Polychronius the Presbyter
The Holy Hieromartyr Polychronius the Presbyter
Hieromartyr · Priest · d. 4th century
Commemorated 7 October
Polychronius was a priest of the fourth century, remembered as a farmer's son whose love of labour and ascetic life, shown in the vineyards near Constantinople, won him the means to build a church and, in time, ordination to the priesthood. Tradition associates him with the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea and makes him a victim of its enemies: he was cut down by Arians at the altar of his church. He is commemorated on October 7.
The transmitted life of Polychronius is brief. The son of a farmer, raised to hard work and Christian piety, he left his parents' home for the region of Constantinople and hired himself to the owner of a vineyard, where the master was struck by the young labourer's diligence and by the ascetic discipline he kept in the midst of his work. With the generous wages his labour earned, Polychronius built a church, and he was in time ordained to the priesthood.
The tradition sets his priesthood in the age of the Arian struggle: he is said to have taken part in the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea (325), and it was to Arians that he owed his death. In the reigns that followed the Council, when the Arian party held power in and around the capital, they fell upon him in his church and slew him at the altar — the priest offered, as the hagiographers love to say of such deaths, at the very place of his offering. The year is not transmitted; the calendars give only the fourth century.
The verses of the Constantinople synaxarion play on his name ("of many years"): "Many swords slay Polychronius; for the swords he shall receive also the prizes" — preserving a tradition that he fell under many blades.
Feast and commemoration
October 7 (church date; Old Calendar civil October 20), on the universal calendar: the Greek synaxarion lists him among the day's commemorations with his own distich, and the OCA and Slavic calendars keep him the same day as "hieromartyr Polychronius the presbyter." The day's proper service belongs to Sergius and Bacchus, and no proper hymns for Polychronius are appointed in the received Menaion.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (from the common of a hieromartyr)
Becoming a partaker of the ways of the Apostles and a successor of their thrones, thou didst find thy deeds, O God-inspired one, a passage to divine vision; wherefore, rightly dividing the word of truth, thou didst also suffer for the faith even unto blood, O Hieromartyr Polychronius: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
No fixed iconographic type of Polychronius the presbyter has been found in the pre-modern record; he would be shown as a priest in phelonion with the Gospel or a cross, and the fitting narrative image is his slaying at the altar. No storable image identified with certainty as this Polychronius — rather than the bishop of Babylon or another namesake — has been located; the saint is listed among the wanted icons.
Disputed questions
- Not to be confused with the hieromartyr Polychronius, Bishop of Babylon, martyred under Decius and commemorated on July 30 with the martyrs Abdon and Sennen — a distinct saint of an earlier century, whose entry carries the reciprocal note. Distinct also from the fifth-century Syrian ascetic Polychronius, disciple of Zebinas, kept February 23 among the Syrian desert ascetics of Theodoret's Religious History.
- Council tradition. His participation at Nicaea rests on the hagiographic tradition ("according to Tradition," as the OCA life itself marks it), not on the conciliar lists; it is recorded here as received.