Hieromartyrs of Cherson

The mission to Cherson

The account of the seven belongs to the missionary expansion of the Church into the Roman lands of the northern Black Sea, and is transmitted in the ancient Acts of the Cherson bishops and in the Synaxaria. In the early fourth century the Patriarch of Jerusalem — named Hermon in the traditional synaxarion-notice, though the OCA account leaves him unnamed — sent bishops out to the still-pagan regions to preach the Gospel. Two of these, Ephraim and Basil, were sent northward to Cherson, the Greek city of the Crimean peninsula (Chersonesus Taurica), an outpost of Hellenic and then Roman civilisation set among the pagan Tauri and Scythians. Their arrival is placed in the reign of Diocletian (284–305), when to confess Christ was still a capital crime.

The city was fiercely hostile to the new faith, and the seven did not come or suffer all at once: the tradition unfolds their labours as a succession of shepherds sent one after another to the same difficult flock, most of them martyred, until at last — under the changed sky of Constantine's reign — the city was won.

Basil, and the raising of the dead child

Basil preached at Cherson and converted many from idolatry; for this he was seized, beaten, and driven from the city. He withdrew to a cave in a mountain outside the walls, where he continued in prayer. The turning-point was a miracle: a prominent citizen of Cherson, whose only son had died, saw the dead child in a dream directing his parents to "the man of God Basil, driven out of the city," who alone could restore him. The grieving father sought Basil out, brought him back, and at his prayer and the sprinkling of water blessed in the Name of the Holy Trinity the boy was raised from the dead. The wonder brought a multitude to baptism.

The success enraged the pagans — and, the older accounts add, the Jewish community of the city. During the persecution renewed under Maximian Galerius (305–311) a mob seized Basil, dragged him through the streets by the feet, and beat him to death with stones and clubs. He died on March 7, about the year 309. His body was left unburied outside the city, but — the tradition says — remained untouched by beast or bird until Christians came by night and buried it in his cave.

Ephraim among the peoples of the Danube

Ephraim, Basil's fellow-missionary, had meanwhile carried the preaching beyond Cherson to the peoples along the Danube — the Scythian and sub-Danubian lands. There too he gathered a church amid great hardship, and there he was beheaded in the early years of the persecution, on the same March 7 by which the Church joins him to his companions. (He is not to be confused with the several other saints named Ephraim — Ephraim the Syrian of Nisibis and Edessa, Ephraim of Pereyaslavl, or Ephraim of Amida, patriarch of Antioch.)

Eugene, Elpidius and Agathodorus

When news of Basil's death reached Jerusalem, three more bishops — Eugene, Elpidius and Agathodorus — were sent, about a year later (c. 310), to take up the shepherding of the Cherson church. They laboured together, confirming and increasing the flock Basil had gathered; and together they met the same end, stoned and beaten to death by the pagans on March 7, about the year 311. The three are always named as a trio in the notices, the second wave of the Cherson martyrdom.

Aetherius, and the peace of the Church

Aetherius (Etherius) was sent to Cherson after the accession of Constantine the Great, in the new age when the emperor's edicts had made the confession of Christ lawful and the persecutions ceased. Under this protection Aetherius was able to build a church in the city and to govern it in peace, gathering openly the harvest for which his predecessors had died. The tradition relates that he journeyed to Constantinople to seek the emperor's help against the pagans who still troubled the Christians of the Crimea, and obtained it; the accounts of his end differ — the OCA life has him repose peacefully on the return journey, while other strands of the tradition keep him among the martyrs, killed on an island near the mouth of the Dnieper as he returned. The Church numbers him with the hieromartyrs of the day; the divergence over the manner of his death is noted below.

Capiton, and the miracle of the furnace

The last and most celebrated of the seven is Capiton (Capito), sent to Cherson to succeed Aetherius. The people, though the persecution was over, were still half-pagan and demanded of the new bishop a sign that his God was the true God: let him enter a burning lime-kiln (a furnace), and if he came out alive they would believe. Trusting in God, Capiton put on his full episcopal vestments, prayed, made the sign of the Cross, and walked into the fire — and stood in the flames unharmed, coming out with his garments untouched and, the account says, carrying live coals in his phelonion without being burned. The whole city was converted at the wonder.

The miracle became famous far beyond the Crimea. It was reported to the emperor Constantine and, the tradition holds, to the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea (325), where the fathers glorified God for it. Capiton governed the now Christian city for some years; in the end he too died a martyr's death, drowned by pagans at the mouth of the Dnieper, on December 21 — but he is commemorated with his six fellow-bishops on March 7.

Veneration and later cultus

By the joining of all seven on the one day, the Church honours the whole generations-long labour by which Cherson was won for Christ as a single act of apostolic witness. Their significance is not local only. Cherson became the mother-city of Crimean Christianity and one of the oldest sees of the region; and it was at Cherson (Korsun, in the Slavonic sources) that, in 988, Prince Vladimir of Kiev was baptised and took the faith home to the Rus' — so that the ground consecrated by the blood of Basil and his companions became, six centuries on, the gate through which Orthodoxy entered the Slavic world. The Slavic Church has therefore kept the seven with particular devotion, appointing them a proper service in the Menaion; the Greek and Antiochian calendars keep them likewise on March 7.