Emilian of Dorostolum
The Holy Martyr Emilian of Dorostolum, who suffered by fire under Julian the Apostate
Martyr · d. 18 July 362, at Dorostolum on the Danube
Commemorated 18 July — Martyrdom by fire on the bank of the Danube at Dorostolum
Emilian was a young man of servile condition in Dorostolum (Durostorum) on the lower Danube — the Roman legionary city that is now Silistra in Bulgaria — who was burned to death there on 18 July 362, in the brief pagan restoration of the emperor Julian the Apostate. Learning that the imperial commissioner had come to enforce sacrifice, he went by night into the city's temple, shattered the idols and overturned the altars; and when an innocent countryman was seized for the deed, he came forward and claimed it as his own rather than let another suffer. Scourged before the vicar Capitolinus and condemned to the flames, he was, the passion relates, untouched by the fire that killed the pagans standing near it, and lay down of his own will upon the embers to die. The wife of his master, a secret Christian, buried him. He is one of the very last martyrs of the Roman persecutions and one of the chief saints of the Danubian church.
Dorostolum on the Danube
Durostorum — Greek Dorostolon, Slavonic Dorostol, the modern Silistra — stood on the right bank of the lower Danube in the province of Moesia Secunda, the fortress of the Legio XI Claudia and one of the principal military towns of the Danubian frontier. Garrison cities of this kind produced martyrs in quantity, because it was in them that the imperial orders about sacrifice were enforced most literally and most often; Dorostolum gave the Church Julius the Veteran and Dasius in the Great Persecution, and the three kinsmen Maximus, Quintilian and Dadas, beheaded at Ozovia near the same city under Diocletian and Maximian about 286. Emilian belongs to the end of that long line — not to the persecutions of the third and early fourth centuries, but to the strange reversal of the year 361, when the empire had been Christian for two generations and a philosopher-emperor tried to turn it back.
The edict of Julian
Julian, nephew of Constantine and reared a Christian, came to sole rule in 361 and set himself to restore the worship of the old gods: temples were reopened and repaired, sacrifice resumed at public expense, and provincial governors were sent out to see the thing done. In the Danubian provinces, through which Julian himself had marched on his way to Constantinople, the order was carried by a commissioner whom the passion names Capitolinus — in the Greek notices the eparch or vicar of Thrace — who came to Dorostolum, found no one there who would confess himself a Christian, and, satisfied, sat down to a banquet given by the city.
Emilian was in that city a slave, or in another line of the tradition the son, of a man called Sabbatianus, a person of standing in the place. He had been secretly a Christian; his master (or father) had discovered it and beaten him for it, warning him of worse if he persisted. The beating produced the opposite of its intention.
The overturning of the altars
While the city was still feasting the departure of the commissioner, Emilian took a hammer and went alone into the temple. He broke the images in pieces, threw down the offerings, and overturned the altars with the fire still on them, and went out again unnoticed.
In the morning the ruin was found, and the town was in an uproar. A countryman — a peasant coming in from the fields, who had had no part in it — was seized on suspicion and was being beaten in the street. Emilian, hearing of it, came forward and said before them all that the deed was his: he had done it, and he was a Christian. It is this act, more than the smashing of the idols, on which the synaxarion dwells; he did not seek martyrdom by stealth and he would not buy his life with another man's blood.
The passion
Capitolinus was recalled and Emilian brought before him. Sabbatianus, terrified for his household, urged him to deny Christ; the martyr answered — the words are given in every recension of the passion — that he acknowledged one Lord, Jesus Christ, and that he would never deny Him. He was stripped and scourged at length, and, when nothing moved him, was sentenced to be burned alive.
A pyre was built on the bank of the Danube outside the city and Emilian was thrown into it. The tradition relates that the flames parted from him and ran outward instead, so that several of the pagan bystanders were burned to death; and that when the fire had spent itself and he stood unhurt, he signed himself, gave thanks, and lay down upon the embers of his own accord, and so gave up his spirit. It was the eighteenth of July, in the year 362 — within a year of the emperor's own death in Persia, and among the last martyrdoms of the ancient persecutions.
Burial and relics
The wife of Sabbatianus, who had been a Christian in secret as her household's slave had been, obtained the body, wrapped it and buried it a little way outside the town. The Byzantine tradition adds that his relics were afterwards carried to Constantinople, where a church was raised in his name. The Western martyrologies also enter him at Durostorum on this day, so that his memory is common to both halves of the ancient Church.
Feast and commemoration
July 18 (church date; New Calendar civil July 18, Old Calendar civil July 31). The day of the feast is the day of the martyrdom, which the passion transmits exactly. Emilian is kept by the Greek, Slavonic and Antiochian calendars alike, and is honoured with particular warmth in Bulgaria, where Silistra stands on the site of his martyrdom, and along the whole Danubian country that also keeps Sabbas the Goth (Apr 12), the martyrs of Niculiţel and the Dorostolan martyrs of the Great Persecution. He is the principal commemoration of July 18 in Greek usage.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
As a divine offering and a whole burnt-sacrifice thou wast brought to the Master through fire, O glorious Emilian; for thou didst cast down the altars of the demons and take upon thyself alone the anger of the ungodly, that no innocent man might suffer. Wherefore, lying down upon the coals as upon a bed, thou didst yield thy spirit to God: entreat Him that our souls may be saved.
Kontakion — Tone 2
Thou didst break in pieces the idols of the temple and quench the fire upon their altars, and by fire thou didst thyself ascend to the Lord as a sweet-smelling sacrifice; wherefore the Danube's land keeps thy memory, O martyr Emilian, and cries to thee: rejoice, thou boast of Dorostolum.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Emilian is shown as a young man, beardless or with the first beard, in the short tunic and mantle of a servant rather than the chlamys of a soldier, holding the cross of martyrdom in his right hand; the hammer or axe with which he broke the idols is sometimes given him as an attribute, and the scene of his passion shows him standing or lying in the flames on the river bank, with the overturned altar and the shattered images beside him. Because his feast falls in July, the Menologion of Basil II — which covers only September to February — offers no miniature of him, and no pre-1900 icon of Emilian of Dorostolum alone has been located for this collection; Western picture-files under the name Aemilianus belong to Emilian of Trevi and were rejected as a different saint.
Disputed questions
- Was he slave or son? The Greek synaxarion makes Emilian a servant (δοῦλος) of Sabbatianus, whose anger is that of a master over a household he must answer for; the Slavonic and Russian notices, followed by the OCA, make him the son of Sabbatianus, "a local officer." The difference is old and is probably a copying-slip in one direction or the other; the Greek reading is the harder and the better attested, and this entry follows it while recording the other.
- "Emilian the Slav." The Slavonic tradition, and the Russian service-books after it, call him a Slav, and modern Bulgarian devotion has made much of it. The description is anachronistic: the Slavic settlement of Moesia belongs to the sixth and seventh centuries, two hundred years after Emilian died, and the population of Durostorum in 362 was Thraco-Roman with a strong military admixture. The epithet is best read as the later Slavic Church claiming, as it reasonably might, the martyr of a city that had become its own — not as a statement about his ancestry.
- The year. 362 is the year given by the passion and by most synaxaria; a few notices give 363, the last year of Julian's reign. Both fall inside the pagan restoration and nothing turns on the choice.
- Not to be confused with Emilian of Cyzicus, the confessor-bishop of the iconoclast persecution (Aug 8), nor with Emilian of Rome (Mar 7), nor with the Western Aemilian of Trevi in Umbria, with whom Latin picture-collections sometimes confuse him.