Twelve Soldier-Martyrs of Crete

The Holy Twelve Soldiers who were martyred in Crete

Martyr

Commemorated 12 August — Perfected by the sword in Crete

A company of twelve soldiers martyred in Crete, commemorated on August 12 in the Greek synaxaria, of whom nothing survives but the number, the island, the profession and the manner of their death: they were beheaded. No names, no emperor, no persecution and no year are transmitted, and the commemoration is absent from the Slavonic books and from the OCA calendar for the day. This entry records what the Greek synaxarion transmits and does not supply what it does not.

What the synaxarion transmits

The entry is one of the shortest forms in the Greek books: the holy twelve soldiers who were martyred in Crete — perfected by the sword, followed by the customary commemorative distich. Four data points survive, and they are worth taking one at a time, because each has some weight and none of them together will yield a story.

The number twelve is not decorative. Companies of soldiers are almost always transmitted by number in the martyrologies — the Forty of Sebaste, the Forty-five of Nicopolis, the Thirty-three of Melitene — because it was the number, and not the roll of names, that the local church remembered and inscribed. Where the names have not come down, as here, the number is what remains of the inscription.

Soldiers (στρατιῶται) means what it says: men in imperial service. The class of soldier-martyr is very large in the calendars of the third and early fourth centuries, when the loyalty oath, the sacrifice at the standards and the purges of the army under Diocletian and Galerius put Christian soldiers under a pressure the civilian population did not feel until later. A company of twelve dying together is most naturally read as a contubernium or squad that refused together, which is the pattern of nearly every attested group martyrdom in the army.

Crete places them in a province with a substantial early Christian community — the island of the apostle Titus, with metropolitan Gortyna at its centre — and with one other and much better attested company of martyrs, the Ten Martyrs of Crete, put to death at Gortyna under Decius about 250. That the island produced more than one group martyrdom in the same period is entirely likely; that the two groups are the same is not.

By the sword is the standard synaxarial formula for beheading, and for soldiers it is the expected sentence: decapitation was the military execution, and its use is itself a small confirmation that these were men of the army rather than provincials.

Feast and commemoration

August 12 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 25), within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration and the Dormition Fast. They are commemorated at the synaxarion reading at Orthros, after Anicetus and Photius, who carry the day's office. Crete keeps them among the island's own martyrs, though without a proper service.

Hymns

Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of several 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 prayers, O Christ God, save our souls.

Iconography

A company of martyrs whose names are not transmitted is painted as a group, and the convention is fixed: a compact rank of figures behind one another, faces of varied age, in tunic and cloak, each with the small cross of martyrdom in the right hand, with a blessing hand or the segment of heaven in the upper corner. Because these are soldiers, the painter may give them the short military tunic, the chlamys fastened at the shoulder, and — where the company is honoured as a body of troops rather than as anonymous confessors — the cuirass and the lance; the crosses, however, always displace the weapons in the hands. The nearest comparable compositions are those of the Forty of Sebaste and the Ten of Crete.

No pre-1900 image of this company has been located for this collection, and none individually is possible, since no names have come down. The Menologion of Basil II, which supplies group compositions of exactly this kind for the minor commemorations of the calendar, covers only September to February and cannot serve an August day.

Disputed questions

Not the Ten Martyrs of Crete. The temptation to identify this company with the famous Ten of Crete — Theodulus, Saturninus, Euporus and their companions, martyred at Gortyna under Decius and commemorated on December 23 — should be resisted. The numbers differ, the day differs, the ten are named and these twelve are not, the ten are civilians of several Cretan cities and these are soldiers, and the Greek synaxarion carries both entries without any cross-reference or suggestion of doubling. Two distinct commemorations, kept six months apart, are what the tradition transmits.
No names, no date. Modern lists which supply a persecution for this company do so by inference alone. No century is given in this entry and it is indexed under unknown.
Jurisdiction. The commemoration is Greek. It stands in the Greek synaxaristes for August 12 and in the Constantinopolitan tradition behind it, but not in the Slavonic Menaion or the Russian calendar, and the OCA's August 12 list omits it.