Triandaphyllus of Zagora
The Holy New Martyr Triandaphyllus of Zagora, who suffered at Constantinople
New Martyr · b. c. 1665 — d. 8 August 1680, at Constantinople
Commemorated 8 August — Beheading at Constantinople, 1680
Triandaphyllus — "Rose," as the name means in Greek — was a boy of fifteen, a sailor's apprentice from Zagora, who was beheaded at Constantinople in 1680 for refusing to accept Islam. He is one of the earliest of the long roll of neomartyrs of the Ottoman centuries, and one of the youngest; his witness is kept in Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian usage alike, the two nations disputing between them, out of affection rather than rivalry, which Zagora was his home.
The boy from Zagora
He was born about 1665. The Greek tradition makes him a native of Zagora, the mountain district of Magnesia in Thessaly, on the slopes of Pelion above the gulf of Volos — a country of seafarers, whose boys went to sea young; the Bulgarian tradition knows him as Trendafil of Stara Zagora in Thrace. He was still in his mid-teens when his ship or his master's business brought him to Constantinople.
Confession and beheading
The circumstance is the one that recurs in a hundred neomartyrologies of the period: an altercation with Muslims, an accusation — genuine or manufactured — that the boy had spoken words amounting to a profession of Islam, and then the demand that he make it good. Under Ottoman law the accusation, once made and witnessed, admitted only one lawful outcome: to deny it was apostasy and a capital crime. Triandaphyllus denied it. He was brought before the judge, pressed with promises and with threats to renounce Christ and put on the turban, and refused. He was beheaded at Constantinople on August 8, 1680, at the age of fifteen.
The Christians of the city recovered his body and buried it with honour, and his memory was kept from the first among the neomartyrs — the company of those who, in the words of the Greek accounts of the age, "renewed the martyrdom of the ancients" and gave the enslaved Church the proof that grace had not departed from it.
Feast and commemoration
August 8 (church date; New Calendar civil August 8, Old Calendar civil August 21), the day of his beheading, within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration. His is a post-Byzantine commemoration and is not in the old Greek Menaion for the day: it entered the calendars through the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collections of the neomartyrs, and stands today in Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian usage and in the OCA calendar. In Stara Zagora he is honoured as a patron of the city.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a new martyr)
Thy martyr Triandaphyllus, O Lord, in his contest received from Thee our God an incorruptible crown; for possessing Thy strength, he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By his intercessions save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Triandaphyllus is painted as a youth: beardless, with the short dark hair of a boy, in the plain tunic and mantle of a layman of the Ottoman period rather than in classical martyr's dress, holding the cross in his right hand and often a rose — a play upon his name, and the attribute by which he is recognised at once in Bulgarian work. Where the martyrdom is shown, the sword and the executioner appear beside him. In Bulgarian churches of the Stara Zagora region he is given the full-length standing type of a local patron; in the composite icons of the Synaxis of the New Martyrs under the Ottoman yoke he stands among the youngest of the company.
No pre-1900 image of him has been located: Wikimedia Commons returns nothing for Τριαντάφυλλος, Триандафил or Трендафил in an iconographic sense, and the circulating images are modern Bulgarian church work whose copyright is the iconographer's. A wanted icon is recorded.
Disputed questions
- Which Zagora? The sources divide. The Greek synaxaria of the neomartyrs make him a native of Zagora in Magnesia (Thessaly), which is how the Orthodox Church in America's notice reads it; Bulgarian usage, followed by several Slavic calendars and by the Wikidata entity, calls him Трендафил Загорски, of Stara Zagora in Thrace. Both readings render the same name (Greek Triantaphyllos, Slavonic Trendafil, "rose"), and both traditions keep the same day and the same year; the difference is one of identification of the place-name, not of the person. This entry follows the Greek reading in the heading and records the Bulgarian in the alternate names, without claiming the question is settled.
- The companion. Serbian and Macedonian usage joins to him a second martyr — Spaso in the Serbian form, Anastasius in the Macedonian — commemorated with him. The Greek and Slavonic notices of August 8 name Triandaphyllus alone, and the companion is not entered here; it is flagged as an open question.
- His age. Fifteen is given consistently. He is nonetheless classed here simply as a new-martyr and not as a child-martyr, which the calendars reserve for younger sufferers.