David of Thessalonica

Origins and early life

David was born about the year 450 in Upper Mesopotamia, in the eastern reaches of the Syriac-speaking world where the extreme forms of solitary ascesis — the stylites, the grazers, the dendrites — had their homeland. Nothing is preserved of his family. As a young man he travelled west in the company of a monk named Adolas, and about 465–470 the two came to Thessalonica, the second city of the empire and the seat of the imperial prefecture of Illyricum.

There he was received into the monastery of the holy martyrs Theodore and Mercurius, known locally as the monastery of the Koukouliatoi — "of the cowl-wearers," from the distinctive hood worn by its monks, which the iconography of David preserves. The monastery stood just outside the northern wall of the city, in the quarter that later took his own name. David gave himself to obedience, fasting, and the recitation of the Psalter with such constancy that the fathers marked him out at once.

Ascetic struggle: the almond tree

When the abbot of the monastery died the brethren chose David unanimously to succeed him. He would not take the office. Instead — and this is the act that made him famous throughout the East — he climbed into an almond tree that grew to the right of the monastery church, and settled himself among its branches. There he remained for three years, without shelter of any kind, praying day and night, keeping a rule of fasting, and enduring what the sources describe simply as the winter's bitter cold and the summer's burning heat, with the rains and the winds of the Thermaic Gulf in between.

The choice was not eccentricity but a recognised form of the ascetic life. The dendrites (from δένδρον, "tree") stood beside the stylites as one of the accepted extreme disciplines of the fifth and sixth centuries: as the pillar lifted the ascetic out of the world without removing him from the sight of the city, so did the tree. David's tree stood inside a working monastery on a busy road, and his ascesis was therefore public, a sermon preached by endurance.

At the end of three years an angel of the Lord appeared to him and told him that his prayer had been heard, that he was to come down and to live henceforth in a cell, and that before his death God would give him one further work of love to accomplish. David descended and, in the presence of the Archbishop Dorotheos of Thessalonica, was enclosed in a cell built for him a short distance beyond the city wall.

Wonderworking and spiritual fatherhood

In his cell David became what the tree had prepared him to be. The sources — and the tradition after them — credit him with the healing of the sick, the expulsion of demons, and above all with the gift of counsel: clergy, monastics, the city's officials and its ordinary people came to the little window of his enclosure for a word. He is remembered as gentle where the extreme ascetics were often severe, and as a man who never used his reputation to rebuke or to dominate. He lived so long in this seclusion that when at last he was made to leave it he had not seen the open sunlight for many years; his hair had grown to his waist and his beard, in the traditional description, to his feet.

Among the wonders attributed to him the best remembered is the one that belongs to his embassy, below; but the narrative of his life also credits him with the healing of a boy tormented by an unclean spirit and with foreknowledge of the day and manner of his own repose.

The embassy to Justinian

The "further work of love" came near the end of his life. In the sixth century the civil prefecture of Illyricum had its seat at Thessalonica; the emperor Justinian I, born in the Balkan interior, resolved to raise his birthplace into a new city, Justiniana Prima, and to move the prefecture — and with it the ecclesiastical primacy of the province — there. For Thessalonica this meant demotion in rank, in revenue, and in the protection of the imperial administration.

Archbishop Dorotheos had died; his successor, Aristeides, judged that no ordinary delegation would move the emperor, and pressed David to go himself to Constantinople. David, by now a very old man, consented, foretelling that this was the last thing required of him and that he would not enter the imperial City a second time. He set out with two disciples, Theodore and Demetrios.

His arrival in the capital caused a sensation; the Empress Theodora received him with great reverence, and word of the tree-dweller of Thessalonica ran through the City before the emperor would see him. When at last he was brought into the presence of Justinian and the senate, David asked for a censer, and taking live coals and incense into his bare hands, censed the emperor and the whole assembly, praying and blessing — the tradition says for something near an hour — and his hands were not burned. The emperor rose from his throne. Whatever the political calculation may separately have been, the sources agree in the outcome: Justinian granted the petition of Thessalonica, and the city kept the prefecture.

Repose

David took ship for home. He had foretold that he would not see his own monastery again, and so it fell out: the ship had reached Thermes, at the place called Emvolos on the Thermaic Gulf — the sources reckon it some 126 stadia from his cell — when he gave up his spirit, about the year 540. His body was carried the rest of the way, met by the archbishop and by the whole city in procession, and buried at his monastery of Saints Theodore and Mercurius in a plain wooden coffin, as he had asked.

Relics and translations

The grave at once became a place of pilgrimage, and the tradition preserves a striking account of its inviolability: about 685–690 an abbot named Demetrios attempted to open the tomb, and a plague fell upon the monastery, which was understood as the saint's refusal; a later archbishop, Sergius, dared to take from the relics no more than some hairs of the beard.

In the disaster of the Latin occupation that followed the Fourth Crusade the relics were carried out of Thessalonica to Italy, and came to rest at Pavia; in 1967 they were moved to Milan. On 16 September 1978 — the date now kept as a second commemoration — they were returned to Thessalonica by Metropolitan Panteleimon, received at the basilica of Saint Demetrios, and afterwards enshrined in the katholikon of the monastery of Saint Theodora in the city, where they remain.

Veneration and later cultus

David is one of the patrons of Thessalonica, second in the city's affection only to Saint Demetrios himself. The quarter around his monastery long bore his name, and the small late-fifth-century church of the Latomou monastery — famous for its mosaic of the vision of Ezekiel, the young beardless Christ in the mandorla — has been popularly known for centuries as Hosios David, after him, though the church is not the monastery in which he lived. His name-day is a civic occasion in Thessalonica, and his relics draw pilgrims from across northern Greece.

The synaxarion distich for the day plays on his name against the Prophet-King's: the new David slew the Goliath of the carnal passions, and on the twenty-sixth passed through the gates of life.