Nicholas the Grocer
The Holy New-Martyr Nicholas the Grocer, of Karpenisi, Martyred at Constantinople
New Martyr · b. c. 1657 — d. 1672
Commemorated 23 September — Martyrdom at Constantinople
Nicholas "the Grocer" (Pantopoles), a young Greek of Karpenisi in central Greece, was martyred at Constantinople in 1672 at about fifteen years of age. Sent to the City to work in his father's provision shop in the market quarter of Tahtakale, he was set to learn Turkish from a Muslim neighbour, who by trickery drew from the boy a recitation of the Muslim confession of faith and then, with witnesses, demanded he live as a Turk. Nicholas answered that he was born a Christian and would die one; neither promises, nor prison, nor torture moved him, and he was beheaded, sealing his baptism with his blood. He is commemorated on September 23 in the Greek calendar.
Nicholas was born about the middle of the seventeenth century at Karpenisi, a mountain town of Evrytania in central Greece then under Ottoman rule, and came as a boy of fifteen to Constantinople, where his father kept a provision shop (whence his surname in the synaxaria: pantopōlēs, the general-goods seller) at Tahtakale, the market district below the Grand Bazaar. The father, needing the boy for trade with Turkish-speaking customers, sent him to learn the language from a neighbouring Muslim — a barber in the received account — who conceived the design of making the handsome and quick-witted boy a Muslim.
The snare was linguistic. Among the phrases set for practice, the teacher had Nicholas repeat the Muslim profession of faith in Turkish; the boy, either unaware of its force or treating it as a mere lesson, repeated the words — and the teacher at once produced witnesses that the young Greek had "made the confession" and must henceforth live as a Muslim. Nicholas refused outright: what was recited as a lesson, he said, was no denial of Christ; he was a Christian, born of Christians, and Christian he would die. Brought before the Ottoman authorities, he said the same. Flatteries and promises of advancement were tried first, then threats, imprisonment and torture; the seventeen-year record of the new-martyrs repeats its constant pattern here, and Nicholas held to his single answer through all of it. He was condemned for apostasy from Islam and beheaded at Constantinople in 1672, on September 23, at about fifteen years of age.
The tradition of Mount Athos and of his native Evrytania keeps his relics: portions are venerated in the Athonite monasteries (Xeropotamou and Gregoriou among them, by their own records), at the monasteries of Tatarna and Prousos in Evrytania, and in the church dedicated to him at Karpenisi, which honours him as its own.
Feast and commemoration
September 23 (church date; Old Calendar civil October 6), with the Conception of John the Forerunner. The commemoration is of the Greek tradition: the Greek Menaion's synaxarion for the day records "the holy new-martyr Nicholas the grocer, who bore witness at Constantinople in 1672, perfected by the sword" (verified live), while the OCA and Slavic calendars do not list him. No proper hymns are transmitted in the Menaion consulted; where his service is kept locally, propers of the new-martyrs are used.
Iconography
No verifiable pre-modern image of Nicholas has been identified — his veneration's monuments are chiefly of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — and a the list of icons still being sought listing stands in his place. He is depicted in Greek practice as a beardless youth in the dress of an Ottoman-era Greek tradesman, holding the martyr's cross and palm.
Disputed questions
- The details of the snare. The accounts descending from the eighteenth-century Greek martyrologies differ in small points — the teacher's trade, whether the recitation was obtained once or repeatedly, the court before which the boy was tried. The core (the language lessons, the extorted confession, the refusal, the beheading in 1672) is constant.
- Not to be confused with the many other new-martyrs Nicholas of the Turkish period (Nicholas of Chios, Nicholas of Metsovo, and others), nor with the town's other martyr-son, Gerasimus the New of Karpenisi; nor, of course, with the great fourth-century hierarch Nicholas the Wonderworker of Myra (Dec 6), a wholly different saint.