Helladius the Hieromartyr

The Holy Hieromartyr Helladius, Bishop in the East

Hieromartyr · Bishop

Commemorated 27 May — Greek Menaion usage, where he is the titular commemoration of the day, 28 May — Martyrdom under torture, at an unnamed city of the Roman East

Helladius is remembered in the books as a bishop "in the East" — that is, somewhere in the vast Roman Diocese of Oriens, the territory of the Antiochene patriarchate — who was thrown into a fire for his faith in Christ and came out of it unhurt, and who died afterwards of the beating inflicted on him. His service adds one further detail, and it is the one his commemoration is really built on: that the Lord Jesus Christ came to him in his prison and healed his wounds. Neither his see nor the name of his persecutor has been transmitted, and the sources are divided over his century, some placing him among the Christians who suffered in the Persian invasions of the Roman East, others four centuries later. He is a saint of whom the Church has kept the substance — a bishop, a fire, a scourging, a visitation — and lost every circumstance.

"Bishop in the East"

The title itself is the first thing to understand. In the Greek and Slavonic books Helladius is ἐπίσκοπος τῆς Ἀνατολῆς / епископ Восточный — "bishop of the East." This is not the name of a city but of a region: the Anatolē, the Diocese of Oriens of the late Roman administration, whose civil capital and ecclesiastical centre was Antioch on the Orontes, and which reached from Cilicia and the Euphrates frontier down through Syria and Phoenicia into Palestine and Arabia. A synaxarist who wrote "bishop in the East" was recording that the see had been forgotten while the fact of the episcopate had not. For readers in the Antiochian tradition the phrase places Helladius, however indistinctly, within their own patriarchate: he is one of the many bishop-martyrs of the Syrian and Mesopotamian borderlands whose names outlived their cities.

The fire, the prison and the scourging

The transmitted account has three movements and no more.

He was cast into a fire on account of his faith in Christ, and remained unharmed — the deliverance which, in the martyr-literature of the Roman East, ordinarily provokes the authorities to abandon spectacle and fall back on brute violence.

He was then beaten, and it was of this beating that he died: not burned, not beheaded, but scourged to death, which is what the books mean when they say he "died as a martyr from the terrible blows inflicted upon him." The distinction matters for his classification — he is a hieromartyr who perished under torture rather than by a formal execution.

Between the two, according to his akolouthia, he lay in prison, and there the Lord Jesus Christ visited him and healed his wounds. This is the detail the hymnography dwells on, and it is worth noticing that the same motif — Christ appearing in the prison to heal a martyr's wounds — belongs to the notice of Heliconis of Thessalonica on the same day. The coincidence may mean that the two commemorations have contaminated each other in the tradition, or simply that the day's hymnography drew twice on a single favoured image; it cannot be resolved, and it should not be turned into an identification.

Feast and commemoration

May 28 (church date; New Calendar civil May 28, Old Calendar civil June 10), always within the Pentecostarion — but the day is not agreed. The Slavonic and Russian books and the OCA keep him on May 28, and that is the primary feast here; the printed Greek Menaion heads May 27 with him as the day's titular commemoration (Μνήμη τοῦ Ἁγίου ἐνδόξου Ἱερομάρτυρος Ἑλλαδίου), appending Therapon of Sardis under the formula "on the same day," and its synaxarion distich fixes the date internally — Εἰκάδι ἑβδομάτῃ Ἑλλάδιον ἔκτανε πυγμή, "on the twenty-seventh, a fist slew Helladius." That verse also specifies the manner of death as blows of the fist (πυγμή) rather than a formal execution, which corroborates the "scourged to death" reading; and the Greek books know nothing of any Persian setting. OrthodoxWiki lists him under both days with a cross-reference; Antiochian usage could not be verified. He is in every case a subsidiary commemoration: no vigil, no dedication, no known shrine. He is served from the common of a hieromartyr, with the proper canon of the day. What is remarkable about his commemoration is that it is one of the few in the calendar in which the service is the principal source for the life — the prison-visitation is known from the hymnography and not from any passion.

Hymns

Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hieromartyr)

As a sharer in the ways and a successor to the thrones of the Apostles, thou didst find in action the means to ascend to divine contemplation, O divinely-inspired one; wherefore, rightly dividing the word of truth, thou didst also contend for the faith even unto blood, O hieromartyr Helladius: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.

Iconography

Helladius takes the hieromartyr-hierarch form: a bishop vested in phelonion and omophorion, blessing with the right hand, the Gospel-book in the left, and the martyr's cross where the painter wishes to mark the manner of his death. Two attributes are available to him from the notice and are occasionally used in menologion illustration — the furnace or brazier from which he came out unhurt, and the scourges by which he died. His finest possible subject, the Saviour standing over him in the prison, belongs to the rare class of icons in which Christ Himself appears to the martyr, and no painted example of it has been identified for him.

No pre-1900 image of Helladius has been located for this collection. Wikimedia Commons returns nothing for the saint under the Greek, Slavonic or Latin forms of the name, and no menologion leaf identifiable as his has been found; the Menologion of Basil II, the usual first resort for the small martyr-commemorations, covers only September to February and therefore contains no May leaf at all.

Disputed questions

The century is genuinely unresolved, and this entry therefore records no century at all. The OCA notice says that "according to certain sources" Helladius suffered under the Persians during their invasion of the eastern part of the Roman Empire in the fourth century — which would set him in the Sasanian wars of Shapur II and among the great Persian martyrs of the 340s. The Russian day-lists, by contrast, give him to the sixth or seventh century, which would place him in the Persian wars of Khosrow I and Justinian, or in the catastrophic invasion of Khosrow II that swept Syria and Palestine after 611. Both readings agree on the region and on a Persian rather than a Roman persecutor; they disagree by some three hundred years. Since the surviving material cannot decide between them, the entry's record omits century and the entry indexes under by-century/unknown.
A Persian persecutor is an inference, not a datum. The transmitted passion names no emperor, king, governor or judge. The Persian setting comes from later sources reasoning from the phrase "in the East"; the fire and the scourging would be equally at home in a Roman persecution.
Not to be confused with the Roman Helladius of the same day. The Latin martyrologies and the fuller Orthodox day-lists carry, for May 28, a company of martyrs at Rome — Crescens, Paul, Dioscorides and Helladius. That Helladius is a layman of a group commemoration in the West; ours is a bishop of the East who died alone. Sharing a name and a calendar day, the two are easily merged, and some lists print only one of them.
Not to be confused with the several other Helladii of the record: Helladius of Caesarea in Cappadocia, the disciple and successor of St Basil the Great in that see (†c. 394), a hierarch and not a martyr; Helladius of Tarsus, the fifth-century metropolitan of the Nestorian controversy; Helladius of Auxerre (†387), a Gallic bishop; and the Helladius who appears among the fathers of the Second Ecumenical Council. None of these is a martyr, and none is commemorated on May 28.