Eustathius of Ancyra
The Holy Martyr Eustathius the Soldier, of Ancyra
Martyr · d. date not transmitted
Commemorated 28 July — Martyrdom at the river Sangarius near Ancyra
Eustathius was a soldier arrested at Ancyra in Galatia for confessing Christ. His passion, as the synaxaria transmit it, is short and consists almost wholly of one scene: after beating and the piercing of his heels he was dragged bound through the streets to the river, shut into a wooden chest and sunk in the water — and an angel brought the chest to the bank again with the martyr alive inside it, singing the psalms. The judge, the account says, was so confounded that he ran on his own sword; and Eustathius, having received communion from the hand of the angel, gave up his soul. Neither the year nor the emperor is transmitted. His relics were laid at Ancyra, and he is kept on July 28.
A soldier of Ancyra
Ancyra — the modern Ankara — was the metropolis of Galatia and a garrison town on the great military road across Anatolia, and it produced a long line of martyrs: the priest Basil, the deacon Theodotus and the Seven Virgins, Clement the hieromartyr, Plato, Julitta. Eustathius belongs to this Galatian company. He was a soldier in the imperial service, and his arrest followed the usual pattern of the soldier-martyrs: an inquiry, a demand that he sacrifice, and a plain refusal. Brought before the governor of the city, he confessed himself a Christian "firmly and bravely," in the words of the notice, and was at once condemned to torture.
The passion
He was beaten, and his heels were pierced — the wound by which a man is prevented from ever walking again, and a punishment attached in the ancient world to runaway slaves. Then ropes were passed through the wounds and he was dragged through the city to the river that the sources call Sangarius (the Sakarya, which rises in Galatian territory north of Ancyra; some recensions give the name as Sagka or Sagaris).
At the water's edge his executioners shut him into a wooden chest, sealed it and sank it. What follows is the whole point of the passion as it was remembered: an angel of God took the chest and brought it to the shore, and when it was opened the martyr was alive within, singing from the Psalter. The governor, seeing it and unable to bear the reversal, drew his own sword and killed himself. Eustathius, brought out of the water, was given the Holy Mysteries by the hand of the angel and so surrendered his soul — not, in this telling, executed at all, but dying at the moment God appointed once the sign had been given. His body was taken up by the Christians of Ancyra and buried in the city.
Feast and commemoration
July 28 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 10), on a day whose principal commemoration is the synaxis of the four deacons of Acts 6. Eustathius appears as a bare notice in the Greek and Slavonic synaxaria alike, without a proper office. The day falls in the open season between the Apostles' Fast and the Dormition Fast. Universal usage, in the weak sense that both the Greek and the Slavonic books carry the name; no local cult of any size is attested outside Ancyra.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Eustathius, O Lord, in his contest received an incorruptible crown from Thee, our God; for possessing Thy strength, he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By his intercessions save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Eustathius is depicted in the type of the soldier-martyr: a young man, beardless or with the first growth of a beard, in a short belted tunic and a mantle clasped at the shoulder, or in military dress with cuirass and cloak, holding the martyr's cross in his right hand. The distinguishing scene, where a painter chooses to give him one, is the chest upon the water: a locked wooden coffer floating on the river, an angel's hand upon it, and the martyr's face at the opening — an image visually close to the sea-chests of the Latin passions and to the ark of Noah, and read by the tradition in exactly that key, as the ark that carries the righteous through the waters. No pre-1900 image of him has been located for this collection. The Menologion of Basil II, the usual resort for minor martyrs, covers only September to February and cannot serve a July commemoration.
Disputed questions
- Ancyra or Apamea? The manuscript tradition is divided, and modern calendars reproduce the division: the Orthodox Church in America prints him as "Martyr Eustathius (Eustace) of Apamea" while its own text places the arrest and the relics at Ancyra; the Greek notices and OrthodoxWiki give Ancyra, sometimes with "or Apamea" appended. The internal evidence of the passion — the governor of Ancyra, the river Sangarius, the burial at Ancyra — is Galatian throughout, and this entry follows it. The Apamea reading is very probably contamination from the martyr Acacius of Apamea, whose commemoration stands beside Eustathius's on the same July day; that two martyrs of the same date should have swapped a city between them in transmission is an ordinary accident of synaxarion copying.
- No date, no emperor. Nothing in the notice fixes the persecution. The soldier's status and the form of the trial would suit any period from Decius to Diocletian; the frontmatter therefore omits century, and the entry indexes under unknown.
- Not to be confused with the great-martyr Eustathius Placidas (September 20), the general converted by the stag with the cross in its antlers, whose dossier is entirely different; nor with Eustathius of Antioch the confessor (February 21), the fourth-century bishop and opponent of Arius; nor with Eustathius of Thessalonica the twelfth-century scholar-archbishop.