Euthymios of Rhodes
The Holy Hieromartyr Euthymios, Metropolitan of Rhodes
Hieromartyr · Bishop · d. 1529
Commemorated 9 August — Martyrdom by impalement at Rhodes
Euthymios was Metropolitan of Rhodes in the first years after the island fell to the Ottomans, having been set over the Orthodox of Rhodes when the Knights Hospitaller surrendered it to Suleiman the Magnificent in 1523. Six years later, in 1529, he was arrested as the alleged head of a conspiracy against the new masters of the island and was impaled, together with other clergy and leading men of Rhodes. The Christians of the island honoured him as a martyr at once, and his tomb became the chief place of pilgrimage in Rhodes, resorted to especially by sufferers from the quartan fever. He is commemorated on August 9.
Rhodes under the Turk
For two centuries Rhodes had been the fortress-state of the Knights of St John, and the Orthodox of the island had lived under a Latin hierarchy, their own bishop reduced or displaced. In the winter of 1522–1523, after a siege of six months, the Grand Master Philippe de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam surrendered the island to Suleiman the Magnificent and the Knights sailed away to Malta. The Latin establishment went with them, and the Orthodox of Rhodes received again a metropolitan of their own communion. That metropolitan was Euthymios.
His position was the one every Greek hierarch of the conquest inherited: he was at once the shepherd of his flock and, in Ottoman law, its responsible head before the authorities — answerable for its taxes, its order and its loyalty. The notices say only that he shepherded his people in a manner pleasing to God through those first years of a rule that had not yet settled into routine, when the island was still a frontier and its Christians still suspected of looking westward to the Knights who had left.
Arrest and martyrdom
In 1529 the Ottoman authorities uncovered — or alleged — a plot against their rule in Rhodes, and named the metropolitan as its head. He was arrested along with other clergy and a number of the leading laymen of the island, and all were condemned together.
The sentence was impalement (anaskolopismos), the punishment reserved by the Porte for rebellion, and the one calculated to be seen: a death that could last a day and more, in the public places of the town. So Euthymios died, with his companions, and the Church of Rhodes lost its bishop in the sixth year of the occupation.
Veneration
His people did not wait for any process. They reckoned him a martyr immediately, and his grave became a shrine. The evidence for the cult is unusually good, and comes from an unfriendly quarter: a Latin ecclesiastic's report to Rome in the years following describes the tomb of the murdered Greek bishop as the foremost place of pilgrimage of the Rhodians, and records that those who came there were healed — above all the sufferers from the quartan fever, the four-day malarial ague that was endemic in the eastern Mediterranean. That a Roman observer, with no interest in advertising Greek sanctity, should report the shrine's standing and its cures is the strongest single testimony to how quickly and how completely the island received Euthymios as a saint.
Feast and commemoration
August 9 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 22), within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration and within the Dormition Fast. The day's office in the Menaion belongs to the Apostle Matthias; Euthymios is commemorated by his notice, with the common of a hieromartyr where his memory is kept with an office. He is honoured chiefly in Rhodes and the Dodecanese and in the Greek calendars generally, among the hierarchs and neomartyrs of the Turkish centuries.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hieromartyr)
As a sharer in the ways and a successor to the thrones of the Apostles, O divinely inspired one, thou didst find in contemplation the means to ascend to divine heights; rightly dividing the word of truth, thou didst struggle for the faith even unto blood, O hieromartyr Euthymios: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Euthymios is painted as a hierarch of the post-Byzantine centuries: in the phelonion and crossed omophorion, blessing with the right hand and holding the Gospel in the left, with the dark full beard of a bishop of middle years and, in the manner of the martyred hierarchs, the martyr's cross set in his hand or the palm laid across the Gospel. The instrument of his passion — the stake — is not usually shown with him, Greek practice preferring for the martyrs of the Turkish period a plain hieratic portrait and reserving the manner of death for the narrative border. Where such a border is painted, the scenes are the arrest of the metropolitan with his clergy and the impalement outside the walls; and beneath, the tomb with the sick brought to it, which is what the island actually remembered him for.
No pre-1900 icon of him has been located for this collection.
Disputed questions
- Martyr or rebel? The Ottoman charge was political — conspiracy against the state — and the punishment was the punishment of treason, not of apostasy refused. Euthymios was not offered Islam and did not decline it; he was executed as the head of a plot. The Church's judgement, made at once and on the spot, was that the charge was a pretext and the death a death for Christ: the metropolitan was killed because he was the head of the Christian body of Rhodes, and the millet system had made that headship itself the thing suspected. This is the same reasoning by which the Church honours the patriarch Gregory V of Constantinople, hanged in 1821 on a charge of sedition; the ambiguity is real, and the tradition has never pretended otherwise.
- The classification. He is styled hieromartyr in the Greek books rather than neomartyr, the latter title being reserved in ordinary Greek usage for those who died refusing Islam or returning to Christ from it. This repository follows that usage.
- The record. No Life survives, no acts, and no proper office; what is known comes from the short synaxaristic notice, the Latin report of the pilgrimage, and the episcopal lists of Rhodes. Nothing of his birth, his origins, or his age is transmitted.