Dionysius of Vatopedi
The Holy Venerable New Martyr Dionysius of the Vatopedi Monastery
Venerable Martyr · New Martyr · d. 1822, on Crete
Commemorated 31 July — Martyrdom on Crete
Dionysius was a monk of the Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos who was sent out in 1822 with the monastery's greatest treasure, the Holy Belt of the Theotokos, to a plague-stricken Crete. It was the second year of the Greek insurrection, and the island was under Ottoman reprisal. He was seized by the Turkish authorities, offered his life if he would accept Islam, and refused; heated iron stakes were driven into his temples, and when he still would not deny Christ he was hanged — on Clean Monday of that year, the first day of Great Lent. The Ecumenical Patriarchate numbered him among the saints, and the Russian Church entered his name in her calendar in 2007.
Vatopedi and the Belt
Dionysius was a monk — the Russian notices call him a hieromonk — of the great Vatopedi monastery on the north-eastern side of the Holy Mountain. Among the relics kept there is the Holy Belt (Ζώνη) of the Mother of God, Vatopedi's most venerated possession, and it has been the ancient custom of the monastery to send it out, carried by its own monks, to places visited by plague, cholera, drought or infertility, where it is exposed for the veneration of the people. Such a journey was an errand of mercy and also a duty of some danger, since the fathers who carried the Belt travelled through Ottoman territory with a portable object of enormous value.
Crete, 1822
In 1822 plague was raging on Crete, and Dionysius was sent there with the Belt.
The year is the point. The Greek Revolution had broken out in the spring of 1821; the Ottoman reprisal against the Greek population had been immediate and general — the Patriarch Gregory V was hanged at the gate of the Phanar on Pascha 1821, Chios was destroyed in the spring of 1822 — and Crete was in insurrection and under the hand of the Egyptian and Ottoman forces. Mount Athos itself was occupied by Turkish troops from 1821, its monasteries garrisoned and heavily fined and a great part of its monks scattered; monks travelling out of the Holy Mountain in those years were suspect on sight.
Dionysius was arrested on the island. The demand made of him was the standard one of the age of the new martyrs: apostatise to Islam and live. He refused it.
He was tortured with a cruelty the sources record precisely — red-hot iron stakes driven into his temples — and, remaining constant, was hanged. The Russian notice fixes the day as Clean Monday, the first day of Great Lent, of that year.
Veneration
His memory was kept first on Athos and on Crete. He was formally numbered among the saints by the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and by the decision of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church in 2007 his name was entered in the Russian calendar under this day, which is how a nineteenth-century Athonite martyr comes to stand in the Slavonic menologion beside a ninth-century Cappadocian layman and a fifth-century bishop of Gaul.
He belongs to the long roll of the new martyrs of the Ottoman period, and specifically to the company of Athonites killed in the reprisals of 1821–1822 — among them Euthymius, Ignatius and Acacius of Athos, the three disciples of the same years — whose passions are the last chapter of that literature before the liberation.
Feast and commemoration
July 31 (church date; New Calendar civil July 31, Old Calendar civil August 13) — the day on which the Russian calendars keep him, and under which the Athonite and Greek commemoration is entered. He is a modern addition to the fixed calendar on the Slavonic side (2007) and is not in the older printed Menaia. The day is the last before the Dormition Fast; his martyrdom itself fell on Clean Monday, at the opposite pole of the year.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a venerable martyr)
Thou didst carry the Belt of the Mother of God to a people under the scourge, and thyself becamest an offering; the iron in thy temples could not unseat the name of Christ from thy heart, O venerable martyr Dionysius. Wherefore, having received a double crown, intercede for our souls.
Iconography
Dionysius is painted, in the modern Athonite manner of the new-martyr icons, as a monk in the schema — dark rason and koukoulion, the analavos with the instruments of the Passion — holding the martyr's cross, with the noose at his shoulder or shown in the background as the manner of his death, and often with the Holy Belt in a reliquary in his left hand or held out before him, which is the one attribute that distinguishes him from the many other Athonite new martyrs. Vatopedi is commonly shown behind him and the sea of Crete before him.
All known images of him are twentieth- or twenty-first-century works by named iconographers and are under copyright; no pre-1900 image exists, since his glorification is later than his death and his cult barely predates the modern Greek state. Searches of Wikimedia Commons under the Greek and Russian forms of his name returned no results at all. No icon is stored.
Disputed questions
- His rank and his name in religion are given variously: the Greek sources call him a monk of Vatopedi, the Russian synodal notice a преподобномученик, and some accounts a hieromonk. This entry follows the Greek and classes him a venerable martyr.
- The place on Crete is not named in the notices reached for this entry, nor is the name of the official who condemned him. His proper service and the fuller Greek accounts are modern publications under copyright and were not used.
- Not to be confused with the other Athonite and Greek Dionysii — Dionysius of Olympus, founder of the monastery on Olympus (†1541); Dionysius of Zakynthos, the archbishop of Aegina (†1622); or Dionysius the Rhetor and Metrophanes of Little Saint Anne. The name is one of the commonest on the Holy Mountain.