Forty-four Martyrs of the Lavra of Saint Sabbas
The Holy Venerable Martyrs, Forty-four in number, slain in the Great Lavra of Saint Sabbas the Sanctified
Venerable Martyr · d. c. 614, in the Judaean desert
Commemorated 16 May — Slaughter of the fathers in the Great Lavra
In the catastrophe that overtook Palestine about the year 614 — the Persian invasion under Chosroes II, the sack of Jerusalem, and the raiding of the countryside by the Arab tribes who came in its train — a band of raiders broke into the Great Lavra of Saint Sabbas in the ravine of the Kedron, seeking the treasure a famous monastery was assumed to possess. Finding nothing, they turned on the monks. Forty-four fathers were killed, some beheaded, others more cruelly, and the community was scattered. Their memory was preserved by one of their own survivors, Antiochus the Monk of the same Lavra, who wrote an account of them, and the Church keeps them on May 16 as venerable-martyrs — monks who did not seek martyrdom but received it in their own cells.
The Lavra and the year 614
The Great Lavra founded by Sabbas the Sanctified in 483 in the gorge of the Kedron, south-east of Jerusalem, was by the seventh century the mother house of Palestinian monasticism, with hundreds of monks in its cells and caves and an authority over the whole desert. It was also, standing where it did, wholly exposed.
In 614 the armies of Chosroes II of Persia took Jerusalem. The Church of the Resurrection was burnt, the Cross carried away, and the population massacred or deported. The Judaean desert monasteries, which had no walls that mattered and no garrison, were pillaged in the confusion of the invasion and in the raiding of the Arab tribes who moved with it and after it. The monks of the Lavra had already suffered in earlier raids; this was the worst.
The martyrdom
The account transmitted is brief and its outline constant. Raiders came into the Lavra expecting treasure — the wealth that pilgrims' gifts were supposed to have accumulated there. They found the monastery poor, and their disappointment turned to fury. They put the fathers to death: forty-four of them, some by the sword, others, the account says, more brutally still; and those who survived fled or were carried off. No list of names has come down; the number is what the tradition preserved, and it is the number by which the Church names them.
The witness of Antiochus
That the memory survived at all is owed to Antiochus the Monk (Antiochus of Saint Sabbas, commemorated December 24), a father of the same Lavra in the first half of the seventh century and the author of the Pandect of Holy Scripture, a long series of homilies which was among the most widely copied ascetic handbooks of the Byzantine world. In the hundred and seventh of those homilies he set down the account of the fathers slain in his own monastery. He is thus both the source for the martyrdom and a witness of the same generation — the rarest thing in the hagiography of a massacre.
Feast and commemoration
May 16 (church date; Old Calendar civil May 29). The commemoration is kept in the Greek synaxaria (τῶν ἐν τῇ Λαύρᾳ τοῦ Ἁγίου Σάββα ἀναιρεθέντων Πατέρων) and in the OCA calendar, and is naturally honoured at the monastery of Mar Saba itself, which is under the Patriarchate of Jerusalem and has kept an unbroken community on the site for more than fifteen centuries. As a company of monastic martyrs of the Holy Land, they are of particular interest to the Antiochian and Jerusalem traditions, whose monasteries suffered the same fate repeatedly under invasion.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of several martyrs)
Your holy 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 prayers, O Christ God, save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Kontakion — Tone 2
Slain in your cells, and stripped of the poverty you had chosen, O fathers, you were found to be the treasure your murderers sought in vain; wherefore the Lavra that bore you rejoiceth, and we cry: pray for our souls.
Iconography
The company is painted as monastic martyrs: a crowd of monks in the dark mantle and cowl, bearded and of various ages, each holding a small cross, ranged in tiers behind the front rank — the standard formula for a numbered company whose names are not transmitted. The narrative type shows the Lavra itself, the buildings clinging to the wall of the Kedron ravine, with armed raiders among the cells and the fathers falling beneath the sword; it is composed exactly like the icon of the twenty monk-martyrs of 796 and of the fathers slain at Sinai and Raithu, and the three are easily mistaken for one another. No pre-1900 image of this commemoration has been located for this collection.
Disputed questions
- Not to be confused with the martyrs of 796. The Great Lavra was attacked more than once, and the two slaughters are habitually run together. The twenty monk-martyrs of the Lavra killed by Arab raiders in 796, whose passion was written by Stephen the Deacon, are a distinct company with a distinct feast (March 20); this commemoration belongs to the c. 614 raid and to the forty-four.
- The year and the agents. Some accounts place the raid in the Persian invasion of 614 itself, others slightly after it, in the disorder of the years that followed, in the reign of Heraclius (610–641); the raiders are described as Arab or Saracen tribesmen rather than as the Persian army. The distinction mattered little to the monks and cannot now be recovered.
- The number. Forty-four is the figure of the tradition. Companies of martyrs in the synaxaria are frequently given round or symbolic numbers, and this one is neither, which is a mild argument for its authenticity.
- Antiochus Strategos. The monk of Saint Sabbas who wrote the well-known Capture of Jerusalem narrative of 614 is often identified with, and is sometimes distinguished from, Antiochus the author of the Pandect; the question is unsettled, and both texts come out of this same community's memory of the same disaster.