Markella of Chios
The Holy Virgin-Martyr Markella of Chios
Virgin · Martyr · d. c. 1500 (traditional; other accounts place her in the 14th century)
Commemorated 22 July — Martyrdom at Volissos on Chios
Markella was a young Christian woman of Volissos, in the north-west of the island of Chios, killed by her own father in defence of her virginity at the place on the shore now called Agia Markella. The narrative tradition — her mother's early death, the father's unnatural desire, her flight into the hills, the arrow, the rock that opened to hide her, and the beheading at the water's edge — is a local one, first written down late; Saint Nikodemos the Hagiorite, compiling the Synaxaristes, frankly recorded that no account of her had been preserved, and that the Chians nevertheless honoured her from ancient custom. What has never been in doubt on Chios is the veneration: the shrine on the shore, the hot spring in the rocks, and the red staining of the stones which the islanders gather as a healing relic. She is the patroness of Chios.
Volissos
The tradition places Markella in the village of Volissos, on the wild north-western coast of Chios — a mountainous district of the island, remote from the town, whose people lived by goats, olives and the sea. Her father is remembered as the headman of the place and a man outside the faith, or at best indifferent to it; her mother was a devout Christian who taught her daughter the faith and died while Markella was still a child.
Left to herself, she is said to have kept what her mother had begun: fasting, prayer, the reading of the Scriptures, almsgiving and hospitality to strangers, and above all a settled resolve of virginity. She grew, the account says, beautiful and much loved in the village, which is where her trouble began.
The pursuit and the martyrdom
When Markella was about eighteen, her father conceived a desire for her. She refused him absolutely, and when he would not be turned, she fled — out of the house and up into the scrub of the hillside, making for the sea. He armed himself and followed.
The tradition is circumstantial about the chase. She hid in a bush or thicket; a shepherd, questioned, betrayed where she had gone; her father set the thicket alight to drive her out. Running toward the shore, she was struck by an arrow from his bow and wounded. Bleeding, she came down to the rocks at the water's edge and prayed that the stone might open and receive her — and, the account says, it did, closing about her so that only her head and breast remained visible. Her father, finding her held fast and unable to move her, cut off her head and threw it into the sea.
Some tellings add a coda: the head was found floating far down the coast, off the beach of Komi in the south-east of the island, upright among burning candles on the water, and was taken aboard a passing Italian ship and carried away to the West; her body remained where she died. The story of the head's discovery, like the rest, is popular tradition rather than record.
The shrine, the spring and the blood
Whatever the origin of the narrative, the place is very old and very concrete, and it is what the Chians actually venerate. At Agia Markella, on the shore below Volissos, a church stands beside the rocks where she is said to have died. Three things are reported there and have been reported for centuries:
- The stained rocks. The stones at the water's edge are marked with a dark red discolouration which the islanders identify as her blood. It is scraped off in small quantities, mixed with water, and taken by the sick; it is said to renew itself, and to be most visible about her feast.
- The hot spring. Water rises in a pool among the rocks and is used for the sick and for bathing children. The local report — recorded already in the older accounts — is that the water agitates and heats during the singing of the Paraklesis, and that this occurs only when a priest is present.
- The apparitions. Markella is said to appear to those who come to be healed, dressed as a nun, coming up out of the sea and entering the church.
Saint Nikodemos, writing in the eighteenth century, gives essentially these three things and nothing else — which is a fair measure of how the veneration was transmitted: not by a Life, but by a place and its miracles.
Feast and commemoration
July 22 (church date; New Calendar civil July 22, Old Calendar civil August 4), shared with the great feast of Mary Magdalene, whose day it principally is. On Chios, however, July 22 is Markella's own: the feast at the shrine of Agia Markella below Volissos is the chief pilgrimage of the island, drawing Chians from the whole diaspora, with an all-night vigil, the blessing of the water at the spring, and a procession of her icon along the shore.
Her cultus is strongest in the Church of Greece and in the Greek diaspora — parishes bearing her name exist in the United States, Australia and elsewhere — and she is honoured as patroness of Chios together with the other Chian saints. A full akolouthia with proper apolytikion, kontakion and canon is printed for her use on the island; it is a modern composition in the traditional forms, and its later portions are under copyright, so only the apolytikion is given here, freshly rendered.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 3
Rose of true religion and sweet-scented shoot of Chios, in hymns we honour thee, O Markella the martyr, beheaded by thy father's hand: for thou didst keep thy virginity unstained and didst run to Christ thy Bridegroom; entreat Him, O maiden, that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Markella is written as a young woman, unveiled or lightly veiled as a virgin, in a red or crimson mantle, holding the cross of martyrdom and often the palm. Two attributes are particular to her and appear in nearly all Chian images: the rock that closed about her, shown as a cleft stone at her feet or enclosing her lower body, and the sea behind her. The narrative icons of the island add the scenes in border medallions — the flight up the hill, the burning bush, the shepherd, the archer, the rock, the beheading, and the finding of the head among candles on the water — in the manner of a vita icon.
No image of her has been stored. The candidates available on Wikimedia Commons are dated only as "19th–20th century" with an unidentified iconographer, and that range does not establish a pre-1900 original; under this collection's icon policy they are therefore rejected rather than assumed public domain. A firmly dated pre-1900 Chian icon of Saint Markella is wanted.
Disputed questions
- Her date is not established. The commonest modern statement is that she lived in the fourteenth century; a competing tradition, current from the nineteenth century and followed by many Greek sources, places her about the year 1500. Neither rests on a document. This entry follows the later dating for the entry's record, indexing her in the fifteenth century, while recording that the fourteenth-century placement is at least as well attested in current usage. A minority notice attaches her instead to the persecutions of antiquity — the confusion arises because a Marcella is also commemorated on July 22 among the ancient martyrs — which no Chian source supports.
- Not to be confused with the ancient Marcella commemorated on the same day in some synaxaria, nor with Marcella of Rome, the fourth-century Roman widow and ascetic. The Chian saint is a virgin-martyr of the Turkish period.
- The father's motive. The accounts diverge: most say an incestuous desire; a variant makes him an idolater or apostate who killed her for refusing to abandon Christ. The two are sometimes combined. The variant is worth noting because it changes the shape of the martyrdom — from a death for chastity to a death for the faith — though in the Church's reckoning she is honoured for both, as a virgin-martyr.
- Whether a written Life ever existed. Nikodemos's blunt statement that nothing had been handed down implies that the connected narrative now current was assembled later, from local memory and from the topography of the shrine itself. The narrative should therefore be read as the pious articulation of an old cultus rather than as its source.