Raphael, Nicholas and Irene of Lesbos

Lesbos after the City

The island of Lesbos passed to the Ottomans in 1462, nine years after the fall of Constantinople, when Mehmed II took Mytilene from the last of the Gattilusi. The martyrdom belongs to the immediate aftermath of that conquest, in the spring of 1463, when the new administration was still being imposed and the countryside was being pacified with the ordinary brutality of such a moment. Monasteries in the hills, small, defenceless and full of clergy who had been the political leadership of the Christian population, were natural targets.

Raphael was born about 1410 on Ithaca, of pious parents, and baptised George. He took the name Raphael at his tonsure, was ordained to the priesthood, and rose in the Great Church's service to be archimandrite and chancellor — an administrative office of the patriarchate, which suggests a man of some standing and education rather than a village monk. In 1453 he was living in Macedonia with a fellow monastic, the deacon Nicholas, a native of Thessaloniki. When the Turks came into Thrace in 1454 the two of them fled to Lesbos and settled at the monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos above Thermi, where Raphael became igoumen.

The passion

In the spring of 1463 a Turkish force came up to the monastery and took the monks. The tradition — which here is the tradition of the apparitions, and is therefore very detailed where ordinary hagiography is vague — says they were held and tortured from Great and Holy Thursday until Bright Tuesday, which is to say straight through the Passion, the Resurrection and the first days of the Renewal.

Raphael was bound to a tree and killed by sawing through his jaw — a death of a kind attested elsewhere in the Ottoman period and one that has fixed itself in the iconography. Nicholas was tortured beside him and died while watching his elder's martyrdom; he it was who afterwards appeared and pointed out where his own relics lay. Irene, the twelve-year-old daughter of the village headman Basil, had one of her arms cut off and thrown down before her parents, and was then put into a large earthen storage jar with a fire lit beneath it and suffocated inside it, all of this before her father and mother, who were themselves killed afterwards. Theodore the village schoolmaster and Eleni, Irene's cousin of fifteen, died with them.

Five centuries of a nameless pilgrimage

Nothing of this was written down, or nothing survived. What survived was a custom: every year, on Bright Tuesday, the people of Thermi and the neighbouring villages walked up to the ruins at Karyes and kept a festival there. By the twentieth century no one could give a reason. There was a memory that a monastery had once stood on the spot, and that its monks had been killed by the Turks; there was no name, no date, no story, and no relic. It is the bare, worn-down residue of a martyr's cult with everything but the day forgotten — and the day, which was the day of the death, is exactly what the Church has now restored the rest of the feast to.

1959–1961: the uncovering

In 1959 a pious islander named Angelos Rallis determined to build a chapel by the ruins. On 3 July of that year the workmen clearing the ground came on the relics of St Raphael.

From that point the story becomes something without close parallel in the modern calendar. The saints began to appear — to villagers, to workmen, to visitors, to children, singly and together, waking and in dreams — and in these appearances they gave their names, their origins, the circumstances of their deaths, and the places where the rest of the relics lay. Following those directions, the relics of St Nicholas were uncovered on 13 June 1960, and on 12 May 1961 the grave of St Irene together with the earthen jar in which she had died.

They asked three things: that their icon be painted, that a service be composed for them, and that they be remembered. The iconographer Photios Kontoglou (1895–1965), the great restorer of Byzantine painting in modern Greece, painted the icon from the descriptions given by those who had seen them. The hieromonk Gerasimos Mikragiannanites of Little St Anne's Skete on Mount Athos, the most prolific Greek hymnographer of the twentieth century, wrote the office. Kontoglou also published in 1962 a book of the accounts, Ἕνα μεγάλο σημεῖο — A Great Sign — which remains the primary collection; Constantine Cavarnos gave a full account of the material in English in the tenth volume of his Modern Orthodox Saints (Belmont, Mass., 1990).

The descriptions themselves are unusually concrete and are the reason the icon looks as it does: Raphael tall, middle-aged, with a beard of moderate length and black hair going grey, a grave and open face; Nicholas short and slight, with a small fair beard, standing behind his elder in an attitude of great respect; Irene in a long yellow dress to her feet, her fair hair in two braids falling in front of her shoulders.