153 Martyrs of Thrace
The Holy 153 Martyrs who suffered in Thrace, perfected by drowning
Martyr
Commemorated 27 July — Perfected by drowning in Thrace
The 153 Martyrs of Thrace are a company of the Synaxarion of Constantinople, entered under July 27 with a number, a province, and a manner of death: they were drowned. No name, no city, no persecutor and no year is transmitted. The number itself is unstable — the Greek lists give 153, and a substantial body of English and Slavonic enumerations give 853 — and the entry is one of the many bare notices by which the synaxarion preserves the memory of martyrdoms whose particulars had already been lost by the tenth century.
What is transmitted
The whole of the record is the synaxarion line. A company of Christians in Thrace — the province between the Haemus and the sea, the hinterland of Constantinople and, before the city existed, of Byzantium and Heraclea — was put to death by water: taken out and drowned, whether in the sea or in a river the notice does not say.
Drowning is a recognisable form in the martyr-acts of the East, and where it is used at scale it usually indicates one of two situations: a mass execution of prisoners for whom the ordinary machinery of the tribunal would have been too slow, or a coastal or riverine locality where the water was simply the nearest instrument. It is the death of Sabbas the Goth, drowned in the Mousaios on the far side of the Danube in the same generation as the Twenty-six Martyrs of Gotthia, and of a number of Bithynian and Thracian companies besides.
Date and context
Nothing in the notice dates them. Thrace suffered in the persecutions of Diocletian and Galerius, and the province is the setting of a number of well-attested passions of the early fourth century; but the synaxarion offers no year, and later attempts to attach these martyrs to a named persecution have no warrant. This collection therefore records no century for them.
Feast and commemoration
July 27 (church date; New Calendar civil July 27, Old Calendar civil August 9). Greek synaxarion usage, carried into the OCA's English enumerations; the Russian calendar does not list them. They have no office: the day belongs entirely to Panteleimon, and the company is read out in the synaxarion at matins and no more.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of 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 broke the feeble insolence of the demons. By their prayers save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Companies of this kind are painted, when they are painted at all, as an undifferentiated crowd of martyrs — a rank of heads and haloes with three or four faces given individual features at the front, each figure holding the martyr's cross — and are identified only by the inscription giving the number and the province. Where the manner of death is shown, the Thracian company would be represented in the water, in the type used for the martyrs drowned in the sea: figures half-submerged, hands raised, sometimes with the boats of their executors above them. No pre-1900 image of this company has been located, and none is likely: the Menologion of Basil II, the ordinary first resort for synaxarion companies, covers only September to February and cannot help a July commemoration.
Disputed questions
- 153 or 853? The Greek synaxaria and the Greek-derived English lists give 153; the OrthodoxWiki calendar and a number of English enumerations dependent on it give 853. A divergence of this kind ordinarily arises from a misread numeral in a manuscript or a printed synaxarion — the Greek alphabetic numerals ΡΝΓ' (153) and ΩΝΓ' (853) differ by a single letter — and there is no independent evidence by which to decide. The larger figure is the less well attested and is not adopted here.
- The number 153 is the number of the great fishes in the net at the Sea of Tiberias (John 21:11), a number on which the Fathers wrote at length. Whether that resonance is the reason the figure was transmitted, or merely the reason it was remembered, cannot be determined; but a martyrdom by water numbered at 153 is unlikely to have struck a Byzantine reader as accidental.
- Not to be confused with the other numbered companies of the fixed year kept in this collection, in particular the 3,628 Martyrs of Nicomedia (September 2) and the 20,000 Martyrs of Nicomedia (December 28).