At the start of the fourth century the Roman Empire was living through the widest-reaching persecution of Christians it had ever undertaken. The campaign that Emperor Diocletian launched in 303, known in history as the Great Persecution, ordered churches destroyed, sacred books seized, and believers compelled to sacrifice to the gods. In the East its harshest enforcer was Galerius, Diocletian's junior colleague and later successor. Its best-known victim in Pontus was a young soldier who came to Amaseia, present-day Amasya, with his unit to pass the winter. Known in Eastern Christianity as Theodore Tiron, Theodore the "Recruit", he made Amaseia, through his martyrdom, a holy place that pilgrims visited for centuries.

Most of what is known about Theodore's life rests on accounts written later. The earliest and most reliable testimony is the panegyric that Gregory of Nyssa delivered on the anniversary of the saint's death. The later "Martyrium", the text of his passion, is considered by scholars to have been largely expanded with later additions. For this reason what is securely known has to be kept apart from what tradition relates, and the account below observes that distinction.

Who He Was and Where He Came From

Theodore's year of birth is unknown, and the sources do not agree on his birthplace. Some modern accounts call him a native of Amaseia, others give Euchaita as his birthplace. Mershman's entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia mentions writers who say he was born in the East, in Syria or Armenia. In his homily Gregory of Nyssa says that his homeland was "the land where the sun rises" and compares him in this respect to Job. According to another account found in Orthodox sources, he came from the village of Humalia in Cappadocia. Gregory relates that Theodore had been enlisted for military service in a unit, and that when the commanders quartered the army for a winter rest his company came to this region. Whether or not he was born in Amaseia, then, the saint came to the city on military duty and met his martyrdom there.

His epithet "Tiron" or "Tiro" derives from the Latin "tiro" and means "recruit, new soldier". The interpretation is disputed, however. Nikolaus Nilles argued that the epithet was later misunderstood and that Theodore was not a recruit but a member of a unit called the "Cohors Tyronum", a view the Catholic Encyclopedia adopts. Gregory of Nyssa likewise presents him as a courageous, seasoned soldier. The name Theodore means "gift of God" in Greek. The people of Rome shortened the saint's name and called him "Toto".

The year of his death is not certain either. The tradition of the Golden Legend gives 287. Later tradition and Alban Butler's lives of the saints give 306. The Orthodox commemoration day, 17 February, is accepted in most sources as the day of his death. Scholars place the martyrdom between 305 and 311, within the reign of Galerius, and regard 306 as the likeliest year.

The Account of His Martyrdom

According to Gregory of Nyssa's sermon, Theodore was in Amaseia at the time when the imperial edict prescribed the death penalty for Christians. As inquiries were made among the soldiers into who was a Christian and who would refuse to sacrifice to the gods, Theodore did not hide his faith. In Gregory's phrase, the only thing he lacked was a confession written on his forehead. The commanders brought him before the court and asked where he found the nerve to mock the emperor's decree. Theodore replied that these gods were not truly gods and that his own God was Jesus Christ, the only Son of God. The judges, appearing to pity his youth, gave him time to reconsider. Gregory finds this mercy feigned. Theodore, for his part, used the time granted to him for an entirely different purpose.

According to Gregory, Theodore waited for a favourable wind and set fire to the temple of the goddess called the "Mother of the Gods", which stood on the bank of the city's river. The blaze was bright enough to be seen from the centre of the city. Theodore did not conceal the deed, and he made no secret of his satisfaction at the confusion that the destruction of the temple and its statue caused among the pagans. The sources name the goddess differently. Gregory and the Catholic Encyclopedia say Magna Mater, that is, Cybele. The Orthodox synaxarion tradition gives the name Rhea. These are two names under which the cult of the Anatolian Mother Goddess was known in the Greek and Roman worlds, and there is no real contradiction between them. The synaxarion account adds that the statue was of wood, that Theodore carried out the act in the early evening, and that he was caught by the temple guard. These details do not appear in Gregory's text.

When the authorities learned that he was the culprit, a second trial began, harsher than the first. According to Gregory, Theodore answered the questions with a brief and plain confession, and thereby cut the inquiry short. The judges then changed tactics and offered him the office of high priest. Theodore received the offer with laughter and described the priests of the idols, and the high priests above all, as pitiable people. In the same speech he also criticises the emperors, saying that they too bear the title of high priest, approach the sacrificial altar in purple robes, slaughter birds, and stain their garments with blood as they examine the entrails of animals. After these words the judges dropped their feigned courtesy and accused Theodore of being the most irreverent of men toward the gods and the most insolent toward the emperors.

Torture followed. According to Gregory, Theodore was first hung from a wooden post and beaten. While the executioners tore at his body, he continued to recite a verse from the Psalms, to the effect of "I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth". He was then thrown into prison. Gregory relates that at night those outside the prison heard a crowd joyfully singing psalms and saw the light of lamps shine like dawn in the middle of the night. When the astonished jailer rushed in, he found the martyr resting and the other prisoners asleep. The Orthodox synaxarion texts elaborate on this scene. In them Christ appears to Theodore in prison and gives him courage, and the official called Publius or Poplios, the governor, is horrified when he hears divine voices coming from a cell whose doors are sealed. The information that the governor offered him the high priesthood of his own gods and that Theodore refused is also found in these synaxarion sources.

The sentence was death by burning. Gregory says that after the verdict Theodore set out on the "good and blessed road" toward God. In the Orthodox synaxarion he climbs onto the pyre on his own feet and makes the sign of the cross, the flames do not harm him, he gives up his spirit to God, and his body is left unburnt. The same text adds that an eyewitness saw his soul rise to heaven. According to tradition, after his death the saint was buried at Euchaita, beneath the house of a widow, by a woman named Eusebia.

The Earliest Testimony of the Church Writers

That the cult of Theodore began very early around Amaseia is clear from Gregory of Nyssa's sermon. Gregory, one of the three great Cappadocian Fathers, was bishop of Nyssa. He delivered his sermon on 17 February, the anniversary of the saint's death, in the saint's own shrine. Scholars differ on the year. According to Mattia Chiriatti, most accept 380, some propose any year between 379 and 381, and some sources give the winter of 381. It is likewise uncertain whether the sermon was delivered at Amaseia or at the shrine at Euchaita. Chiriatti speaks of the martyrion at Euchaita, while other sources leave the matter open. A pilgrimage church in the saint's name is known to have existed at Euchaita by about 400 at the latest.

The sermon is valuable as much for how it shows the shrine in those years as for what it says of the saint's life. Gregory describes the sanctuary as adorned by a painter, a marble worker and a mosaicist. The painter depicted on the walls the martyr's struggle, his sufferings, the fearsome faces of the tyrants and the cauldron of fire, and also Christ the contender, shown in human form. Gregory compares these paintings to a book that speaks through its colours. The floor is laid with mosaic. Visitors approach the coffin to touch it and, if possible, to take the dust on it and keep it like a gift. The more fortunate touch the body, which looks alive and healthy, laying their hands on its eyes, mouth and ears and weeping. The same sermon says that the barbarian raid of the previous year, by the Scythians in Gregory's phrase, was turned back by the saint's protection. At the end of the sermon Gregory summons the saint to his shrine, asks him to protect the region against a new attack, and asks him to call Peter, Paul and John to his aid in this.

Gregory says nothing about the saint's life beyond the basic account, but he notes that the saint can influence the lives of his hearers and in particular can intervene in battles. This quality would make Theodore one of the patron saints of the Byzantine army in the centuries that followed. Nectarius, patriarch of Constantinople, also preached a sermon on Theodore before 397. A church in Theodore's name is recorded in the capital in 452. He is known to appear in the mosaic of the Church of Saints Cosmas and Damian in Rome, made around 530. The circular church of San Teodoro at the foot of the Palatine Hill, which the Romans called "San Toto", was consecrated in the sixth or seventh century. Pope Felix IV is said to have raised it to the status of a collegiate church.

The Transfer of the Relics to Euchaita

The sources state that Theodore's body was carried from Amaseia to Euchaita. There are two different accounts of who did this. Some sources relate that the Christian empress Eusebia had the relics moved before her death in 360. Another tradition, recorded in the tenth or eleventh century, says that a woman of Euchaita named Eusebia carried the relics at the saint's own wish. In this second account the same woman also appears in the saint's encounter with the dragon. The inconsistency leaves open whether the name Eusebia belongs to one person or to two.

Euchaita was a settlement that is accepted as corresponding to the village of Beyözü in present-day Çorum. Out of love for the saint the town came in time to be called "Theodoropolis", the City of Theodore. That the relics lay here and that the town was an important pilgrimage centre is documented from the ninth century at the latest, though it is possible that this began much earlier. When, in the late eleventh century, the Amasya region was gradually laid waste by Turkish raids, Euchaita too lost its population. According to tradition the later journey of the relics was as follows. Part of the body was taken to the church in Constantinople. In the twelfth century the body is said to have been transferred to Brindisi, and the saint is regarded as that city's patron. His head is kept at Gaeta. Relics recorded in Theodore's name at Venice are reported to have been taken from Mesembria by a Venetian admiral in 1257, placed first in a Venetian church in Constantinople, and in 1267 deposited in the church of San Salvatore in Venice.

The Problem of the Two Theodores

The most tangled aspect of Theodore Tiron's hagiography is the appearance of a separate figure, Theodore Stratelates, "Theodore the General". This second saint is called a native of Heraclea, and his martyrdom is placed in the time of Licinius, about ten years later. His emergence as a separate saint is documented from the late ninth century. It seems that, to bring consistency to conflicting accounts, it was assumed that there were two different persons. The two saints are frequently depicted side by side in Byzantine art. The association of the shrine at Euchaita with both saints has added to the confusion. Yet the shrine existed long before this distinction was made. The separate shrine of Stratelates stood at Euchaneia, a different settlement from Euchaita.

The view generally accepted in the West today is that there was only one Theodore. In 1909 Hippolyte Delehaye wrote that the historical existence of the second Theodore could not be established, and in 2003 Christopher Walter called Stratelates "surely a fiction". Some writers interpret the second figure as a later promotion in rank of the first. Alban Butler had already observed that the accounts of the two figures overlap and cannot be separated. Even so, in Eastern Christianity the two saints go on living with separate commemoration days. In the Slavonic Byzantine calendar Theodore is commemorated on 8 February, and in the Orthodox calendar on 17 February and on the first Saturday of Great Lent.

The Horseman Who Slew the Dragon

According to the Orthodox synaxarion tradition, Theodore killed a great serpent or dragon that lived in a forest near Euchaita, attacked people and terrorised the town. In the account the saint meets a Christian woman on the road, she tells him to take care, and Theodore, saying that he trusts in Christ's help, cuts the serpent in two. The woman is said to have been the Eusebia who afterwards gathered the saint's relics. This account is absent from Gregory of Nyssa's sermon. The story that a dragon was destroyed near Euchaita is said to be no younger than the late ninth century.

The iconography of a mounted holy soldier fighting a dragon was a widespread image applied to various saints throughout the Christian period. Theodore's depiction as a dragon-slaying horseman is traced to the seventh century at the earliest and, with certainty, to the early tenth. A depiction at Aghtamar from about 920 is the oldest certain example. On a plaque from Vinica in North Macedonia, dated to the sixth or seventh century, Theodore does not slay a dragon but appears as a horseman carrying a dragon-shaped standard. In the rock-cut churches around Göreme in Cappadocia, tenth-century frescoes show mounted saints fighting serpents with one, two or three heads. One of them is the Mavrucan 3 church at Güzelöz. The fresco of Theodore and George in the Yılanlı Kilise is dated to the tenth century, or even to the middle of the ninth. The twelfth-century ceiling panels of the Cappella Palatina in Palermo likewise show Theodore as a dragon-slaying horseman.

The dragon motif was gradually transferred from Theodore to Saint George. The first concrete traces of this transfer appear in the early eleventh century. The oldest certain images of George fighting the serpent are again found in Cappadocia, in the fresco of the Church of Saint Barbara at Soğanlı, dated 1006 or 1021. From the thirteenth century on, the fight with the dragon was increasingly attributed to George. Because George was the best-loved warrior saint in the West, Theodore's dragon-slaying aspect largely receded in the following centuries. In Orthodox iconography Theodore is shown with black hair and a pointed beard, usually with one point, and Stratelates with a two-pointed beard.

The Miracle of the Kolyva

In Eastern Orthodox tradition Theodore's name is also bound up with a liturgical custom. The feast celebrated on the first Saturday of Great Lent has its origin, according to tradition, in an event that took place about fifty years after Theodore's martyrdom. Emperor Julian had abandoned Christianity and returned to Roman paganism, and reigned from 361 to 363. During the first week of Great Lent Christians kept a strict fast. At that time the emperor ordered the city governor of Constantinople to sprinkle all the food in the markets with blood offered in sacrifice to the idols. The aim was to force the Christians, hungry after the fast, to eat polluted food without knowing it. That night Theodore appeared in a dream to Eudoxius, the archbishop of the city, and told him that no Christian should buy anything from the market and that they should instead eat wheat boiled at home and sweetened with honey. When the bishop asked who it was that addressed him, the saint said that he was Theodore, who had died a martyr for Christ, and that he had been sent by the Lord to help.

In memory of this miracle, on the evening of the first Friday of Great Lent, at the end of the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, Orthodox churches chant the canon of Theodore composed by John of Damascus. Then the kolyva, boiled wheat prepared with honey, raisins or other dried fruit, is blessed and distributed to the congregation. The kolyva is the first food eaten after the strict fast of the first week. The Orthodox Church records that it was Nectarius, patriarch of Constantinople (381-397), who established the first Saturday as Theodore's feast. The saint's troparion recalls the martyr who rejoiced in the flames as if he were beside still waters. His kontakion praises a victor who took faith in Christ as his breastplate and crushed the enemy forces.

The Cult in East and West

Theodore became one of the important military saints of Byzantium, and fifteen churches were built in his name in Constantinople. He was also widely venerated in Asia Minor, Syria and Palestine. There were churches in his name in Jerusalem and Damascus. His name occurs twice in the Georgian inscriptions of Bir el-Qutt. After the period of iconoclasm, from the ninth century on, he was depicted in military dress. The Crusaders also adopted him as a military patron.

In Western Europe, Venice took the saint as its patron during the period of Byzantine rule, and the doge's chapel was dedicated to him until the ninth century. Tradition relates that after the relics of Saint Mark were brought to Venice in 828, the city put Mark forward as its patron in order to consolidate its independence from Byzantium. Whether Venice's first patron was Theodore of Amaseia or Theodore of Heraclea is disputed. Otto Demus at one time argued for Theodore of Heraclea. Later he noted that none of the twelfth-century mosaics gives more than the saint's name, and that the saint may therefore have become the city's patron before the two Theodores were distinguished. A statue of Theodore was set up on one of the columns of the Piazzetta in 1372. The statue there today was assembled in the second half of the fifteenth century from various antique fragments. A crocodile, representing the dragon, is part of it, and a copy has now taken the original's place on the column. The small chapel dedicated to the saint that stands today was built only in 1486.

In France, Chartres Cathedral has a thirteenth-century stained-glass window that tells the saint's life in thirty-eight panels. Even so, the cult never became widespread outside Italy. San Teodoro in Rome was opened to the Orthodox community for their use by Pope John Paul II in 2000, and services began there in 2004. On the Croatian island of Korčula the sword dance called Moreška is performed on 27 July, the day of Sveti Todor. The saint is invoked against storms, for the recovery of lost articles, and as the patron of soldiers. In the Catholic calendar his commemoration day was 9 November. Under the reform that followed the Second Vatican Council in 1969 he is no longer celebrated liturgically except in certain local calendars. In the Orthodox world the feast of 17 February and the kolyva custom of the first Saturday of Great Lent continue to this day.

Chronology

303: Diocletian's edicts of the Great Persecution against Christians begin.

287 or 306: The year in which Theodore was martyred at Amaseia. The Golden Legend tradition gives 287, later tradition 306.

Before 360: Tradition relates that a person named Eusebia carried the relics to Euchaita.

361-363: According to tradition, the miracle of the kolyva takes place in the reign of Julian.

380 or 381: Gregory of Nyssa delivers his sermon on the martyrdom in the saint's shrine.

Before 397: Nectarius, patriarch of Constantinople, preaches a sermon on Theodore.

About 400: A pilgrimage church of the saint at Euchaita is documented.

452: A church in Theodore's name is recorded in Constantinople.

About 530: A mosaic of the saint is made in the Church of Saints Cosmas and Damian in Rome.

About 920: The depiction of Theodore slaying a dragon at Aghtamar, the oldest certain example.

1006 or 1021: At Soğanlı, the oldest certain image of George fighting the dragon.

1267: Relics in Theodore's name are placed in the church of San Salvatore in Venice.

1969: The Catholic Church removes the saint from the general calendar.

Bibliography

Books

  • Gregory of Nyssa. In sanctum Theodorum (Gregorii Nysseni Opera X/1, ed. J. P. Cavarnos), Leiden, 1990, pp. 61-71.

Other sources

  • Mershman, Francis. "St. Theodore of Amasea", The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 14, New York, 1912.
  • Chiriatti, Mattia C. "A Late-Antique and Byzantine Hagiographic Text: The Encomium of the Martyr Theodore of Gregory of Nyssa", Svmma 18, 2021, pp. 140-154.
  • Walter, Christopher. The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition, Routledge, 2003.
  • Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les Légendes Grecques des Saints Militaires, Paris, 1909.
  • Demus, Otto. The Church of San Marco in Venice, Washington, 1960.
  • Orthodox Church in America. "Great Martyr Theodore the Tyro (Recruit)", Lives of the Saints.
  • Ortodokslar Topluluğu. "17 Şubat Kutsal Yüce Şehit Theodor" and "Aziz Theodor'un koliva mucizesi". ortodokslartoplulugu.com
  • "Theodore Tiron", Wikipedia (supporting source). en.wikipedia.org

Online sources