The Six Thousand Martyrs of David-Gareji
The Holy Six Thousand Venerable Martyrs of the David-Gareji Wilderness, slain by the army of Shah Abbas I
Venerable Martyr · Hieromartyr · Martyr · d. 1616, in Bright Week, at the David-Gareji lavra in Kakheti, Georgia
Commemorated Bright (Renewal) Tuesday — the massacre of the brotherhood of the Gareji wilderness by the troops of Shah Abbas I
The largest single martyrdom in the history of the Georgian Church, and the one commemoration of the Georgian calendar that is fixed to Bright Week rather than to a day of the month. In 1616, in the aftermath of the devastation of Kakheti by Shah Abbas I of Persia, the whole brotherhood of the cave-monasteries of the David-Gareji wilderness — reckoned by the Georgian tradition at six thousand monks — was cut down by the shah's troops in the paschal season, at the altar, in their festal vestments, immediately after they had received Holy Communion. The tradition relates that the shah, hunting in the semi-desert, saw from his camp a line of lights moving on the mountain at midnight and was told that these were monks going round their church with candles for the Resurrection of Christ, and that he gave the order for their slaughter on the spot; that an angel warned the abbot Arsenius that night and left each man free to flee or to stay; that all but two novices stayed; and that the two who had hidden returned and were killed when they saw the crowns descending from heaven, two of which floated empty in the air. Their bones were gathered later in the century by King Archil and laid in a great stone vessel beside the altar, where they were reported to stream myrrh. The brotherhoods of the David and the Baptist monasteries asked Catholicos Anthony I to compose their service and to appoint the Tuesday of Bright Week as their day, and it has been kept so ever since.
The wilderness and its brotherhood
David-Gareji (Georgian დავითგარეჯი) is not one monastery but a complex of some twenty of them, hollowed into the soft rock of a waterless ridge on the edge of the Iori plateau, some sixty kilometres south-east of Tbilisi, on what is now the Georgian–Azerbaijani frontier. It was founded in the sixth century by David of Gareji, one of the Thirteen Syrian Fathers, whose disciples Dodo and Lucian enlarged the original lavra and founded the neighbouring houses of Dodo's Rka and Natlismtsemeli — "the Baptist's" — and it was extended and frescoed under Hilarion the Iberian in the ninth century and again under the Bagratid kings. Its churches, refectories, cells, granaries and cisterns are all cut out of the cliff, and in the centuries of its greatness the number of monks living in them was so great that the place was called in Georgian "the city of monks."
It was also, for a thousand years, one of the most exposed monastic settlements in the Christian east. It stood on the open march between Kakheti and the Muslim khanates, with no walls worth the name and nothing between it and a raiding column but distance. It was sacked by the Mongols in 1265, laid waste by Timur at the turn of the fifteenth century, and would be pillaged again and again by Dagestani raiders in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — the raids that produced the martyrdoms of Shio the New and his companions at the end of the seventeenth century and of Gerontius and the six with him in 1851. The massacre of 1616 is the greatest of these disasters and the one the Georgian Church has never ceased to keep.
Shah Abbas and the ruin of Kakheti
Abbas I (reigned 1588–1629), the fifth and greatest of the Safavid shahs, spent the middle of his reign reasserting Persian control over the Caucasus. In 1614–1616 he campaigned repeatedly against the eastern Georgian kingdoms of Kartli and Kakheti, which had attempted to throw off Safavid suzerainty. The punitive expedition against Kakheti was among the most destructive events in Georgian history: contemporary and later Georgian sources describe the burning of the towns, the deportation of a large part of the population to Persia, and the systematic destruction of churches and monasteries. It is against this background — the country already conquered and devastated, the shah's army wintering and hunting in the eastern plains — that the Gareji tradition sets the martyrdom.
The paschal night
The account transmitted in Georgian, and printed in the modern collection of the Lives of the Georgian Saints, runs as follows. After the subjugation of the country the shah went out to hunt in the plains of Outer Kakheti. Night overtook him in the hills of the Gareji ridge, and he made camp there with his retinue. About midnight his attention was caught by a line of fire moving far off on the mountainside. He took it at first for an apparition; then it was explained to him that monks lived in those places, and that they were at that moment keeping the Resurrection of Christ, going round their church in procession with lighted candles. The shah ordered a detachment sent to the monastery with instructions to kill them all.
That same night an angel appeared to Arsenius, the abbot of the lavra, with a message that the tradition has preserved in something close to direct speech: Our Lord Jesus Christ calls you all today to his heavenly dwelling. This night a great trial awaits you — you will be cut down by the sword. Whoever wishes to spare his temporal life, let him flee or hide; but whoever thirsts to save his soul for eternity will fall by the sword and be crowned by the Lord with an incorruptible crown. Declare this call of God to all the brethren gathered in the monastery. The abbot told the vision to the whole community, and the fathers began to prepare themselves for martyrdom. Two novices alone were afraid, left the monastery, and hid on a hill at some distance from it.
The Liturgy and the massacre
The soldiers surrounded the monastery while the Liturgy was still being served, at the singing of the Our Father. The abbot went out at once to the commander of the detachment and asked that the brotherhood be allowed to finish the service and to communicate. The Persians took counsel among themselves and agreed to wait a little before carrying out the shah's order.
The fathers received the Holy Mysteries, encouraged one another, and came out to the soldiers vested as for a feast. The abbot was beheaded first. Then, in the words of the Georgian account, the soldiers fell upon the fathers like wild beasts and hacked them all down without mercy.
At that moment the two novices on the hill saw shining crowns coming down out of heaven upon the monastery, and among them two crowns floating pitifully in the empty air with no one to receive them. They understood, ran back to the lavra, and were cut to pieces there and their remains scattered on the ground for the birds and the wild animals. The tradition adds that on the spot where they fell a rose bush sprang up, and that it was still flowering in the nineteenth century in that dry and stony ground where nothing else grew.
The relics
The bodies lay unburied. Towards the end of the seventeenth century King Archil — the Bagratid king of Imereti and Kakheti (1647–1713), who undertook the restoration of the ruined lavra — had the bones of the martyrs gathered with great care and laid together in a large stone vessel (the Georgian word is that used for a wine-press vat) set on the left side of the holy table. From the relics, the tradition says, there began to flow a fragrant myrrh. The revival of the monastery was completed under the abbot Onopre Machutadze, appointed superior in 1690.
Some time afterwards the brotherhoods of the monastery of St David and the monastery of St John the Baptist in the same wilderness petitioned the Catholicos-Patriarch Anthony I (1720–1788) — the great canonist, grammarian and hymnographer of the eighteenth century Georgian Church — to compose a divine service in honour of the martyrs and to appoint a day for their memory. He did both, and the day he appointed was the Tuesday of Bright Week.
Feast and commemoration
Their commemoration is movable: it is kept on the Tuesday of Bright (Renewal) Week, 2 days after Pascha, and has no fixed date at all — an unusual arrangement for a company of martyrs, and one that is explained by the circumstances of their death, since the day of the massacre was itself determined by Pascha. Because it is their only feast, their movable_feasts entry carries rank: primary and no fixed feast is ranked, as the project's constitution provides for saints whose principal commemoration is movable.
The day is kept by the Georgian Orthodox Church at Gareji and throughout Georgia, with a pilgrimage to the lavra, and is carried in the calendars that follow the Georgian usage. The OCA lists the Georgian saints generally but does not carry this commemoration on its own Bright Tuesday page, which enumerates the martyrs of Lesbos and the arrival of the Portaitissa on Athos; the martyrs of Gareji are named in its Georgian material. The commemoration is not in the Greek Pentecostarion, whose Bright Tuesday synaxarion — like that of every other day of the week — reads only "on the holy and great Tuesday of Pascha we celebrate the very life-bearing Resurrection of our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ." Neither the Antiochian nor the Russian calendars enter it. In practice the memory of the six thousand is also gathered into the general commemoration of all the saints of the Gareji wilderness, with David, Lucian and Dodo at their head.
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. At their supplications, O Christ our God, save our souls.
Kontakion — Tone 8 (original composition on the matter of the day)
Vested as for the feast and fed with the Bread of immortality, ye went out to the sword as to a bridal chamber, O six thousand fathers of the wilderness; and the crowns that came down from heaven found none of you wanting save two, and them the Lover of mankind called back. Wherefore we cry to you: rejoice, O city of monks made a city of martyrs.
Iconography
The martyrs are painted in the Georgian manner as a multitude, which is the whole point of the image: not a rank of named figures with individual attributes, as with the seven of 1851, but a crowd of black-habited monastics filling the panel from edge to edge and receding into the ochre cliffs of the wilderness, each with the small red cross of martyrdom, and above them a shower of crowns descending from the segment of heaven. Where the passion is shown narratively the composition has three registers that follow the account exactly: the shah at his camp fire on the ridge looking towards the mountain; the procession of candles going round the cave-church in the darkness; and the slaughter before the altar, with the vested abbot beheaded in the foreground and the two novices returning from the hill. The empty crowns floating in the air are sometimes shown, and the rose bush growing from the stony ground is a regular detail of the modern panels. In the composite icons of the saints of Gareji the six thousand stand as a dark mass behind David, Lucian and Dodo.
No image of them can be stored here. Every icon of this martyrdom is a twentieth- or twenty-first-century Georgian work by a named or nameable iconographer; the monastery's own mediaeval furnishings were destroyed in the very raid that made them martyrs, and there is no pre-1900 depiction of the event to be had. Freely licensed photographs of modern Georgian icons on Wikimedia Commons license the photograph only: the painter's rights in the panel underneath are untouched by the photographer's licence, and such files are not storable under this repository's icon policy. The entry is listed under wanted icons on that ground.
Disputed questions
- 1615 or 1616. The Georgian hagiographical tradition dates the martyrdom to 1616 and the Safavid invasion that occasioned it to 1615; secular historians of the Safavid campaigns commonly speak of the destruction of Gareji in 1615, within a war that ran from 1614 to 1617. The discrepancy is between the year of the campaign and the year of the paschal massacre and is not a real contradiction, but the two dates are found side by side in the literature and are noted here.
- The paschal night or Bright Tuesday. The narrative as transmitted reads continuously — the shah sees the procession at midnight, the angel appears "this night," the soldiers arrive at the Our Father — and taken strictly it would place the killing at the Paschal Liturgy itself. The commemoration, however, has been kept from Anthony I onwards on Bright Tuesday, and the older repository notices and the Georgian day-lists say flatly that the six thousand were slain "on Easter Tuesday." The most economical reading is that the shah's order was given on the paschal night and executed on the third day of the Renewal, the interval being the time it took a detachment to reach a place two days' march into the semi-desert. The tradition itself does not resolve it, and the day of the commemoration is the firmer datum.
- The number. Six thousand is the figure carried by the whole Georgian tradition and is the name by which the martyrs are known. It is a round number for the whole population of a monastic complex of twenty houses at a season when its scattered anchorites would have come in to the lavra for the feast, and it should be read as the tradition's estimate of the community rather than as a count of bodies. That the massacre was very large, and that it effectively ended the medieval life of the wilderness, is not in doubt: the manuscripts and the movable treasures of Gareji were destroyed in the same event.
- The name of the abbot. The Georgian account names him Arsenius (Arsen). He is not to be identified with any of the several other Georgian saints of that name — he is a different man from Arsenius of Ninotsminda, the tenth-century hierarch and translator.
- Not to be confused with the other martyrs of the same wilderness, of which there are three distinct companies with three distinct commemorations: Shio the New, David, Gabriel and Paul, killed in a Dagestani raid at the end of the seventeenth century, kept on June 1; and Gerontius, Serapion, Otar, Herman, Bessarion, Michael and Simeon, killed in another such raid in 1851, kept on August 12. The six thousand of 1616 are the earliest and by far the largest, and theirs is the only one of the three whose day is movable.