciples of the apostles came to the city and preached there in the first and second centuries. The same work lists among Amasya's old epithets "Rûmiyye-i Suğrâ", Little Rome. Hüsameddin explains the name by comparison with Rome's place in the Christian world: Amasya, he says, was both the administrative centre and the centre of "mesîhiyyet", Christianity, for a province that took in Pontus and Cappadocia. The gap between the records that speak of a metropolis from the third century and Hüsameddin's dating to the early fourth shows how scattered the evidence for the early period is.

This order began to unravel after the twelfth century, when Turkish incursions started to affect the Anatolian interior. When Amasya fell to the Danishmendids in 1075, some seven centuries of Byzantine rule came to an end. According to a Danishmendid history quoted by Hüsameddin, Vengliyus, who succeeded the patriarch Kâyrılus after the latter died during the siege, obtained permission from Melik Ahmed Danişmend Gazi when he entered the city and went on living in the old church and patriarchal residence for a long time. Hüsameddin connects the name of the city's Veng quarter with this patriarch and notes that the area appears as "Vengiyüs" in the endowment deed of Halifet Gazi and in certain boundary documents. He also records Greek inscriptions on some of the stones of the Torumtay and Halifet Gazi buildings; it appears that a church and patriarchal residence once stood east of Veng and that, after falling into ruin following the conquest, their stones were used to build a madrasa, a mosque and a tomb (türbe).

The church nevertheless tried to preserve its organization. Callistus, appointed in 1315 to a long-vacant metropolis, could not enter the city during a violent Turkmen attack in 1317. With the permission of Patriarch John XIII the see was moved to Limnia, which lay within the Empire of Trebizond and was thought safer. The arrangement was repeated in 1384, when the bishop of Limnia temporarily administered the metropolis. The Orthodox metropolis of Amaseia remained active until the population exchange of 1923; in 1922 it counted about 40,000 Christians, half of them recorded as Greeks. The last metropolitan was Germanos Karavangelis. Today both the Orthodox and the Catholic churches list Amaseia as a titular see.

Material Traces of the Early Christian Period

A material trace of the city's early Christian period came to light in 2013. At the Küp Deresi site near the village of Yavru, in the central district, where an illegal dig had taken place, the Hitit University Centre for Black Sea Archaeology carried out a rescue excavation. It uncovered a mosaic floor decorated with geometric figures, with a central medallion showing an apple tree, four apples and, beneath them, three partridges. After it was lifted the mosaic was placed under protection, kept in storage for a time following technical work, and later put on display in the Amasya Museum.

The accounts of what the find actually was do not agree. Some reports say the mosaic covered about twenty-four square metres and belonged to the floor of a chapel, while others give a size of twenty square metres and date the mosaic to the Roman period, some 1,700 to 1,800 years ago. One report calls the building a "Roman temple"; according to another view, voiced by the city's tourism circles, the mosaic was laid in the house of a wealthy landowner of the time, and the house was converted into a church in the Byzantine period and later abandoned. If this last view is correct, the conversion of a Roman-period dwelling to Christian worship would be a small example of how old buildings in rural Amaseia were adapted to the new faith; but until an excavation report is published, the original function of the building cannot be stated with certainty. The museum presents the mosaic as the only ancient mosaic in the world to depict an apple tree.

A sarcophagus displayed in the garden of the Amasya Museum also sheds light on the period. According to the study published in 2018 by the art historian Esra Keskin, this lidless, boat-shaped sarcophagus, carved from a single block of limestone, was purchased from the village of Aksalur and brought to the museum in 1983. Only its front face is decorated; on a surface worked in both relief and carving there are human and animal heads, vine and ivy branches, geometric motifs and a cross. In Keskin's reading the human and animal heads reflect pagan influence and the cross reflects Christianity directly. Vine and ivy were common in Christian art from an early date because of their symbolic meaning, but their appearance here alongside pagan figures is striking. The piece is a witness, in the Amasya countryside, to an age of transition in which the new religion had not yet fully formed its own artistic language and old motifs met new symbols on the same surface.

The Martyrdom of Bishop Basil

Another bishop of Amaseia, Basil, died for his faith, and the churches commemorate him on 26 April. One of the earliest records of Basil is in Jerome's Latin version of Eusebius's Chronicle, which notes under the 275th Olympiad (321-324) that Basil, bishop of Amaseia in Pontus, was martyred under Licinius. The same name appears among the signatures of the bishops who attended the councils of Ancyra and Neocaesarea (314). Eusebius also relates that under Licinius Christians were treated with great cruelty, especially in Amaseia and the other cities of Pontus, and that the governor inflicted the ordinary punishments of criminals on several bishops. Athanasius names Basil of Pontus among the bishops of the early fourth century who held that the Son was of like substance with the Father; the reference is evidently to the martyr-bishop of Amaseia.

The statement of Philostorgius that Basil attended the Council of Nicaea arises from a confusion, since among the signatures at Nicaea the bishop of Amaseia appears as Eutychianus. The Acts of Basil's martyrdom, attributed to an eyewitness, a presbyter named John, are not considered authentic. The narrative is entirely legendary. Even so, the life still read in the Orthodox Church today rests largely on this text, and it paints a vivid picture, whether true or not, of the Christian community of Amaseia in the early fourth century.

The Story of Glaphyra

According to hagiographic tradition, Licinius had set his eyes on young Glaphyra, a maidservant of his wife, Empress Constantia, who came from a noble Italian family. Glaphyra turned to the empress for help; Constantia dressed her in men's clothes, gave her a large sum in gold, silver and precious stones and sent her secretly away from Nicomedia, while the palace was told that the girl had lost her mind and lay at death's door. After a long journey Glaphyra reached Amaseia and found shelter in the house of a devout Christian. Bishop Basil visited her and advised her to live in seclusion, so as not to draw the attention of the city's ruler and bring trouble on the local community.

The most striking feature of the story from Amaseia's point of view is that Basil was building a church in the city at the time. Glaphyra gave all her money to the work and wrote to Constantia asking for more to finish it. The empress granted the request, but the letter fell into the hands of Licinius. The enraged emperor ordered the ruler of Amaseia to send the bishop and the girl to Nicomedia. By the time the order arrived Glaphyra had died, and Basil was sent alone, in chains. Two deacons, Parthenius and Theotimus, followed him, and in Nicomedia they lodged with a Christian named Elpidophorus.

At the trial Licinius accused the bishop of hiding Glaphyra and promised him pardon and honours if he would sacrifice to the gods. When Basil refused he was beaten and then beheaded. Soldiers put the body and the head in a boat and threw them into the open sea at separate places. According to the story an angel appeared three times to Elpidophorus, telling him that Basil awaited his friends at Sinope; on the way to Sinope the body was caught in fishermen's nets, its head miraculously rejoined to it, with only the mark of the sword left on the neck. The relics were brought to Amaseia and buried in the church Basil himself had built.

The feast days also depend on this story, though the sources diverge. In one account Basil was beheaded on 28 March, his relics were found in the sea twenty-five days later and he was buried in Amaseia five days after that, on 26 April; the translation of the relics is also commemorated on 30 April. Another synaxarion account places the martyrdom on 26 April and the finding of the relics on 30 April. Basil is reported to have died at Nicomedia in 322. His skull is kept at the Docheiariou Monastery on Mount Athos and his hands at the Iviron Monastery. Tradition presents John, the priest of Nicomedia who wrote Basil's life, as someone who visited the bishop in prison and witnessed his execution; some scholars, on the other hand, attribute a life of Basil to his successor Asterius. Basil's historical existence and his martyrdom under Licinius therefore rest on reliable records, while details such as the story of Glaphyra, the building of the church and the finding of the relics off Sinope belong to tradition.

Bishop Asterius and His Sermons

His Life

Asterius was born in Cappadocia and was made bishop of Amaseia between 380 and 390. His birth is given as about 350 and his death as about 410, though neither date is certain. He is known to have practised as a lawyer before becoming a bishop. The one fact about his life that is known almost for certain he tells himself: his principal teacher was a Scythian who in his youth had been sold as a slave to a schoolmaster of Antioch. His master educated him with great care, the Scythian won a great name among both Greeks and Romans, and Asterius was trained directly under him. He is thought to have made a careful study of Demosthenes at some point in his career and to have become an orator of note himself. He was a younger contemporary of Amphilochius of Iconium and belonged to the generation after the great Cappadocian Fathers; he was also a contemporary of John Chrysostom. He should not be confused with the Arian polemicist of the same name, Asterius the Sophist.

The limits of his episcopate are unknown. Galusha Anderson, who translated his sermons into English in 1904, writes that he preached in the last quarter of the fourth century and perhaps briefly in the fifth, then passed from view, and that when, where and how he died is unknown. Anderson describes Asterius as a faithful pastor who served his flock from house to house and whose life matched his teaching. Because so little is known of his life, the sermons themselves become almost the only written witness to everyday life in Amaseia at the end of the fourth century.

The Surviving Texts

Sixteen homilies and panegyrics on the martyrs survive from Asterius. Photius, in his Bibliotheca (codex 271), mentions about ten further sermons that have not come down to us; he says that one of these lost sermons told him Asterius lived to a great age. The number of his works varies from source to source: an early twentieth-century Catholic encyclopedia credits him with twenty-one homilies, while the 1904 translators speak of between twenty and thirty texts, noting that some scholars doubted the authenticity of all of them but that most are in all probability his. Two sermons, on penance and on the beginning of the fasts, were at one time attributed to Gregory of Nyssa. Some of the texts were translated into medieval Latin, Georgian and Church Slavonic.

The New Year Sermon

The sermons show familiarity with the classics and contain an unusual concentration of concrete detail about everyday life. One of them was delivered on 1 January 400 and attacks the pagan customs and excesses of the New Year festival. In it Asterius answers point by point the arguments Libanius had made in favour of the same feast. Together with another reference to his great age, the date of this sermon is the main clue to the chronology of his career: the text alludes to the fate of Eutropius, who had fallen from the consulship the year before, an event dated to 399. It is also known as the earliest surviving New Year sermon.

The New Year that Asterius describes is a street festival competing with the feasts of the church. He opens by saying that part of his congregation has stopped coming to church. In his view the purpose of the festival is unclear, and the legends told about it contradict one another. The greeting is half-hearted, and the kiss is the prelude to the gift; the mouth is kissed, but it is the coin that is loved. Gifts flow from hand to hand, from lower to higher, and end up in the purses of the most eminent. Asterius compares the flow to streams merging into larger ones, then into rivers and finally into the sea. Vagrants and stage performers gather in bands before the houses, besiege the gates of officials in particular, shouting and clapping until the householder throws out whatever money he has, even what is not his own.

The most vivid scenes of the sermon concern different parts of the city's population. Children go from house to house offering fruit covered with silver tinsel and receive gifts of twice the value in return; Asterius complains that they thus learn the habits of trade at a tender age. For the farmers, the city on the feast day is a place to be avoided: those caught inside are attacked by drunkards, robbed of what they carry and mocked. Soldiers spend their entire pay on a single night's revel, mount a chariot as if on a stage and ridicule the authorities; one of them puts on women's clothes, does up his hair like a woman, takes a distaff full of wool and raises his voice to a treble. The consuls, too, squander their wealth on charioteers, flute-players, dancers, beast-fighters and feed for the beasts; Asterius says the only aim of it all is to have their names written on the year's contracts, since contracts were dated by the names of the consuls of the year. The sermon ends by listing the bitter ends of statesmen who had recently fallen from favour.

On Wealth, Dress and Marriage

One of the most striking of his texts is the first sermon, on the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. His criticism of the clothes of the wealthy gives direct information about dress in late antique Anatolia. Asterius speaks of fabrics woven with biblical scenes and animal figures, including the wedding at Cana, the paralytic carrying his bed, the blind man healed with clay and the sinful woman at the feet of Jesus, and he notes that some wearers regarded such garments as a sign of piety. He urges instead that these clothes be sold and the money given to the poor, and that the image of Christ be carried in the soul rather than on one's robes. The art historian Arnold Hauser, drawing on these lines, mistakenly called Asterius an iconoclast. In fact his objection was directed not at images but at the expense and ostentation of such clothing.

His sermon on divorce opens another window, onto family life in Amaseia. Asterius begins by saying that Saturday and Sunday, two days that come round together each week, gather the people in church, and that the previous day's sermon is still ringing in his ears; the remark shows that the bishop preached on two consecutive days. He then interprets the Gospel passage in which the Pharisees ask Jesus whether a man may put away his wife for any cause, and he addresses the men of his congregation: those who change their wives as readily as their garments, who build bridal chambers as easily as booths for a feast, who marry money and deal in women, who write a bill of divorce at the slightest provocation. For Asterius marriage ends only with death or adultery. Referring also to the agreements made over the dowry, he stresses that marriage is a bond of both law and nature. The sermon suggests that divorce had become commonplace among the city's wealthier classes.

The Euphemia Homily and the Dispute over Icons

Asterius's name also appears in the Byzantine dispute over images. His eleventh homily is devoted to the martyrdom of Euphemia of Chalcedon and contains a detailed description (ekphrasis) of a painting displayed in a church near her tomb. Asterius compares the picture with the works of the famous Hellenistic painters Euphranor and Timomachus. The painting, evidently on canvas, shows a manner of death (by fire) that differs from other accounts in the tradition, which has puzzled scholars. How closely the description matched an actual work is also disputed. The text was quoted twice at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, in defence of the veneration of icons. At the council, with a play on his name, Asterius was called "a bright star illumining the minds of all". A bishop of Amaseia thus ended up among the witnesses in a debate that divided the Christian world. His feast day is 30 October.

The Later Life of His Writings

The later life of Asterius's writings is also worth noting. Fourteen of his sermons were printed with a Latin translation in volume 40 of Migne's Patrologia Graeca, and two more, found by M. Bauer in a manuscript on Mount Athos, were first published by A. Bretz in 1914. Eleven of the sermons have been translated into German. An English translation appeared in 1904 as Ancient Sermons for Modern Times. When Galusha Anderson, professor of homiletics at the University of Chicago, praised Asterius's sermons in his lectures on the history of preaching, his student Edgar Johnson Goodspeed translated from the Greek the five whose authenticity was least in doubt, and the two worked over the text together: The Rich Man and Lazarus, The Unjust Steward, Against Covetousness, On the Festival of the Calends and On Divorce. Copies of the book became very rare, and the text was republished online only in 2003. Philip Rubens, brother of the painter Peter Paul Rubens, also prepared an edition of the homilies, which was included in a memorial volume published after his death in 1611. The Greek text of the first fourteen homilies, with an introduction and notes, was published by C. Datema in Leiden in 1970.

Theodore Tiron

Another name in Amaseia's Christian memory is Saint Theodore Tiron, a soldier said to have been martyred during Diocletian's Great Persecution. According to tradition, Theodore was a legionary whose unit wintered in Pontus; he refused to take part in a pagan sacrifice and was burned to death after setting fire to the temple of Cybele. His death is dated to 306, while the Golden Legend gives 287. His cult is documented by the encomium Gregory of Nyssa delivered in the winter of 381, and he later became one of the principal military saints of Byzantium. His life and cult are treated in detail in a separate article.

In Hüsameddin's account Theodore's story takes a different shape. Drawing on general histories and on Şemseddin Sâmi's Kâmûsu'l-A'lâm, he writes that under Licinius a Roman officer in Amasya named Te'odor became a Christian through the persuasion of the famous priest Asteris, who managed the affairs of the city's Christians. After an incident between Christians and pagans, Te'odor and the Christians with him destroyed the pagans' temples and killed many people. The pagans then rallied round a leader named Otas and killed Te'odor and his followers in December 307. Hüsameddin adds that the Christians counted Te'odor among the saints and held a feast in his name every December. The date of this account (307) and its making the saint a pupil of Asterius cannot be reconciled with the date of 306 in church sources or with the fact that Asterius lived at the end of the fourth century; it may be supposed that Hüsameddin merged names from two different generations into a single story.

Amasya's Saints in Local Historiography

Hüsameddin's Amasya Tarihi tells the story of early Christian Amaseia from a viewpoint very different from that of the church sources. According to him, after Constantine the Great defeated Licinius and became sole emperor, Pilinus (Pilin), one of the commanders of the former governor of Bithynia who had supported Christianity, was appointed governor of Pontus, and the priest Asteris became the first metropolitan of Amasya. Hüsameddin writes that the two used coercion to convert the pagans, and that Asteris both wrote books on Christian doctrine and used his influence on the faith's behalf, which is why he entered the ranks of the saints as "Saint Asteris". During his time as metropolitan, Amasya, already the provincial capital, also became the centre of Christianity, sending priests and preachers in every direction; Hüsameddin therefore calls the city a "nest of clergy". He adds that Asteris lived to a great age, was held in esteem equal to a patriarch in his day, died about 271 years before the Hijra, that is around 351, and was buried in what is now the Çukur Kilise (the Sunken Church).

This account conflicts with the Asterius of the church sources on several points. Asterius's episcopate began between 380 and 390 and he was still preaching in 400; the date of death Hüsameddin gives falls thirty years before the start of that episcopate. In Constantine's time the bishop of Amaseia, according to the signatures at Nicaea, was Eutychianus. It may be supposed that the Asteris whom Hüsameddin presents as "the first metropolitan" is the Asterius of church history, carried back to an earlier period in local memory; this is an inference. Even so, the account shows that the name of Asterius was still remembered in Amasya at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Legend of the Çukur Kilise

Hüsameddin also records a legend that he says was widespread among the Christians of Amasya. In the Çukur Kilise, it ran, there lived a priest who had been one of the disciples of Christ and had grown so old that over the years his body had shrunk to the size of a crow; he was kept in a basket of cotton and was still alive. At the beginning of every year he would lift his head once and ask the chief priest of the church whether the fish had climbed the poplar and whether the Lord Jesus had come; on being told no, he would say he still had time, lie down again and sleep for another year. Hüsameddin notes that the Christians told the story as a miracle, yet nobody had ever seen the basket or the living priest, and that although he investigated its origin he found nothing beyond hearsay. In his view the tale must have been composed to keep alive the memory of Asteris, Teodor and Pelin, who had spread Christianity in Amasya. In the same work the Çukur Kilise is also mentioned as a building in the Eski Kethüdâ quarter, adjoining the Kâşifiye Madrasa.

Ayvasıl and Veng

East of Amasya, on the south bank of the Yeşilırmak and stretching as far as the old match factory, lies an area the townspeople call "Ayvasıl" or "Ayavasıl". Hüsameddin links the name to a magnificent "Ayavasilus Church" which he says was built there, and notes that "aya" means "saint" in Greek. He presents Ayavasilus, however, as one of the patriarchs who governed Amasya in the Byzantine period. The name "Ayavasilus" clearly reflects the Greek pronunciation of "Saint Basil"; since tradition holds that the relics of the martyr-bishop Basil were buried in Amaseia in the church he himself had built, it may be supposed that the name Ayvasıl derives from a church dedicated to this saint. The connection is not confirmed by any document and is an inference. In the memoirs of Osman Fevzi Olcay, Ayvasıl appears as one of the city's vineyard districts, next to the Savadiye quarters.

For the Veng quarter, too, Hüsameddin records two different Christian traditions. According to the Greeks, Yovannis, a disciple of the apostle Peter, came to call the people of Amasya to the faith and made water flow from a rock; according to the Armenians, the apostle Ohannis hid from his enemies in Amasya on his way to Kayseri and, when thirsty, drew water from the rock he leaned against. Hüsameddin finds neither tradition adequate to explain the name, and, recalling that Christianity appeared in Amasya only at the beginning of the fourth century, rejects these stories set in the first and second centuries. Another tradition he quotes from the history of Mustafa Vâzıh Efendi relates that the great church at Veng was the reference point for all the churches of Anatolia, and that the patriarch "Dağatur", who lived there, was killed by the Greeks after he confirmed the letter the Prophet Muhammad had sent to the Byzantine emperor. None of these stories is supported by a contemporary source, but they show how the Christian past of Amasya was remembered through its place names.

The Forty Martyrs of Sebaste

The Forty Martyrs belong to Sebaste (modern Sivas), not to Amaseia. The events took place in the neighbouring country, on the borders of Pontus and Lesser Armenia, during the same Licinian persecution, and for this reason the story is often mentioned together with the religious world of Amaseia. The persecution that led to Basil's martyrdom and the death of the Forty Martyrs took place under the same emperor, a few years apart.

The Forty Martyrs were soldiers serving in the Legio XII Fulminata (the Thunderbolt Legion). They were put to death near Sebaste in about 320, during the persecutions of Licinius, who intensified the pressure on Christians in the East after 316. The earliest account is the homily Bishop Basil of Caesarea (370-379) delivered on the martyrs' feast day. The commemoration is therefore older than Basil himself, who spoke of them some fifty or sixty years after their deaths.

According to Basil, forty soldiers who openly confessed that they were Christians were condemned by the governor to be exposed naked on a frozen lake near Sebaste on a bitterly cold night. On the shore, warm baths had been prepared for anyone who renounced his faith. One of the martyrs could not endure it, left his companions and ran to the bath, but he went into shock as he entered the cauldron and died. One of the guards, Aglaius, who had been set to watch the martyrs, saw at that moment an extraordinary radiance above them, declared himself a Christian, took off his clothes and joined the remaining thirty-nine. The number of forty was thus made complete again. At daybreak the frozen bodies, which still showed signs of life, were burned and the ashes thrown into a river. Christians gathered the remains, and the relics were distributed to many cities. For this reason the veneration of the Forty Martyrs became very widespread.

In the Orthodox Menaion the names of the martyrs begin with Hesychius, Meliton, Heraclius, Smaragdus, Domnus, Eunoicus and Valens and end with Aglaius, while the list given by Antonio Borrelli differs on several points. The discrepancy suggests that details changed as the story was handed down through the generations. The sources agree on the date and place of the event; the records of finer detail belong to hagiographic tradition.

How the Cult of the Forty Spread

The rapid spread of the cult can be followed from the Cappadocian region of the fourth century. A church was built in Caesarea in the martyrs' name, and Basil delivered his homily in it. Gregory of Nyssa had a special devotion to them; he preached two discourses in their honour in the church and, when his parents died, laid them beside the relics of the martyrs. Ephrem the Syrian also praised them. Sozomen, as a witness, describes how the relics were found in Constantinople, in the shrine of Saint Thyrsus built by Caesarius, through the initiative of Empress Pulcheria. In Byzantium and the Eastern churches a series of buildings was raised in the name of the Forty. The sixth-century monastery at Sarandë in Albania, which gave the city its name (Greek Hagioi Saranda), the depictions in the churches of St Sophia in Ohrid and Kyiv, the Xeropotamou Monastery on Mount Athos and the thirteenth-century Church of the Holy Forty Martyrs in Veliko Tarnovo are among the principal examples. There is also a chapel dedicated to the martyrs in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Anna Komnene mentions a church of the forty saints in Constantinople in the Alexiad.

In the Syriac tradition, a Syriac Orthodox church at Mardin is among the earliest churches named after the martyrs and is still in use today, and Syriac Christians celebrate their memory with the feast of Rozune, at which a star-shaped loaf with a coin hidden inside is shared. In the West, too, interest arose early. Bishop Gaudentius of Brescia obtained particles of the martyrs' ashes on a journey to the East and placed them in the altar of the basilica he had built. The fifth-century church of Santa Maria Antiqua in the Roman Forum contains a chapel dedicated to the martyrs and a wall painting of their martyrdom dated to the sixth or seventh century.

Byzantine artists liked the subject in particular because it allowed them to show human helplessness. The martyrs are usually shown at the point of freezing, shivering, wrapping their arms around themselves or raising their hands to their faces or wrists. This is especially evident in the tenth-century ivory plaque in the Bode Museum in Berlin and in the Palaiologan mosaic icon at Dumbarton Oaks. The feast day is 9 March; in the West it was kept on 10 March until it was suppressed in 1969. In the Orthodox churches that follow the Julian calendar the day is deliberately made to fall in Great Lent, because the number forty corresponds both to the number of martyrs and to the days of the fast. On this day there is a custom of baking pastries in the shape of larks. In 2013 the Feast of the Holy Forty Martyrs in Štip, in Macedonia, was inscribed on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list for North Macedonia.

The Connection with Amasya

There is no reliable evidence that the story of the Forty Martyrs was preserved in Amasya at a particular site or place of commemoration. One of the documented Forty Martyrs churches in Turkey is the Surp Karasun Manug Church in Kayseri, which has no connection with Amasya. The early Christian heritage of Amaseia should therefore be limited to concrete names: Theodore Tiron, Basil, Asterius and the metropolitan organization. To these can be added material finds such as the Yavru mosaic and the Aksalur sarcophagus, and the local memory that keeps the Christian past alive in place names such as Çukur Kilise, Ayvasıl and Veng. These names show that Amaseia held an active place in the church history of the period. The tradition of martyrdom and preaching left the trace of a quite different world of belief in the same city where the Pontic kings had their tombs cut into the rock.

Chronology

306: The year of Theodore Tiron's martyrdom at Amaseia (tradition; the Golden Legend gives 287, Hüsameddin December 307).

314: The councils of Ancyra and Neocaesarea; Basil of Amaseia among the signatories.

about 320: Death of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste (Licinian period).

321-324: Martyrdom of Bishop Basil of Amaseia in Jerome's version of the Chronicle.

322: According to hagiographic tradition, Basil is executed at Nicomedia and his relics are buried in Amaseia in the church he had built.

325: The Council of Nicaea; Eutychianus signs as bishop of Amaseia.

380-390: Asterius becomes bishop of Amaseia.

381: Gregory of Nyssa's encomium on Theodore Tiron.

399: Eutropius falls from the consulship; the event is alluded to in Asterius's New Year sermon.

400: Asterius's sermon of 1 January against the New Year festivities.

787: Asterius's homily on Euphemia is quoted at the Second Council of Nicaea.

1075: Amasya is conquered by the Danishmendids.

1317: Metropolitan Callistus cannot enter the city and the metropolis is moved to Limnia.

1904: Five of Asterius's sermons are translated into English as Ancient Sermons for Modern Times.

1914: Two sermons found in an Athos manuscript are first published by A. Bretz.

1923: The activity of the Orthodox metropolis of Amaseia ends with the population exchange.

1983: The early Christian sarcophagus from the village of Aksalur enters the Amasya Museum.

2013: The mosaic with an apple tree and partridges is uncovered in a rescue excavation at Küp Deresi near the village of Yavru.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

Books

  • C. Datema (ed.), Asterius of Amasea. Homilies I-XIV, Leiden 1970.

Other sources

Online sources