Mocius of Amphipolis

Presbyter of Amphipolis

Mocius was, the passion says, of Roman descent but settled in Macedonia, where he served as a presbyter of the church of Amphipolis — the old Athenian colony on the Strymon, near the coast of the Aegean, a city St Paul had passed through on his way to Thessalonica (Acts 17:1). It was a place still deeply attached to its ancestral cults, and above all to Dionysus, whose annual festival was kept there with the sacrifices, drunkenness and licence proper to that god.

The tradition presents Mocius as a priest of great personal severity and fearless speech. When the persecution of Diocletian (284–305) was published, he did not hide; and when the city gathered for the Dionysia he went into the midst of the feast and preached, telling the crowd that what they called worship was the service of demons and the ruin of their souls, and calling them to repentance and to baptism. A number, the account says, were converted. The pagan priests and the magistrates were enraged: the assault had been made not in private but at the heart of the city's public religion.

The tortures at Laodicea

Mocius was arrested and brought before the governor — the passion places the examination at Laodicea — who pressed him first with promises and then with threats. His answer is preserved in substance in the synaxarion: that death for Christ was not a loss to him but his greatest gain. He was scourged and racked, and endured it, the account says, as though the body suffering were another's.

Taken into a temple and commanded to sacrifice, he called upon the name of Jesus Christ, and the idols fell and were broken where they stood. He was then shut into a furnace heated red-hot; the fire did him no harm, but broke out of the mouth of the furnace and burned those who stood by — the governor himself, in the received account, perishing in the flames he had prepared. He was given to wild beasts in the arena, and the beasts would not touch him but lay down at his feet, and the people, seeing it, cried out for the martyr's release.

Martyrdom at Byzantium

Because the miracles were turning the crowds, the authorities moved him away from the scene of them. He was sent under guard to Perinthus (Heraclea) on the Propontis, and from there to Byzantium — the small Greek city on the Bosphorus that had not yet become a capital — where the sentence was at last carried out. He was beheaded there, about the year 295, having prayed, as the passion gives it, that the Lord would receive his spirit in peace and strengthen the faithful he left behind.

Relics and the church of Saint Mocius

The Christians of Byzantium buried him, and his tomb was in the city when Constantine chose that site for his new Rome. The tradition — carried by the synaxaria and echoed in the Byzantine topographers — is that Constantine raised a church over the martyr's relics, one of the earliest sanctuaries of the new capital, and by some accounts built it out of the materials of a demolished temple of Zeus. The Church of St Mocius was thereafter a fixed point of the liturgical topography of Constantinople: the Typikon of the Great Church appoints stations there, and a great cistern of the City, the Cistern of Mocius, took its name from the quarter around the church. The building was damaged in the earthquakes of the eighth and ninth centuries and repeatedly repaired, and it had disappeared by the later Ottoman period; the name survived attached to the cistern.

That the martyr of Byzantium should be commemorated on the very day of the dedication of Constantinople is not a coincidence of the calendar but its logic: the City's birthday and the memory of the City's own martyr-priest were kept together, the martyr's blood being understood as the foundation older than the walls. The Menaion for May 11 accordingly joins the two commemorations, and the synaxarion notices tie them expressly.