Nicholas of Sofia
The Holy Great-martyr Nicholas the New of Sofia, the Shoemaker
New Martyr · Great Martyr · b. 1510, at Ioannina in Epirus — d. 17 May 1555, stoned outside Sofia
Commemorated 17 May — Martyrdom by stoning outside Sofia
Nicholas the New of Sofia (1510 – 17 May 1555) was a shoemaker of Ottoman Sofia, born at Ioannina in Epirus of Christian parents, whose martyrdom in the middle of the sixteenth century became one of the great causes of the Bulgarian Church under the Turkish yoke. Made drunk by Muslim acquaintances and circumcised while insensible, he was thereafter claimed as a convert to Islam; he answered publicly that he had never left Christ and never would, was beaten, imprisoned and tried, and on 17 May 1555 was stoned to death by the mob outside the city at the place called the Three Wells, his body afterwards burned. His Life and Praise were written within a few years by Matthew the Grammarian of Sofia, and a diocesan council under the metropolitan James numbered him among the saints. He is one of the martyrs by whom the city of Sofia is chiefly known in the Orthodox calendar.
Ioannina and Sofia
Nicholas was born in 1510 at Ioannina, the chief city of Epirus, to Christian parents named in his Life as Martin and Euphrosyne; the tradition describes the family as Albanian in origin, which in the mixed population of sixteenth-century Epirus is neither surprising nor decisive. He was given a good education for a boy of his station, and on the death of his parents took up a trade: he became a shoemaker, and a skilled one.
The trade took him north into Bulgaria, and he settled in Sofia — Sredets to the Bulgarians, Serdica of the old Roman province, and by then a substantial Ottoman administrative town with a large Christian population living under the disabilities of the dhimmi. He was drawn from the first, according to his Life, to a monastic manner of life, and it was at the insistence of friends rather than by his own inclination that he married. He kept, so far as a married tradesman could, the discipline he had wanted: the Life dwells on his fasting, his almsgiving out of a craftsman's earnings, and his habit of prayer.
For some years he worked in Wallachia — the Ungro-Wallachia of the ecclesiastical title — where the excellence of his work brought him to the notice of the court of the voivode Mircea the Shepherd (Mircea Ciobanul). He returned to Sofia about 1554. By then he had buried two sons, and the losses are presented in the Life as the discipline that detached him finally from the world.
The circumcision by stealth
The occasion of his martyrdom was a stratagem, and it is the feature that gives his passion its particular character. Muslim acquaintances — the Life is precise that they were men he knew, and that the thing was done under the appearance of friendship — pressed wine on him until he was insensible, and while he lay unconscious had him circumcised. He woke to find himself, in the eyes of Ottoman law, a Muslim: the physical mark was taken as proof of conversion, and apostasy from Islam was a capital matter.
Nicholas did the one thing that made his death certain. He declared, publicly and repeatedly, that he had never denied Christ, that what had been done to his body had been done without his knowledge and against his will, that he had not spoken the words of the Muslim confession and would not speak them, and that he was and remained a Christian. He was seized, beaten and tortured, and brought to trial before the judge of the city. The Life records his answers at the hearings; their substance is that a mark cut in the flesh of a drunken man is not a confession of faith, and that faith is confessed with the mouth and the will.
The stoning at the Three Wells
He was condemned. On 17 May 1555 he was led outside Sofia to a place remembered in the Bulgarian tradition as the Three Wells (Trite kladentsi), and there stoned to death by a crowd — a mode of execution reserved for the crime of which he was accused, and carried out by the populace rather than by the officers of the state. His body was then burned, at a place the Life names Tarnitsata, so that the Christians should have no relics to venerate; what could be gathered from the ashes was gathered secretly by the faithful of the city.
The Life by Matthew the Grammarian, and the cultus
Within a few years of the martyrdom a Sofia cleric known as Matthew the Grammarian (Matey Gramatik) composed a Life of the New Martyr Nicholas of Sofia, with a Rhetorical Praise attached to it. It is a work of some literary ambition — an eyewitness or near-eyewitness account of the events of 1555, set in a frame of praise and of lament for the condition of the Christians of the city — and it stands, with Pop Peyo's Life of George the New of Sofia, at the head of what Bulgarian scholarship calls the Sofia Literary School: a body of vernacularising Slavonic hagiography produced in the city in the first Ottoman century, whose subject is precisely the new martyrs, and whose purpose was to steady a Christian population under continuous pressure to apostatise.
The metropolitan James of Sofia convened a diocesan council which received Nicholas among the saints and appointed his feast, and a service was written for the day. His veneration spread from Sofia through the Bulgarian lands and, with the manuscripts, into Serbian, Wallachian and Russian usage. He is honoured in Bulgaria as a great-martyr, and he and George the New are together the saints by whom the Christian memory of Ottoman Sofia is chiefly carried.
Feast and commemoration
May 17 (church date; New Calendar civil May 17; Old Calendar civil May 30), always within the Pentecostarion. In Bulgaria the day is kept with solemnity, and in Sofia as a feast of the city; elsewhere it is a simple commemoration listed among the day's saints, and it is carried by the Greek and Slavic calendars and by the Orthodox Church in America. A proper service exists in the Bulgarian books, together with the Praise of Matthew the Grammarian, which is read at the feast; the general commemoration is served with the common of a martyr.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
Thy martyr Nicholas, O Lord, in his contest received an incorruptible crown from thee our God; for possessing thy strength, he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By his intercessions save our souls.
Kontakion — Tone 2
They stole thy body's mark by craft, but they could not steal thy confession; for with a free tongue thou didst cry, "I am a Christian and I have not denied," and beneath the stones thou wast crowned, O Nicholas, boast of the city of Sofia.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Nicholas is painted as a layman-martyr of the Ottoman centuries: a man of middle years in the belted tunic and mantle of a townsman, sometimes in the fur-trimmed coat of the Balkan Christian trades, bearded, holding the cross of his witness and often a palm. The Bulgarian tradition gives him the tools of his craft — the shoemaker's knife or last — as a secondary attribute, and shows the stoning in a marginal scene: the martyr kneeling outside a walled city while the crowd casts stones, with the fire in which his body was burned beside it. He is frequently paired with George the New of Sofia, the two standing together as the martyrs of the city, in Bulgarian church painting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and in the National Revival iconostases of Sofia and its region.
No pre-1900 image of him has been located for this collection: searches of Wikimedia Commons in English, Bulgarian and transliterated forms returned nothing depicting the saint, and the Menologion of Basil II — the usual resort for a minor commemoration — covers only September to February and in any case predates him by five centuries.
Disputed questions
- "Great-martyr" or "new-martyr." The Bulgarian books style him velikomuchenik — great-martyr — and the jurisdictional calendars in English follow them, while by the ordinary reckoning of the terms he is a new-martyr, a Christian put to death under Ottoman rule for refusing Islam. Both titles are recorded in this entry's classification; the title of great-martyr is a mark of the honour in which his city held him rather than a claim of antiquity.
- Ioannina, and the epithet "of Sofia." His birth at Ioannina is constant in the sources, and some Greek lists therefore claim him as a saint of Epirus; the martyrdom, the Life, the service and the cultus are all of Sofia, and the epithet is universally "of Sofia." One jurisdictional calendar places Ioannina "in Thessaly," which is an error for Epirus.
- The year of the trade in Wallachia. Mircea the Shepherd's reigns in Wallachia fall in 1545–1552, 1553–1554 and 1558–1559; a stay at his court must therefore belong to the first or second of these, which agrees with the return to Sofia about 1554 but rules out the third.
- Not to be confused with the martyrs George of Sofia — George the New (of Kratovo), burned in 1515 (February 11), and the other two Georges of the same city — nor with the same day's new martyr Nicholas of Metsovo (†1617), a very close parallel case from Epirus, whose feast some Greek day-lists also enter on May 17 though his proper day is May 16. The two Nicholases are distinct men: this one never denied Christ at all, while the martyr of Metsovo did deny him, repented, and returned to die for him.