Shio the New and the Martyrs of Gareji
The Holy Martyrs Shio the New, Hieromonk, and the Monks David, Gabriel and Paul of the David-Gareji Wilderness
Hieromartyr · Venerable Martyr · d. end of the 17th century, David-Gareji
Commemorated 1 June — Slain by Dagestani raiders at the David-Gareji monastery
At the end of the seventeenth century a band of Dagestani raiders fell upon the cave-monastery of David-Gareji in the semi-desert of Kakheti while the abbot was absent, plundered the church, burned or broke the icons and vestments, and put to the sword the hieromonk left in charge and three of his brethren: Shio the New, David, Gabriel and Paul. Shio was of the Kartlian nobility, from the village of Vedzisi, one of eight children of parents named Papuna and Tamar, and had come to Gareji after a murderous quarrel over the family inheritance drove him out of the world. He was known in the wilderness for humility and for the gift of counsel, and the abbot Onopre entrusted him with the governance of the house. Their mutilated relics were buried by order of the Catholicos and the king in the courtyard of the lavra, south of the tomb of St David of Gareji, and the Georgian Church keeps them on June 1.
Shio of Vedzisi
Shio came from Vedzisi, a village of the province of Kartli, and was born into a wealthy and influential family: his parents are named in the Georgian tradition as Papuna and Tamar, and he was one of eight children. What drove him to the desert was not a call heard in prosperity but a catastrophe. After his parents' death the inheritance was disputed among the brothers, and the quarrel ended in fratricide — one brother killing another. Shio, the Georgian account says, would have nothing further to do with a world in which such a thing could happen for the sake of land, and withdrew from its vanity altogether.
He came to the David-Gareji wilderness, the great complex of cave-monasteries hollowed into the soft rock of the Gareji ridge on the border of Kakheti and the Muslim khanates, founded in the sixth century by St David, one of the Thirteen Syrian Fathers, and by his disciple St Dodo. There he was received by the abbot Onopre (Onophrius) and took the monastic habit, keeping the name Shio — the Georgian form of Simeon, and the name of another of the Thirteen Fathers, Shio of Mgvime, from whom he is distinguished as "the New."
In the monastery he became known for firmness of faith, humility and spiritual counsel, and Father Onopre came to rely on him: when the abbot was called away, it was Shio, by then a hieromonk, whom he left in charge of the lavra and its brethren.
The raid and the martyrdom
Gareji stood on an exposed frontier, and for centuries its monks were killed in waves — most famously the thousands slain on Bright Tuesday in 1616 by the army of Shah Abbas. The martyrdom of Shio belongs to the last of those centuries. While Onopre was away from the monastery, a band of Dagestani robbers — the lezgi of the Georgian chronicles, raiding southward out of the mountains — came suddenly into the monastery grounds. They seized the hieromonk Shio and the monks David, Gabriel and Paul, and killed them where they found them. Then they ransacked the lavra: the sacred vessels and vestments were destroyed or carried off, the icons broken, and the monastery's goods pillaged.
The Georgian sources are brief, as they are for most of the Gareji martyrs — there was no one left to write a passion — and they do not record either a trial or an offer of apostasy. What they record is that four monks were cut down in their own church for no cause but that they were monks of Christ in a house the raiders had come to strip, and that the Church of Georgia numbered them among her martyrs on that ground.
Relics
When word came, the Catholicos-Patriarch of Georgia and the king gave order for their burial. Their mutilated relics were gathered and laid in the courtyard of the lavra, to the south of the grave of St David of Gareji — the place of honour in the monastery, beside its founder — where they remain, and where the memory of the four is kept with that of the other martyrs of the wilderness.
Feast and commemoration
The four martyrs are commemorated on June 1 (church date; New Calendar civil June 1, Old Calendar civil June 14) in the calendar of the Georgian Orthodox Church, and the OCA enumerates them on the same day; the Greek Synaxaristes also carries them for June 1, dividing them into two notices, one for Shio and one for his three companions. They are honoured further in the general commemoration of the martyrs of the David-Gareji wilderness and at the monastery itself, where their graves are shown beside that of St David. The Antiochian Menaion does not keep them.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of several martyrs)
O holy martyrs Shio, David, Gabriel and Paul, who in the wilderness of Gareji fought the good fight and received your crowns, entreat the Lord that He have mercy on our souls.
Original translation from the Georgian
Iconography
They are painted as a group of four Georgian monastics in black, three of them monks of the simple habit and one — Shio, as hieromonk — vested or holding a censer or a Gospel-book, each bearing the martyr's cross; the background in modern Georgian panels is the ochre rock and the cave-openings of Gareji, sometimes with the lavra's church and the ridge above it. In the composite icons of the saints of David-Gareji they stand among the wilderness's martyrs behind St David and St Dodo. Where the passion is depicted, the scene is the raiders in the monastery with drawn swords and the four monks falling before the sanctuary.
No pre-1900 image of these martyrs has been located for this collection. The Georgian iconography of them appears to be entirely modern — a consequence of their late date and of the destruction of the monastery's own furnishings in the very raid that made them martyrs — and the openly licensed image collections return no candidate at all under any spelling of their names.
Disputed questions
- The year. The Georgian and OCA accounts give only "the end of the seventeenth century." No year is transmitted; the raid is one of many, and it is dated by the abbacy of Onopre and by the reign of the king who ordered the burial rather than by an annalistic entry.
- "Of Akhalkalaki." The OCA heading styles them "Martyrs Shio, David, Gabriel, and Paul of Akhalkalaki in Georgia," although the narrative places their labours and their death at David-Gareji, some distance to the east. The epithet appears to attach either to a toponym within the Gareji complex or to the family origin of one of the four rather than to the place of martyrdom; the Greek day-lists avoid it, entering "Ἅγιος Σίος" and "Ἅγιοι Δαβίδ, Γαβριὴλ καὶ Παῦλος" separately and without a place-name. The martyrdom at Gareji is the constant element in every telling and is followed here.
- Not to be confused with Shio of Mgvime (†c. 560), one of the Thirteen Syrian Fathers and founder of the Shio-Mgvime lavra, commemorated in Cheesefare week and on May 9 — from whom this Shio is distinguished by the epithet "the New"; nor with the 6,000 martyrs of David-Gareji slain by Shah Abbas I in 1616, whose commemoration is movable (Bright Tuesday); nor with Onuphrius of Gareji (Otar Machutadze, 18th c.), a later ascetic of the same wilderness. The abbot Onopre of this account is a different man again from that Onuphrius. Nor, finally, are they to be confused with Gerontius and the Martyrs of David-Gareji, the seven fathers killed in a later Dagestani raid on the same lavra in 1851 and commemorated on August 12 — a distinct massacre, two centuries after this one, with its own eyewitness account and its own roll of names.