Six Martyrs of Bizye
The Holy Six Martyrs who suffered at Bizye
Martyr
Commemorated 10 August — Martyrdom by the breaking of bones and the tearing of flesh
Six martyrs, whose names have not come down, are commemorated on August 10 in the Greek Menaion under the heading "the six martyrs at Bizye" — the Thracian city of Bizye, the modern Vize in eastern Thrace. All that the synaxarion transmits of them is the manner of their death, and that only in a couplet: that some had their bones broken and others their flesh torn, and that these torments were the seizing of their crowns. Neither the reign, nor the persecutor, nor the year is given, and the manuscripts do not even agree on the place: the synaxarion of the monastery of Dionysiou on Athos sets their martyrdom in Libya rather than in Thrace. The entry is one of the shortest in the fixed year, and is given here without supplement.
The notice and its couplet
The Menaion's whole account of these six is the distich placed over their name:
Ὀστῶν κατάγμωσις καὶ σπαραγμὸς σαρκίων, Ἁρπαγμός ἐστιν ἓξ ἀθληταῖς στεμμάτων.
— "The breaking of bones and the tearing of flesh is, for six contenders, the snatching of crowns." The two torments named are among the commonest in the Roman repertory: crurifragium, the shattering of the limbs with iron bars, which was ordinarily a way of finishing a crucified or exposed prisoner; and the tearing of the flesh with hooks or claws, the ungulae, applied under interrogation. That the couplet distinguishes them — some broken, some torn — suggests either a company examined in two groups or, more probably, a compressed memory of a set of tortures applied in sequence. The verb ἁρπαγμός, a snatching or seizure, is the point of the epigram: what the torturers thought they were taking from the martyrs was in fact what the martyrs seized for themselves.
Bizye in Thrace
Bizye (Βιζύη, Latin Bizye, Turkish Vize) was an old Thracian royal seat some sixty miles west of Constantinople, on the southern slopes of the Strandzha, and from the fourth century the see of a bishop under the metropolitan of Herakleia. It has a small martyrological record of its own; it is best known in the Byzantine tradition as one of the places of exile of the confessors of the Monothelite crisis. If the Thracian reading is correct, a company of six suffering there would most naturally belong to the persecutions of Diocletian or of Licinius, under whom the Thracian and Bithynian cities furnished many martyrs, but the notice permits no such conclusion and none is drawn here.
Feast and commemoration
August 10 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 23), within the Dormition Fast (August 1–14) and the afterfeast of the Transfiguration. This is a Greek commemoration: the Menaion and the Synaxarion of Constantinople carry it, the Slavic calendars and the Orthodox Church in America do not. The six are sung, where they are sung at all, at the common of many martyrs, the day's proper office belonging to Laurence the Archdeacon.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of many martyrs)
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest received incorruptible crowns from Thee our God; for possessing Thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By their intercessions save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
An anonymous company of a fixed number is painted in the Byzantine tradition as a compact group of half-length or full-length figures of varied age — some young and beardless, some grey — in tunics and mantles, each holding a small cross, ranged behind one another so that the number can be counted; the group is identified only by the inscription, here ΟΙ ΑΓΙΟΙ ΕΞ ΜΑΡΤΥΡΕΣ. Where the manner of death is shown, the instruments of the couplet appear: the iron bars and the flesh-hooks. No image of this company has been located for this collection, and none individual is possible, no names having been transmitted. The Menologion of Basil II, the ordinary first resort for figures of this kind, covers only September to February and is of no use for an August notice.
Disputed questions
- Bizye or Libya? The received Greek notice reads ἐν Βιζύῃ; the synaxarion preserved at the monastery of Dionysiou on Athos reads Libya. One of the two is a copyist's substitution and there is no way to choose between them on internal grounds, the notice containing nothing that belongs to either country. The Greek printed Menaion, and modern Greek calendars following it, keep Bizye, and this entry follows the printed text while recording the variant.
- Names. None are transmitted. Later lists that supply names for this company do so without manuscript authority, and none is adopted here (see the group-commemoration rule in the repository's PRD: transmitted names are given in the body, never invented for a roll).
- Date. No reign or year is given. The entry accordingly carries no century and is indexed among the saints of undetermined date.