Joseph of Damascus
The Holy New Hieromartyr Joseph of Damascus, and those martyred with him
Hieromartyr · Priest · New Martyr · b. 15 May 1793 — d. 10 July 1860, at Damascus
Commemorated 10 July — Martyrdom at Damascus with his companions, 1860
Joseph of Damascus (1793–1860) is the great new martyr of the Church of Antioch in modern times: a parish priest and schoolmaster of Damascus who was killed, with a great company of his people, in the sack of the Christian quarter of Bab Touma in July 1860. For twenty-four years he directed the Patriarchal School of Damascus and made it the foremost Orthodox school in the Arab East, teaching the men who would become bishops and archpriests from Syria to Brazil and North America — among them Raphael of Brooklyn. When the quarter was set alight on 10 July 1860, the tradition of the Archdiocese holds that he refused to hide, and went through the burning streets with the Holy Gifts to communicate the dying until he was cut down. The Holy Synod of Antioch glorified him with his companions in 1993, and the Church keeps their memory on July 10.
Origins and priesthood
Joseph was born on 15 May 1793, the son of George Muhanna al-Haddad — his family name, al-Haddad, means "the smith," and the sources describe his father as a craftsman of Syrian stock. He was ordained priest in 1817 for the diocese of Damascus, then as now the see of the Patriarchate of Antioch, and served in the parishes of the city attached to the ancient cathedral of the Dormition, the Mariamite, in the Christian quarter of Bab Touma.
His was the Church of the Arab East under Ottoman rule in its hardest generation: an Arabic-speaking Orthodox flock, poor, taxed as a subject community, pressed on one side by the Latin missions and the Melkite union and on the other by the long Greek dominance of the patriarchal throne, and living in a countryside that was sliding towards open communal war.
The Patriarchal School
From 1836 to 1860 Joseph directed the Patriarchal School of Damascus. Under him it became the leading Orthodox institution of learning in the Middle East — not a seminary only but the place where a native Arab Orthodox clergy and an educated Orthodox laity were formed at a moment when the alternative was to be educated by other confessions or not at all. Its alumni went out as bishops and archpriests across Syria, Anatolia, Lebanon, the United States and Brazil. Two are remembered by name in this collection's field of view: Raphael Hawaweeny, later Raphael of Brooklyn, the first Orthodox bishop consecrated on American soil; and Ignatios Firzli, Greek Orthodox archbishop of São Paulo. Joseph was also a preacher and a writer in Arabic, and is remembered in Damascus as a defender of the Arab character of the Antiochian Church a generation before that cause was won.
The massacre of July 1860
The civil war that broke out in Mount Lebanon in the spring of 1860 between Druze and Maronite reached Damascus in July. On 9 July 1860 the Christian quarter of Bab Touma was attacked by a mob numbered by contemporaries in the tens of thousands — Druze and Muslim countrymen, Kurdish irregulars and city rabble — while the Ottoman garrison stood aside or joined in. For some eight days the quarter was burned and plundered: churches, the Patriarchal residence and school, and the consulates of Russia, France, Austria, the Netherlands and Belgium were destroyed, and the Christians who had crowded into the churches and monasteries for sanctuary were killed there. Contemporary and modern estimates of the dead run from several thousand to upwards of eleven or twelve thousand, the great majority of them Greek Orthodox and Melkite Greek Catholic. Thousands more were saved by the Algerian emir Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza'iri, then in exile in Damascus, who armed his own men, opened his house and quarter to the fugitives, and stood between the mob and them.
Joseph was killed on 10 July 1860. The account handed down in the Church of Antioch is that he was urged to hide and would not; that he took the reserved Holy Gifts and went out into the streets and the burning houses to give communion to the wounded and the dying and to absolve them; that he returned again and again into the quarter after leading people out of it; and that he was at last recognised, seized, and hacked down, with a great number of the faithful — priests, deacons, and lay people, men, women and children — who died in the same days and in the same quarter.
The companions
The Church commemorates him not alone but as Joseph and those with him — "Saint Joseph and his companions of Damascus." The commemoration is in its nature collective: what is kept is the memory of the whole slaughtered congregation of Bab Touma, of whom Joseph is the named and representative head, as the passion of a bishop stands for his city. Lists of individual companions circulate in Antiochian parish material, generally naming the clergy of the Mariamite cathedral and of the Patriarchal school who fell in the same days; no critical roll drawn from the synodal act of glorification was available to this collection at the time of writing, and none is asserted here. In accordance with §4 of the PRD the companions are documented as a company and not as a definitive list of names.
Glorification and veneration
The Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Antioch glorified Joseph of Damascus and his companions in 1993, more than a century and a quarter after their death — the first glorification of new martyrs of the Arab Orthodox world in modern times, and one of great consequence for the self-understanding of the Antiochian Church, which in these martyrs honours its own recent dead in its own language. He is honoured throughout the Patriarchate of Antioch and in its diaspora, and is carried in the calendar of the Orthodox Church in America, whose Antiochian and Syrian parishes preserved the memory in North America. Parish churches and schools bear his name in Syria, Lebanon and the Americas, and he is invoked particularly by clergy and by teachers.
Feast and commemoration
July 10 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 23), the day of the martyrdom. The feast is proper to the Patriarchate of Antioch and its Archdioceses and is kept also by the OCA, which lists "Saint Joseph and his companions, of Damascus" on this day. It is the principal Antiochian commemoration of July 10, and stands in this collection's calendar beside the great Slavic feast of the same date, that of Antony of the Kiev Caves — the two ends of the Orthodox world keeping, on one day, a father of monks and a martyred parish priest.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hieromartyr)
As a sharer in the ways and a successor to the thrones of the Apostles, O divinely-inspired one, thou didst find in contemplation the means to ascend to divine heights; rightly dividing the word of truth, thou didst struggle for the faith even unto blood, O hieromartyr Joseph: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Kontakion — Tone 4
The city of Damascus offereth thee to the Lord as the firstfruits of her sorrow, O shepherd who wast slain among thy sheep; for thou didst not flee from the fire, but didst bear the Bread of life into it, and wast broken with them that thou didst feed. Wherefore, O Joseph, together with thy companions, entreat Christ God for us who honour your memory.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Joseph is a modern saint and his iconography was made after 1993. He is written as a priest of the Antiochian usage: middle-aged, dark-bearded, in the phelonion and epitrachelion with the epigonation, holding in his right hand the martyr's cross and in his left — the attribute that identifies him at once — the chalice, or a covered communion set, for the Gifts he carried through the burning quarter. Behind him are commonly drawn the burning houses of Bab Touma, the domes of the Mariamite cathedral, and the crowd of his companions, whose heads fill the ground behind him as in the icons of ancient companies of martyrs; some versions place him at the centre of a great gathering of the Damascene martyrs, with the open Gospel or the school of the Patriarchate at his side. Arabic inscriptions are usual.
No image is stored. Every icon of St Joseph is the work of a living or recently living iconographer and is therefore copyright; the images of him on Wikimedia Commons and elsewhere are photographs of modern painted icons, and a free licence granted by the photographer of such an icon does not touch the rights of the iconographer who painted it. Under the icon policy of this collection such an image is not storable, and none has been taken.
Disputed questions
- Place of birth. He is generally given as of Damascus, and Damascus is where he spent his ministry and died; the fuller genealogical accounts, followed by the standard reference works, place his birth at Beirut in 1793 to a family of Syrian origin. The epithet is one of service, not of birth.
- The number of the dead. Figures for the Damascus massacre vary widely with the source and its interest — from a few thousand to about twelve thousand. No figure is secure; the corpus records the range rather than choosing.
- The manner of his death. The detail of the Holy Gifts carried through the burning quarter is the settled tradition of the Antiochian Church and is repeated in all its accounts of him. It is transmitted as hagiography and is recorded here as such.