Caluf of Egypt
The Holy Martyr Caluf the Egyptian, of Thebes
Martyr · d. c. 303, at Thebes in Egypt
Commemorated 19 May — Martyrdom by fire at Thebes
Caluf was a Christian of Thebes in Upper Egypt, put to death in the persecution of Diocletian and Maximian about the year 303. Brought before the governor of the city and ordered to sacrifice, he refused; he was hung head downward and beaten, and when he was asked how he could bear it, he answered that he endured everything in expectation of the life to come. Since neither promises nor torture moved him, he was thrown into a fire and gave up his soul in it. Nothing else of him is transmitted: he is one of the very many Egyptian martyrs of the Great Persecution whose memory the Church kept when their histories were already lost.
Thebes in the Great Persecution
Thebes — the ancient city of Upper Egypt, capital of the district the Greeks called the Thebaid — was among the places where the persecution launched by Diocletian in 303 fell hardest. Egypt in general, and the Thebaid in particular, furnished so many martyrs in those years that the Church's calendars could not accommodate them individually, and Eusebius, writing of the Thebaid, says frankly that the numbers passed all reckoning. Caluf belongs to that company. His name, which is not Greek and is transmitted in the Slavonic notices as Калуф, is one of the few things that place him: it is a native Egyptian name, and he was in all likelihood a Copt of the local population rather than a Greek of the administrative class.
Martyrdom
The account is short enough that its whole content can be given without paraphrase-padding. He was denounced, or gave himself up, and was brought before the prefect of Thebes, who required him to sacrifice to the gods. He confessed Christ and refused.
He was then suspended head downwards and beaten — a punishment used in Egypt both as torture and as a humiliation, since it inverted the man before the crowd. Under it he was asked, in the ordinary manner of these interrogations, why he would not spare himself; and the one saying preserved of him is the answer: that he bore all of it in the expectation of the future life. It is the standard martyr's answer, and its interest lies precisely there — the courts recorded it because the martyrs kept giving it, and the theology of the whole persecution is in it.
When the beating had not shaken him and the offers of release had failed, the prefect ordered that he be cast into a fire. He died in the flames, about the year 303, during the joint reign of Diocletian and Maximian Herculius (284–305).
Feast and commemoration
May 19 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 1). He is carried by the Slavonic menologia and by the OCA on this day, among the Egyptian and Eastern martyrs listed after the Russian venerables; the Greek books of the day give in his place the martyr Akolouthos (see above). He has no proper service and is sung with the common of a martyr. The day always falls within the Pentecostarion, whose movable hymns take precedence over the fixed commemorations.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Caluf, O Lord, in his contest received an incorruptible crown from Thee, our God; for possessing Thy strength, he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By his intercessions save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Caluf is painted as a lay martyr of the Egyptian persecutions: young or middle-aged, beardless or lightly bearded, in the plain tunic and mantle, holding the cross of his witness in the right hand and with the left open before his breast. Where the passion is depicted rather than the person, the scene is the fire into which he was thrown — a brazier or a heap of burning faggots, with the martyr standing in the flames and the governor seated at one side — and where the earlier torture is shown, he hangs inverted while a soldier beats him, which is the detail that distinguishes his passion from the many other Egyptian burnings.
No pre-1900 image of him has been located for this collection, and none is likely to exist: he is a synaxarion-only martyr with no cultus of his own, and the Menologion of Basil II — the usual first resort for minor saints of the fixed year, in which such martyrs do receive a miniature — covers only September to February and therefore cannot serve a May commemoration.
Disputed questions
- The century. The OCA notice heads him "of the third century" while dating the martyrdom to 303, which falls in the fourth by strict reckoning; the discrepancy is the usual one, arising from treating the persecution of Diocletian as belonging to the age it closes rather than the century it occupies. This corpus indexes him under the fourth century and records the martyrdom as c. 303.
- Caluf and Akolouthos. On this same day the Greek Menaion commemorates a martyr Akolouthos (Ἀκόλουθος) who was likewise an Egyptian and was likewise perfected by fire, while the Greek day-list carries no Caluf; the Slavonic and OCA lists carry Caluf and no Akolouthos. The coincidence of day, country and manner of death is close enough that the two notices may well transmit one martyr under two divergent forms of a name that neither Greek nor Slavonic scribes could handle. No source consulted for this entry makes the identification, and it is not asserted here; the Akolouthos notice is deferred for separate examination rather than merged, so that the question is not prejudged in either direction.
- The prefect is not named in the notices, and no attempt should be made to supply one from the lists of Egyptian officials of the period.