Isidore of Chios

An Alexandrian in the fleet

Isidore came from Alexandria in Egypt, and by the synaxarion's account was a sailor of the imperial fleet — most sources make him a man of some rank, an officer or marine rather than a common oarsman. The fleet in which he served was commanded by the admiral (navarchos) Numerius, and in the reign of Decius (249–251) its squadron lay at anchor off the island of Chios, in the eastern Aegean.

Chios at that time was not a place of active persecution, and Isidore appears to have kept his faith without much concealment. The centurion Julius learned of it and denounced him to Numerius. Summoned and questioned, Isidore did not equivocate: he acknowledged that he was a Christian and refused to offer sacrifice to lifeless images. The admiral, who evidently had some regard for him, urged him to comply with the imperial edict and spare himself; the martyr's answer, preserved in the acts, turns on the limits of imperial power — that they might kill his body but had no authority over his soul, in which the living God, Jesus Christ, dwelt, and would dwell after his death; and that he would not cease to confess Him while breath remained.

The passion

He was handed over to the torturers. He was beaten with whips and dragged over rough ground, and through it all praised Christ and mocked the idols as the soulless handiwork of men; then he was thrown into prison. It was at this point, the passion relates, that his father — hearing in Alexandria that his son had abandoned the religion of his ancestors — took ship for Chios. The meeting was tender: Isidore embraced him with reverence and told him that he ought rather to rejoice, since his son had seen the light that Christ gives, and begged him to open the eyes of his own soul. His father petitioned Numerius for custody of the young man, promising to bring him round; failing, he cursed and disowned him and urged the admiral to execute him without delay. The hagiographers see in this the literal fulfilment of the Lord's word that "the father shall deliver up the child to death" (cf. Matt. 10:21) — the persecutor found not only among strangers but within the household.

The final tortures followed. His tongue was cut out; and — the detail on which the acts insist — he went on confessing Christ audibly by grace, while Numerius himself was struck speechless, so that he had to give the order for the execution by a sign. Isidore heard the sentence with joy, and was beheaded, in the year 251. The Greek synaxarion verses mark both the manner and the day: "The hope of the crown caressed Isidore, and urged him towards the sword, from which the crown came… on the fourteenth the blade cut Isidore down."

Myrope and the burial

The martyr's body was flung into a well (some recensions say a ravine) to be devoured by carrion birds, and a few soldiers were set to watch it lest the Christians should carry it off. That night the Christian virgin Myrope, who with her mother had withdrawn from Ephesus to Chios, came with two servant-women while the guards slept, took up the relics, and buried them with honour. When Numerius discovered the loss and condemned the guards to death, Myrope gave herself up rather than let innocent men die in her place; she was scourged and imprisoned, and at midnight, as she prayed, Isidore appeared to her amid a company of angels and told her that her prayer was heard and her crown ready — and she surrendered her soul, the whole prison filling with fragrance. Her feast is December 2, and her memory is inseparable from his. The Slavonic recension used by the Orthodox Church in America adds a second name, Ammonios (commemorated September 4), as sharing in the burial, and says that he too was afterwards martyred, at Cyzicus. Myrope was laid beside Isidore, and a chapel was raised over the two graves.

Relics, the well, and the mastic

In the fifth century the chapel gave way to a church, and Markianos, the oikonomos of the Great Church of Constantinople (commemorated January 10), who built a chapel by the church of Hagia Eirene, translated the martyr's skull and a portion of his relics to Constantinople, placing them in the church of the Most Holy Theotokos at Peran.

The rest remained on Chios, and the shrine there is one of the better-attested healing sites of the sixth century, because a Latin witness describes it. Gregory of Tours, in the Liber in gloria martyrum, reports that Isidore is buried on Chios, that in his church there is the well into which he was thrown, that those who drink its water — the possessed, the fevered, the sick — are frequently cured, and that a light like a burning candle is often seen at the well's mouth; he says he met a priest who had seen it himself. In the same passage Gregory notes the island's peculiar product, the resin gathered from its mastic trees. Local tradition draws the two together: at the place of the martyrdom the mastic trees are said to have wept fragrant tears for the martyr, and the mastic of Chios — the island's wealth for centuries — is held to be gatherable only from the groves near where he suffered.

Latin sources record a further translation: in 1125 the Venetians carried the martyr's body from Chios to Venice, where it was laid in the basilica of San Marco; the chapel of San Isidoro, off the north transept, still houses his sarcophagus. The Orthodox synaxaria do not record this removal, and Chios continues to keep him as her own; both traditions agree in making him a protector of seafarers, which his own naval service and the ship stamped on his pilgrim tokens amply explain.