Blaise of Caesarea

The herdsman of Cappadocia

Blaise was, as his epithet Boukolos records, a herdsman — a keeper of oxen or cattle in the countryside about Caesarea in Cappadocia, the great city of central Asia Minor. He is remembered as a man of no rank or learning, a labourer of the fields, whose sanctity lay in the plain steadfastness of his confession; the synaxarion tradition places his martyrdom in the third century, in one of the persecutions that fell on Cappadocia before the peace of the Church. When the demand to sacrifice to the gods reached him, the herdsman refused, confessing himself a Christian, and was arrested and brought to trial.

The martyrdom

Refusing again before the magistrate to offer to the idols, Blaise was given over to torture. The account has him hung upon a tree and his body torn with iron — the raking of the flesh common to the martyr-acts — which he bore unshaken, giving thanks and confessing Christ throughout. To his passion the tradition attaches a detail proper to the herdsman: that the animals of his herd followed him to the place of his suffering, or gathered about him, as though the beasts he had kept would not abandon their keeper — a motif that has bound his memory to the flocks and, in popular devotion, made him (like his episcopal namesake) a protector of cattle. Having endured the tortures to the end, Blaise was beheaded, and received the martyr's crown.

Not to be confused — the two Blaises

The calendar keeps two martyrs named Blaise / Vlasios within nine days of each other, and they are constantly conflated:

• Blaise of Caesarea, the Herdsman — this saint: a Cappadocian cowherd, layman, martyred in the third century, kept February 3.
• Blaise, Bishop of Sebaste — the celebrated hieromartyr and physician, bishop of Sebaste in Armenia, who healed men and beasts, is invoked against diseases of the throat, and was martyred (traditionally under Licinius, c. 316) by being combed with iron wool-combs and beheaded — kept February 11, and one of the most popular saints of both East and West.

The two share the name Vlasios, an association with animals (the herdsman's cattle; the bishop's healing of beasts and patronage of flocks), and torture by iron; and the herdsman's slighter acta have often been drawn into the orbit of the bishop's famous legend. They are nonetheless two distinct martyrs of two distinct days, and the tradition keeps them apart. (The office of February 11 belongs to the bishop; this entry is the February 3 herdsman.)

A further, unrelated coincidence of the Greek word touches this saint: the epithet given to this Blaise, ho Boukolos ("the cowherd"), is the very word that serves as the personal name of Bucolus of Smyrna, the holy bishop of Smyrna kept three days later on February 6. There the word is a man's name and here an occupation; the two are wholly different saints.