The Fathers slain at the Monastery of St Sabas
Our Venerable Fathers, the Twenty Monks slain by the Saracens at the Great Lavra of Saint Sabas
Venerable Martyr · Venerable · d. 796 (some sources 797), at the Great Lavra of Saint Sabas in the Judaean desert
Commemorated 20 March — The massacre of the monks of Mar Saba by desert raiders under Abbasid rule
On March 20 the Church commemorates the monks of the Great Lavra of Saint Sabas — the monastery of Mar Saba in the Judaean desert — who were massacred by marauding desert nomads about the year 796, in the disordered years of early Abbasid rule over Palestine. Raiders fell twice upon the defenceless community above the Kidron gorge; when the monks yielded up what little the poor house possessed and still the plunderers found no treasure, they turned to torture and slaughter, driving many of the fathers into the cave-church of Saint Nicholas and choking them with the smoke of a fire kindled at its mouth. Some twenty monks died of wounds and suffocation, among them John, Sergius, and Patrick; the survivors, tended by the abbot Thomas, buried their dead and kept the Lavra. The sufferings were set down by an eyewitness monk of the house, Stephen the Sabaite, and the day stands as one of the great witnesses of Palestinian desert monasticism enduring under Muslim rule.
The Great Lavra under a new dominion
The Great Lavra founded by Sabbas the Sanctified in 483 — the monastery of Mar Saba, clinging to the cliffs of the Kidron ravine south-east of Jerusalem — had by the eighth century already outlived the Persian sack of 614 and the passing of Byzantine rule, and had become, under the caliphs, the intellectual and liturgical heart of Palestinian Orthodoxy. Within its walls in that very century had lived and laboured John of Damascus, the great theologian and defender of the icons, who wrote his works there and lies buried in the Lavra, together with Cosmas of Maiuma and the other Sabaite hymnographers. The house was a school of theology and sacred song precisely in the generations after the Muslim conquest, when the Christians of the Holy Land lived as a tolerated but subject people, the dhimmī of the new order.
That order, tolerable while it held, depended on the peace the caliphs could keep in the desert. After the death of the caliph al-Mahdi (785) and through the early reign of Harun al-Rashid, central authority over the Palestinian frontier weakened, and the settled country lay open to the raids of the Bedouin and Saracen tribes of the surrounding wilderness. The lavras and coenobia of the Judaean desert, unwalled or lightly walled, poor, and full of unarmed men, were an obvious prey. It was in this breakdown of the desert peace, and not in any organised religious persecution, that the massacre of the fathers of Mar Saba fell — an act of plunder turned to murder, which the Church received as martyrdom.
The raid and the massacre
The eyewitness account tells of raiders coming up against the Lavra and demanding its supposed riches. The monks met them without resistance and gave up the little the house possessed; but the plunderers, convinced that treasure was hidden and enraged to find none, fell to torturing the fathers to make them reveal it — beating them, wounding them, and cutting some down where they stood. A number of the monks were herded into the cave-church of Saint Nicholas, the old rock-cut sanctuary of the Lavra, and there the raiders kindled a fire of dung and brushwood at its narrow mouth, so that the fathers within, unable to escape the choking smoke, suffocated at their prayers. When the raiders at last withdrew, some twenty of the brethren were found dead of their wounds and of the smoke, and many more lay injured.
The tradition does not transmit a full and certain roll of the slain. Among the names the account and the synaxaria hand down are John, Sergius, and Patrick (Patrikios); the higoumen of the Lavra at the time was Thomas, a monk skilled in medicine, who with the survivors gathered and tended the wounded, buried the dead in the ground their founder had hallowed, and held the community together through the disaster. The monks had died as they lived — unarmed, at prayer, refusing to abandon the desert house — and the Church numbers them, like the earlier Fathers slain at Sinai and Raithu, among the venerable-martyrs: ascetics who won the martyr's crown not in the arena of the pagan city but in the poverty and defencelessness of the wilderness.
The witness of Stephen the Sabaite
The massacre is known because a monk of the Lavra who lived through it wrote it down. The Passion of the Fathers slain at the Lavra of Saint Sabas — a Greek narrative of the raid and of the sufferings and deaths of the individual monks — is transmitted under the name of Stephen the Sabaite, a father of the house and an eyewitness of what he describes. It is a rare and precious thing: a first-hand record, from within the monastery, of Christian desert monasticism at the moment of its trial under early Islamic rule, set down with the particularity of a man who knew the dead by name.
The identity of this Stephen is bound up with a wider tangle. The Lavra gave the calendar more than one saint of the name — Stephen the Hymnographer "the Sabaite" (October 28), and Stephen the Sabaite the Wonderworker, nephew of John of Damascus (July 13) — and the sources do not everywhere agree in distinguishing them or in assigning the authorship of the Passion. What is not in doubt is that the account comes from within the Lavra, close to the event, and preserves the memory the house itself kept of its martyrs (see Disputed questions).
Feast and commemoration
The Fathers are commemorated on March 20 (church date; New Calendar civil March 20, Old Calendar civil April 2), universally in the Byzantine churches — the Antiochian, Greek, Russian and OCA calendars all keep the day. The feast falls within Great Lent, and where it does not coincide with a Sunday its proper office is sung in the Lenten manner, joined to the ferial services of the fast. The commemoration is naturally kept with special solemnity at Mar Saba itself, the Lavra that these monks died to keep and that has been inhabited without a break from 483 to the present day; and it stands beside the memory of the Lavra's other great sons — Sabbas its founder, John of Damascus, Cosmas of Maiuma, and the Sabaite hymnographers — as the martyric witness of that house.
A note on the Lenten readings. During Great Lent the full Divine Liturgy is not served on weekdays, and no proper Epistle and Gospel are appointed to a fixed commemoration falling on a Lenten weekday; the day's memory is kept at the Lenten services and, where a Liturgy is served, on the Saturday or Sunday. No readings are therefore given here.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4
O God of our fathers, who ever dealest with us according to thy forbearance: take not thy mercy from us, but by their prayers guide our life in peace.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Kontakion — Tone 8
As first-fruits of nature to the Planter of all creation, the world offereth unto thee, O Lord, the God-bearing martyrs; by their prayers, and through the Mother of God, preserve thy Church in deep peace, O thou who art plenteous in mercy.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
The Fathers of Mar Saba are shown, in the manner of the desert-martyr icon, as a company of monks — tonsured and bearded, in the dark habit of the great schema — before the tiered cliffs of the Kidron gorge and the towers and cave-churches of the Lavra, falling under the swords of the raiders or borne down by the smoke of the sealed cave; behind them rises the God-built church of the monastery their founder raised. The scene belongs to the same iconographic family as the martyrdom of the Fathers of Sinai and Raithu, the desert made a place of witness. No pre-modern, identity-verified image of this company has been secured for storage; the icon is wanting.
Disputed questions
- The date and the year. The commemoration is kept on March 20; the year of the massacre is most often given as 796, though 797 is also found, and the older service-books say only "of the eighth century." The uncertainty is of a year, not of the fact.
- The number and the names. The tradition speaks of some twenty slain, and hands down among them the names John, Sergius, and Patrick; the fuller roll is not securely transmitted, and the number is a round one. As with other companies of desert martyrs the entry gives the names the sources present without asserting a definitive list.
- Stephen the Sabaite, the author. The Passion is ascribed to Stephen the Sabaite, an eyewitness monk of the Lavra; the precise identity of this Stephen — and his relation to the hymnographer of October 28 and the wonderworker of July 13, both also styled "Sabaite" — is an unresolved question of the same kind noted in the entry for Stephen the Hymnographer. Flagged for verification.
- Not to be confused with the Fathers slain at Sinai and Raithu (commemorated January 14) — a distinct and earlier massacre, of the monks of the Sinai peninsula and the Red Sea shore in the fourth and fifth centuries, not of the Judaean-desert Lavra of Saint Sabas. The two are easily conflated as "desert fathers slain by the Saracens," but they are different companies, different places, and different centuries.