Abudimus of Tenedos
The Holy Martyr Abudimus of the Island of Tenedos
Martyr · d. c. 304
Commemorated 15 July — Martyrdom by the sword on Tenedos
Abudimus was a Christian of the small Aegean island of Tenedos, off the Troad opposite the site of Troy, martyred in the persecution of Diocletian at the beginning of the fourth century. Refusing to sacrifice to the idols or to eat what had been offered to them, he was bound and beaten, his ribs torn open with iron nails, and at last beheaded. The Greek Menaion commemorates him under July 15 with a two-line distich; his relics were still shown and venerated on the island in the twelfth century, when the Russian pilgrim-abbot Daniel saw them on his way to the Holy Land.
The record of Abudimus is short and there is nothing to be added to it honestly. He was of Tenedos — the island the Greek fleet hid behind in the Iliad, and in the Christian centuries a suffragan see of the metropolis of Mytilene. When the edicts of Diocletian went out, he was denounced as a Christian and required to sacrifice; he refused, and refused also the lesser demand that he simply eat food that had been offered to the idols, which was the ordinary test used on those thought likely to yield.
He was bound and beaten with great severity, and confessed Christ throughout. His torturers then broke open his ribs with iron nails, and, when he still would not deny, he was beheaded with the sword. The Greek synaxarion's distich makes the sword the whole of his notice: "To Abudimus the blade was the agent of his end, and this same blade the agent of his crown."
Relics
His relics remained on the island, and were an object of pilgrimage. The Russian abbot Daniel, whose account of a journey to Jerusalem about 1106–1107 is the earliest Russian pilgrim narrative, records seeing the relics of the martyr Abudimus on Tenedos as he passed through the Aegean — a rare independent attestation for so obscure a saint, and the reason the Slavonic tradition knows him at all.
Feast and commemoration
July 15 (church date; New Calendar civil July 15, Old Calendar civil July 28), rank primary. He is the third commemoration of the day in the Greek Menaion, after Cyricus and Julitta and Lollianus, and is carried also by the Slavonic books and by the OCA calendar as Martyr Abudim of Tenedos. No service is appointed to him; the day's office is that of Cyricus and Julitta in Greek usage and of Vladimir of Kiev in Slavonic usage.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Abudimus, O Lord, in his contest received an incorruptible crown from Thee our God; for possessing Thy strength, he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By his intercessions save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
No individual icon type has developed for Abudimus, and no pre-1900 image of him has been identified for this collection. Where he is painted at all it is in the menologion sequences for July, among the ranks of the martyrs: a young or middle-aged layman, beardless or lightly bearded, in tunic and mantle, holding the cross of martyrdom in his right hand — the generic type for a martyr who suffered by the sword, with no distinguishing attribute. Menologion miniature cycles do not help here, since the illustrated Menologion of Basil II covers only the half-year from September to February.