Ephraim of Nea Makri
The Holy Venerable-Martyr Ephraim the New, Wonderworker, of Mount Amomon
Venerable Martyr · New Martyr · Wonderworker · b. traditionally 14 September 1384, Trikala in Thessaly — d. 5 May 1426
Commemorated 3 January — The finding of his relics, 1950, 5 May — His martyrdom on Mount Amomon
Ephraim is a fifteenth-century Greek monk of Mount Amomon above the modern Nea Makri in Attica, held to have been tortured to death by Turkish raiders on 5 May 1426. Nothing whatever was known of him until 1950, when the nun Makaria Desipri, excavating the ruins of the abandoned Monastery of the Annunciation on the hill, uncovered a burial she took — on the strength of a series of dreams and visions she reported — to be his, and from which the whole of his transmitted biography derives. A very large popular veneration grew up around the shrine within a generation; the Church of Greece entered him in its calendar in 1998 and the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2011. His commemoration is therefore canonically established and liturgically kept, while the historical foundation of his life rests on private revelation and not on any document, and the Church's own recognition of him was cautious and late.
What the sources are
Ephraim must be described differently from the saints of the older synaxaria, because the nature of the evidence is different and the difference is itself the important fact. There is no manuscript, chronicle, inscription, colophon, monastic register or local tradition of any kind that mentions him before 1950. Every detail of his name, dates, family, tonsure, captivity and death comes from what the nun Makaria Desipri reported to have been shown her in dreams and appearances after the excavation of the grave, and was published subsequently. The account that follows is that account, given as such.
Constantine Morphes of Trikala
By this transmitted life he was born at Trikala in Thessaly on 14 September 1384, and given the baptismal name Constantine, of the family Morphes; his father died while he was a child, and his widowed mother, faced with the Ottoman levy of children for Islamisation, sent the boy away at about fourteen. He came to the monastery of the Annunciation of the Theotokos on Mount Amomon — "the mountain of the Blameless One" — above the bay on the eastern shore of Attica where the village of Nea Makri now stands, was tonsured with the name Ephraim, and lived there for some twenty-seven years in the ordinary round of the coenobium and, latterly, in a cave on the mountain. Later accounts style him hieromonk; the earlier form of the story does not clearly make him a priest, and the Greek calendars honour him as ὁσιομάρτυς, a monastic martyr, without insisting on the priesthood.
Martyrdom on Mount Amomon
In 1424, the account continues, a Turkish raiding party sacked the monastery and killed the community; Ephraim, absent in his cave, came down to find the church desecrated and the monks dead, and remained alone on the mountain among the ruins. On 14 September 1425 a second party took him. He was held and tormented for more than eight months, and on 5 May 1426 was killed: hung head-downwards from a mulberry tree in the monastery court, his feet and head pierced with nails, and his body finally transfixed with a burning stake. The mulberry tree standing in the courtyard of the present monastery is venerated as the tree of his passion.
The finding of the relics, 1950
The monastery had been ruined and forgotten for centuries. In 1945 the nun Makaria Desipri settled among its remains and began to clear and rebuild. She reported a persistent sense of a presence and a series of dreams directing her where to dig; on 3 January 1950, in the ground beside the ruined church, she uncovered a skeleton, with the remains of a monastic habit, which she and those with her described as giving off a strong fragrance. She reported that the saint then appeared to her, named himself Ephraim, and told her the story of his life and death, and that at his direction the relics were placed within the restored church.
Veneration and the modern shrine
The shrine grew with remarkable speed. The rebuilt house on Mount Amomon became the Monastery of St Ephraim at Nea Makri, one of the most visited pilgrimage places in Greece; the saint acquired the popular styles θαυματουργός ("wonderworker") and even μεγαλομάρτυς ("great-martyr"), and a very large body of reported healings, apparitions and answered prayers attaches to him — the characteristic material of a living cult rather than of a hagiographic text. His icon spread through Greece and the diaspora, myrrh from his relics is distributed, and akathists, a full service and a considerable devotional literature have been composed for him in Greek since the 1970s.
The formal ecclesiastical position followed the devotion rather than leading it. The Holy Synod of the Church of Greece entered him among the saints in 1998; the Ecumenical Patriarchate inscribed his name in the calendar in 2011. He is kept in Greece and in Greek jurisdictions abroad on May 5, his martyrdom, and on January 3, the finding of his relics; he is not carried by the older Slavic or Antiochian menaia, whose calendars predate his glorification.
Feast and commemoration
May 5 (church date; Old Calendar civil May 18) for the martyrdom, and January 3 (Old Calendar civil January 16) for the finding of the relics in 1950. Both days are kept in the Church of Greece and, since 2011, in the calendar of the Ecumenical Patriarchate; the principal pilgrimage is to the monastery at Nea Makri in Attica. On May 5 in Greek usage he stands beside the Great-Martyr Irene, whose day it principally is.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a venerable-martyr)
Trained in the discipline of the monks and made perfect in the contest of the martyrs, thou didst offer to Christ a twofold crown, O Ephraim: for having died to the world in the ascetic life, thou didst give thy body to torments for His name, and wast found faithful unto the end. Wherefore intercede with Him that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
The iconography of Ephraim is wholly of the second half of the twentieth century and is remarkably uniform, having spread from the shrine at Nea Makri: a monk of middle years in the black rason and koukoulion, with a full dark beard, holding a cross, and very often shown with the instruments and scene of his passion — the mulberry tree with the body hung inverted, the nails, the burning stake — either in a border cycle or in the ground of the icon. A second common type shows him standing before the monastery on the hill. Some icons place him beside the nun Makaria, or show the moment of the finding of the relics.
Because every existing image of the saint is a modern painting by a living or recently-deceased iconographer, and therefore a copyrighted work, no image is stored for this entry. No pre-1900 depiction of him exists or can exist: he was unknown to the Church before 1950. Note also that the Menologion of Basil II and the other Byzantine menologia, sometimes raided for images of "St Ephraim," depict only Ephrem the Syrian.
Disputed questions
- The historical existence of the saint. This is stated plainly by the sources themselves, including sympathetic ones: no source outside the 1950 revelations testifies to Ephraim as a historical person, and his sainthood is therefore, in the frank words of the critical notices, a matter of asserted divine revelation rather than historical proof. The ruined monastery on Mount Amomon and the Turkish devastation of the Attic coast in the 1420s are real; a monk martyred there in 1426 is entirely plausible in itself; but the name, the dates and the details of the passion have no independent attestation. Some Greek scholars and clergy have accordingly questioned the cult, and the two-generation gap between the popular veneration and the synodal acts of 1998 and 2011 reflects that caution. This entry records the commemoration as established (which it is, by synodal act) and the biography as revealed (which is what it claims to be).
- His rank and titles. Popular Greek usage calls him μεγαλομάρτυς, "great-martyr" — a title the older tradition reserves for the great confessors of the pagan persecutions — and the same styling has passed into some English lists. The synodal and liturgical style is ὁσιομάρτυς, venerable-martyr, with νεομάρτυς, new-martyr, for the Ottoman period. This repository classifies him as venerable-martyr and new-martyr and records the "great-martyr" usage here.
- Not to be confused with Ephrem the Syrian, the deacon and hymnographer of Edessa (January 28), nor with Ephraim of Pereyaslavl; the bare Greek name Ἅγιος Ἐφραίμ in modern Greek devotional material almost always means the martyr of Nea Makri, while in patristic and liturgical contexts it means the Syrian.