Gerasimus of Karpenisi
The Holy New Venerable-Martyr Gerasimus the New, of Megalo Chorio in Karpenisi
New Martyr · Venerable Martyr · Venerable · b. c. 1787, at Megalo Chorio in Karpenisi (Eurytania) — as George — d. 3 July 1812, at Constantinople — beheaded
Commemorated 3 July — Martyrdom at Baba Humai in Constantinople (1812)
Gerasimus the New (c. 1787 – 3 July 1812) was a new venerable-martyr of the last Ottoman generation, born George at Megalo Chorio in the mountains of Karpenisi (Eurytania) in central Greece. Sent to Constantinople at eleven to work for a relative who kept a grocer's shop, he was taken in by a Muslim household after an accident in the street and, in gratitude and childish ignorance, allowed himself to be circumcised with the sons of the house. Years later, having returned to his village and repented, he went to Mount Athos, was tonsured Gerasimus, and after nine years of ascetic preparation under an elder who twice made him wait, went back to Constantinople, confronted the man who had adopted him, publicly repudiated Islam and confessed Christ. He was tortured and beheaded at Baba Humai, aged twenty-five. His relics are divided between the Monastery of Prousos in Eurytania and the church built in his name at Megalo Chorio.
The boy in the street
He was born about 1787 at Megalo Chorio, a village of the Karpenisi district in Eurytania, and baptised George. At eleven he was sent down to Constantinople, in the ordinary way of the mountain villages, and placed with a relative who kept a grocery.
The turn of his life was an accident. Carrying a copper tray of yoghurt in clay pots on his head — the day's stock, and not his — he slipped in the street, and every pot broke. He stood in the road crying, and a Muslim woman who had seen it from her window came down, took him into her house, and comforted him.
Her husband was at that moment preparing his two sons for circumcision. When it was suggested to the boy that he be circumcised with them, he agreed — out of gratitude for the kindness shown him, and, the Life is careful to say, without understanding what he was doing. The man undertook to adopt him and promised he might visit his own people whenever he wished. So George became, in the eyes of the law and of the household, a Muslim, and remained there two years.
He was not kept. The husband grew suspicious of his wife's fondness for the boy, and made him over to a Muslim official, in whose service he travelled to Bulgaria and Bosnia before returning to the capital.
Repentance, and the long wait
The Life gives no dramatic moment of conversion: he simply came, in time, to understand what he had done, and to grieve over it. He left Constantinople and went home to Megalo Chorio, where he lived three years, attending the services of the church faithfully.
When a monk named Gerasimos passed through the village on his way back to the Holy Mountain, George went with him. On Athos he entered the Skete of St Panteleimon, and the elder Cyril accepted him as his spiritual son. The elder taught him prayer and gave him a rule, which included the reading of the New Martyrologion of St Nikodemos the Hagiorite — the book that, more than any other single cause, shaped the martyr-vocation among the Greeks of the Ottoman centuries. A year later he was tonsured Gerasimus.
Three years after the tonsure he asked his elder's blessing to go and be martyred. The elder told him the request was premature and refused. Three more years passed, spent visiting the monasteries of the Holy Mountain. Only then — nine years in all from his arrival on Athos — did he obtain leave to go down, and that leave was for a visit to his mother and his relatives, not for martyrdom.
The confrontation and the passion
Instead of going to Megalo Chorio he went to Constantinople, to the house of his Muslim stepfather, and told him to his face that he had been a young and ignorant boy, tricked into circumcision. "Now I have come of age," the Life records him as saying, "and I can tell the light from the darkness. I confess that I was born an Orthodox Christian, and I shall die an Orthodox Christian."
The man was astonished, but did not immediately give him up. He concealed his anger, kept Gerasimus in the house three days, flattered him, and offered him money and a position; and when none of it moved him, tried a last, almost tender, expedient — go and live somewhere else, and pretend to be a Muslim until you are out of the city, or you will be killed. "You have been my son. I am sorry for you, and I do not want you to die."
Gerasimus answered that he could not do it: he would proclaim his faith publicly. He was handed over to the authorities, whipped, and — glorifying God under the lash and reviling his tormentors — thrown into prison, where the torments went on for several days. Sentenced to death, he was pressed to deny Christ even on the way to the place of execution.
At the block he knelt and deliberately turned to face east. The executioner noticed, and turned him round. He turned east again. In fury the man took his sword and beheaded him — at Baba Humai in Constantinople, on 3 July 1812. He was twenty-five.
Relics
The body was first buried on the island of Proti in the Sea of Marmara. The relics were afterwards translated to the Holy Monastery of Prousos in Eurytania, and from Prousos in 1971 to the great church raised in his name at Megalo Chorio by the villagers and by the emigrants of the village. His skull and arms remain at Prousos; the rest of the relics are at Megalo Chorio; three vertebrae are kept in the kyriakon of the Skete of Koutloumousiou on the Holy Mountain.
Feast and commemoration
July 3 (church date; New Calendar civil July 3, Old Calendar civil July 16), the day of his martyrdom. Greek usage: he is kept with a full service at Megalo Chorio, at the Monastery of Prousos, and throughout Eurytania, of whose saints he is among the chief; he is numbered in the Synaxis of the Saints of Eurytania and in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs who suffered after the Fall of Constantinople. The Slavonic books do not keep him; the OCA calendar carries him as "Monastic Martyr Gerasimus the New of Carpenision," following Greek sources. He is one of the last of the neomartyrs of the Ottoman period to be commemorated on the fixed calendar before the Greek revolution of 1821 changed the terms of that martyrdom entirely.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
Thy martyr, O Lord, in his contest received the crown of incorruption from Thee our God; for possessing Thy strength, he cast down the tyrants and broke the feeble insolence of demons. By his supplications, O Christ our God, save our souls.
Iconography
Gerasimus is painted as a young monk — a beardless or lightly bearded man of about twenty-five, which sets him apart at once from the aged, white-bearded Gerasimus of Cephalonia with whom he is most often confused. He wears the monastic schema, the analavos with its instruments of the Passion over the black rason, and holds the martyr's cross in his right hand; the left may hold a scroll or be open in prayer. His own scene, where a hagiographical border is painted, is the beheading at Baba Humai, with the martyr kneeling and turned to the east and the executioner above him — the gesture that the Life makes the last act of his confession, and which iconographers of the neomartyrs render literally, the body facing the sunrise while the executioner tries to turn it.
All known icons of him are modern: his martyrdom falls in 1812, his veneration spread from Prousos and Megalo Chorio in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the great majority of his images date from after the 1971 translation of the relics to his village. No pre-1900 or free-licensed image has been located, and none is stored here.
Disputed questions
- Was he an apostate? The canonical question that hangs over every "returning" neomartyr hangs over him, and the Life answers it deliberately by its shaping: the circumcision was procured from a child of eleven or twelve by kindness and stealth, not professed by an adult in understanding, and Gerasimus's own words at the confrontation ("when I was young and naive… now I have come of age") make the distinction the ground of his confession. The Church received him as a new venerable-martyr, and his elder's double refusal — nine years of testing before any blessing was given — is remembered as the guarantee that the martyrdom was not the vainglory the elders of Athos were always watching for.
- The year of his birth. Not transmitted directly; it is inferred from the Life's statement that he was twenty-five at his death in 1812, giving c. 1787.
- Not to be confused with Gerasimus of Cephalonia (†1579, feast August 16), the great ascetic of the Ionian islands, who is also styled "the New" and is by far the better-known bearer of the name — a confusion made easy by the shared epithet and by English lists which render this saint's epithet as "of Carpenision." Nor with Gerasimus of the Jordan (March 4), nor with Romanos of Karpenisi (†1694, February 16), the other new-martyr of the same small town, who likewise went from Athos to Constantinople to confess and die — the two are a century and a quarter apart and are distinct men.