The Six Martyrs of Melitene
The Holy Six Martyrs who suffered at Melitene
Martyr
Commemorated 30 August — Martyrdom by drowning
Six martyrs, associated in the Greek synaxarion with Melitene in Armenia Minor, who were drowned for Christ. As with several of the minor companies of August 30, no names and no date are transmitted: the synaxaristes gives them a two-line epigram — six stars of the martyrs of Christ, sunk beneath the sea and shining in the heavens — and the bare notice that they were drowned. Melitene was one of the great martyr-cities of the Christian East, and the memory is presumably a fragment of its enormous local calendar.
The Greek synaxaristes carries them as the holy Six Martyrs who suffered at Melitene, with the couplet:
Hexasteron ti Christomartyrōn selas, / dynan thalassēs endon eklampei polō —
"A certain six-starred radiance of the martyrs of Christ: having set within the sea, it shines out in the vault of heaven" — and the single line of notice: they were martyred, having been drowned in the sea.
Melitene (modern Malatya) on the upper Euphrates was the base of the Legio XII Fulminata, and the Christian community there produced martyrs in numbers under Diocletian — the most famous being the Forty-five Martyrs of Melitene (July 16), and Polyeuctus, the soldier-martyr of the city. A small detached group of six, remembered without names, is the kind of remnant such a calendar leaves when the fuller passion is lost.
Feast and commemoration
August 30 (church date; Old Calendar civil September 12), in Greek usage. They are named at the synaxarion reading of the day, whose office belongs to the three patriarchs of Constantinople. The Slavonic calendars and the OCA do not carry them.
Hymns
Apolytikion — 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.
Iconography
They would be painted as a group of six, standing together in the tunics and mantles of laymen, each with the martyr's cross, and named in the plural above their heads; where the passion is depicted, the martyrs are shown in the water, bound or with stones about their necks, and the hand of God blessing from the segment of heaven above — the standard formula for a drowning, as it is used for the martyrs of the Gothic and Persian persecutions. No image of them has been located for this collection, and the Menologion of Basil II covers only September to February and cannot supply one for an August day.
Disputed questions
- Melitene and the sea. The difficulty is geographical: Melitene stands far inland, on the Euphrates, and could not be the site of a drowning in the sea. Either the epigram's thalassa is a poetic licence for the river — Greek epigram uses the word loosely for great waters — or the martyrs were of Melitene but suffered elsewhere, on the coast. The synaxarion says only that they were drowned, and gives the place with the martyrs, not with the drowning.
- Names and date. None is transmitted. They are indexed under saints of unknown date.
- Not to be confused with the Forty-five Martyrs of Melitene (July 16), nor with Polyeuctus of Melitene (January 9), nor with the companies of martyrs drowned at sea on other days.