Mark of Chios
The Holy New Martyr Mark of Smyrna, who suffered at Chios
New Martyr · d. June 5, 1801
Commemorated 5 June — Beheading at Chios in 1801
Mark, a new martyr of the Ottoman period, was a young man of Smyrna who in a weak hour denied Christ and professed Islam, repented bitterly, was received back and prepared for martyrdom in the monastic life, and then went deliberately to Chios to unsay his denial in public. Brought before the Turkish authority, he declared himself a Christian, refused every inducement to return to Islam, and was beheaded on June 5, 1801. He is commemorated on June 5 among the new martyrs of the Greek Church.
Denial and repentance
Mark's story is the commonest of all the new-martyr patterns, and its very ordinariness is what the Greek Church has insisted on remembering. He was born at Smyrna, of Christian parents, and — as a young man in service or apprenticeship in a Turkish household or workplace, whether by inducement, by trickery, or in a quarrel from which the profession of Islam offered him an escape — he denied Christ and was registered a Muslim.
The apostasy was not the end. Under Ottoman law a Christian who apostatised and then returned was liable to death, so that the road back was itself a capital matter; and the young man, unable to live with what he had done, took it. He escaped from Smyrna, was received again into the Church by chrismation, and — following the discipline that the confessors of the age had worked out — withdrew to a monastic community, in the usual pattern to Mount Athos, where he was prepared by fasting, confession and the services for the death he now intended to seek. This preparation is the specific institution of the Greek new-martyr movement: it was not permitted to court martyrdom unprepared, and the elders who trained such men were as much the authors of their witness as they were.
Confession and martyrdom at Chios
Prepared, Mark left the monastery for Chios — the island whose Christian community was among the most substantial in the Aegean, and which in this generation produced or received a remarkable number of new martyrs. There he presented himself to the authorities, or was recognised, and confessed openly that he was a Christian and that his profession of Islam had been nothing.
The examination followed the standard course: the offer of honours and money, the threat of death, the pressure of former associates, and — since the case was one of apostasy from Islam — the impossibility of any outcome but recantation or execution. Mark held to his confession, and was beheaded at Chios on June 5, 1801.
His body was recovered by the Christians of the island and buried with honour. Chios kept his memory, and the notice of his passion was gathered into the Greek collections of the new martyrs, where he stands with the great company assembled by Nikodemos the Hagiorite and his continuators.
Feast and commemoration
June 5 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 18) — a Greek commemoration, kept in the calendars of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and in the general Orthodox enumerations of the day; it does not appear in the Moscow Patriarchate's calendar for the day (verified live) nor in the OCA's June 5 synaxarion. Chios, which has its own rich company of new martyrs, keeps him locally. Where his memory is kept liturgically the common of a martyr is used.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Mark, O Lord, in his contest received an incorruptible crown from Thee, our God; for possessing Thy strength, he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By his intercessions save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
The new martyrs of the Ottoman centuries have a fixed and easily read iconography, and Mark is written to it: a young layman, beardless or with the first dark beard, in the dress of his own century and station rather than in any antique tunic — the sash, the short jacket and the fez or cap of an Ottoman Greek — holding a cross in the right hand and a martyr's palm or a scroll in the left, with the sword of his beheading laid beside him or held by an attendant figure. Where the passion is shown, it is a plain scene of beheading before a seated Turkish official, in the manner of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Chian and Athonite panels of the new martyrs. He may appear among the ranks of a composite icon of the New Martyrs of Chios.
No pre-1900 icon of Mark of Chios has been located for this collection. His cult is local and the surviving images are, for the most part, modern painted icons in Chian churches, which are the copyrighted work of living iconographers and are not stored here.
Disputed questions
- Sources and detail. This entry is deliberately brief. The new-martyr notices of the turn of the nineteenth century are terse and vary between recensions; the circumstances of Mark's original denial, the monastery of his preparation, the name of the official who tried him, and the place of his burial on Chios could not be established from the sources reachable in preparing this entry, and nothing has been supplied to fill the gap. What is secure is the frame: a Smyrniote who apostatised, repented, was prepared for martyrdom, confessed at Chios, and was beheaded on June 5, 1801.
- "Of Smyrna" or "of Chios." He is styled both ways — from his birthplace and from the place of his passion — and the calendar entry in most forms names both, as here.
- Not to be confused with the many other new martyrs named Mark, nor with the Evangelist Mark (April 25), nor with the several new martyrs of Chios of the same period.