Kindeas of Pamphylia
The Holy Hieromartyr Kindeas, Presbyter of Side in Pamphylia
Hieromartyr · Priest · d. c. 290 (some accounts under Diocletian, 284–305)
Commemorated 11 July — Martyrdom by fire in Pamphylia
Kindeas (Cindeus) was a presbyter of the village of Talmenia in the territory of Side in Pamphylia, put to death by fire in the persecution about the year 290. The short synaxarion account is remembered less for the manner of his death than for two details of his bearing on the way to it: he paid the woodcutter whose faggots the soldiers had seized to burn him, and when the man fell ill he carried the wood to his own pyre on his own back. The fire, the account says, was quenched by a sudden storm, and he gave up his spirit unburnt; the pagan priest who had watched him was converted with his wife and buried him.
Presbyter in Pamphylia
Pamphylia was the narrow coastal plain of southern Asia Minor between Lycia and Cilicia, and Side, its chief port, had been Christian in part since the second century. Kindeas served as a priest in a village of its territory which the sources call Talmenia. The persecution — the synaxaria place it in the reign of Diocletian, though the year usually given, about 290, is a decade earlier than the great persecution of 303 and may belong to one of the local harassments that preceded it — found him openly at his work, preaching and gathering his people; he made no attempt to hide, and was denounced. He was tried before the governor of the province and sentenced to be burned alive.
The woodcutter, and the burning
The single narrative episode the tradition preserves belongs to the road out to the place of execution. The soldiers, wanting fuel, took the load of a woodcutter they met on the way, without payment. Kindeas stopped them, and paid the man himself — the account fixes the sum at thirty pieces of copper — so that the wood for his own burning should not be stolen goods; the number is surely chosen for its echo of the thirty pieces of silver, one price paid to betray and one paid to make a wrong right. The woodcutter then fell sick under the burden, or could not go on, and the condemned priest took the faggots on his own shoulders and carried them the rest of the way. Byzantine readers of the notice would not have missed the second figure either: the man who carries to the place of death the wood on which he is to die is Isaac on Moriah, and behind Isaac the Lord bearing His own cross.
Bound on the pyre, he did not stop speaking. The account says he called on those standing by to turn to Christ while the flames were kindled, and that a sudden thunderstorm broke over the place and put the fire out; and that in that moment, the fire quenched and his body untouched, he committed his soul to God. A pagan priest who had been among the officials of the execution was so struck by what he had seen that he confessed Christ, with his wife, and it was the two of them who took the body and buried it.
Feast and commemoration
July 11 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 24). He is carried by the Greek synaxaria, the Slavonic books and the OCA on this day, always as a secondary commemoration behind Euphemia; the Menaion has no proper service for him and supplies the common of a hieromartyr. On the Greek calendar of the same day he stands with the martyr Martyrocles and, in some recensions, with Marcian, both of whom are notices of a single line.
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 Kindeas: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Kindeas is painted as a priest-martyr: middle-aged and bearded, in the phelonion over the sticharion with the epitrachelion hanging in front — the priest's vesture, without the omophorion that would make him a bishop — holding the martyr's cross in the right hand and the Gospel or a scroll in the left. Where the passion is illustrated he stands in the flames of an unlit or extinguished pyre, and in the fuller compositions the bundle of faggots on his own shoulder is his distinguishing attribute, with the woodcutter beside him. No pre-1900 image of him has been identified for this collection: the Menologion of Basil II, which supplies miniatures for most minor saints of the fixed calendar, runs only from September to February and cannot serve a July commemoration, and a search of Wikimedia Commons returns nothing under any spelling of the name.
Disputed questions
- The name. Greek manuscripts and calendars give Κινδέος, Κύνδαιος and Κύνδεος; English calendars render it Kindeos, Kindeas and Cindeus. All are the same man.
- The place. "Talmenia" is otherwise unknown; the calendars attach him variously to Side and to Pamphylia at large, and some Slavonic books to "Sidon", by a copyist's confusion of Σίδη with Σιδών. Pamphylian Side is meant.
- The date. The year 290 is transmitted with the reign of Diocletian, which would allow it, but the great persecution belongs to 303–305; the synaxarion's chronology is approximate, and the century of repose is given here as the third on the strength of the transmitted year.
- The manner of death. That the fire was extinguished and the martyr died unburnt is common to the accounts; some later retellings, uneasy at the loss of the sentence, add that he was beheaded afterwards. The synaxarion does not say so.