Habakkuk the New Martyr
The Holy New Martyr Habakkuk, who suffered at Thessalonica
New Martyr · Martyr · d. August 6, 1628, at Thessalonica
Habakkuk was a Greek Christian — by the tradition a monk, and probably an Athonite — who bore witness to Christ and was put to death at Thessalonica on August 6, 1628, under Ottoman rule. Almost nothing else about him has come down: his name and the date of his martyrdom are preserved in a seventeenth-century codex of the Great Lavra on Mount Athos, and portions of his relics are kept at the Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos in Akarnania in western Greece, but no account of his trial or his death survives. He belongs to the long roll of the neomartyrs of the Turkish period — the Greeks, Slavs, Albanians and Arabs who from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century confessed Christ before Muslim tribunals and were executed for it — and among them he stands for the great many whose sufferings the Church remembers by name alone. His feast falls on the Transfiguration, whose Great Feast wholly displaces his service; the coincidence is not without its own eloquence, for the neomartyrs are precisely those who were given, in the hour of death, the light that shone upon Tabor.
What is known
The record is a single line. The synaxaria of the Greek Church note under August 6 that Habakkuk the New Martyr bore witness at Thessalonica in the year 1628, and the source they depend on is a codex of the seventeenth century belonging to the Great Lavra of Saint Athanasius on Mount Athos — one of those monastic registers in which the Athonite houses recorded the names and dates of the martyrs of their own generations, often long before any formal life or service was composed, and sometimes instead of one. From that notice comes everything the Church knows: a name, a city, a year, and the day.
The designation "venerable" attached to him in some listings, together with the Athonite provenance of the notice and the survival of his relics in a monastery, has been taken to indicate that he was a monk, and quite possibly a monk of the Holy Mountain who went down to Thessalonica to confess the faith. This was a recognised pattern in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Athonite fathers, and in particular those who had themselves lapsed under pressure or who had been born Muslim, deliberately sought out the authorities to confess Christ publicly and accept the consequence, and their spiritual fathers on the Mountain prepared them for it. Whether Habakkuk was such a one, or a Christian of Thessalonica denounced and condemned, or a convert from Islam — the class of neomartyr most certain of execution — cannot now be determined, and this entry does not supply what the sources do not say.
Portions of his relics are preserved at the Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos in Akarnania, the mountainous province of western Greece north of the Gulf of Patras. The presence of relics implies that his body, or part of it, was recovered by Christians after his death and translated westward at some point — itself the ordinary evidence that his martyrdom was witnessed and his memory kept locally from the beginning, whatever was afterwards lost.
The neomartyrs of Thessalonica
Thessalonica, the second city of the Byzantine empire and of the Ottoman Balkans after it, was one of the principal places of neomartyrdom in the Turkish centuries, and Habakkuk's name stands in a considerable local company: Kyranna of Thessalonica, beaten to death in the prison of the city in 1751, is the best documented of them, and there were many more. The pattern was consistent. A Christian was accused of having professed Islam — often on the evidence of a chance word, a moment of weakness, or an interested informer — and, refusing to conform, was tried before the kadi, offered honours and wealth to apostatise, imprisoned and beaten to break him, and, when he held, hanged or beheaded. The Church of Constantinople and the monks of Athos gathered these deaths deliberately: the New Martyrologion compiled in the eighteenth century by Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain and Macarius of Corinth exists precisely to keep such names, and it was through that movement that many earlier notices like the Lavra codex entry for Habakkuk were rescued and passed into the printed synaxaria.
Feast and commemoration
August 6 (church date; New Calendar civil August 6, Old Calendar civil August 19), the day of his martyrdom in 1628. He is listed for the day in the Greek synaxaria and in the calendar of the Orthodox Church in America; his observance is Greek and Athonite in origin, and where his relics are kept in Akarnania he is honoured locally with more solemnity than elsewhere.
In practice his commemoration is almost invisible in the services, because August 6 is the Transfiguration of the Lord, one of the Twelve Great Feasts, whose vigil and propers displace every other commemoration of the day. He receives at most a mention at the synaxarion reading of Matins, and in most parishes not even that. Nothing of a proper akolouthia to him is known to survive; where he is served at all, the common office of a martyr is used with his name inserted.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4
Thy martyr Habakkuk, 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 in pieces the feeble insolence of the demons. At his prayers, O Christ God, save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
No pre-modern icon of Habakkuk the New Martyr has been located, and it is doubtful that an early one exists: martyrs known only from a monastic register, without a life or a service, rarely acquired an iconographic type, and the overwhelming weight of August 6 in the calendar left no liturgical occasion at which such an image would be needed. A search of Wikimedia Commons under both the Greek and the transliterated forms of his name returned nothing.
Where he is painted at all — in the monastery in Akarnania that holds his relics, and in modern compositions of the synaxis of the neomartyrs — he would be shown by the common conventions of his class: a young or middle-aged man in the Greek dress of the Ottoman period, or in the monastic mantle and koukoulion if the monastic tradition is followed, holding the cross of martyrdom in his right hand and a palm or a scroll in his left, with his name and the date of his witness inscribed beside the halo. Any such image is a modern work and cannot be reproduced here.
Disputed questions
Three points are open, and none is likely to be closed.
Identity and status. Whether Habakkuk was a monk of the Great Lavra, a monk of another house, or a layman is not stated by any source consulted; the inference of monasticism rests on the Athonite provenance of the notice and on the epithet used in some listings, not on testimony. The entry therefore ranks him among the martyrs and new-martyrs and does not claim the monastic title in its types.
Manner of death. No source consulted gives it. Hanging and beheading were the usual sentences at Thessalonica in the period, but nothing licenses a choice between them here, and the pious guesses that circulate in devotional retellings have no warrant.
Name. He bears the name of the prophet Habakkuk, in the Greek form Ἀββακούμ, and is on that account occasionally confused with him. He is not to be confused with the Holy Prophet Habakkuk, eighth of the Twelve Minor Prophets, who is commemorated on December 2, nor with the martyr Abbacum who suffered at Rome with Marinus, Martha and Audifax (January 19). The coincidence of the name is the only connection.