Bassa of Edessa and her sons Theognius, Agapius and Pistus
The Holy Martyr Bassa and her sons the Holy Martyrs Theognius, Agapius and Pistus
Martyr · d. c. 305–311, at Halone near Cyzicus
Commemorated 21 August — Martyrdom of the mother and her three sons under Maximian Galerius
Bassa was a Christian woman of Edessa in Macedonia — the old royal city of the Macedonian kings, not the Syrian Edessa of the apostle with whom she shares this day — who was married to a priest of the idols and who raised her three sons, Theognius, Agapius and Pistus, secretly in the faith. When the persecution of Maximian Galerius came (305–311) it was her own husband who denounced them. The boys were tortured before their mother's eyes and put to death one after another, the eldest torn with iron claws and beheaded, the second flayed, the third scourged and beheaded; and Bassa, who had stood by them and urged them on, was carried through prison, fire, water and the beasts, and at last beheaded on the island of Halone near Cyzicus. A church was standing in her honour at Chalcedon by the middle of the fifth century.
Edessa in Macedonia
The city is the first thing to be got right, because almost every modern day-list gets it wrong. Edessa — Ἔδεσσα, the Slavic Voden, the modern Έδεσσα in Greek Macedonia — was the ancient seat of the Argead kings of Macedon, a town of waterfalls on the road from Thessalonica to Illyria. It has nothing to do with the Syrian Edessa of King Abgar, whose apostle Thaddaeus is commemorated on this same twenty-first of August. The coincidence is a coincidence of the calendar alone; but it has repeatedly caused Bassa to be moved to Mesopotamia in English lists, and one strand of the Greek tradition moves her instead to Larissa in Thessaly, which is a different error of the same kind.
Bassa was of the city, brought up from childhood in the Christian faith. She was married — whether by her parents' arrangement or in the ordinary way of a mixed town, the sources do not say — to a man who was a priest of the idols. Three sons were born of the marriage: Theognius, the eldest, then Agapius, then Pistus. Their mother taught them the faith she had received, and they held it; their father did not know, or affected not to know.
The denunciation
The persecution that reached Macedonia under Maximian Galerius — the years 305 to 311, the fiercest and last of the great imperial persecutions — was the occasion of their undoing, and the accuser was the father of the house. He informed against his wife and his own sons before the governor, and they were brought to the tribunal together.
The examination followed the ordinary form: sacrifice, and live. The three young men refused in turn, and the governor, judging that the sight of the children's sufferings would break the mother, had them tortured in front of her. What the account preserves is that the opposite happened. Bassa stood by and exhorted her sons not to weaken, and she watched each of them die.
Theognius was raked with iron claws — the hooks that stripped the flesh from the ribs — and, when he would not yield, beheaded. Agapius had the skin flayed from his head and face down to his breast, and the passion notes, with the plainness that these texts reserve for their worst moments, that he made no cry. Pistus, the youngest, was scourged and tormented and then beheaded like his brother. So the three were taken from their mother in a single day.
The passion of Bassa
Bassa was left alive, and the governor turned on her the whole apparatus of the persecution in succession, as though her endurance were a public affront.
She was thrown into prison and left without food or water to die of hunger; the account says that an angel came to her and strengthened her with heavenly food, and she was found alive and in good heart. She was cast into fire and was not burnt; into water and did not drown; given to the beasts and was not touched. Brought at length into the temple to be made to sacrifice, she took hold of the idol of Zeus and threw it down and broke it — the act that in these passions marks the point past which no magistrate can retreat.
She was put aboard a ship and thrown into the sea. The tradition here becomes frankly miraculous and is worth reporting as the sources have it: the sailors, looking back, saw her seated in a vessel they did not know, guided by three men shining with light, whom the account identifies as her own martyred sons. After eight days she came ashore, or was brought, at the island of Halone (Ἁλώνη, Alona) in the Propontis, near Cyzicus — one of the islands of the Sea of Marmara. She was taken before the governor of the island, confessed Christ once more, was beaten with rods, and was beheaded. With that the company was complete.
Veneration
The cultus is old and it is Constantinopolitan. A church of the holy martyr Bassa was standing at Chalcedon, across the water from the capital, by about the year 450 — that is, within a century and a half of her death, and in the generation of the Fourth Ecumenical Council which met in that suburb. Her memory passed from there into the Synaxarion of Constantinople and so into the whole Byzantine calendar, where it has been kept on August 21 ever since. The relics are not traced further; no translation is recorded.
Feast and commemoration
August 21 (church date; New Calendar civil August 21, Old Calendar civil September 3), within the afterfeast of the Dormition. The Greek Menaion prints a single service for the day, principally of the Apostle Thaddaeus, in which the martyrs are sung with their own stichera and their own synaxarion notice and distich but without a proper apolytikion or kontakion of their own; the hymns of the afterfeast take precedence over both. The commemoration is universal in the Byzantine rite and is carried by the Greek, Slavonic, Antiochian and Georgian books alike.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a woman martyr)
Thy lamb Bassa crieth out to thee with a loud voice, O Jesus: I love thee, O my Bridegroom, and seeking thee I contend, and I am crucified and buried together with thy baptism; I suffer for thy sake, that I may reign with thee; I die for thee, that I may live in thee. Receive me, offered to thee in love, as a sacrifice without blemish; and by her intercessions, as thou art merciful, save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Synaxarion
Three fairest children of one mother, and with their mother Bassa one soul unto the sword. The sword cut down Bassa with her children on the twenty-first.
Iconography
Bassa is painted as a matron-martyr: a woman of middle years, veiled in the maphorion with the head covered, in a long tunic and mantle of red or dark blue, holding the cross of martyrdom in the right hand and often with the left open before the breast in the gesture of prayer. Where the family is shown together — the usual form in the menologion panels and in the Balkan wall-calendars — the three sons stand at her side, beardless youths in short tunics and mantles, each with his own small cross, and the mother behind or above them; the composition is that of the mother-and-sons martyrdoms generally, and is the same type used for Sophia with her daughters and for Solomone with the Maccabees. Where a scene is given, it is either the boys' torments with their mother watching and exhorting, or Bassa in the little boat upon the sea with three shining figures at the helm.
No pre-1900 image of Bassa and her sons alone has been located for this collection. The seventeenth-century Russian menaion icon for August, from which the icon of the apostle of this day is taken, includes the whole company of the twenty-first in its ranks, but no published detail of the martyrs from it has been identified, and no separate panel of them was found in the Wikimedia Commons search made for this entry. The saint is accordingly listed among the wanted icons.
Disputed questions
- Which Edessa. Macedonian, not Syrian: the passion is set in the Balkan city, and the martyrdom ends in the Propontis. The Syrian Edessa belongs to the apostle of the same day. Where a modern list places Bassa "of Edessa in Mesopotamia," it has read the two notices of August 21 as one.
- Edessa or Larissa? A strand of the Greek tradition sets the trial and the sons' deaths at Larissa in Thessaly rather than at Edessa. Both cities lie in the same region and on the same road system, and no criterion is available to decide between them. The received form is followed here and the variant recorded.
- Where and when Bassa herself died. The Greek distich of the synaxarion says flatly that "the sword cut down Bassa together with her children on the twenty-first," which reads as a single execution of all four; the narrative passion, followed by the Slavonic and OCA accounts, separates them by the whole sea-voyage and the eight days, and kills her at Halone. The calendar keeps them on one day either way. This entry follows the narrative form and notes that the verse does not agree with it.
- Were the sons children? The Greek verse calls them παιδία, which means the children of their mother and says nothing certain about their ages, and the narrative treats them as able to answer for themselves at a tribunal. Some retellings make them small boys and number them among the child-martyrs. The corpus classes all four simply as martyrs and leaves the ages open.
- The name of the eldest. Theognius (Θεόγνιος) is the form of the Greek books; Theognis and Theogonius both appear in English and Slavonic lists, and are the same name.
- Not to be confused with the several other saints of the name in the calendar — among them the Bassa who was one of the three women that carried the body of Agrippina of Rome to Sicily, who is not a martyr and has no feast — nor with the masculine Bassus and Bassian of the Byzantine calendar, which are different names altogether.