Five Martyrs of Nicomedia
The Holy Five Martyrs who suffered at Nicomedia
Martyr
Commemorated 16 June — Beheaded at Nicomedia
Five Christians, whose names the tradition has not kept, who were beheaded at Nicomedia in Bithynia and are commemorated together on June 16. Nothing survives of them beyond the bare synaxarial notice that they were martyred by the sword, and a two-line epigram which likens them to a five-towered fortress shaken down by the sword of the executioner. They belong to the long roll of the martyrs of Nicomedia, the eastern imperial capital where the persecutions of Diocletian and Maximian were pressed hardest.
The Greek synaxarion for June 16 records these five in a single clause: the holy five martyrs suffered at Nicomedia by the sword. Their names, their trades, the name of the governor who condemned them, and the year of their contest are all lost; what the books transmit is the number, the place and the manner of death.
The epigrammatic couplet appointed for them turns on that number. It calls them a great five-towered tower — pentapyrgos, the word used of a fortress with five bastions — brought down by the earthquake of the headsman's sword: five witnesses standing together like the towers of a citadel, and one blow levelling all five. The conceit is characteristic of the metrical synaxarion, where anonymous companies are given in a figure rather than a narrative.
Nicomedia, the city of their martyrdom, was the eastern residence of Diocletian and the place where the edict of 303 was first published. It gave the calendar more martyrs than almost any other city of Asia Minor — the twenty thousand burned in the church, the martyrs of the imperial household, the bishops Anthimus and Theopemptus, and companies like this one, remembered only as a number. Their commemoration was almost certainly attached to the day by the local Nicomedian martyrion in which they were buried, and it travelled from there into the synaxarion of the Great Church.
Feast and commemoration
June 16 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 29). Greek usage: the day's service is that of St Tychon of Amathus, and these martyrs receive synaxarion notice with their couplet. They do not appear in the Russian or Antiochian enumerations of the day.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of several martyrs)
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest received incorruptible crowns from thee our God; for possessing thy strength they cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By their intercessions save our souls.
Iconography
Anonymous companies of this kind are painted as a group of five young or middle-aged laymen — some beardless, some bearded, to mark different ages — in tunics and mantles, standing in a row and each holding a cross, or gathered under a single sword and the hand of the executioner in menologion illustration. No individual attributes can be assigned, because none is transmitted. No pre-1900 image of this company has been located for this repository; and the Menologion of Basil II, the usual first resort for such synaxarial companies, covers only September to February and so contains no miniature for June 16.
Disputed questions
- Anonymity, not obscurity. The absence of names is not evidence that the company is fictitious: the metrical synaxarion regularly commemorates groups whose names were never written down in the capital but whose graves and annual liturgy were known locally. Nothing in the notice permits a date more precise than "the persecutions", and no identification with any named company of Nicomedian martyrs elsewhere in the calendar is proposed here.
- Not to be confused with the other numbered companies of the same city — above all the twenty thousand martyrs of Nicomedia (December 28), nor with the Five Martyrs of Sebaste or the Five Martyrs of Ascalon, with whom the Greek titles are easily confused in indexes.