Timothy of Proconnesus
Our Father among the Saints Timothy the Wonderworker, Bishop of Proconnesus
Bishop · Wonderworker · d. 6th century (August 1)
Commemorated 1 August — Repose on the island of Proconnesus
Timothy was bishop of Proconnesus, the marble island in the Sea of Marmara now called Marmara Adası, in the sixth century. The synaxarion remembers him for two things: he took charge of an island that had been ravaged by pirates and left demoralised, and reformed it by ascetic labour and patience under slander; and he was a wonderworker, whose most celebrated miracle was the healing of an emperor's demon-possessed daughter at Constantinople. He reposed on August 1, and an empress, in gratitude for the healing, raised a monastery over the place; there his relics were found and a holy spring broke out. He is the patron of the island, whose people kept his festival on this day for centuries.
The island
Proconnesus (Προικόννησος) is the largest island of the Propontis, the Sea of Marmara, and takes its name and its ancient wealth from the white marble quarried there — Proconnesian marble, the stone of a great part of Constantinople, of Hagia Sophia's revetments and of sarcophagi shipped all over the Roman world. A quarrying island close to the capital, on the sea road between the Aegean and the Bosporus, it was populous, prosperous and exposed. The see of Proconnesus was a suffragan bishopric under the metropolitan of Cyzicus, later raised in title, which is why the Slavonic and English calendars usually style Timothy archbishop while the Greek sources call him simply bishop.
The account of Timothy's episcopate begins from the state in which he found the island: it had been overrun by pirates, and the coastal settlements — a quarrying and shipping population, transient and rough — had fallen into disorder and vice. The Propontis was never free of raiders, and an island of loading-quays and slave-worked quarries was an easy mark. Timothy was chosen for the see, the sources say, on account of his virtue, and what he did there is described in the plainest terms: he shepherded the people back, living himself as an ascetic, and bore slander patiently while he did it. That last detail is the kind that does not get invented; the synaxarion notices, without explanation, that his pastoral work was attended by calumny, and that he endured it.
The healing at the palace
The miracle for which he was famous took him to the capital. A daughter of the emperor was possessed by a demon, and no remedy availed; Timothy was sent for, and at his prayer she was delivered. The empress, in thanksgiving, founded a monastery dedicated to him at the place where the healing occurred, and it was in the church of that monastery — at Topağaç, toward the south-east of the island — that his relics were afterwards discovered, and there that a holy spring (hagiasma) broke out and continued to be resorted to. Which emperor and which daughter is a genuine difficulty, treated below.
Of the rest of his wonders nothing specific is transmitted. The epithet ὁ θαυματουργός, "the wonderworker," is attached to his name in every calendar that carries him, and the synaxarion's distich turns on the point — that God honoured him in his life and honours him still by miracles — which implies a continuing tradition of healings at his tomb rather than a single famous cure.
Repose and cultus
He reposed on August 1, and it is the day of his death, not of any translation, that the Church keeps. His shrine at Topağaç became the island's chief place of pilgrimage and the site of an annual festival; he is the patron saint of Proconnesus, and remained so through the Byzantine centuries and under Ottoman rule, until the Greek population of the island was removed in the exchange of 1923. The commemoration survives in the Greek and Slavonic calendars as a bare notice on a crowded day.
Feast and commemoration
August 1 (church date; New Calendar civil August 1, Old Calendar civil August 14), on the first day of the Dormition Fast. He is carried by both the Greek and the Slavonic books as a bare synaxarion notice, without proper hymnography, the day being wholly occupied by the Procession of the Precious Cross and the Seven Maccabee Martyrs. His own island kept him with a proper festival at the monastery of Topağaç while a Greek population remained there; since 1923 that local observance has lapsed, and what survives is the calendar entry. The Greek synaxarion gives him the customary distich, to the effect that Timothy, the celebrant of Proconnesus, was honoured by God in his lifetime and is honoured now by his wonderworking.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hierarch)
A rule of faith and an image of gentleness, a teacher of self-restraint, hast thou been shown to thy flock by the truth of thy deeds; therefore hast thou gained by humility the things on high, and by poverty the things of wealth. O Father and hierarch Timothy, intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Timothy is painted according to the ordinary hierarch type: standing or bust-length in the phelonion and the crossed omophorion, blessing with the right hand and holding the jewelled Gospel in the left, of middle age, with a short dark or greying beard, the inscription reading Ο ΑΓΙΟΣ ΤΙΜΟΘΕΟΣ Ο ΘΑΥΜΑΤΟΥΡΓΟΣ or, in Slavonic images, naming him archbishop of Proconnesus. Where the wonderworking is signalled at all it is by the epithet in the inscription rather than by an attribute; his one narrated miracle, the deliverance of the emperor's daughter, is not part of the received iconography. Because his feast falls in August, the Menologion of Basil II — which extends only from September to February — contains no miniature of him, and none of the surviving early menologion cycles reaches him.
No pre-1900 image of this saint has been located for this collection, and Marmara Island's churches did not survive the population exchange in a state that would preserve a local icon of him in accessible collections.
Disputed questions
- Whose daughter did he heal? The Greek sources place Timothy under Justin I (518–527) and Justinian the Great (527–565), and the received account names Justinian as the father of the possessed girl and Theodora as the empress who built the monastery. This cannot be right as it stands: Justinian and Theodora had no daughter. A parallel tradition identifies the girl as Arabia, the daughter of Justin II (565–578) and the empress Sophia — a real person, and one about whom the Byzantine sources do report an affliction — which would move Timothy a generation later, into the third quarter of the sixth century. Neither reconstruction can be proved. The most economical account is that the miracle belongs to the reign of Justin II and that the more famous imperial pair displaced the less famous one in the retelling, as constantly happens in hagiography; but the entry records both and asserts neither. The sixth century as a whole is secure.
- Bishop or archbishop? The Greek synaxarion calls him bishop of Proconnesus; the Slavonic and OCA calendars call him archbishop. The see's rank changed over time and the titles reflect different periods, not different men.
- Nothing survives of his own words. No writing, no synodal act and no dated subscription of a Timothy of Proconnesus has been identified, which is why the sixth-century dating rests wholly on the hagiographic tradition. He does not appear in the acts of the councils of his supposed lifetime.
- Not to be confused with the many other saints named Timothy — above all the Apostle Timothy of Ephesus, disciple of Saint Paul (January 22), with whom the wonderworker of Proconnesus shares nothing but the name and the episcopal office.