Christopher of Mela
Our Venerable Father Christopher of Gazara, Abbot of the Monastery on Mount Mela
Venerable · d. 7th century
Commemorated 18 August — Commemoration of the restorer of the Soumela monastery
Christopher was born at Gazara, a place near Trebizond in Pontus, and governed the monastery of the Theotokos on Mount Mela — the Soumela of the Pontic Greeks — in the second half of the seventh century, in the reign of Constans II (641–668). He is remembered as the man who raised the house again after the ruin of the intervening centuries, and so as its second founder after Barnabas and Sophronius, with whom the calendar keeps him on August 18. Beyond his birthplace, his abbacy and his period, the record transmits nothing, and nothing is added here.
What is transmitted
The synaxarion's notice is three facts long. Christopher was born in the locality of Gazara, near Trebizond; he was head of the monastery on Mount Mela; and his tenure fell in the later seventh century, which the Slavonic notice fixes by the regnal years 641–668, those of the emperor Constans II. He is called venerable, not martyr and not hierarch, and the tradition of the house adds only that the monastery, fallen into desolation, was restored by him.
That is the whole file. He wrote nothing that survives, no Life of him is preserved, and no miracle is recorded of him.
The seventh century on that coast
The bareness is itself informative. Christopher's abbacy falls in the worst decades the Christian East had known. Within his lifetime the Arab conquests had taken Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia and Egypt; Armenia was overrun; raiding parties reached deep into Anatolia year after year, and in 674 the Umayyad fleet would begin the first great siege of Constantinople. The empire lost its administrative continuity along with its provinces, and the seventh century is accordingly the emptiest stretch of the Byzantine documentary record.
To restore a mountain monastery in Pontus in those years was not a small undertaking, and the fact that the memory of the man who did it survived at all — when so much else did not — is evidence that the house counted for something locally well before it became the imperial sanctuary of the Grand Komnenoi six centuries later. Trebizond in the seventh century was a frontier port and the terminus of the caravan road from Persia; the mountain behind it, with its gorge and its cliff-ledge, was a plausible refuge exactly when the coast was not safe.
The house he restored
The monastery Christopher took in hand had been founded, by its own tradition, about 386 by the Athenians Barnabas and his nephew Sophronius, around the icon of the Theotokos ascribed to the Evangelist Luke which the tradition says angels carried to the cave. It would go on, after Christopher, to be rebuilt again in the fourteenth century under Alexios III of Trebizond, whose chrysobull of 1365 endowed it and confirmed its autonomy; to be protected by Ottoman firman after 1461; and to be inhabited without interruption until the population exchange of 1923. Of the three men the calendar names as its fathers, Christopher is the one whose contribution — keeping a foundation alive through its worst century — is the least visible and was probably the most necessary.
Feast and commemoration
August 18 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 31), within the afterfeast of the Dormition of the Theotokos. He is commemorated in one group with the founders Barnabas and Sophronius and with the Hodegetria icon of the Mother of God of the Mela monastery, the three notices forming together the day's commemoration of Soumela. There is no proper service; the common of a venerable father is sung. His veneration is essentially that of the Pontic Greeks, and it travelled with them in 1923 to the new Panagia Soumela at Kastania on Mount Vermio in Greek Macedonia.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
In thee, O father, was the divine image preserved with exactness: for taking up the cross thou didst follow after Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, which passes away, and to care for the soul, which is immortal. Wherefore thy spirit, O venerable Christopher, rejoices with the angels.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Christopher has no attribute of his own. He is painted as a monastic elder in the schema and mantle, bearded, holding a scroll, and — where the composition belongs to the monastery — carrying a model of the church of Soumela in the manner of founders' portraits, either alone or standing beside Barnabas and Sophronius on the far side of the cave-church. In the Pontic devotional prints of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the three appear together beneath the Hodegetria, with the cliff and the gorge behind them.
No pre-1900 image of Christopher has been located for this collection. The surviving frescoes of the Soumela cave-church, which would be the natural source, are known chiefly through modern photographs taken at an angle to the rock-face, in which the photographer holds rights of his own, and no faithful flat reproduction of a panel identifiable as Christopher has been found. The Menologion of Basil II is unusable for him: it covers September to February only.
Disputed questions
- His dates. "Second half of the seventh century" and "641–668" are the synaxarion's own bracket, and they do not quite agree: 641–668 is the whole reign of Constans II and includes the first half of the century's second quarter as well as its third. No year of birth or death is transmitted, and none is proposed here.
- Gazara. The place is identified only as being near Trebizond; it has not been securely located, and the name appears in the Slavonic notices as Gazar, in others as Gazaron. It should not be confused with the Palestinian Gazara (Gezer), which has nothing to do with him.
- Restorer or founder? Some later Pontic accounts make Christopher the founder outright and drop Barnabas and Sophronius, or else compress all three into a single foundation narrative. The synaxarion keeps them distinct, three hundred years apart, and this repository follows it.
- Not to be confused with Christopher of Lycia, the great martyr of May 9 depicted in the older iconography with the head of a dog, nor with Christopher of Antioch, the patriarch murdered in 967 (May 21), nor with the several Georgian and Russian Christophers of the calendar.