George the Great Martyr

Origins: Cappadocia and Lydda

George was born in Cappadocia, in the last quarter of the third century, into a family of rank and of Christian faith. The tradition names his father Gerontius, an officer of the Roman army — in some recensions a senator or a man of the military nobility — who suffered martyrdom for Christ while George was still a boy; and his mother Polychronia, a native of Lydda in Palestine, who is herself commemorated on the same day as a martyr in the Slavic and Greek synaxaria. Widowed, Polychronia returned with her son to her own country, where she held lands, and there brought him up "in strict piety," as the synaxarion has it: so that George belongs by birth to Asia Minor and by upbringing to Palestine, and both regions have claimed him. Lydda, where his mother's estates lay and where his body would be laid, is the anchor of the whole tradition; the Latin sources, which often place the martyrdom itself there, style him simply Georgius Diospolitanus.

Soldier of the emperor

Grown to manhood, George followed his father's calling and entered the army. The accounts agree in describing him as of great physical beauty and courage, distinguished in campaign, and rapidly promoted: tribune while still young, and then, by the emperor's own favour, comes (κόμης, "count") — a rank in the imperial guard which set him among the officers immediately about the person of Diocletian. He was, on the tradition's reckoning, not yet thirty. The name itself became a subject of pious wordplay: Γεώργιος, "the husbandman," the tiller of the earth who tilled instead the field of the soul, an image the kontakion of his feast turns on.

The setting is the court of Diocletian at Nicomedia in Bithynia, the administrative capital of the East, at the moment when the Tetrarchy resolved upon the last and greatest of the persecutions. The synaxarion presents the decision as taken in council: the emperor, alarmed at the spread of Christianity, laid the matter before his senate and his governors and gave them a free hand against the Christians, promising the resources of the state to whoever should press the work hardest. This is the historical Great Persecution of 303, opened at Nicomedia with the destruction of the cathedral church and the publication of the edicts against the Scriptures, the clergy, and finally against all who refused sacrifice.

The confession before the council

George's response is the hinge of the whole account, and it is not the response of a man discovered but of a man who chooses. Knowing what the edict meant, he distributed his wealth to the poor, set his household slaves at liberty, and went of his own accord into the assembly where the emperor sat with his council. There, in the hearing of the court, he declared himself: "I am the servant of Christ my God, and trusting in him I have come among you of my own will, to bear witness to the truth." Asked what truth was, he answered that the Truth was Christ himself, whom they persecuted; and he told the emperor to his face that his gods were nothing, and that the throne which fought against heaven would not stand.

Diocletian, who had loved the young officer and had raised him, is remembered as having tried first persuasion and the promise of higher honours, and only afterwards the whole apparatus of the state's cruelty. The passion insists on this: the martyr's constancy was tested less by pain than by favour, and the offer of advancement was renewed at every stage of his torments.

The cycle of tortures

The long cycle of tortures is the most famous feature of George's passion, and it is the feature that most clearly marks the account as hagiography grown in the telling (see Disputed questions). The tradition transmits them in a sequence which the icons faithfully reproduce:

• The spears that bent. When the guards moved to drive him from the hall with their lances, the iron is said to have softened and turned aside from his body like lead. He was taken to prison, stretched in the stocks, and a heavy stone laid on his breast.
• The wheel. Diocletian ordered him bound upon a great wheel set over a frame of boards stuck with blades and iron spikes, which as it turned cut the martyr's naked body to pieces. He was left for dead; an angel appeared, and he was found whole, standing and giving thanks. This torment gives the Georgian Church its second feast of the saint (see Feast and commemoration), and gives the icon its wheel.
• The pit of quicklime. He was cast into a deep pit and unslaked lime poured over him and the pit filled in, for three days; when they dug him out to collect his bones, he was alive and unharmed.
• The red-hot iron shoes. Sandals of iron, heated white and set with nails driven inward, were forced on his feet, and he was scourged through the city at a run — "run well, George, and finish thy course," the mockers cried; and the following morning he came before the emperor sound.
• The scourging with ox-hide thongs, until, the passion says, the flesh came away in pieces and the ground was soaked with his blood; and, in some recensions, the beating with hammers, the salt rubbed into his wounds, and the drawing on the rack.

Through all of it he was neither broken nor silenced, and the effect on the onlookers is the point of the narrative: at each deliverance new witnesses believed. Two of the officers of the guard, Anatolius and Protoleon, who had been secret Christians, confessed openly at the sight of his sufferings and were beheaded at once; they are commemorated with him on 23 April. So too were Glycerius, a farmer whose ox George healed, and Valerius, Donatus and Therinus, whose names the Greek synaxarion joins to his.

Athanasius the magician and the raising of the dead

Concluding that so obstinate a body must be protected by sorcery, the emperor sent for the celebrated magician Athanasius, who undertook either to break the Christian's will by enchantment or to destroy him by drugs. Two cups were given to George: one to rob him of his reason, one to kill. He signed them with the cross, drank both, and was unharmed.

Athanasius then demanded a sign, and — the account continues — the emperor bade the martyr raise a dead man from a tomb near by, that they might see whether his God had any power over death. George prayed aloud, asking not for himself but for the bystanders: "Lord, show these who stand here that thou alone art God over all the world." There was an earthquake, the grave opened, and the dead man came out alive and fell at his feet. At this Athanasius the magician cast himself down and confessed Christ as the almighty God; Diocletian, enraged, ordered him and the raised man beheaded on the spot, and George returned to prison — where, the passion adds, the crowds came secretly to him and were baptised, and the sick were healed by his touch through the bars.

The Empress Alexandra

The most celebrated of the conversions wrought by the martyr's endurance was that of the emperor's own wife. On the last day, with the court assembled in the great temple of Apollo for a final attempt to make George sacrifice, the saint went up to the idol, made over it the sign of the cross, and asked it whether it wished to receive sacrifice as God — at which, the tradition says, a voice from within confessed itself a demon, and the images fell and were shattered throughout the temple, the priests and the mob falling upon the martyr in fury.

At that moment the Empress Alexandra, who had followed the whole contest, forced her way through the crowd, cried out "O God of George, help me, for thou alone art almighty!" and fell at the martyr's feet confessing Christ. Diocletian, beside himself, condemned them both to the sword the same hour. The passion relates that as they were led out the empress asked to rest, sat down against a wall, and there gave up her soul to God — so that her martyrdom, in the received account, was accomplished without the executioner. She is commemorated with her husband's victim as Alexandra the Empress; the difficulties of her history are set out in her own entry.

The beheading at Nicomedia

George was brought to the place of execution outside the city. He prayed — the tradition preserves the substance of his last prayer: for the forgiveness of his persecutors, for the peace of the Church, and that God would hear those who should call upon his own name in their afflictions, a petition to which the whole later cultus of intercession is referred — and then, in the words of the synaxarion, "bowed his neck beneath the sword and received the crown of martyrdom." The date is given as 23 April 303. His servant, according to the passion, had been charged to carry his body to Lydda, to the place of his mother's people; and there it was laid.

Relics and the shrine at Lydda

The tomb at Lydda, the Greek Diospolis, in the Palestinian coastal plain, is the oldest and firmest datum of the whole tradition and the point from which the cult radiated. A church over the martyr's grave is ascribed to the age of Constantine; by the sixth century pilgrims to the Holy Land record Diospolis as the place "where Saint George was martyred and where his body lies," and the dedication of that church on 3 November entered the Byzantine calendar as a second feast of the saint, kept to this day. The building was destroyed and raised again more than once — in the Persian and Arab invasions, by Saladin's order after the Crusades, and again in later centuries; the present Greek Orthodox church of St George at Lod was rebuilt in 1870–72, largely with Russian alms, on the ruins of the crusader church, and the sarcophagus venerated as the martyr's is shown in its crypt.

Portions of the relics travelled early and widely: a head venerated at San Giorgio in Velabro in Rome, another at Ferrara, an arm at Venice, fragments in nearly every great treasury of East and West, and — most numerously — in the monasteries of Greece and the Levant, where relics of St George are among the commonest of all. The Church has never treated the dispersal as a difficulty: the martyr is understood to be present wherever he is invoked.

The early cult, and the Antiochian witness

The historical bedrock beneath the legend is the cult, which is early, sudden and enormous. Its epigraphic traces are thickest not in Cappadocia but in the country between Damascus and the Hauran, in the patriarchal territory of Antioch: the inscriptions of Shaqqa and the dedicatory inscription of the martyrium at Ezra'a (Zorava) of the year 515, which speaks of a shrine of "the holy and triumphant martyr George" raised over what had been a place of demons — evidence that by the beginning of the sixth century George was already a great name in Syria. In the Arabic-speaking Church he is Mar Jiryis (Mar Girgis), and the most thronged of his shrines is the Antiochian monastery of St George al-Humayra (Deir Mar Jiryis) in the Valley of the Christians (Wadi al-Nasara) near Homs, whose feast gathers pilgrims from the whole of Syria and Lebanon. In popular Levantine piety — Christian and Muslim alike — he is assimilated to al-Khadr / al-Khidr, "the Green One," the immortal deliverer of the Qur'anic and folk tradition, and his shrines at Lod, Homs and Beirut are visited by both. The Greek tradition further localises the miracle of the dragon on the coast at Beirut, whose bay still bears the saint's name; and it was at Antioch, in 1098, that the crusading army believed itself to have seen George and Demetrius riding at its head — the vision which, more than any other single event, carried the eastern warrior-saint into the devotion of the Latin West.

The dragon

The story by which the world knows George is not part of his passion at all. The miracle of the dragon is a posthumous miracle, one of a collection of Miracula which grew around the shrine, and it is late: no trace of it appears in the Greek or Latin passions of antiquity, and its earliest known written form is an eleventh-century Georgian text, from which — or in parallel with which — Greek versions spread, reaching the Latin West in the twelfth century and achieving its final popularity in the thirteenth-century Golden Legend of James of Voragine.

In the received form, a city — the Greek versions name Lasia, and locate it variously in Libya, in Syria, or at Beirut; the eastern accounts most often on the Lebanese coast — was terrorised by a serpent living in a lake or marsh, which poisoned the air and devoured the people, who appeased it by lot with their children. When at last the lot fell on the king's own daughter and she was set out at the water's edge, the saint appeared on horseback, signed himself with the cross, and overthrew the monster with his lance; and — a detail the icons love — he did not kill it outright, but bound it with the maiden's girdle so that she led it into the city like a dog on a lead, before it was destroyed and the whole people, the number is given as twenty-five thousand men besides women and children, were baptised.

The Church has always read this as it reads such narratives: as an image of the victory of Christ over the devil worked through his martyr, the serpent of Eden and of the Apocalypse overthrown, the delivered maiden the human soul or the Church herself. That the tale is allegorical in origin, and demonstrably later than the martyr by seven centuries, is not concealed in the Orthodox tradition; the synaxaria narrate it among the miracles, distinct from the passion, and the Greek editors of the miracle-collections treat it as such.

Other miracles

The Greek Miracles of St George, a collection of about a dozen narratives copied in the menologia and edited in modern times from the manuscripts, gathers the material on which his reputation as wonderworker rests. Among the best known:

• The Saracen and the icon. A Saracen entering the church at Ramla (or Lydda) mocked the picture of the saint and shot an arrow at it — or, in other tellings, struck it with his spear; the shaft turned back upon him and his hand was withered and swelled, until, taught by a priest, he did penance, was healed, and was baptised, himself dying a martyr afterwards at the hands of his own people.
• The widow's column. A poor widow of Ramla, having nothing but a marble pillar to give towards the building of the martyr's church, prayed over it and set it on the shore; the saint appeared to the builders and the column was found at Lydda before the ship that carried the rest, and was set in the place he had marked.
• The youth of Mytilene. A boy carried off by Saracen pirates from Mytilene in Lesbos was serving as cup-bearer at the table of his captor when his parents, keeping the saint's feast at home, prayed for him; the martyr appeared, set the boy on his horse, and brought him back into the church in the midst of the festival, still holding the cup of wine he had been carrying. From this miracle the islanders keep to this day a custom peculiar to Lesbos of blessing boiled wheat (kolyva) on the saint's feast and distributing it as "St George's cake" — wheat used, unusually, not as a memorial for the dead but as a thank-offering for a deliverance. The same miracle is told elsewhere of a youth of Paphlagonia, and the two versions are variants of one story.
• The healing of Glycerius's ox, in the passion itself; and the countless local deliverances of captives, prisoners and the sick which earned him the title the apolytikion gives him first of all: liberator of captives.

Patron of nations

No other martyr has been adopted by so many peoples.

• Georgia honours him as its especial patron and keeps the wheel-feast of 10 November as Giorgoba, its greatest national commemoration; the tradition holds him a kinsman of Nina, the Enlightener of Georgia, who taught the Georgians his veneration. (The derivation of the country's western name from the saint is a folk etymology of crusader date — the name comes rather through Persian Gurğ — but the devotion it reflects is real, and hundreds of Georgian churches bear his name.)
• Greece keeps him as patron of the army and of innumerable villages; Ai Giorgi is the commonest of all Greek church dedications.
• Russia received him early: Yaroslav the Wise, baptised George, founded the Yuriev monastery at Novgorod and built the church at Kiev whose dedication on 26 November is his fourth feast; the mounted martyr became the emblem of Moscow and thence of the Russian state, and gave his name to the imperial military Order of St George and to "Yuri's day" in the peasant year.
• England adopted him from the crusades: the Synod of Oxford of 1222 raised his day to a feast, and Edward III placed his new Order of the Garter (1348) under the martyr's protection, after which George displaced the older English patrons.
• Ethiopia (where his churches and his image are everywhere), the Copts of Egypt (Mari Girgis), Portugal, Aragon and Catalonia (Sant Jordi), Genoa, Lithuania, Beirut, Lod and Cappadocia all claim him; and he is the patron of soldiers, of horsemen, of shepherds and of the flocks.

Hymnographic and literary legacy

George's passion is among the most widely translated texts of Christian antiquity, surviving in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Georgian, Old Slavonic and Old English recensions — an index of the cult's reach and, at the same time, of the tradition's fluidity. Encomia on the martyr were composed by Byzantine preachers, among them Andrew of Crete, and the office of 23 April in the Menaion is one of the fullest of the fixed year, with two canons, proper stichera at the Praises and at "Lord, I have cried," and a doxastikon of great solemnity. Later devotion added a widely used Akathist to the Trophy-bearer, and the Slavic tradition an immense body of popular verse and spiritual song about Egoriy the Brave.