Callistratus and his Forty-nine Companions

A Christian inheritance

The passio gives Callistratus a remarkable pedigree: his family's Christianity reached back to the generation of the Crucifixion itself. An ancestor named Neochorus (Neokoros), a soldier of Carthaginian origin, had served in Palestine under the emperor Tiberius in the forces commanded by Pontius Pilate, witnessed the Passion and heard the preaching of the apostles, and returned home a believer. The faith was handed down in the family, and Callistratus was raised a Christian by his father. Like his forebears he became a soldier, and in a pagan cohort was conspicuous for his good conduct and gentleness — and for the prayers he kept by night while the camp slept.

Betrayal and first tortures

A soldier sleeping near him heard Callistratus invoking the name of Jesus Christ and denounced him to the commander — unnamed in the Slavic account the OCA follows; the fuller Greek tradition calls him Persentinus. Summoned and ordered to sacrifice to the idols, Callistratus refused outright. He was beaten, and then dragged, covered with wounds, over sharp stones; neither torment moved him.

The sack and the dolphins

The commander then had him sewn into a leather sack and thrown into the sea. The sack struck a sharp rock and tore open, and Callistratus came to land unharmed — carried, the passio says, by dolphins. Forty-nine soldiers who watched the wonder believed in Christ on the spot. The commander imprisoned Callistratus together with the new believers, all of them first subjected to severe floggings. In prison Callistratus preached the word of God to his fellow soldiers and prepared them for martyrdom.

The second wonder and the end

Brought before the commander again, the company confessed Christ firmly. They were bound hand and foot and thrown into the deep water of a lake or cistern; their bonds broke, and the martyrs stood in the water with shining faces, rejoicing — the passio presents the immersion as the baptism of the converts, coinciding with their confession. Crowns appeared above their heads, a voice was heard bidding Callistratus and his company take courage, the earth shook, and a nearby idol fell and was shattered. At this a further hundred and thirty-five soldiers believed. The commander, fearing mutiny if he tried so many, returned Callistratus and his forty-nine to prison, where they prayed and gave thanks; by his order they were cut to pieces with swords in the night. The hundred and thirty-five who survived buried the relics, and a church was later built on the place of the martyrs' sufferings, as Callistratus had foretold to his companions.

Veneration and later cultus

The commemoration of Callistratus and his company on September 27 is universal in the Byzantine rite and is the principal commemoration of the day: the Synaxarion of Constantinople carries it, the Menologion of Basil II gives it the day's miniature, and the received Greek Menaion appoints the day's full sanctoral service to the martyrs — proper stichera, kontakion and oikos, and a canon by Joseph the Hymnographer. A monastery "of Callistratus" (τοῦ Καλλιστράτου) attested in Constantinople carried the martyr's name, a witness to an established cultus in the capital. The Menaion's stichera and canon single out by name one companion, the martyr Gymnasius — beheaded by the sword, and invoked as a healer "of them that run to thy temple in faith" — and the Russian calendar likewise pairs "Callistratus and Gymnasius of Byzantium." No other names of the forty-nine are transmitted in the received tradition.