Tryphon of Campsada

Origins: the goose-herd of Phrygia

Tryphon was born of poor and pious Christian parents in the village of Campsada (Greek Kampsádē), near the city of Apamea in Phrygia, in Asia Minor, about the year 232. (Some later notices, following the confusion of places, style him "of Lampsacus" or place his village near Apamea "in Syria"; the tradition and the Greek synaxarion set his home in Phrygia.) His family was of the humblest sort, and as a boy Tryphon was set to herding geese — a detail the tradition has never let fall, for it fixes him as one of the little ones of the earth, a labourer among beasts and fields, whose sanctity owed nothing to learning or rank. From this childhood among the flocks and furrows springs the whole character of his cultus: the saint of the countryside, the friend of those who work the soil.

Even as a child, the accounts say, he was granted by God a gift of grace over unclean spirits and over the creatures that plague the harvest — that at his word demons fled, sickness was healed, and the vermin and insects that devoured the crops were driven from the fields. The gift was exercised in simplicity and without payment, and his fame as a wonderworker spread through the region while he was yet a boy.

The healing of the emperor's daughter

The event that carried his name beyond Phrygia is the deliverance of the possessed daughter of the emperor. The tradition names the emperor Gordian (Gordian III, r. 238–244), whose daughter — called in the accounts Gordiana — was tormented by a demon that none could expel. When the imperial physicians and exorcists failed, the demon itself, pressed, confessed that it could be driven out by no one but Tryphon. Messengers were sent into Phrygia, and the boy — then about seventeen — was brought toward Rome. The tradition holds that the demon, unable to bear his approach, departed from the girl before Tryphon had even reached the city; and that Tryphon, questioned, made the spirit manifest in the sight of all in the form of a black dog, and compelled it to confess that it had power only over those who forsook God. Rewarded by the grateful emperor, the boy gave what he received to the poor and returned to his flocks and his village, to the same hidden and labouring life.

Arrest, torture, and martyrdom under Decius

When the emperor Decius (r. 249–251) unleashed his general persecution — the first empire-wide assault on the Church, in which every subject was required to sacrifice to the gods and receive a certificate of having done so — Tryphon was denounced as a Christian. He was seized and brought to Nicaea in Bithynia, before the eparch Aquilinus, and there confessed Christ openly and without fear, refusing to sacrifice.

The torments the accounts assign to him are those of the age of the martyrs: he was beaten, hung up and scourged, his flesh torn; iron nails were driven through his feet and he was dragged through the city in the frozen winter; he was scorched with torches and racked. Through all of it, the tradition says, he was preserved in joy and in confession, converting some of the onlookers by his constancy. At the last, when neither cruelty nor persuasion could move him, the eparch condemned him to be beheaded. But — as the synaxarion verse for the day remembers — Tryphon gave up his spirit in prayer before the sword fell, so that he received his crown a moment before the blow, dying of himself into the hands of God about the year 250.

Relics and cultus

His body was carried, at his own dying request, back to his native village of Campsada for burial, that his own countryside might keep him; afterward his relics were translated and shared, as the veneration of the martyr spread. His head and portions of his relics came in time to be treasured in several places: he is the patron of Kotor (Cattaro) in Montenegro, whose cathedral of Saint Tryphon has guarded a relic of the martyr since the ninth century and keeps him as protector of the city; and his veneration took deep root in the Slavic world, above all in Russia, where from the seventeenth century the church of Saint Tryphon "at Naprudnoye" in Moscow made him one of the best-loved saints of the people. The Menologion of Basil II preserves a tenth-century miniature of his beheading among the martyrs of February 1.

Miracles and traditions

Tryphon's veneration is overwhelmingly a veneration of the fields. Because from childhood he had power over the creatures that harm the harvest, he became across the Orthodox world the protector of crops, gardens, and vineyards and the saint invoked against locusts, caterpillars, worms, beetles, mice, and every kind of pest and blight. In many places his feast on February 1 opened the agricultural devotions of the late winter: the vines were blessed in his name (in Bulgaria and the Balkans February 1 or the old-calendar equivalent is kept as Trifon Zarezan, the day of the first ceremonial pruning of the vineyards), and the fields and orchards were commended to his prayers for the coming season.

To this belongs the celebrated "Prayer of Saint Tryphon" (the Molitva or adjuration), preserved in the Slavic Trebnik and in Greek euchologia among the prayers for the blessing of fields: an exorcistic invocation, made in the name of the Holy Trinity and through the intercession of the martyr, commanding the vermin — the worms, caterpillars, locusts, beetles, and mice — to depart from the gardens, vineyards, fields, and orchards of the faithful and to do them no harm. It is one of the very few such agricultural adjurations to have entered the service-books, and it fixed Tryphon forever in the piety of the farming people.

In Russia a further tradition made him the patron of falconers and hunters: the story is told of a falconer of one of the tsars (in the usual telling, of Ivan the Terrible) who lost a favourite royal falcon and, in danger of his life, prayed to Saint Tryphon; the saint appeared to him on a white horse, bearing the lost bird, and so the church of Saint Tryphon at Naprudnoye was built in thanksgiving. The legend is late and local, but it made Tryphon the heavenly guardian of the hunt as he was of the harvest.