Demetrius of Samarina
The Holy New Martyr Demetrius of Samarina in Epirus
New Martyr · Venerable Martyr · Venerable · b. late 18th century, at Samarina in the Pindus — d. 17 August 1808, at Ioannina
Commemorated 17 August — Martyrdom under Ali Pasha of Ioannina
Demetrius was a monk of Samarina, the high Vlach village of the Pindus in Epirus, who was tortured to death by Ali Pasha of Ioannina on 17 August 1808. After the crushing of the rising led by the priest Euthymios Vlachavas in 1808, he left his monastery to go among the terrified villages, preaching and strengthening the people in their faith. Ali Pasha's men took him for a conspirator and demanded the names of the plotters. He gave none — through nails driven under his fingernails and toenails, an iron band tightened around his skull, and suspension head-downward over a fire — and at the last was walled up alive with only his head left showing, dying after ten days. A Turk who watched him was converted by what he saw and was himself martyred.
Samarina and the monastery
Samarina lies at some 1,400 metres in the Pindus range, one of the highest permanently inhabited villages in the Balkans and a principal seat of the Aromanian (Vlach) people. Demetrius was born there in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. The record of his early life is brief: he entered a monastery of the district as a young man and gave himself to the ordinary ascetic labour of a Greek monk under the Ottoman yoke — fasting, vigil, obedience — with, the account says, the deliberate purpose of purifying body and soul together.
The rising of 1808 and its aftermath
The context of his death is one of the darkest episodes of Epirot history. Ali Pasha of Tepelena, ruling from Ioannina as a nearly independent prince, had by 1808 made himself master of Epirus, Thessaly and much of southern Albania. In that year the priest Euthymios Vlachavas — an armatolos of Thessaly and one of the first organisers of Greek revolt — raised an insurrection against him. It was broken quickly and answered with exemplary savagery; Vlachavas himself was dismembered alive at Ioannina.
The villages of the Pindus, which had supplied and sheltered the rising, were left in terror. Demetrius left his monastery and went out among them: not to organise, but to preach, to hear confessions, and to keep the people from apostasy at a moment when conversion to Islam was the obvious road to safety. That was precisely the activity Ali Pasha's agents could not distinguish from sedition.
Martyrdom
He was arrested and brought before the Pasha, who was certain he was a conspirator and wanted names. Demetrius answered that he had done nothing but strengthen the faithful in their religion and in lawful conduct. Ali Pasha did not believe him, and set his men to extract the truth.
The tortures, as the account transmits them, were four, applied in sequence over many days:
- Nails driven through his arms, and slivers of wood forced beneath the nails of his hands and feet.
- An iron band fastened about his forehead and tightened by degrees.
- Suspension head-downward over a fire.
- Finally, the sentence Ali Pasha reserved for those he could not break: he was built into a wall, immured upright with only the head left exposed, and left there.
Through all of it he was silent — not defiant, the account is careful to say, but silent: he named no one, because there was no one to name. A Turk who watched the immurement was so shaken by what he saw that he confessed Christ himself and was put to death for it, a second martyr of the same day whose name has not come down.
Demetrius died on the tenth day in the wall, on 17 August 1808.
Feast and commemoration
August 17 (church date; New Calendar civil August 17, Old Calendar civil August 30), within the afterfeast of the Dormition of the Theotokos. He is kept in the Greek synaxaria and by the OCA. In Samarina itself, where the village empties in winter and fills in summer with the returning Vlach families, the memory falls in the season when the place is full, and is kept as the village's own; the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of the Ottoman period commemorates him with the rest.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a new martyr)
Thou didst blossom in the last times as a new shoot of the ancient martyrs, O Demetrius, and didst endure the wall and the fire in silence, betraying neither Christ nor thy brethren; wherefore, having received the unfading crown, intercede for those who honour thee.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Demetrius is written as a young monk-martyr: dark-bearded, in the monastic mantle and klobuk, holding the cross of confession and often a palm. The scene proper to him — and the one by which he is recognised at once — is the wall: the saint standing immured to the neck in fresh masonry, only the head and the halo above the courses, with the Pasha's men at the side and, in fuller versions, the Turkish onlooker turning toward him with hands raised. The instruments of his passion — the nails, the iron circlet — may be set in the margins. All surviving images of him are modern (the earliest belong to the later nineteenth century and the great majority to the twentieth): none is free-licensed, and no storable image has been located for this collection.
Disputed questions
- A local cultus. Demetrius is a saint of the Greek calendars — of Epirus, of the Vlach villages of the Pindus, and of the general commemorations of the New Martyrs — and is carried by the OCA. He does not appear in the Slavonic Menaion or on the Antiochian calendar. His akolouthia is a modern composition.
- The name of the second martyr. The converted Turk is unnamed in every version of the account; some later retellings give him the baptismal name of the day, which is not transmitted evidence.
- Not to be confused with Demetrius of Thessalonica (October 26), the great-martyr and Myrrh-streamer, whose name he bears; nor with the many other new-martyrs Demetrius of the Ottoman period — of Tripoli (April 14), of Chios (January 29), and the Peloponnesian Demetrius of 1802. The epithet of Samarina is essential to the identification.