Martyred Fathers and Mothers of Atchara
The Holy Martyred Fathers and Mothers of Atchara, slain for refusing Islam
New Martyr · d. through the 17th and 18th centuries, and notably in 1790
Commemorated 29 May — Synaxis of the Christians of Atchara put to death for refusing conversion to Islam
The Martyred Fathers and Mothers of Atchara are the Christians — men and women, and by the name of the commemoration chiefly the elderly — of the mountainous Georgian province on the Black Sea coast who, through the long generations of Ottoman rule, were put to death for refusing to renounce Christ and accept Islam. They are venerated as a company rather than as named individuals: the hangings and beheadings were carried out village by village over roughly a century, with the year 1790 transmitted as the culminating persecution, and the bridge over the Atcharistsqali river — the medieval "Bridge of Queen Tamar" — remembered as the chief place of execution. The Georgian Church canonised them collectively, and keeps their memory on May 29.
A Christian land
Atchara (Adjara, აჭარა) is the south-westernmost province of Georgia, the country of the lower Chorokhi and the Atcharistsqali, running from the Black Sea up into the Meskheti mountains. Its Christianity is of apostolic antiquity in the Georgian tradition: it was through this region that the Apostle Andrew the First-Called is held to have entered Iberia, so that Atchara heard the Gospel before the rest of the Georgian land; and the relics of the Apostle Matthias are venerated at Gonio on its coast, at the site of the Roman fort of Apsaros. For a thousand years and more it was a settled Christian country of churches and monasteries, and it belonged to the Georgian kingdom and afterwards to the principality of Samtskhe.
The Ottoman conquest and the forced conversions
In the sixteenth century, in the aftermath of the Ottoman–Safavid wars, Atchara passed with Samtskhe and Chaneti under direct Ottoman administration, and was organised as a Turkish province. What followed was not a single persecution but a systematic and patient campaign of conversion: the Georgian language driven from worship and then from use, the clergy removed, the churches taken or ruined, taxation and tenure made to depend upon religion, and the inducement of privilege held out to those who would apostatise. Over generations most of the population was brought to Islam, and Atchara became — as it remains in part — the Muslim province of a Christian nation. This is the context of the martyrdoms: they are the resistance of those the pressure did not move.
The martyrdoms
Where persuasion, bribery and taxation failed, the Ottoman authorities used the sword. The tradition remembers that they turned in particular against the old — the fathers and mothers of the villages, whose refusal held the rest firm, and who had least to gain by yielding. Companies of them were arrested and brought down to the river Atcharistsqali, to the twelfth-century bridge known as the Bridge of Queen Tamar, and there hanged or beheaded in the sight of their people. Executions of the same kind are remembered at Atcharistsqali, Keda, Chakvi, Khulo, Machakhela and Gonio — that is, along the whole length of the province, coast and highland alike.
No roll of names survives, and no total. The transmitted focal year is 1790, understood in the Georgian memory as the culmination of about a century of killing rather than as a single day's massacre. Their number is known only to God, which is the reason they are venerated in the manner of the anonymous companies of the early Church: not as a list of persons but as a body, "the fathers and mothers of Atchara."
Veneration
The Georgian Apostolic Church glorified the martyrs of Atchara collectively and appointed their commemoration on May 29. The feast is kept in Georgia, and is carried in the calendar of the Orthodox Church in America, which has published the Georgian synaxarial notice in English. In Atchara itself the commemoration is bound up with the restoration of Christian life in the province since the nineteenth century and especially since 1991, and the Bridge of Queen Tamar is visited as a place of martyrdom.
Feast and commemoration
May 29 (church date; New Calendar civil May 29, Old Calendar civil June 11). The commemoration is Georgian in origin and is kept in the Georgian Apostolic Church and in the OCA calendar; it does not appear in Greek or Antiochian usage. It falls on the same day as the memory of Theodosia of Constantinople, the protomartyr of the icons, and — in Greek reckoning — the fall of Constantinople in 1453, so that the day carries three commemorations of the Christian East under assault.
Because Orthodox Pascha falls between April 4 and May 8, this day always stands within the Pentecostarion, and whatever belongs to the movable cycle in a given year takes precedence over the fixed commemoration.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of several martyrs)
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest received incorruptible crowns from Thee, our God; for possessing Thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By their intercessions save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Kontakion — Tone 2
The fathers and mothers of Atchara would not sell Christ for their fields and their peace, and being grey-headed they were led to the bridge over the river and slain; their names are written in no book of ours, but in the book of life. O holy martyrs of Atchara, pray for the land that the Apostle first hallowed.
Original translation from the Georgian
Iconography
Anonymous companies are painted as a crowd, and that is how the martyrs of Atchara are shown in the modern Georgian icons of the commemoration: ranks of men and women, the foremost of them old and white-haired to answer the title of the feast, in Georgian dress, each holding a small red cross, standing behind a foreground figure or beneath the blessing hand of Christ; the bridge over the Atcharistsqali and the mountains of the province may be shown below, with the instruments of their death. Occasionally the composition borrows the arrangement of the Georgian icon of the Hundred Thousand Martyrs of Tbilisi, ranks of the slain before a river.
No pre-1900 image exists, and none could: the company was glorified in modern times, and every icon of it is the work of living or recent iconographers, none of it free-licensed. Nothing is therefore stored here, in keeping with the project's constitution
Disputed questions
- The number, the names and the dates are all unrecoverable. The company is anonymous, and the year 1790 is a focal rather than an exact date; the notice itself speaks of the executions as spread over about a century. Nothing in this entry should be read as a precise chronology. The century field is given as 18 to follow the transmitted focal year; the sufferings begin considerably earlier.
- Not to be confused with the Hieromartyr Theodore of Atchara, a named Georgian martyr of the Ottoman period commemorated on his own day (kept February 17 in the lists consulted for this collection), who is a distinct individual commemoration and not part of this company.
- Not to be confused with the other Georgian companies of the Ottoman and Persian persecutions — the Hundred Thousand Martyrs of Tbilisi (November 13), the Six Thousand Martyrs of the Davit-Gareji desert (Bright Tuesday), the martyrs of Kvelta and of Tsromi — with which Atchara shares a type of veneration but not an event.
- Scope. Whether the commemoration includes only those killed under judicial sentence for refusing Islam, or also those who died in the accompanying raids and enslavements, the notice does not say.