Thirty-three Martyrs of Palestine
The Holy Thirty-three Martyrs of Palestine, perfected by the sword
Martyr
Commemorated 16 August — Martyrdom by the sword
A company of thirty-three martyrs of Palestine, of whom the calendar of the Church has kept the number, the province and the manner of their death — they were beheaded — and nothing else. They stand in the Greek synaxarion for August 16 between the ascetic Chairemon and the notice of the Holy Image, with a single distich of verse for their whole memorial. Neither their names, their persecutor, nor the year of their contest has come down. They are an instance, honest and unadorned, of what the great persecutions left behind: a number, a place, a sword, and a day.
What is transmitted
The Synaxarion of Constantinople for August 16 records: "On the same day, the memory of the holy thirty-three martyrs from Palestine, perfected by the sword," and appends the customary epigram:
A steadfast host, a great shield-wall locked fast: fallen by the sword, it routs the armies of the demons.
That is the entirety of the record. The Greek Synaxaristes adds only the gloss "they were all martyred by the sword." The Russian calendar carries the same bare notice — "Of the 33 martyrs of Palestine" — with no year attached, which is itself informative: where the Slavonic books have a date they normally print it.
No acta survive; no Palestinian martyrology known to us supplies the names; and the company is not to be found in the great Palestinian martyr-narrative of Eusebius, On the Martyrs of Palestine, which covers the persecution of Diocletian and Maximin in that province year by year and would very probably have registered a group of thirty-three had they belonged to it. The entry is therefore what the Byzantine calendar preserves and no more, and no year, emperor or governor is assigned here.
The shape of such notices
Companies of martyrs identified only by a number and a province are common in the synaxaria, and the Church has never treated the loss of the names as a loss of the saints. The epigram makes the point in military language, as such epigrams often do: the martyrs are a συνασπισμός, a shield-wall — the close-locked formation of the Greek phalanx — and their falling is not the breaking of the line but the charge that scatters the enemy. It is a soldier's image for men who were not soldiers, and it is the only characterisation of these thirty-three that the Church possesses.
Feast and commemoration
August 16 (church date; New Calendar civil August 16, Old Calendar civil August 29), within the afterfeast of the Dormition. They are kept in both the Greek and the Slavonic calendars, are commemorated at the reading of the synaxarion, and have no proper service; the day belongs liturgically to the Translation of the Image Not-Made-by-Hands and, in Greek use, to the martyr Diomedes. Where the common of martyrs is sung for them the plural form of the hymns is used.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest received imperishable crowns from thee our God; for possessing thy strength they cast down the tyrants and broke the feeble insolence of the demons. By their supplications save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
No individual iconography exists or could exist for a company whose names are unknown. Where such groups are painted at all, the iconographer follows the standard formula for a numbered company of martyrs: a close-packed crowd of heads in three or four ranks, distinguished by age and hair rather than by identity, each with the nimbus and the small red cross of the martyrs held before the breast, and often with the sword or the executioner indicated at one side to name the manner of death. In menologion illustration a group like this is normally given a single miniature of the mass beheading rather than portraits. No pre-1900 image of the Thirty-three Martyrs of Palestine has been located.
Disputed questions
- No date is transmitted. The absence is deliberate in this entry: neither the Greek nor the Slavonic calendar supplies a year or a persecutor, and none is invented here. The company is indexed by century as unknown.
- The text of the epigram. The received Greek reads πρέπει ("befits") in the second line, which yields no clear sense; the reading τρέπει ("routs, puts to flight") is assumed in the translation above, and the variant is recorded.
- Not to be confused with the 156 Martyrs of Palestine (September 17) — the company of the copper mines of Phaeno suffering with the bishops Peleus and Nilus under Maximin, whose story Eusebius does tell — nor with the Martyrs of the Lavra of Saint Sabbas and the other Palestinian companies of the calendar. The one thing these thirty-three share with them is the province.