Constantine of the Agarenes

Origins and early life

He was born in the closing decades of the eighteenth century at Ypsilometopo, a village of the northern part of Lesbos (Mytilene), to Muslim parents of Turkish descent. His Muslim name is not securely transmitted; the sources call him only by his baptismal name and the epithet ho ex Agarēnōn, "he who was of the Agarenes" — the Byzantine term for the Muslims, from Hagar the mother of Ishmael, and the standing designation in the New Martyrologion for converts from Islam.

About his fifteenth year he was struck down by a grave illness. The accounts differ in detail — some say he was poisoned by a Turkish woman, others speak of smallpox — but they agree in the outcome: he went blind and lay bedridden for some three years, abandoned by the physicians of his own people. He was healed by the holy water of the Christians: in one telling a Christian neighbour-woman washed his eyes with the hagiasma blessed at the Theophany, in another he was brought to a Christian holy spring, and his sight was restored. That healing was the seed of everything that followed. He understood that the grace which had opened his eyes belonged to the faith of the Christians, and he never afterwards forgot it.

Smyrna, and the desire for baptism

Recovered, he left the island for the mainland and settled at Smyrna, where he made his living as a greengrocer and fruit-seller. His shop and his errands brought him continually to the quarter of the Metropolis, and there — standing at the doors during the services, listening to the chanting and to the conversation of the clergy and the educated laymen of the great Greek city — he learned the faith by ear over a long time. The sources are careful to say that no one solicited him: under Ottoman law the baptism of a Muslim was a capital matter for the baptiser as much as for the baptised, and no priest of Smyrna would have dared it. The desire was his own, and it hardened into resolve.

Since it could not be done in a Turkish city, he did what a number of would-be converts of those years did: he went to the Holy Mountain. There the monks, hearing him out and weighing the danger, would not act on their own authority but sent him to the highest authority then living on Athos.

Catechism at Kavsokalyvia and baptism by Gregory V

The Ecumenical Patriarch Gregory V — thrice patriarch, and destined himself to be hanged at the gate of the Phanar in 1821 — was at that time living in exile on Mount Athos, at the Monastery of Iviron. To him Constantine was brought, and by his direction the young Turk was sent for catechism to the Skete of Kavsokalyvia, that severest and most hidden of the Athonite settlements, where the fathers had already formed several of the new martyrs. There, under an elder named Gabriel, he was instructed for about six months in the faith, in the psalms and prayers, and in what he was undertaking; and then he was baptised by the hand of the Patriarch Gregory himself and given the name Constantine. The Athonite tradition remembers that at the moment of the baptism his face was seen to shine "like the sun."

He remained a while on the Mountain in the discipline of the skete. But the thing he had received he could not keep to himself, and he formed the intention that would kill him: to go back to his own family and bring his brothers and sisters to the same baptism.

Martyrdom or repose

He crossed to Asia Minor and made for his kindred in the Smyrna–Magnesia district. There he was recognised — at Aivali (Kydonies, the modern Ayvalık) by one who had known him as a Muslim — and denounced as an apostate from Islam. Arrested and examined, he made no attempt at concealment: he declared himself a Christian, named the baptism he had received, and refused every inducement to return. He was tortured — the accounts single out a heated iron cap or helmet forced upon his head — and, when he would not yield, was sent under guard to Constantinople for the sentence of the Porte.

At the capital he was interrogated again and pressed once more to deny Christ. Instead — this is the detail the New Martyrologion loves in him — he turned the summons round and invited the official to be baptised himself, telling him that he had found the truth and wished the same for his judge. The enraged officer ordered his execution, and Constantine was hanged at Constantinople on 2 June 1819. He was a young man; the sources do not transmit his exact age.

Veneration and later cultus

His memory was gathered up at once by the Athonite fathers who had catechised him, in the manner in which the whole company of the New Martyrs was preserved: an account of the martyrdom written down while witnesses lived, and a proper service composed for the day. He is entered in the Greek synaxaria for June 2, and is kept with particular honour at Kavsokalyvia, where he was made a Christian, and on Lesbos, the island of his birth — which, with Constantine, counts among its saints one who came to the faith from outside it. He is invoked especially for those who seek baptism at cost to themselves, and for the healing of the eyes, in memory of the hagiasma that opened his own.