Gurias, Samonas and Abibus

Origins and confession

Edessa (Syriac Urhāy, modern Şanlıurfa), a chief city of Christian Mesopotamia and an early centre of Syriac Christianity, is the setting of the whole story. Gurias and Samonas were natives of its territory, men of piety who in the years of the Great Persecution went openly through the city and its villages strengthening the faithful and urging them not to sacrifice to the idols. Under the edicts of Diocletian (284–305) and his colleague Maximian they were arrested, brought before the governor, and ordered to offer incense to the gods. They refused, confessing Christ boldly, and were subjected to a long sequence of tortures: beaten, suspended by one hand with weights bound to their feet, and shut up for a great while in a dark and stifling prison, where they were left to waste with hunger and thirst in the hope that they would relent.

The Syriac Acts, which are early and detailed, preserve a prayer said to have been uttered by Samonas in the prison and taken down by a witness — a plea that God, "against whose will not one sparrow falls into the snare," who made room for David in his distress, shut the mouths of the lions for Daniel, and preserved the Three Children in the furnace, would keep the unquenchable light of his commandments burning in them and not let the enemy tear away the work of his hands. Unbroken, the two were at last led out of the city by night and beheaded, about the year 306. Christians recovered the bodies and buried them with honour in a common grave outside Edessa.

Abibus the deacon

Some sixteen years later, under Licinius (308–324) — who in the last phase of his rivalry with Constantine turned against the Christians of the East — a new persecution reached Edessa. Abibus (in the Syriac tradition Habib), a deacon of the Edessene church, was singled out for the zeal with which he taught and gathered the faithful. Learning that officers had been sent to seize him, he would not let others be endangered on his account or seem to flee: he presented himself voluntarily to those who were searching for him and confessed his faith. Condemned to death by fire, he walked willingly into the flames and gave up his soul in prayer. The account relates that when the fire had died down his mother and kinsfolk found the body unharmed by the flames; they buried him beside Gurias and Samonas, so that the three confessors of Edessa lay together in one tomb.

The miracle of Euphemia and the Goth

The wonder that fixed the three saints in the devotion of the whole Church belongs to a later generation, when Gothic federate troops were quartered at Edessa (the fifth century). One of these soldiers lodged with a widow named Sophia and her daughter, the virgin Euphemia, and sought the girl in marriage. The mother, fearing both his foreign faith and the impermanence of a soldier's promises, consented only after he had sworn a solemn oath at the tomb of Gurias, Samonas and Abibus that he would keep Euphemia as his lawful wife, do her no harm, and never treat her as a servant — the martyrs themselves taken as witnesses and guarantors of his word.

He broke every clause of it. Carrying Euphemia off to his own country when his service ended, he revealed that he already had a wife there and reduced Euphemia to slavery in his household, threatening her with death if she told anyone they had been married. When she bore him a son, his jealous first wife poisoned the child. In her extremity Euphemia called on the three martyrs who had heard the oath, and — in the miracle as the tradition transmits it — she was carried back by their power to Edessa and to her mother. When the Goth was later posted again to Edessa, his crime came to light through Sophia's accusation; convicted, he was executed by the city's governor. The saints who had been invoked as witnesses had themselves brought about the vindication.

Veneration and later cultus

The three were the special patrons of Edessa, their relics resting in a shrine that became a goal of pilgrimage. The story of Euphemia — recounted by the Edessene notary who wrote her Acts, and reworked in Greek by Symeon Metaphrastes — gave the martyrs their enduring character across the whole Byzantine world: they are the guarantors of sworn faith and the guardians of marriage, invoked against domestic discord, marital cruelty, and the unjust hatred of one spouse for the other. An akathist addresses them, "Rejoice, Gurias, Samonas and Abibus, heavenly patrons of honourable marriage." Churches were dedicated to them widely in the Slavic lands — notably at Smolensk — where Aviv, Samon and Gury (as their names are rendered in Slavonic) are kept as helpers of the married and of those wronged within a family.