Theocharis of Neapolis
The Holy New Martyr Theocharis of Neapolis in Cappadocia
New Martyr · b. c. 1720s, in Cappadocia — d. 20 August 1740, near Neapolis (Nevşehir) in Cappadocia
Commemorated 20 August — Martyrdom by stoning and hanging at the white poplar near Neapolis, 1740
Theocharis was an orphan boy of Cappadocia taken into the household of the Turkish judge of Neapolis — the town the Ottomans called Nevşehir — who was offered his master's daughter in marriage on the single condition that he become a Muslim. He answered that he had been born a Christian and could not deny the faith of his Saviour or of his fathers; and he held to that answer through starvation, imprisonment and torture. On 20 August 1740, at noon, he was tied to a horse, dragged an hour's distance out of the town to a white poplar, and there stoned and hanged. The tree is still called Kanlı Kavak, the Bloody Poplar, and is a place of pilgrimage; his right hand was carried to Thessaloniki with the Cappadocian refugees in 1923 and is venerated in the church of Saint Katherine there.
An orphan of Cappadocia
Theocharis was left an orphan young, in one of the Greek-speaking Christian communities of Cappadocia — a countryside of rock-cut churches and half-buried villages where the faith had survived under Muslim rule since the eleventh century, in places with the liturgy in Greek and the daily speech in Turkish. In 1740 the Ottoman state was at war, and boys of the Christian communities were gathered up and put into a camp to be trained as soldiers. Theocharis was among them.
There he was noticed by the judge (kadı) of Neapolis, who took a liking to the boy, had him released from the camp, and brought him home to work on his estate. He and his wife grew fond of him. In time they made him what they must have thought a generous offer: their daughter in marriage, and with her a place in the household and a future — on the one condition that he turn Turk.
The refusal
His answer is preserved: "I was born a Christian, and I cannot deny the faith of my Saviour, nor that of my Fathers." The refusal was not merely a disappointment but an insult, and the judge, who a moment before had been his patron, threatened him with hunger, with torture, and with death.
Theocharis went to the church of Saint George, made his confession to the archimandrite George and received Holy Communion — the pattern of nearly every neomartyr's passion, in which the decisive act is not the confession before the judge but the preparation before the altar. He came back to the house and, asked again, gave the same answer.
He was thrown into prison and kept there with barely food or water, and the account says simply that he passed the time in prayer. He was offered the marriage a third time, and refused a third time; and after severe torture the sentence was given.
The Bloody Poplar
At noon on 20 August 1740 he was tied to a horse and taken about an hour's distance from Neapolis, to a place where a white poplar stood. There he was hanged from the tree and stoned.
The tradition of the place adds that the sky, which had been clear, went dark as he died, and that a storm of thunder and lightning broke and flooded the road. The poplar became Kanlı Kavak — the bloody poplar — because, the local Christians said and their descendants still say, a blood-coloured sap runs from its broken branches. It became a place of pilgrimage for the Cappadocian Greeks and remained one after they were gone.
Relics
With the exchange of populations of 1923 the Christians of Cappadocia were uprooted, and they carried their relics with them into Greece. The right hand of the new martyr was brought to Thessaloniki and placed in the church of Saint Katherine, where it is venerated still, and where his feast is kept every August 20 with a procession.
Feast and commemoration
August 20 (church date; New Calendar civil August 20, Old Calendar civil September 2), within the Afterfeast of the Dormition. His memory is Greek: it is kept at Thessaloniki, where his relic rests, and in the Cappadocian refugee communities of northern Greece, and it stands in the Greek day-lists and in the OCA synaxarion, which took it from them. The Slavic calendars do not carry him. The proper service composed for him is a modern Greek composition and is not reproduced here.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
An orphan of Cappadocia, thou wast made rich in Christ; and refusing the bread and the bride of the ungodly, thou didst choose the tree and the stones, O new martyr Theocharis. Wherefore, having received thy crown, entreat Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Theocharis is painted as a beardless youth in the plain dress of a Cappadocian villager — the belted tunic and the short cloak — holding the cross of martyrdom and the palm; his proper attribute is the poplar tree, shown behind him with the rope, and stones scattered at its foot. In the fuller icons of the Thessalonian churches the narrative registers show the judge's house, the reception of Communion at the church of Saint George, and the passion at the tree under a darkened sky.
No storable image has been located. Every known icon of this saint is a twentieth- or twenty-first-century work — he was painted only after his relic came to Thessaloniki — and modern icons are the copyrighted work of living or recently deceased iconographers; none has been found under a free licence granted by the iconographer. A live search of Wikimedia Commons for his name in Greek returned no results at all.
Disputed questions
- Which sultan? The accounts of his passion say that he was taken in the levy of boys "in the reign of Sultan Ahmed." Ahmed III was deposed in 1730, ten years before the martyrdom; the sultan of 1740 was Mahmud I. Either the tradition has attached the wrong name to the reign, or the boy's conscription belongs to an earlier year than his death. The entry records the date of the martyrdom, which is firm in the tradition and fixed by the feast, and notes that the imperial name attached to it is not.
- What kind of levy? The accounts describe a gathering of Christian boys for military training, which reads like the devşirme, the child-levy of the janissary corps. But the devşirme had effectively lapsed by the beginning of the eighteenth century. What is described in 1740 — a war year, in the aftermath of the Austro-Russo-Turkish war of 1736–1739 — is more probably an irregular local conscription or seizure of Christian orphans, of the kind the provincial authorities practised without warrant from Constantinople. The account is retained as transmitted; the institutional label is the memory of a later generation.
- Not to be confused with the venerable brothers Theocharis and Apostolos of Arta, ascetics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, who are commemorated on the movable Sunday of the Myrrhbearers and not on August 20. The two commemorations are frequently conflated in day-lists.