John of Vlachia
The Holy New Martyr John of Vlachia, who suffered at Constantinople
New Martyr · Martyr · b. 1644, in Oltenia (Wallachia) — d. May 12, 1662, at Constantinople (hanged at Parmak Kapi)
Commemorated 12 May — Martyrdom by hanging at Constantinople
John of Vlachia (Ioan Valahul, 1644 – 1662) is the young martyr of Wallachia who suffered at Constantinople at the age of seventeen. Taken prisoner as a boy when the Ottoman punitive campaign fell upon Wallachia after the revolt of the Voivode Mihnea III, he was bought by a Turkish officer for immoral purposes; resisting, and in extremity defending himself, he killed his captor and was carried to Constantinople and handed over as a slave to the dead man's widow. For two and a half years she pressed him, by flattery and by threat, to deny Christ, accept Islam and marry her. He refused. He was imprisoned, tortured, and at last condemned; the executioners hanged him at Parmak Kapi in Constantinople on May 12, 1662, before he was eighteen years old. His memory was kept by the Greeks of the City and by the Romanians, and the Romanian Orthodox Church canonised him formally in 1950 (the glorification proclaimed in 1955), the first Romanian saint of the modern canonisations; he is honoured as a patron of Romanian youth.
Wallachia under the Turks
John was born in 1644 in Oltenia, the western province of Wallachia, of a family the sources call noble and prosperous. He was brought up in the Orthodox faith and, the account emphasises, in love of his country — the two being one thing in the Romanian lands under Ottoman suzerainty, where the faith was the identity that the tribute-paying principality preserved.
In 1659 the Voivode Mihnea III (Mihnea Vodă) rose against the Porte, unable or unwilling to bear the crushing exactions laid upon Wallachia. The rising was put down and the Turkish and Tatar forces sent against the country ravaged it, killing and carrying off the population wholesale. John, then about fifteen, was among those seized. He was taken with the mass of captives, and in the division of the spoil a Turkish officer — struck, the account says, by the boy's beauty — bought him and took him for himself, intending to use him as a catamite.
Resistance and the killing of the officer
John refused. When persuasion failed the man used force; and in the struggle, defending himself, John killed him. This is the hard centre of his story and the Church has never smoothed it: he was a boy of fifteen or sixteen resisting rape, and a man died. He was seized by the Turkish authorities, brought under guard to Constantinople, and — because the blood-claim belonged to the dead man's household — handed over as a slave to the officer's widow.
Two and a half years of trial
The widow held him for two and a half years. She offered him his life, and marriage, and a place in her house, on one condition: that he become a Muslim. She tried caresses and promises; she tried threats and beatings; the account describes a long, wearing, intimate pressure of the kind that breaks people more surely than the executioner does. "The young man remained firm," the record says, "in faith and in chastity alike" — refusing both apostasy and the woman.
When she was convinced he would not yield, she gave him up to the courts. He was imprisoned in the Bostangi prison, tortured, and repeatedly urged to deny Christ. He confessed himself a Christian to the end.
Martyrdom
He was condemned to death. The executioners led him out to Parmak Kapi — the gate of that name in Constantinople, in the district near the covered market where the Ottoman authorities hanged condemned Christians publicly — and hanged him there on May 12, 1662. He was not yet eighteen.
The Greeks of Constantinople took up his memory at once; his passion was written down in Greek in the New Martyrologion tradition — the collection of the martyrs of the Turkish yoke assembled in the eighteenth century and printed under the name of Nikodemos the Hagiorite — and from there it passed into the Romanian consciousness. His veneration spread among the Orthodox of the Balkans and the Danubian principalities as one of the new martyrs.
Canonisation and veneration
The Romanian Orthodox Church decided upon his canonisation in 1950, in the first act of the general glorification of Romanian saints, and proclaimed it solemnly in 1955. He is commemorated on May 12, and is venerated in Romania as the patron of young people, invoked especially for purity and for courage under pressure — the two virtues his short life displays. Churches and chapels bear his name in Bucharest and elsewhere; no relics survive, his body having been disposed of by the Ottoman authorities.
Feast and commemoration
May 12 (church date; New Calendar civil May 12, Old Calendar civil May 25), the day of his hanging at Constantinople in 1662. The commemoration is proper to the Romanian Orthodox Church, which canonised him, and is carried by the Greek synaxaria (as Ἅγιος Ἰωάννης ὁ Βλάχος) and by the OCA, which lists him among the saints of May 12; in Romania it is a feast of some solemnity, kept with a proper service. He is named among the new martyrs of the Turkish yoke and among the saints of the Romanian land whose general commemoration falls in the Romanian calendar. The Antiochian calendar does not list him.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Your martyr John, O Lord, in his contest received the crown of incorruption from You our God; for having Your strength, he cast down the tyrants and broke the feeble insolence of the demons. By his prayers save our souls.
Original translation from the Romanian
Iconography
John is painted as a very young layman-martyr: beardless, with the short dark hair of a boy, in the tunic and mantle — Romanian icons frequently give him the embroidered shirt and sash of the Wallachian peasantry or the dress of a young boyar — holding the cross of martyrdom in his right hand and a palm or a scroll in his left. The rope or noose is his particular attribute, and the scene of his hanging at Parmak Kapi, with the Ottoman city behind, is shown beside him in fuller compositions; sometimes the instruments of his imprisonment are added. Because his cult was formally established only in 1950, the painted tradition is entirely of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and no pre-1900 image exists; nothing is stored here.
Disputed questions
- The date of his capture. The revolt of Mihnea III is dated 1659, and John is said to have been about fifteen when taken; the two agree with a birth in 1644.
- The place of martyrdom. "Parmak Kapi" (Turkish Parmakkapı) is given by the Greek passion; the identification with a specific gate of the City has been debated, and some accounts place the execution simply "in the district of the market."
- His age. "Not yet eighteen" is the transmitted formula; a birth in 1644 and a death on May 12, 1662, gives seventeen or eighteen depending on the unrecorded birthday.
- Not to be confused with the several other new martyrs named John of the Ottoman period, nor with John the Wallachian's Greek style Ἰωάννης ὁ Βλάχος, which is the same person.