Gerontius and the Martyrs of David-Gareji
The Holy Martyrs Gerontius and Serapion, hieromonks, Otar the hierodeacon, and the monks Herman, Bessarion, Michael and Simeon of the David-Gareji Wilderness
Hieromartyr · Venerable Martyr · d. summer 1851, at the David-Gareji lavra in Kakheti
Commemorated 12 August — Slaughter of the monks by Dagestani raiders at David-Gareji
In the summer of 1851 a raiding party of Dagestanis fell upon the ancient cave-monastery of David-Gareji in the semi-desert of Kakheti, plundered the church and the cells, and put to death seven of the brethren: the hieromonks Gerontius and Serapion, the hierodeacon Otar, the monks Herman, Bessarion and Michael, and the eighteen-year-old novice Simeon. Their deaths were recorded two years later by the hieromonk Isaac of Gelati, who had been in the monastery and survived; his account, which reports that the bodies of the slain were seen shining with a divine light, is the source of everything that is known of them. They are the last of a line of Gareji martyrs stretching back to the six thousand slain on Bright Tuesday in 1616, and they are commemorated on August 12.
The Gareji wilderness
The David-Gareji lavra was founded in the sixth century by David, one of the Thirteen Syrian Fathers, in the waterless hill country between Kakheti and the Dagestani lowlands, and grew into a complex of a dozen monasteries cut into the soft rock — cells, refectories and churches hollowed out of the cliffs and frescoed from the tenth century onward. Its position made it, for a thousand years, both a spiritual centre of the first importance for Georgia and one of the most exposed places in the Caucasus.
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the worst of it. With the Georgian kingdoms broken and the Russian administration not yet in effective control of the eastern marches, Dagestani raiders — lekianoba, the raiding is called in Georgian — came down repeatedly on Kakheti, and the monasteries of Gareji, rich in vessels and defenceless, were a standing target. The monastery was pillaged again and again through these two centuries, monks were killed in several of the raids, and the community shrank to a handful. The martyrs commemorated on August 12 belong to the last and best documented of these attacks.
The raid of 1851
A Dagestani force came upon the lavra in the summer of 1851. The account of Isaac of Gelati describes the plundering first: the raiders stripped the church of its treasures and the sacristy of its vessels and vestments, broke into the cells, and took what they found. Then they turned to the brethren, who had neither fled nor resisted.
The names and the manner of each death are transmitted individually, which is unusual for a massacre and is a mark of the eyewitness character of the source:
- Otar, hierodeacon, was stabbed to death.
- Gerontius, hieromonk, was beheaded.
- Serapion, hieromonk, was cut down with swords.
- Herman, monk, was stabbed and then beheaded.
- Bessarion, monk, was beheaded.
- Simeon — Svimeon in Georgian — a youth of eighteen, was shot through with arrows and then beheaded.
- Michael, monk, was tortured at length before he died.
None of them, so far as the account goes, was offered apostasy as a price for his life; this was not a persecution but a raid, and the monks died as monks have often died in the Caucasus, because they were where they were and would not leave. The Church has nonetheless numbered them with the martyrs, on the settled principle that those killed in hatred of the faith or in the place of their obedience receive the martyr's crown.
The witness
The martyrdom was written down in 1853 by the hieromonk Isaac of Gelati (Gaenati), who was present at the sack and survived it. His narrative supplies the names, the offices, the manner of each death, and the detail that has since become inseparable from their memory: that after the raiders had gone the bodies of the fathers were seen to be illumined with a divine light. The brethren buried them in the monastery.
Veneration
The seven were locally honoured at Gareji from the time of their death, and their veneration was confirmed by the Georgian Orthodox Church among the great number of Georgian saints canonised or reconfirmed in the twentieth century. Their commemoration was carried into the calendar of the Orthodox Church in America with the other Georgian saints, and appears in the OCA's list for August 12 as "Martyr Gerontius and those with him of Saint David Gareji Monastery."
The monastery itself survived, was closed under the Soviet régime and used as a military firing range, and was restored to monastic life after 1991; the cave churches and their frescoes are among the chief monuments of Georgian Christian art.
Feast and commemoration
August 12 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 25), within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration and the Dormition Fast. The commemoration is Georgian, kept at the David-Gareji lavra and throughout the Georgian Church, and is carried by the OCA in its American calendar; it does not appear in the Greek Menaion or in the Antiochian calendar for the day. In Georgia their memory is joined in practice to that of the wilderness's founder David of Gareji and his disciple Dodo, and to the whole company of the martyrs of that place.
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 prayers, O Christ God, save our souls.
Iconography
The martyrs of Gareji are painted, in the modern Georgian manner, as a company: a rank of monastics in the black habit and koukoulion, the two hieromonks and the hierodeacon distinguished by the epitrachelion and orarion over the habit, the young Simeon beardless at the end of the row, each holding the small cross of martyrdom, and behind them the ochre cliffs and the cave-cells of the lavra with the blessing hand of Christ in the segment of heaven above. Where a narrative scene is painted, it shows the raiders in the church and the bodies of the fathers on the rock shining with light, the detail Isaac of Gelati recorded. Some compositions place the seven within the larger assembly of all the saints of Gareji, with David and Lucian and Dodo at the head and the six thousand of 1616 behind.
No image of them can be stored here. The martyrdom is of 1851 and every icon of it is a twentieth- or twenty-first-century work by a named or nameable Georgian iconographer, whose copyright is untouched by any licence a photographer of the panel may grant; freely licensed photographs of such icons on Wikimedia Commons license only the photograph, not the painting underneath, and are therefore not storable under this collection's icon policy. The saint is entered in the list of icons still being sought on that ground.
Disputed questions
- The number and the roll. Georgian and English lists give the names in varying order and with varying spelling — Geronti/Gerontius, Besarion/Bessarion, Svimeon/Simeon, Germane/Herman — and some lists of six omit Otar the hierodeacon, who is present in the OCA's fuller notice. Seven is the fullest transmitted roll and is given here.
- The year. 1851 is the date carried by the Georgian tradition and by the OCA. Some general accounts of Gareji describe the martyrdom loosely as belonging to "the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries," which is the period of the raids rather than the date of this one.
- Not to be confused with the other martyrs of the same wilderness: Shio the New and the Martyrs of Gareji, four monks killed in a Dagestani raid at the end of the seventeenth century and commemorated on June 1; and the six thousand martyrs of David-Gareji slaughtered by Shah Abbas I on Easter Tuesday, 1616, whose commemoration is movable (Bright Tuesday) and belongs to the movable calendar rather than to any fixed day. Three distinct massacres, three distinct commemorations.