Manuel of Crete
The Holy New Martyr Manuel the Cretan
New Martyr · b. Crete, 18th century — d. 1792, on Chios
Commemorated 15 March — Beheaded on Chios for returning to Christ
Manuel the Cretan (†1792) was a new martyr of the Ottoman period. Born a Christian in Crete in the eighteenth century, he was taken captive as a child by the Turks and compelled to accept Islam. Grown to manhood and unable to bear the denial of his baptism, he openly confessed himself a Christian once more, and for this "apostasy" from Islam — a capital crime under Ottoman law — he was beheaded on the island of Chios in the year 1792. He is numbered among the company of new martyrs who, under the yoke, washed away a forced conversion in their own blood, and is commemorated on March 15.
Manuel belongs to the great company of New Martyrs of the Turkish yoke — those who, in the centuries of Ottoman rule over the Orthodox East, sealed their return to Christ, or their refusal to leave him, with martyrdom. His story follows a pattern the age made terribly common. Born of Christian parents in Crete in the eighteenth century, he was seized as a boy and forced into Islam, made outwardly a Muslim against his will and his baptism — one of the child-converts the tradition remembers with particular tenderness, robbed of their faith before they could defend it.
He did not remain in it. Reaching adulthood and unwilling to live under a religion pressed upon him, Manuel cast off the outward profession of Islam and confessed Christ openly — the decisive and irreversible act of the neomartyr, which under Ottoman law was apostasy from Islam and punishable by death. He was arrested, and, holding firm to his confession, was condemned and beheaded on the island of Chios in 1792, giving his life for the faith of his childhood. Chios, which in these very decades gave the Church a number of its neomartyrs, kept his memory among them.
Of the particulars of his passion — the place of his captivity, the circumstances of his confession, the name of the judge — little detailed record survives beyond the fact and the manner of his martyrdom; his memory is preserved chiefly in the Greek neomartyrologies and the calendars that keep his day.
Feast and commemoration
March 15 (church date; New Calendar civil March 15; Old Calendar civil March 28), kept in Greek usage — the Greek synaxaria and neomartyrologies — as the memory of "the holy new martyr Manuel the Cretan." His is not a pan-Orthodox commemoration: the OCA and Slavic calendars for the day do not list him. The feast falls within Great Lent, so that on a weekday no proper Liturgy is served and his memory is kept with the Lenten office.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (from the common of a martyr)
Thy martyr, O Lord, in his courageous contest received an incorruptible crown from Thee, our God; for possessing Thy strength, he cast down the tyrants and broke the feeble insolence of the demons. By his intercessions, O Christ God, save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Manuel is depicted in the type of the new martyrs of the Turkish yoke — a young man in the dress of his people, holding the martyr's cross, sometimes shown with the instrument or scene of his beheading. No pre-modern image proper to him has been identified and verified for storage — his martyrdom is of the late eighteenth century, and such icons of him as exist are the work of modern iconographers; a storable public-domain image is wanting.