Miracle of the Archangel Michael at Chonae

Colossae, the spring, and the shrine

Colossae lay in the valley of the Lycus in Phrygia, close by Laodicea and Hierapolis — Pauline ground, addressed in the apostle's Epistle to the Colossians. The region was marked from earliest times by an intense devotion to the angels: Paul himself had warned the Colossians against a "worship of angels" (Colossians 2:18), and the fourth-century Council of Laodicea, held a few miles away, legislated against angelolatry in its thirty-fifth canon, while Theodoret, commenting on the Pauline verse in the fifth century, remarks that oratories of the holy Michael could still be seen throughout the district. The Church's answer to this crooked local piety was not suppression but correction: the veneration of Michael the Archangel, chief commander of the bodiless hosts, flourished at Colossae in orthodox form, and the legend of Chonae is its monument.

The received narrative of the miracle relates that after the preaching of the apostles in the region — Philip at Hierapolis and John the Theologian at Ephesus — a healing spring broke forth at a place called Chairetopa (Cheretopos) near Colossae, foretold by the Theologian as a visitation of the Archangel's grace. A pagan of Laodicea, whose only daughter was mute, was told by Michael in a dream that she would receive speech if she drank of the water. She drank and spoke; the man was baptized with all his house, and in gratitude built over the spring a small church in the Archangel's name. Both Christians and pagans came to the water, and many of the latter, healed there, turned to Christ.

Archippus and the miracle

At this church a young man of Hierapolis named Archippus took up the office of sacristan (προσμονάριος) at the age of ten, and served there for sixty years in extreme ascetic simplicity, catechising the pagans who came to the spring and turning many to baptism. The pagans of the neighbourhood, exasperated by his preaching and by the stream of conversions, attempted his life more than once, and at last conceived a plan to destroy sacristan, church, and spring in a single blow. Two rivers descend from the heights above the place — the received text names them Lykokapros and Kouphos — and the conspirators laboured to join their beds into one channel aimed directly at the church, damming the waters until they had gathered into a flood, and then releasing them.

Archippus, refusing to abandon the holy place, remained in the church at prayer. The tradition relates that the Archangel Michael appeared beside the shrine, commanded the old man to stand and watch, and, striking the great rock before the church with his staff, opened in it a wide fissure, into which he commanded the torrent to pour. The waters plunged roaring into the chasm and were swallowed; the church and its sacristan stood unharmed, and the terrified conspirators fled. From those funnels the place was thereafter called Chonae (Χῶναι, "the plungings" or "funnels"), a name which in time displaced that of declining Colossae for the whole settlement.

Modern topographers have observed that the legend answers exactly to the country: the limestone landscape at the foot of Mount Cadmus, where the town of Chonae (the modern Honaz in Turkey) succeeded Colossae, is karstic, and its streams do in fact vanish underground into swallow-holes — the local wonder around which the narrative crystallised.

The shrine and town of Chonae in later history

Chonae inherited Colossae's bishopric and rose to the rank of an archbishopric and later a metropolis. Its great church of the Archangel — rebuilt on a magnificent scale in the middle Byzantine period — was one of the celebrated pilgrimage shrines of Asia Minor, and its annual festival drew crowds from the whole region. The city gave the twelfth century two of its most learned men, the brothers Michael Choniates, metropolitan of Athens, and the historian Nicetas Choniates, whose surname preserves the town's. Nicetas himself records the desecration of the shrine in the 1190s, when the rebel pseudo-Alexius with his Turkish troops ravaged the Maeander valley; with the Seljuk conquest of the region the great church passed out of Christian hands and eventually disappeared.

The feast in Byzantium and beyond

The commemoration on September 6 appears in the Typikon of the Great Church and the Synaxarion of Constantinople, and the miracle became one of the fixed angelic feasts of the Byzantine year, second in popularity only to the Synaxis of the Bodiless Powers on November 8. Its hold on the Slavic lands was, if anything, stronger: the "Miracle of Michael" (Михайлово чудо) was a marked day of the Russian folk calendar, and the Chudov ("of the Miracle") Monastery, founded in the Moscow Kremlin in 1365 by Metropolitan Alexis and dedicated to the Miracle at Chonae, was among the most venerable houses of Muscovy until its demolition by the Soviet state in 1929–30.

The narrative tradition and the date

The earliest surviving account of the miracle (BHG 1282) is an anonymous narrative, generally assigned by scholars to the fifth or sixth century and later reworked by Symeon Metaphrastes; the Synaxarion notices derive from it. The story's own chronology is legendary and unanchored: it sets the building of the church in the generation after the apostles, yet the conventional datings place Archippus and the miracle in the fourth century, and no source permits precision. Scholarship reads the narrative as an aetiology — of the ancient and originally suspect angel-cult of Phrygia, brought within the Church's order, and of the toponym Chonae itself. The Church's calendars commemorate the miracle without committing themselves to a year.