Argyra of Prussa
The Holy New Martyr Argyra of Prussa, who suffered at Constantinople
New Martyr · b. 1688, at Prussa in Bithynia — d. 5 April 1721, in prison at Constantinople
Commemorated 5 April — Repose in prison, 5 April 1721, 30 April — Uncovering and translation of her incorrupt relics (1735); the day of her commemoration
Argyra was a young married woman of Prussa (Bursa) in Bithynia who, having refused the advances of a Turkish official's son and refused with them the invitation to apostatise, was denounced on a false charge, flogged, and shut up in prison at Constantinople, where she spent seventeen years under repeated interrogation, beating and the abuse of her fellow prisoners without yielding, sustained by fasting and prayer. She died in her cell on 5 April 1721, aged about thirty-three. Some years later her body was found whole and incorrupt and fragrant, and on 30 April 1735 her relics were translated with the blessing of the Ecumenical Patriarch to the church of St Paraskeve, where they are still venerated. She is commemorated on April 30, the day of the translation.
Prussa and the marriage
Argyra was born about 1688 at Prussa in Bithynia — the old Byzantine city under Mount Olympus that had been the first capital of the Ottomans, and in which by her day the Christian population lived interleaved with a Muslim majority. Her family was devout, and the accounts dwell on both her beauty and her seriousness. At eighteen she was married to a pious Christian husband, and the couple's house stood in a quarter inhabited chiefly by Turks.
The accusation
A young Turk of the neighbourhood — the son of a local official — conceived a passion for her and pressed her to leave her husband, embrace Islam and marry him. Argyra answered that she would rather die than be the wife of a Muslim. Rebuffed, he took the course that the legal situation of the Christians made available to him and that recurs again and again in the acts of the new martyrs: he accused her before the judge of having consented to him and then derided him, which is to say he alleged that she had promised to become a Muslim and then gone back on it — an accusation of apostasy from Islam, for which the penalty was death, and against which a Christian woman's word counted for nothing.
She denied it and confessed herself a Christian, and continued to confess it. She was flogged and, rather than executed, was sentenced to imprisonment for life, and was taken to Constantinople and shut up there.
Seventeen years in prison
Her martyrdom was neither swift nor public. For seventeen years she was brought out from time to time to be examined afresh, urged to accept Islam, and beaten when she refused; and in the intervals she was tormented by the other prisoners — some of them Christians who had apostatised and resented her constancy, some of them criminals — who mocked and struck her and made her life in the common cell a continual affliction. Through it all she kept a monastic rule so far as her circumstances permitted, fasting and praying and refusing every inducement. Her endurance in a place designed to grind down endurance is the substance of her sanctity: she was not killed for the faith in a single hour but slowly consumed for it, and the Church counts her a martyr accordingly.
She died in her cell on 5 April 1721, worn out by the seventeen years, at about thirty-three years of age.
The relics
She was buried without honour. Some years afterwards — the notices say several — her grave was opened and her body was found whole and incorrupt, giving off an ineffable fragrance, the sign by which Ottoman-era Greek piety recognised the martyrs it had not been permitted to bury publicly. On 30 April 1735, with the permission of the Ecumenical Patriarch, clergy and people took up the relics in procession and laid them in the church of St Paraskeve at Constantinople, where they remain an object of veneration to this day, and where the translation became her feast.
Feast and commemoration
April 30 (church date; New Calendar civil April 30, Old Calendar civil May 13) — the anniversary of the translation of her relics in 1735, kept with the Apostle James the son of Zebedee, whose day it principally is; and April 5 (Old Calendar civil April 18), the day of her repose in prison. She is one of the new martyrs of the Turkish yoke whose commemorations were fixed in the eighteenth century, in the same generation and by the same impulse that produced the great collection of the neomartyrs of St Nikodemos the Hagiorite. A proper service exists and is sung at the church that holds her relics, but it is a modern composition and its texts are not reproduced here; the commons of a woman martyr are given below.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a woman martyr)
Thou wast a lamb of Christ, O Argyra, and didst cry aloud in thy contest: I am the bride of my Bridegroom, and Him alone will I confess. Neither flattery nor beating nor the long years of the prison could sever thee from Him; wherefore He hath crowned thee with an incorruptible crown, and hath glorified thy body with incorruption. By thine intercessions save our souls.
Iconography
Argyra is painted as a young married woman of the Ottoman Greek world: in the long dress and the head-covering of an eighteenth-century Anatolian Christian woman rather than in the tunic and mantle of the ancient martyrs, holding the cross of confession in her right hand and often a palm; the crown or wreath may be shown above her, held by an angel or by the hand of Christ. Where a scene accompanies the portrait it is her prison — the barred window, the chains, the saint at prayer among her tormentors — since her contest was not an execution but a captivity. As with the other new martyrs, all her images are modern: her cultus begins in the eighteenth century, after the age of the panel icon in the old sense, and the icons at her shrine are the work of recent iconographers. No pre-1900 image of her has been identified for this repository.
Disputed questions
- The day. Her repose fell on 5 April and her translation on 30 April, and both dates appear in the calendars. The Orthodox Church in America and most Greek notices commemorate her on 30 April, which is the date of the translation of the relics and is therefore taken here as the primary feast, with 5 April recorded as the secondary; some Greek synaxaria keep her on 5 April instead, or on both.
- The arithmetic. The transmitted numbers do not quite reconcile: born in 1688, married at eighteen (so about 1706), and dead in 1721 after seventeen years of imprisonment (so arrested about 1704, before the marriage). Either the seventeen years is a round figure, or the birth year, or the age at marriage, is approximate. The frame — a young married woman of Prussa, a long imprisonment at Constantinople, death in 1721 — is not in doubt.
- The patriarch. The received notice names Paisius II as the patriarch who authorised the translation in 1735. As the lists of the Ecumenical Patriarchs are usually given, Paisius II's several patriarchates fall in 1726–1732, 1740–1743, 1744–1748 and 1751–1752, and the see was held by another in 1735; so either the year or the name in the received account requires correction. The point is noted rather than resolved here.
- Her name. Ἀργυρή (Argyre, Argyra) means "silvern," from ἄργυρος, silver — a name common among the Greeks of Asia Minor and the source of the variants Argyri and Argyro in the calendars.