Mark of Crete
The Holy New Martyr Mark the Cretan, who suffered at Smyrna
New Martyr · d. 1643, at Smyrna
Commemorated 14 May — Martyrdom at Smyrna, 1643
Mark the Cretan is a new martyr of the return: a Cretan boy taken to Smyrna after his mother's death, forced into Islam as a child in consequence of his father's violence, who lived four years as a Muslim under the name Mustafa — and then repented, fled home, was received back through the discipline of the Church, studied at Constantinople under the theologian Meletios Syrigos, and deliberately returned to Smyrna, the city of his apostasy, to preach Christ publicly there. He was arrested, refused with great firmness to betray the faith a second time, was cruelly tortured, and beheaded in 1643. His relics were ransomed by the Christians and buried in the church of Hagia Photini at Smyrna, where they became a source of healings.
Crete, Smyrna, and the apostasy
Mark was Cretan born and bred. His father Andreas came from Zakynthos, his mother from Crete. She died while he was young, and he followed his father to Smyrna. There, the account says, it was his father's violent conduct that brought about the disaster: the boy was Islamised by the Turks, and lived under Islam for four years, taking the name Mustafa.
Repentance and formation
Coming to himself, he repented, rejected with loathing what he had been made to profess, and escaped — first to Zakynthos, his father's island, and from there to Crete. He took refuge in the then flourishing monastery of the Panagia Akrotiriani — the monastery of Toplou in the district of Sitia, at the eastern end of the island — for recollection and ascetic discipline. Afterwards he went to Constantinople, where he made his confession and sat at the feet of the learned Meletios Syrigos (†1663), the Cretan theologian and preacher of the Great Church, one of the most formidable Orthodox controversialists of his century.
Return to Smyrna and martyrdom
Formed and resolved, Mark went back to Smyrna — the city where he had denied Christ — and there preached Christianity publicly. For a man legally counted a Muslim this was capital apostasy, and he was arrested. He refused with great steadiness to betray his faith, was savagely tortured, and at last beheaded, at Smyrna, in the year 1643.
The Christians ransomed his body — the customary practice, the Ottoman authorities selling the remains of executed Christians back to their community — and buried it in the church of Hagia Photini, the principal Orthodox church of Smyrna; and God, the account concludes, made him in recompense for his sacrifice a fountain of healings to those who came to him with faith.
Veneration and later cultus
His martyrdom was recorded, unusually, by a Latin witness — a Jesuit named Isaac, whose narrative underlies the Greek accounts. He is honoured in Crete, at the Toplou monastery which sheltered his repentance, and in the general commemoration of the New Martyrs who suffered after the fall of Constantinople. His memory belongs to the class of neomartyrs the Church holds up with particular emphasis: those who had once fallen, and whose martyrdom was the undoing of their own denial.
Feast and commemoration
May 14 (church date; Old Calendar civil May 27) in Greek usage, and in the general synaxis of the New Martyrs. He has no proper office available in a public-domain text and is sung with the common of a martyr. Depending on the year the day falls late in the Paschal season or after Pentecost.
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
Mark is painted as a young new-martyr of the Ottoman centuries: beardless or with the first beard, in the dress of a seventeenth-century Greek layman — long belted coat, sometimes the turban or cap he would have worn in Smyrna — with the cross in his right hand and the palm in his left, and the sword of his beheading at his feet. Modern Cretan churches and the monastery of Toplou paint him among the saints of the island; in the great collective icons of the neomartyrs he stands in the ranks of those martyred at Smyrna. No pre-1900 image of him has been located for this collection.
Disputed questions
- The circumstances of his Islamisation. The Greek text says only that it happened "because of the violent conduct of his father," which has been read both as the father himself apostatising and dragging the boy with him, and as the father's brutality driving the child to the protection of the Turks. The sources do not decide it.
- Not to be confused with the several other saints Mark of the Greek calendar — Mark of Ephesus (January 19), Mark of Arethusa (March 29), Mark the Athenian, or Mark of Apollonias.