Thirty-eight Martyrs of Thrace
The Holy Thirty-eight Martyrs who suffered in Thrace
Martyr
Commemorated 23 August — A company of thirty-eight martyrs beheaded in Thrace
A company of thirty-eight martyrs who suffered in Thrace and were beheaded. The Greek synaxarion of August 23 keeps their memory in a single line and a distich of verse, and that line is the whole of the record: neither their names, nor the emperor or governor who condemned them, nor the city, nor the year has come down. They stand in the calendar as one of the anonymous companies of the Byzantine martyrology, honoured for the number and the manner of their death and for nothing that can be told about them individually.
What the calendar preserves
The notice belongs to the last lines of the synaxarion of August 23, after the martyr Lupus, the two hieromartyr Irenaei and the patriarch Callinicus: the holy thirty-eight martyrs in Thrace were perfected by the sword. Three facts are given — the number, the province and the manner — and the accompanying distich, as the verses of the synaxarion regularly do for such companies, plays on the number rather than adding to the account.
Thrace was the great land bridge between Constantinople and the Danube, and no province of the empire has more anonymous martyr-companies in the calendar: the armies passed through it, the persecuting edicts were published in its garrison towns, and the Gothic and later the Bulgar and Arab raids gave it further martyrs of whom nothing survives but a number. Whether this company died in the persecutions of Diocletian and Licinius — Thrace being Licinius's own ground, and his persecution of 320–324 having filled the province with martyrs — or in one of the later incursions, the sources do not say, and it is not guessed at here.
Feast and commemoration
August 23 (church date; Old Calendar civil September 5), on the day of the leavetaking (apodosis) of the Dormition of the Theotokos. The festal office of the Great Feast governs the whole day; the martyrs have their synaxarion notice and distich and no service of their own. They are the last commemoration entered in the Greek synaxarion of the day.
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
Anonymous companies are painted as a crowd of martyrs ranged in rows, of varied ages and dress — soldiers, elders, youths — each holding the martyr's cross, with the number given in the inscription: ΟΙ ΑΓΙΟΙ ΛΗ΄ ΜΑΡΤΥΡΕΣ ΟΙ ΕΝ ΘΡΑΚῌ (lambda-eta, thirty-eight). In menologion cycles the company is reduced to a group of three or four figures standing for the whole, or shown at the moment of the sword. No icon of this company has been located for this repository, and none is likely to exist independently of a menologion; the Menologion of Basil II covers only September to February.
Disputed questions
- Nothing is transmitted beyond the synaxarion line. Some modern lists silently attach the company to the persecution of Licinius, or conflate them with other Thracian groups (the Six Martyrs of Bizye, the Forty-five and the Twenty-six of the Thracian notices). No such identification has any authority, and none is made here.
- The number. Thirty-eight is unusual and therefore probably transmitted rather than conventional; round numbers (forty, forty-five) are the ones that attract suspicion in the synaxaria.
- Jurisdiction. The commemoration is carried by the Greek Menaion and synaxarion. The Slavonic books of September 5 (Old Calendar) do not generally print it, and the entry is marked accordingly.