Anastasius Paneras and Demetrius Begiazes

The Holy New-Martyrs Anastasius Paneras and Demetrius Begiazes, who suffered at Kasaba

New Martyr · d. 1816 (some sources 1819), at Kasaba in Asia Minor

Commemorated 11 August — Martyrdom at Kasaba in Lydia

Anastasius and Demetrius were two young basket-weavers from Lesbos, working in the Anatolian interior, who were put to death for the faith of Christ at Kasaba in Lydia in 1816 — some accounts say 1819. Anastasius Paneras, of the village of Asomatoi, was twenty years old; Demetrius Begiazes, of Agiasos, was eighteen; the sources suggest they were kinsmen. They are among the last of the long roll of new-martyrs of the Ottoman period, and among the most typical: obscure working men of no education, denounced on a charge that carried the death penalty for a Christian, offered life at the price of the faith, and refusing it. Their memory is kept on August 11, above all on their own island.

Two boys from Lesbos

Lesbos in the early nineteenth century was a populous and predominantly Greek island under Ottoman rule, and it sent its young men out to work. Asomatoi, on the slopes above the Gulf of Kalloni, and Agiasos, the mountain town under Mount Olympus of Lesbos, were both inland villages of small landholders and craftsmen. From such places boys crossed to the Anatolian mainland to find work in the towns of the Lydian and Ionian plains and came home for the winter or for the feasts.

Anastasius Paneras of Asomatoi and Demetrius Begiazes of Agiasos were basket-weavers — kalathopoioi, a trade of the poorest sort, plaiting withies for the markets — and they worked together at Kasaba in Lydia, the town on the Hermus plain east of Smyrna known to the Turks as Turgutlu. Anastasius was about twenty; Demetrius about eighteen. The Greek notices suggest a family connection between them, which would be the natural reason for two boys from different villages to be at the same trade in the same town.

The martyrdom

The Greek synaxarial notice is brief, and calls them simply the victorious holy martyrs of Christ. What is transmitted is the shape common to the new-martyr accounts of the period: an accusation was raised against them at Kasaba which, under Ottoman law, admitted of only one escape — the profession of Islam. The pattern that produced hundreds of such deaths is well documented: a Christian was alleged to have spoken the shahada, or to have promised conversion, or to have insulted the Prophet; the charge of apostasy from Islam, once a man was held to have entered it, was capital; and the court's mercy consisted in the offer to make the profession good.

The two refused, confessed themselves Christians, and were put to death at Kasaba. The year given in the Greek calendars is 1816; some notices give 1819.

Their bodies were recovered and honoured by the Christians of the place, and their memory was carried back to Lesbos, where it belongs to a very dense local hagiography: the island's calendar of the Ottoman centuries is thick with new-martyrs, and its people kept their names with a particular tenacity, since these were not remote saints of the persecutions but neighbours' sons.

Feast and commemoration

August 11 (church date; New Calendar civil August 11, Old Calendar civil August 24), within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration and the Dormition Fast (August 1–14).

The commemoration is Greek, and within the Greek world it is chiefly Lesbian: the Metropolis of Mytilene keeps the new-martyrs of the island with particular solemnity, and at Asomatoi and Agiasos the day is a local feast. The Slavonic, Russian and American calendars do not carry them. They are not in the Antiochian books.

Hymns

Troparion — Tone 4 (common of new-martyrs)

The island of Lesbos hath brought forth two young shoots, and Kasaba hath gathered their fruit for heaven: for Anastasius and Demetrius, plaiting baskets with their hands, wove for themselves the unfading crown, and being offered life for the denial of Christ, they chose death and found life. O new-martyrs, intercede with Christ our God that our souls may be saved.

Original translation from the Greek

Iconography

The two are painted together, as young men — Anastasius the elder of the two by a couple of years and lightly bearded or beardless, Demetrius a boy — standing side by side in the contemporary dress of Greek islanders under Ottoman rule rather than in antique tunic and mantle: this is the distinguishing convention of new-martyr iconography, which insists that these are men of the painter's own century, and it produces the short jacket, the sash, the vraka or full breeches, and sometimes the fez. Each holds the cross of confession in the right hand and the martyr's palm or a branch in the left. Where a painter names their trade, the attribute is a woven basket at their feet — an attribute unique to them in the calendar. Behind them the town or the sea may be indicated, and their inscription is ΟΙ ΑΓΙΟΙ ΝΕΟΜΑΡΤΥΡΕΣ ΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΙΟΣ ΚΑΙ ΔΗΜΗΤΡΙΟΣ.

No image of them is stored here. Their martyrdom falls in 1816, so that any icon of them is by definition later than that; the icons in use at Mytilene, Asomatoi and Agiasos are modern works under their painters' copyright, and none has been found under a free licence. This is a case where the repository's pre-1900 rule and the saints' own dates leave very little room, and the entry is listed among the wanted icons in the hope of a nineteenth-century example.

Disputed questions

The year. 1816 and 1819 both circulate in the Greek sources, and this collection records the discrepancy rather than choosing. The date of the day, August 11, is stable.
The manner of death is not specified in the notices available for this entry. The overwhelmingly usual sentence in such cases was beheading, and hanging was the alternative; but since the sources consulted do not say, nothing is asserted here.
The relationship between them. They are always commemorated together and were of the same trade in the same town, though from different villages; the suggestion that they were relatives appears in the Greek notices and is likely but not certain.
Their epithets. Πανερᾶς and Μπεγιάζης are family names, not place-epithets; the second is a hellenised Turkish form (beyaz, "white"), of the sort common in the Greek populations of Asia Minor and the eastern Aegean. English lists render them variously as Paneras / Panieras and Begiazes / Begiazis / Beyiazis.
Not to be confused with the many other Anastasii of the calendar, and in particular with Anastasius the Fuller of Salona (October 25) or Anastasius the Persian (January 22). Some English day-lists have attached to August 11 a "Martyr Anastasius of Salona" together with a "Martyr Sozon"; no jurisdictional calendar consulted for this entry — Greek, Slavonic, Antiochian or American — carries either of them on this day, and the Anastasius of August 11 is this new-martyr.