Michael Pakhnanas
The Holy New Martyr Michael Pakhnanas the Gardener, of Athens
New Martyr · b. c. 1750, at Athens — d. 9 July 1771, beheaded at Athens
Commemorated 9 July — Beheading at Athens under the Ottomans
Michael Pakhnanas — the surname is also written Baknanas (Μπακνανάς) — was an illiterate young gardener of Athens, born about 1750 in the quarter of Vlassarou beneath the Acropolis, on ground that is now the excavated Ancient Agora. Returning to the city from a village where he had been working, he was seized by the Turkish guard and falsely accused of smuggling gunpowder to the Greek insurgents. Offered his life if he would apostatise to Islam, he answered with the sentence that fixed him in the memory of Athens — "Δὲν τουρκεύω", "I will not turn Turk." Led out to execution he went rejoicing; the executioner struck him first with the flat and reversed blade to frighten him into recanting, and then nicked his throat, and to each stroke Michael answered, "Strike, for the faith." He was beheaded on 9 July 1771, aged about twenty-one, and is honoured as the new martyr of the Church of Athens.
A gardener under the Acropolis
Michael was born at Athens about 1750, of pious and honourable parents, in the quarter of Vlassarou — a dense old neighbourhood of small houses under the north slope of the Acropolis, cleared in the twentieth century for the excavation of the Ancient Agora, so that the place of his birth is now an archaeological site. His family was poor; he was never taught his letters, and he worked as a gardener (κηπουρός), one of the market gardeners who supplied the town from plots on its edge. The tradition places his gardens in the area of what is now Neos Kosmos, south of the ancient city.
The Athens of his youth was a provincial Ottoman town of a few thousand souls, governed from the Acropolis garrison. The year of his death, 1771, falls in the aftermath of the Orlov revolt — the Russian-encouraged Greek rising of 1770 in the Morea and the islands, crushed with severity, after which the Ottoman authorities in every Greek town were watching for insurgents, arms and powder. It is against that background that the charge laid on Michael has to be read.
The false accusation
Coming back into Athens from a village where he had gone for work, Michael was stopped and arrested by the Turkish guards, who charged him with carrying gunpowder in secret to the Greek rebels. The tradition is explicit that the charge was a slander. Brought before the judge, he protested the injustice done him; he was nonetheless condemned to death, with the standing offer that he might save his life by denying Christ and accepting Islam.
To every renewal of the threat — and the sources say the threats were pressed on him repeatedly — the young Athenian answered in the same words, with a bearing his biographers call proud: "Δὲν τουρκεύω." "I do not turn Turk." It is a layman's answer and not a theologian's, and it is exactly the phrase in which the enslaved Greek populations expressed the whole of the matter: to apostatise was to cease to be what one was.
"Strike, for the faith"
He was led to the place of execution rejoicing and giving thanks that he had been counted worthy of martyrdom. What followed is the heart of his passion and the reason his memory did not fade. The executioner, hoping still to break him and win the conversion his masters wanted, first struck him on the neck with the sword reversed, using the blunt back of the blade; the boy, unshaken, urged him on — "Χτύπα γιὰ τὴν πίστη", "Strike, for the faith." The executioner then laid the edge to his throat and cut him slightly, to terrify him with the beginning of his own death; and out of the wounded throat came the same words again, "Strike, for the faith." At the third stroke he was beheaded. The year was 1771, and the day the ninth of July.
The memory of Athens
The martyrdom was remembered in the city with unusual precision. On the first standing column of the Olympieion, the temple of Olympian Zeus, a scratched inscription was long legible recording it in the plainest terms: "1771, July 9: Michael Pakhnanas was beheaded." A graffito on a pagan column is an odd monument for a saint, and a very Athenian one.
The only chapel in the capital dedicated to him stands within the church of the Ascension of the Lord at Neos Kosmos (at the corner of Lagoumitzi and Delacroix streets), in the district where tradition places his gardens. In 2003 he was proclaimed the patron of dieticians and nutritionists, on the strength of his trade; and his name has been given to institutions of the city. He is one of the very few saints of Athens itself, and the Church of Greece keeps him as the new martyr of that Church.
Feast and commemoration
July 9 (church date; New Calendar civil July 9, Old Calendar civil July 22), in the Church of Greece and the Greek day-calendars, where he stands with Pancratius of Taormina and with Dionysius the Rhetor and Metrophanes as one of the three principal names of the day. He is not kept in the Slavonic calendars, which give July 9 to Theodore of Edessa and the Egyptian martyrs. At Athens the day is kept in his chapel at Neos Kosmos.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (*Ταχὺ προκατάλαβε*)
In the youth of thy body thou didst cast down the murderous enemy by thy contest for Christ our God, thy neck being severed; wherefore the far-renowned city of the Athenians sings thy struggle, O new martyr Michael, for out of her thou didst spring up as a fragrant flower.
Synaxarion
The godly severing of his head does not dismay Michael; for Christ's sake he receives it willingly. Why, O swordsman, do you cut the throat a little at a time? Michael does not fear the sword. On the ninth, unyielding bronze shore through Michael's neck.
Iconography
Michael is painted as a very young layman, beardless or with the first down of a beard, in the plain dress of an eighteenth-century Greek working man — the short jacket and sash, sometimes the fustanella — holding the martyr's cross in his right hand and, very often, a branch, spade or basket of greens, the attribute by which the Athenians know their gardener. The scene of his passion shows him kneeling with the executioner standing over him with the sword, the Acropolis rising behind, which is the standard modern composition. His halo and the inscription Ὁ ἅγιος νεομάρτυς Μιχαὴλ ὁ κηπουρός identify him.
No storable image has been found. He was martyred in 1771 and his iconography belongs entirely to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century revival of the cult of the new martyrs; what circulates today is the work of modern iconographers, whose rights are not affected by any licence a photographer of their panels may attach. No pre-1900 image of him has been located, and none is stored.
Disputed questions
- His age and the year. The sources agree on 1771 and on July 9, the date fixed by the Olympieion inscription. His birth is placed "about 1750," which would make him about twenty-one; some notices call him a boy of eighteen. Nothing turns on it and no source is precise.
- The surname. Pakhnanas and Baknanas (Πακνανᾶς / Μπακνανᾶς) are the same name in two spellings; both are current in Greek usage and neither is to be preferred.
- Not to be confused with the other new martyrs named Michael, in particular Michael the Black-Robed the Sabbaite (May 23) and Michael the Soldier of Bulgaria (November 22); Michael Pakhnanas is a layman of the Ottoman period, of Athens, of the eighteenth century.